Scale Model Challenge – Daan of War

September + October Hell Part 2

Right after the Gurash Wars, I threw myself into my entry for the 2018 edition of Armies on Parade. The idea behind the project was to build a display for my homebrew Renegade Chaos Warband: The Shades of Tranquil.

If you go far back enough on this blog you’ll see that this army was started way back in 2010 and 8 years later it’s only gotten bigger and better. It’s been through 3 edition changes and I can honestly say that I’m still proud of how I’ve painted and built the whole thing. That’s basically why I wanted to take Armies on Parade this year and really celebrate how amazing and cool this force is.

In the end I got the Best Theme award which was nice and I was just really happy to have respectfully finished this project and army.

The next weekend though, I had to reshift my focus completely again as we were going to the Scale Model Challenge again. Before I went there I apparently didn’t have enough hobby on my plate since I spent the friday evening playing an awesome Heresy game against Koen for the campaign (which is still going strong):

I enjoyed being able to use my Knight for the first time in a heresy game but I unfortunately can’t stand up to rapier batteries and I lost the Knight without it getting into combat at all. The battle was fun though and it was cool to make an appearance in my own campaign for a change.

Next day was time for the SMC!

So, there you have it. In between all the happenings of the past months I also spent time helping Stephan build and paint this awesome table. Stephan, Dirk and me added our armies on top of it as well as some terrain pieces and to be honest I was really proud again of our achievement.

Pictured above are me, Stephan and Dirk from left to right. Below is the only mini that I painted especially for the display. I really felt that I needed a cool centerpiece in between Stephan’s stardrake and Dirk’s flying cow. I’m glad I painted it in the end, but I won’t deny that it took a lot more work than I anticipated. Probably because it’s really a mini that you really want to do your best on and can’t leave hanging with a simply ‘ok’ paintjob.

Now below here are a lot of pictures, but since it’s such a big board I’m going to not care about making this a long post and just show everything.

With that out of the way I’ll leave this with only a few more cool images from our neighbouring club at the SMC who brought along an INSANE mordheim table:

The table was so awesome I can’t even explain it properly with just these images. Basically EVERYTHING on the table can be taken apart in floors which means that your mini’s can literally enter and walk around each house in that city. You can even remove entire houses to see what’s underneath. You can even use some of the fucking SEWERS! The witch hunter warband pictured above is my own and I’m really glad I brought them along just so I could have a chance to play on such an amazing table.

Needless to say though, after so much hobby I forced myself to take a break for a while so expect the next post to contain a lot less material, but hopefully a bit more short and sweet stuff. I’m using my break from events and stuff now to get some bits done that I wouldn’t normally have time for and Horned Rat knows I have enough of that stuff lying around, so I won’t be parched for material on this blog just yet.

So until next time and…

Death to the False Emperor!
Glory to the Horned Rat!
Victory or Death!

2017 In Review Part 2

Welcome back to DaanofWar’s 2017 hobby highlights!

Part 1 left us just before the big wedding. The wedding was great. We had to take an enormous ammount of pictures, sit in chairs, sign papers, eat loads of stuff and party our asses off. Here’s a picture of me and my wife making an attempt at posing for a photo:

So, with all that nonsense out of the way I finally had some time to paint my warhams again:

As can be seen in the images above, I put my Raven Guard on hold for a while and continued the work to rebase my entire Chaos Space Marine army. The new edition of Warhammer 40k was just released and we were going to kick off a campaign at the GameForce, so I really wanted to give my ‘good-old’ chaos marines a bit of love and attention. I had good hopes that they might be viable again with the new rules and I was pretty hyped to see if my old army could come back with a vengeance.

Having rebased most of my marines: This is a shot of my first 500pts battle against Naut’s Grey Knights. Not only did I instantly learn that Grey Knights are pretty good in the new edition, but units of 20 marines die waaay too easily to morale checks. Never again.

During the rest of the campaign I started noticing the pattern that I was not only losing a lot of the games, but that I was also losing them fast. Most of my games were over by turn 3. Also, the hope I had for my chaos army catching a break rules-wise this edition were shattered when it turned out that not only was the core of my army (my 40+ chaos marines with bolters) not very points efficient, but they also lost the option to take an extra close combat weapon. This made my entire army a lot less viable as I found myself stuck with a lot of units that did not excel in any of the 3 main phases of the game.

With each new game I played each month I realised more and more that I needed to do a lot more than rebasing to salvage my chaos army in 8th edition. All of this got me a bit down about the new edition, so I wasn’t that sad when ForgeWorld announced that the Horus Heresy would be staying with 7th edition and I could happily continue working at my Raven Guard again.

Above is the first model that I did when I started working on my RG again. Pretty happy with it and a nice change of pace from the drop pods and the storm eagle that I still had to finish.

Another reason for needing to hurry with my Raven Guard was the upcoming Scale Model Challenge. As you may remember from last year, the Scale Model Challenge is a fairly large miniature painting convention that’s right next door for me and since we had such a blast visiting last year I managed to get us a spot for the club for 2017. The idea we had to wow the crowds was to try and display the sheer ammount of Heresy we have going on at our local club by building a giant Isstvan V display board.

Here’s some work in progress pics of how we built the board:

Thanks to a lot of help from friends we managed to finish the table just in time for the SMC and with all of our armies on top it turned out to be a roaring succes:

Also, to finish my big 3000 point Raven Guard project in style, I took the second half of the army (the part that I painted this year) to Armies on Parade at the Warhammer store in Eindhoven:

I was super proud to have finally finished everything after almost 2 years of working on it and my efforts were rewarded by a nice gold pin for Best Army Theme.

The final thing that I went to in 2017 was the first Gurash Wars event in November. First time I went to a narrative e Horus Heresy event and it was a blast. It was a long way to travel, but it was worth it to take part in the ongoing story and see a lot of cool new Heresy armies. Here are a few impressions of the event:

So that was pretty much it for me in 2017. A lot more has happened so far in 2018 though, so I’ll save all of that for the next post.

Victory or Death!

Drop Pod Hell

The past month I’ve been spending most of my time doing drop pods.

Man these things are rough. Not only are they hard to paint on the outside, but they’re twice as much work on the inside as well!

They’re so much work that I still didn’t manage to complete my army in time for the game I had scheduled at Koen’s place:

How things looked after my first turn: one plasma marine got hot and the rest of the army did nothing.

The game itself went really bad dice-wise for me and the first two turns resulted in a lot of dead marines on my side, starting me off with a big disadvantage. The turns afterwards only got worse and I only managed to take out the mortars in the end of the game. My only hope and plan to salvage the game was to destroy the two objectives in one fell strike of my deathstorm drop pod, but even that was not to be as my dice failed me again. I damaged one of the objectives with it, while my dark furies finished off another one in turn 5. In hindsight I should have used my newly assembled mor deythan to take out one of the objectives, but since I’ve never used snipers before I was stumbling around a lot with their deployment and usage.

At this halfway point it is evident that my army has been thoroughly chipped away. Hah!

Despite my low rolls the game was pretty fun and it was nice to play on Koen’s well painted table with all the cool terrain. Koen’s attic (where we played) was stuffed to the brim with 40k and 30k stuff and keeps, so far, the largest private collection of painted citadel miniatures I’ve ever seen in my life.

The weekend afterwards I didn’t do much painting either as I spent my sunday at the Scale Model Challenge. This is an amazing event that’s practically next door to me and definately worth checking out for any miniature fan. Here’s a video (in dutch) from the event where you can see some of the highlights from the painting competition the event is best known for:

Then, for the last two weeks I finally got my inspiration for the title of this blog post. As I was trying to finish most of my raven guard for the Armies on Parade event I got overambitious and set my
goals way too high, hoping to finish all four drop pods that are going to be in the final army. Just painting 2 of those bastards (along with my display board) almost got the best of me.

I started out trying to paint the ‘pods with a drybrush technique, but this turned out to be really ugly as you can probably see in this image. I’ll try and get some better pictures tomorrow, but just going with the edge highlights proved to be the better option in the end.

So, once I’m done making this post I’m going to go to sleep and prepare myself for displaying what I’ve got so far for my ravens at the Armies on Parade event. I’ll do a proper report on it next week when I’ve also had my next Horus Heresy campaign battle.

Wish me luck!

Victory or Death!