ForgeWorld – Daan of War

2019: The year of the pile!

Happy 2019! I’ve mentioned this in the previous post, but I’ve been trying to not buy as much warhammer the last few months and it seems to be working. Abaddon is the last model that I finished recently and that marks the absolute end of the chaos miniatures I have in my posession.

Now that that’s finished I’ve even started digging in to “The Pile”!

Trust me, this was a lot worse a couple of months ago.

To the trained eye, the pile is actually pretty well organised:

So far I’m planning to go about this project in the following order:

Terrain (Blue pile). Terrain needs to go first. Thanks to all the work I’ve done these last few years I now have a large 40k and a large Heresy army that I can perfectly use for games in their current rulesets. The only reason I never play a game at home is because I lack proper terrain. If I finish this I can not only start playing some awesome games in my own house, but I’ll be able to take better pictures with nicer backgrounds as well.
Raven Guard and Sisters of Silence (Purple pile). These are models I’ve bought a long time ago and I’ve had the idea of a RG army with a small allied SoS force for a long time now. If I get the terrain done, finishing off my Ravens and painting up some Sisters will be a great reward for me.
Skaven (Orange pile). When my Raven Guard are completely done it will be good to switch gears and start painting up my Skaven again. It’s a lot of work and a lot of it is grinding, but grinding out simple color schemes will likely be a refreshing change after working on the RG and the sisters. I need to paint 80 clanrats, a start collecting pestilens box and a random assortment of old models that either need some TLC or a more permanent storage solution.
Eldar (Red pile). I can not paint so many armies in 1 year. My solution for the Eldar is to hand them over to Scar’s Mini ature Madness. With all the money I’m not spending on warhammer this year I feel like I can afford to fix 1 problem the expensive way. I’m also really hyped for it. Owning a pro-painted 40k army that complements my chaos and has a totally different playstyle is something I’m really looking forward to.
Word Bearers and Militia (Purple again). Even the best plans do not survive contact with the enemy. Even if I somehow manage to get all of the above done before 2019 is done I will finally start working on my remaining Heresy stuff. It’s the project I’m saving for last because I want it to be a passion project. This is going to be the ultimate reward for finishing the other stuff. I will finally get to feel what it’s like to work on a single project without having something else in the back of my head that will need to get done after that. Also, so far, Heresy seems to work the best for me in terms of excitement and motivation. It’s something about the lore aspect and the long term aspect FW seems to have going with it that just really scratches my hobby itch. Hopefully I can start on these this year and actually start buying stuff again in 2020.

House Pyke

My summer hobby break has continued somewhat during the last month. Despite very little activity on my personal projects however, I do finally have some cool things to post about.

First up: I finally finished my Imperial Knight!

It took me a long time to finally fix all the transfers, but I’m really happy with it now. The pike designs were custom transfers that I ordered quite a while ago at Fallout Hobbies and it’s nice to see they turned out well. I also tried to include some water effect on the base for the first time.

Another thing that I’ve started up last month is a brand new Horus Heresy campaign called ‘The Knights of Dies Veneris’.

It’s supposed to become a year long campaign where I get to write a lot of stories about everyone’s battles while at the same time things stay pretty casual and people can drop in and out, only having to play 1 game a month. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time, so I’m glad I finally had the time to set things in motion. I had a lot of fun writing the stories for the campaign, so if you like to read it might be worth checking out the blog posts on the club website.

As for my own games, I did manage to play a few here and there. Here are some cool pics from a 40k game against Koen’s Knight list and some images from a really cool heresy game against Peter’s Iron Warriors:

This sunday I’ll be participating in another Bloodstorm Age of Sigmar event. I’ve entered a list with several new models I still need to paint for my Skaven army, but with the 120 clanrats out of the way I feel confident I’ll be able to get it done. Next week I’ll probably post some pics from that event and discuss some of the upcoming stuff in October.

Migration + 2017 In Review Part 1

Hello and welcome to my brand new WordPress site!

I’ve decided to start blogging again after a year away from my old blog (daan-of-war.blogspot.com). Making the transfer from Blogger to WordPress has been in my mind for a lot longer, but converting all my old posts had always seemed way too much work. Not any more though and I’m proud to say that I’ve been able to save my 7 years of sporadic content!

The last post I made on the blogger blog left me at the cusp of 2017 which I had declared to be the year of my Raven Guard. I also mentioned my Chaos Space Marines and how I was in the process of rebasing them. So, for the sake of keeping track of my hobby, I’ll kick off this new blog with a 2 part report of what I’ve been up to for 2017 and the first part of 2018. So pour yourself some tea and kick back because it’s going to be a long one.

I’ll start off by mentioning briefly that, outside of the hobby, 2017 has been defined for me by getting married halfway through (30th June). This meant that I spent most of the first half of the year in preparation of this outrageous event and didn’t always get much hobby done.

To compensate for lack of hobby we had a wedding invitation image made that at least implies that we spend time painting.

Despite the stressful times, I did manage to see through the Horus Heresy campaign we had going; playing the final few games and culminating the year-long event in a second megabattle:

This was my final regular heresy game (2750 points I guess) against Naut’s fantastic Alpha Legion. Don’t remember much of it, but I most likely lost this battle. You can see that my Mor Deythan were not even painted at this time.

Here are my Ravens during the final 3k per person megabattle. Due to the arangement of tables and sides, the megabattle wound up mainly pitting me against Naut (again) while we had minimal dealings with the world eaters and mechanicum to our left. This was a bit of a pity, but since Joyce couldn’t be around for the whole day I got to control her awesome Word Eaters for a while.

I really like this picture of Joyce’s World Eater force with her awesomely commisioned Legio Audax warhound titan forming up the center. Props to Scar’s Miniature Madness for this amazing piece (not to mention Joyce’s own amazing work on her 45 assault marines!).

Here’s Naut’s cool Alpharius Conversion that I just had to take a picture of.

Overview of the entire megabattle. It was pretty epic.

After the megabattle, I spent the next few months focussed on the impending wedding and getting into rumour arguments with people about the launch of 8th edition Warhammer 40k. Speaking of which: It’s almost been an entire year and I still don’t really know how to feel about it. More on 8th ed in the next post, but around the time of release I wasn’t truly captured by the hype, yet also not as down and out about it either. I was also really glad that they kept the Heresy in 7th after the death of Alan Bligh (long shall he be remembered and his absence felt). To distract myself from buying new stuff in the preparation of a costly wedding I spent the time I had painting and playing my Ravens.

This is a shot from a pick-up game I played against Dirk. Dirk was bummed about his army’s performance in the campaign, but somehow managed to wipe me clean off the table when it appeared my army was no match for an Acastus Knight Titan, Quad Mortars and a Medusa.

And this is what I was left with right before the wedding. My 3k army almost completely painted. Only 2 Drop Pods, A Storm Eagle and Corax himself left to go.

It feels good to be blogging again and I hope the new WordPress website works out. I have a lot more images for the next post so hopefully until then!

Victory or Death!

Age of Sigmar and Another Squad

Once again a long period in between blogs, but no matter. It’s been a busy month mostly because I’ve spent a lot of time playing guitar. Now that my music school’s yearly rock-night is over, I can afford to free up some warhammer time again. First off some updates from april that I forgot to mention: the arrival of my birthday goodies and a painted land speeder!

Contents of this pile are: Master of Signal/Legion Champion, Darkwing Pattern Storm Eagle, Deathstorm Drop Pod, Dark Furies, Mor Deythan and Corvus Corax.

This was a quick foto at the time. I stayed at home on King’s Day purely to paint this one up.

This month I spent a friday night playing my first proper Age of Sigmar battle. Finally found someone from the local club who was also eager to try out the game and we decided to just take some random stuff and use a scenario from the Quest for Ghal Maraz book. I forget what the mission was called, but it involved me being the invader and having to rescue a hero model from my opponents army.

This was the set up, I think, because I can’t even look at this picture due to the woefully unpainted state of my skaven warband.

The game was good fun and though we still had to look up a whole lot the gameplay still felt fast. I liked the doomflayer and doomwheel warscrolls. They’re still random and fit the all or nothing Skaven style of gameplay that I enjoy. The clanrats and rat swarms made great tar pits although the clanrats would’ve been better in a larger unit. AoS has, so far, been winning me over more and more. The only thing I still don’t really like is the way they dispense the story. The big books are too expensive for me to buy them all and I don’t like that they’re basically the only way to keep up with what’s happening in the storyline. I mean, nice and everything that we have an advancing narrative now, but why keep it locked behind a 60 euro per 3 month paywall? Anyhow, the game itself is great and building armies in the mortal realms is fun as hell.

Here you can see my unpainted clanrats falling apart after a saurus charge and my rat swarms holding up a bunch of kroxigors and skinks.

Aside from my AoS adventures I haven’t played much else and spent the rest of the month painting up a new unit of Raven Guard marines instead. It’s the same unit as the other one with the exception of a power spear instead of a power sword for the squad sergeant.

The spear is actually a chaos sorcerer staff that has been heavilly modified.

Starting to look like a proper army, right?

That’s about it. The new squad took a long time to paint and I’m going to have to paint up even more marines if I want to be ready for the next round in the campaign. The next guys will be in a drop pod though.

Victory or Death!

Glimpse into the Golden Age: Battle 5

So, last friday, another battle for the campaign went down. It’s kinda scary because we’re about over half-time with the campaign and it’s still going! I’d have to knock on wood, but it almost seems like this one might actually be able to make it to the end…

The battle I played was against Remco (Confessor Theodoris on the forums) with his sisters of battle. His list is kind of famous at the club for doing well in tournaments and stuff “despite” it being a sisters list. This kinda put me on my guard and also pretty much halfway into writing down a loss.

Totally unnessescary of course as the battle turned out to be just a plain ‘ol draw. Well, not quite plain as it was a really tense battle in the end which could have swung a lot of ways before the final dice was rolled.

Turn 1: The big trench in the middle is supposed to represent a river (something that was required for the mission). We obviously didn’t have a lot of river terrain at the store.

The battle started out bad for me as my defiler got shot down right away and my lord got killed by Saint Celestine (which I believe his unkillable special character was called) a couple turns later. My rhino unit compensated a bit by surviving an outflanking sister unit and killing them off in revenge, claiming a special mission objective afterwards (you needed to get two of those for 1 vp). When my deepstrikers came tried to use a termicide unit (3 guys with combi meltas) and an obliterator to kill off his two nasty S8 AP1 tanks, but I only managed to kill one before I lost both units. I used my daemons to kill off celestine and her unit of flying sisters.

Celestine is apparently best dealt with though superiority in numbers.

At the end of the battle my only shot at a draw was to hold on to my home objective, as I wasn’t going to be able to get him off of his, and score 2 mission objectives, for a single vp, to counter his ‘first blood’ vp. I also had to hope Celestine stayed dead of course…

End of the battle: I only had a single daemon claiming that objective… Thank the gods for fearless units!

So a draw it was!

In other news: I am getting the new Horus Heresy book from forgeworld. I’m not planning on starting a pre-heresy force in any sense of the idea (at least not before I win a fucking lottery or something), but just think of all that juicy fluff, people. Oh that juicy fluff!

I’ll also be getting the new chaos codex of course. But so far I find most of the models ugly. Especially the dragon. It looks really wierd and not at all like anything that would fit into my chaos army as I built it. Wtf is it even? A mechanical dragon? It doesn’t have a crew as far as I can see… Is it some sort of daemon? Why would it wanna help chaos marines? Is this something that one would see regularly among a random chaos marine warband or is it tied to a particular legion? It’s just too much nonsense for me right now.

Left: Awesomeness. Right: Dafuq..

Oh well, I guess I’ll read all about it next week and in the meantime…

Death to the False Emperor!

Decimated

No big update today. Just a teensy one because I just can’t resist showing off my new toys. Feast your eyes on a brand spankin’ new Chaos Decimator Daemon Engine (it has too many names).

Big mini. Tiny base.

The image was taken before priming. Assembling the model was an enormous bitch as I had to pin nearly every joint and socket in this thing and still had trouble fitting it in a pose that didn’t make it look like it was either standing motionless or tipping over. In the end I feel happy with the result. Only thing that needs to be done is fitting the magnets that I’m going to use for the weapon mounts (I also have a siege claw, butcher cannon and stormlaser for it) as well as the painting. Hopefully more updates on this project as it develops.

Also this:

Coolest. Cover. Ever.

If you have ever even remotely considered the Night Lords to be a cool legion I sincerely urge you to get your hands on the amazing trilogy books by Aaron Dembski-Bowden. Void Stalker is the last installment and I can’t freaking wait to read it.

Death to the False Emperor.