Categorie: Shades of Tranquil

The First Vault / Eye of the Beholder

“Velkath. Report your status.” A dark voice spoke from within the squad leader’s mind. This voice was very much unlike the patchy vox communications that Velkath was used to getting from his other superiors. It sounded foreboding, ominous and undeniably clear. The voice belonged to the Shadowcursed, a being so above his followers, he did not need to communicate with them through traditional channels. “Events are progressing as planned, Lord.”
It was the first time this battle that Velkath had been able to speak such a sentence. Up until the last twenty minutes or so, the battle had deviated as far from the plan as had been possible. The goal of the battle was to gain access to one of the great vaults of Gorhna Spire III. The door to the vault had been protected by ancient force fields, which were controlled by pair of consoles. In a stroke of bad luck the thrice cursed Ultramarines (choir boys of the Imperium as Hathos liked to call them) already appeared active at the scene. Apparently setting up a base camp at the site before going after the consoles. 
As soon as the presence of the Emperor’s lap dogs had been detected, the entire Shades of Tranquil warband was thrown into a frenzied rush towards the vault doors. Exploiting the fact that one of the Ultramarine’s librarians had temporarily disabled the force field, Chaos Lord Tyrin had led a small group of fighters straight to the vault. Realising their librarian’s mistake and possibly afraid of what Tyrin might uncover, the Ultramarines sent out a massive vanguard of army commanders, dreadnoughts and veteran marines. 
What happened afterwards was lost in the maelstrom of combat. Velkath’s squad had been sent after the first console and the Ultramarine librarian. Getting rid of the librarian with bolter fire, they managed to reach the console. It was then that they recieved their first order from the Shadowcursed himself to bring the force fields back up again. Apparently, the daemon had secured the second console himself and his plan was to trap their foes within the force fields and the vault itself. This would leave the rest of the warband free to raid the base camp. Figuring out how to work the ancient consoles had proven to be quite a task for Velkath’s squad. When they had finally managed to re-activate the force fields, Hathos’s torrent of rage-fueled remarks gave Velkath the impression that it had been a very close call indeed.
“You have my persmission to engage. Velkath.” The Shadowcursed spoke. “Hathos has confirmed that there are no more enemies at his position and will assist your unit in assaulting the base. I am returning to the Gift and I am leaving the battlefield in his hands.”
“As you command, Lord.” Velkath replied back through his mind, feeling great disgust at the thought of having to take orders from Hathos again. Velkath’s next thought then automatically went to: “How much of mythoughts are actually being heard by the Shadowcursed?”, which then led him to “Wait a minute… Did the Shadowcursed hear that thought as well?”. Realising eventually that this reasoning was leading him nowhere, Velkath glared with frustration at the Ultramarine commanders trapped within the force fields. However he hated to admit it, he sometimes envied the loyalists and the blissfull unencumberance of their minds.

Story’s a bit longer this time (Yay?). Second battle of the campaign was a fun draw against Piers’s Ultramarines. The force field rules were fun to play around with (and exploit) as well. I’ve been regrettably absent at the gaming store during the past few weeks though since I had to focus on my graduation report. Everything’s been finished now on that end, so I’m looking forward to my regular gaming fridays again. Yesterday I spent most of the evening designing a list for the upcoming Battle of the Clubs tournament again, so no campaigning unfortunately. Maybe next week there’ll be another battle to report.

In the meantime I’ll be keeping myself busy assembling the following:

Going to need to build the terminators especially if I want to finish my new tournament list in time. The Island of Blood set was acquired mainly for the Skaven. I still plan on restarting that army during the summer holidays. But before that happens…

Death to the False Emperor!

Planetfall / Eye of the Beholder

“This is ridiculous!” Squad leader Velkath voxed angrily to the rest of his squad. “We’re not even on the ground and this battle has already cost us more than we can afford!”.
His remark went unreplied for a moment as heavy tremors, caused by a railgun shell detonation, shook the Thunderhawk that was carrying the ten Chaos Marines and their Rhino troop transport.
“Shut your face Velkath.” Sorcerer Lord Hathos growled in return. “You and everyone else in this vehicle knows damn well we can not doubt the strategies that the Lord of Fate has given to us.”
Another tremor interrupted as the Rhino was detached from the Thunderhawk in mid air.
“By the bloody throne, I will not sit here, my transport getting torpedoed to the ground, to suffer your mindless backtalk on top of it! I expect total obedience when we grab that landing zone. From all of you.”
A solemn and awkward silence descended among the squad for several moments before the rhino impacted the foreign soil of Gornha Spire III with a force that tested even a space marine’s endurance.
“Filthy xenos.” Hathos spat as the squad leader peered through a windowslit. “Make straight for the landing zone.” He voxed to the driver. “We will meet The Shadowcursed there and finally rid ourselves of these wretched aliens.”

So.. a new 40k campaign (named “Eye of the Beholder”) has started up at our local club/store a few weeks ago. The campaign system is pretty fun and besides an interesting system for battle selection and unit upgrades, it features a new, story driven mission each week. First mission I played against Bobby’s Tau and we ended up with a draw. The mission was to secure a center objective while all our units were forced to deploy through deep strike with night fighting rules in effect during the first two turns.

I’m going to try and write a short piece like the one I did above for each battle I play. Try and weave a bit of character into my chaos warband. That’s all for now though. Stay tuned for the second battle as the week goes on and hopefully a third game next week.
Death to the False Emperor!

The 40k Grand Tournament

Against all odds, I have survived yet another GT experience. As might have been deduced from my previous blog entry, I didn’t go to sleep the night before, just so I could finish painting my army. Meeting deadlines like this has always been a source of trouble for me. The fact that I’ve been trying to prepare for the GT while also doing my graduation internship and writing two important papers for school on the side… didn’t really help either.

Woes and laments out of the way, I did have an incredibly fun weekend. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a GT where I’ve played so many cool opponents and had fun even in the games where I was losing. The list I took helped a lot in both of those respects (the ‘having fun’ as well as the ‘losing’).

Having failed in fully painting my original competitive list, I was forced to take some more fluffy options to fill up the points I missed by not having a second defiler or a winged sorcerer/raptors. Instead I went with a daemon prince of Tzeentch with warptime and bolt of change and a chaos sorcerer with mark of Tzeentch and doombolt. In the end I did pretty much what I expected with the list, but despite losing 3 out of 5 games, there were still a lot of fun moments and I also learned a lot about how my army works as well.

Below here are some pics I took from the games I played. Some of them are more clear than others, but I only had my iphone handy at the time.


My first opponent had a space wolf list with lots of long fangs, grey hunters, runepriest and thunderwolves. Needless to say this was my first loss, but nonetheless I kinda managed to give him a hard time until turn 3 when I forgot to assault with my daemon prince. D’oh!


My army on display. I didn’t get nominated or anything, but I’m still pretty pleased with how it looked.


This ones a bit blurry, but this is Sam’s army, one of the guys from the club. It’s a really cool space marine army that he did pretty well with.


An eldar army that just blew me away. Those yellow glows in the explosions and blue glows beneath the vehicles are actually LED lights! Really surprised that it wasn’t nominated for best army.


Bill’s guard army. He apparently also put on a bit of a last minute painting frenzy, but got more sleep than me I guess since he did a bit better in the rankings.


Bob’s orange ork army. Bob switched gaming clubs on us (he’s now a Fallen Angel), but was still cool enough to drive us to and from the event. He ended up 28th or something. Quite impressive for me, but given bob’s record he was a bit dissapointed. He won the great gamer sportsmanship award as well, so I guess he’ll be back next year regardless.
Second game against guard. This was the one I actually won. Seize ground has always been one of my prefered missions, but my opponent made it difficult for me and in the end I managed to win with only 2 guys left in a rhino on an objective.


The third battle. I was getting pretty tired at this point (having been awake for about 40 hours) and my opponent was fielding a list with 15 stormshield terminators, backed up by 3 dreadnoughts and 3 minimal troop choices. I tried to punch through, but just made a lot of mistakes and got totally destroyed in the end.


The second day my first battle was against orks. I also lost this one, but it was a fun game and my opponent had a really cool orky army. (see photo below as well).


The final game was against Iron Warrior chaos space marines. We ended up drawing and having a lot of fun. The game was really tense and even though I had some crappy luck (initiative got stolen, defiler blown up first turn, etc) we were quite evenly matched. Picture below is one of my last units facing off against his converted iron warriors lord and plague marines, desperately trying to stop them contesting my barely held objective.

There you have it. My GT experience in a nutshell. I’ll definately be going back next year, but obviously with a more competetive list. Next couple of blogs will probably be about regular painting and gaming again. So, see you next time folks and don’t forget…

Death to the False Emperor!

Short But Sweet

As opposed to previous posts, I’m going to keep this one shorter on the introduction and heavier on the pics. Just the stuff I’ve been up to so far. Don’t have any real warhammer related opinions or brainfarts to share right now anyway. So sit back and check out these babies:
My two sorcerers so far. Still have to do highlights on the metal and the details. Also I need to think of a way to make it obvious that they’re slaanesh sorcerers. Pink seems to be the main mode of thought so far.
In addition to starting work on the sorcerers I’ve started work on the defilers as well. I wanted to fill up the empty space inside the monolith bits so first I started greenstuffing them closed, but then decided that it would become too expensive. It was about the moment that I spent half a pack of greenstuff (15 euro’s a pop) and didn’t even fill half the thing. Arts and crafts store downtown came to my rescue though. Always nice to be confronted with how much my hobby resembles those of old ladies and preschool children.
 Not going to leave you without some finished project pics. This is another Dark Heresy character I played once and painted up a model for. He’s pretty much finished now so I thought it’d be cool to post him here. 
Ok, so that’s that already. I’ll see if I can find something more discussion-worthy next time. Tonight I’m just gonna try and recuperate from a last night’s Game of Thrones ‘episode-that-turned-into-a-marathon’ ..marathon.
Death to the False Emperor!

Distractions

I’ve been somewhat distracted this week.

Work has been a constant drain on my energies since I now work 6 days a week at both my graduation internship and McDonalds. In fact, it’s been such a strain that I’ve decided to quit working at McDonalds, even though it’s been my best part-time job ever and it’ll probably be rough times ahead without the extra income.

For my graduation internship I also have to travel back and forth for about 3 hours by train every day. This has had the nifty little side-effect that I now tear through my black library books like there’s no tomorrow. The First Heretic by Aaron Dembski-Bowden has been the first to fall.

Did I ever mention that I like chaos space marines? For those not in the know: The First Heretic is about the how the Word Bearers legion introduced the worship of Chaos to the imperium of man and set in motion the massive war of betrayal that was the Horus Heresy. This right here is also precisely why I love to read Horus Heresy books. Every book reads like it’s history in the making. It’s immensely fascinating to me how all these small coïncidences and decisions, usually motivated by very understandable human emotions, end up shaping these incredibly epic and apocalyptic events. The First Heretic has this stuff in spades.

Another thing I never fail to enjoy is a story that makes me sympathise with a vilain. Even regular space marines are a bunch of superhuman indoctrinated psychopaths who kill people with less emotion than I feel when making a sandwhich. Chaos Space Marines (and the Word Bearers in particular) do not only go around commiting horrible genocide around the universe, but are also the ones that come up with the brilliant idea to start worshipping daemons from hell and completely betray and murder their own brothers while they’re at it. It’s a testament to a story when you can not only be a witness to all of this, but still get that “I know that feel” moment in the midst of it.

Even chaos marines need a hug sometimes.

Then again, this is Aaron Dembski-Bowden we’re talking about here and, as he has proven with his excellent Night Lords series, chaos space marines and their inner workings are his expertise.

The only thing I felt was missing in this book were the absence of a single, continuous plotline. The main character in this book is the word bearers captain Argel Tal, but since this guy is ‘merely’ a captain and therefore not present at most of the plotting and scheming that goes on behind the scenes, I felt like I missed some important points from the main story. This is remedied to some extent by switching storytelling focus around a lot to the other characters, but this doesn’t actually achieve the ‘best of both worlds’ effect that it should. This is a problem with more heresy books though as I had kinda the same complaint while reading Fulgrim, for instance.

All in all, everyone who’s interested in 40k and the Horus Heresy in general should not miss this book. I highly reccomend it for a deeper understanding of the 40k universe if nothing else. 8 out of 10.

So, besides working and getting wierd looks from the people sitting beside me on the train, the rest of my week was spent getting together with friends, rehearsing/recording with the band (anyone know a good bass player near Eindhoven?) and playing Space Marine. I said in my last blog that I might give it a review this time, but I don’t really feel like it right now and there’s already loadsofgoodreviewsoutthere anyway.

As for the progres I made on the warband this week:

….

Get ready for it people…

….

I assembled and basecoated 2 chaos sorcerers.


Now that’s there’s some good-ol’ fashioned metal.

Death to the False Emperor.

The Price of Progress

It’s been one hell of a holiday.

So much so that the time to write a decent blog entry has been desperately lost to me these past two months. However: I have returned with the last two Chaos Space Marine squads and their Rhino transports finished. Behold!

Apologies for the bad lighting on the pictures. The natural lighting in my room sucks and I’m too lazy to try anything semi-proffesional to fix it. Better luck next time I guess.

So it seems the warband is shaping up. I’m currently still working on the Defilers and a pair of Chaos Sorcerers though, so look out for some updates on these sometime soon.

In the meantime the 40k universe will be keeping me busy through Space Marine:

Damn that game is awesome! I’ve spent about 6 hours playing the campaign so far and it’s been all kinds of crazy. The weapons, the levels, the enemies, the flow of the game and even the story have positively surprised me at every turn. As long as the multiplayer doesn’t dissapoint I can see myself playing this game as enthusiastically as I did Gears of War when it came out. I might provide a full review in a couple of days, but so far my only gripes are the absense of co-op and splitscreen options and the imperial voice acting being a tad on the lame side (ork voices are as ace as always though).

Anyhow, this is where I’ll be leaving things for time being. Look more updates on the Shades of Tranquil and perhaps a review of Space Marine in the next blog. Also: holler in the comments if you’re enjoying this game as much I am. Beter yet, if you’re also playing on xbox live: leave your gamertag and meet up with DaanofWar online!

Death to the False Emperor!

Back in Black (and Blue)

Jep, you’re reading it right. Daan of War has restarted… again.
I’d rather not dwell on the motivations behind the deletion of the last one and the sudden decision to start anew, but instead focus on the stuff I have been doing during the last few months. Namely: Working on my Chaos Space Marine warband.

In an attempt to train my highlighting technique and improve my painting skills, those who have been following my old blog might remember that I’m in the process of repainting an entire 1700pts army of chaos space marines. The new colour scheme uses at least 4 times as many different pots of paints as the last one and looks a hell of a lot better if I may say so myself. Pics are later on in this post.

I’ve also been working on a name and background for the army, which is something they’ve never had before. I always like getting into the storytelling side of the hobby, but somehow it never really happened for this army and a couple of days ago (with some help from a /tg/ thread) I’ve come up with the following background:

9th Company of the Shadow Lords are all that is left of their chapter after their homeworld Tranquil had turned out to be a necron tomb world. Their captain, Darius Vyle, has called out for help to nearby space marine chapters many times since the necrons had emerged but recieved no replies. For a while now, Vyle has been haunted by the whispers of Tzeentch and, at his most desperate moment, agrees to a pact that will eliminate the necron threat from Tranquil and save what is left of his beloved company. In return he vows to serve the Changer of Ways as a daemon prince for the rest of eternity and hunt down the imperial scum that had refused to come to their aid.

Henceforth all imperial worlds in the sector that surrounds the now deserted ruins of a planet once named Tranquil, are being haunted and corrupted by the highly dangerous chaos warband that call themselves “The Shades of Tranquil”.

So, with that saucy bit of fluff out of the way, here are some pics of what I’ve completed so far:

The first squad. These guys are also probably the “horniest” members of my warband. *snort* Geddit?

The second squad. Although they’re not as “horny” as the first squad (I kill myself), they make up for it by whipping their hair around in a synchronised manner. Either that or they’re always standing in a really windy area. I guess the great Tzeentch blesses his children in mysterious ways.

My first finished rhino transport. I’m currently working on the second one. For those who remember my previous blog, I was having trouble with getting the blue tone right without having to wash the entire vehicle. Turns out the solution is Chaos Black and water, at a 1:3 ratio.

My termicide unit. Looking pimp as fuck. It’s a total shame that they’re really a suicide unit.

Darius Vyle, the Shadowcursed. Lord of the Shades of Tranquil. Giving you the finger.

Check out the mad conversion skills on these oblits baby! Daan of War once again proves that anything can look decent as long as you keep slapping on random bitz and greenstuff.

And finally, an inquisitorial henchmen I’ve been working on. I used him as an adept for a Dark Heresy campaign once but only recently finished painting him. His last in-game moment was ramming a truck into a line of heavy bolter emplacements. It was pretty epic.

And that concludes the first post of this newly reinstated wargaming blawg.

Thanks for reading!