Categorie: Warhammer 40k

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.

Battle of the Clubs 2012

About a week ago I went to another edition of Battle of the Clubs. I always go to these events mainly to help support and represent my club and not so much because I actually feel the need to compete on a national level. I can count myself lucky though, since it seems almost everyone I meet who does come to compete has something to complain about. It’s either the new scoring system, the increasing number of guard players, the terrain, the overpoweredness of grey knights and space wolves or the sportsmanship scoring system.
So, as said, I count myself lucky and am just thankful for the three cool battles I experienced as a non-competetive BotC attendee.


Nids. Why doth thou vex me so?

First up was a tyranid list. It was a last minute change-up from what originally was meant to be space marines. I always have trouble with tyranids because nobody at our club really plays them and since they’re an army that pretty much has it’s own special rule for everything, I am constantly surprised by what my opponent is capable of. Which is kind of a bad thing if I remember my Sun Tzu quotes correctly. Nevertheless, early in the game I made the completely wrong call to charge defilers into his big monsters which pretty much ended my chances of killing them. The battle was a massacre.


An uncharacteristically heroic unit at the bottom grabs the objective in the nick of time.

The second battle was a minor loss against a counts-as space wolf terminator list The battle ended on turn 5 at a point where I had just been able to move my last scoring unit onto my home objective. I had lost almost everything else in the battle, but thankfully 40k rules state that you’ve only actually lost the game if your opponent has more objectives than you. The tournament rule that a draw becomes a minor loss if the victory point difference is big enough swung through in my opponent’s favor though. Great game nontheless and exciting till the very end.


So much blue on so much orange! This was my least favorite table color so far.

Last game was a draw against ultramarines. This was the first time I was actually winning the match. I had claimed 2 out of 3 objectives while my opponent had only 1. Or that’s what I thought. My opponent had strategically neglected to inform me that a scoring unit that was near my second objective wasn’t actually within the required 3 inches. This made me feel incredibly stupid, but then again:  for me it’s the moral victory that counts. Knowing that you can win a match as long as you remember to keep track of tiny details such as this is good enough for me.

In the end I guess the biggest reason why going to Battle of the Clubs was a good idea is the fact that I have now finally managed to finish all my terminators.


Look at them! They’re so pretty.

So that’s all for now. In a few weeks I’ll be attending another tournament and hopefully playing some campaign battles in the meantime. Catch you later and…

Death to the False Emperor!

The Second Vault / Eye of the Beholder

Blood Angels. 
Another Librarian. 
Vault 681 must be reached.
Weren’t we taxed enough already?
We must accept our fate as the Changer declares it.
I’d rather have the angels accept their fate, daemon.
Achieve this and the day will be ours.
Let’s make it quick then.
An acid rainstorm?
An amusing twist in the Changer’s scheme.
That’s very nice. You know it’s causing warp interference, right?
A challenge presented to us by Fate itself.
You know it will be harder for us to manifest, right?
The Scheming One tests our endurance.
 You know you’re not actually helping, right?
Ok, their transports are blown and their numbers significantly reduced.
You’ve done your best.
Thanks, but I doubt we’ll be able to stall them long enough for the troops to reach the vault.
The Changer knows the value of sacrifice best of all.
Good. ‘Cause where this is going, he’s going to see a lot more of it. 
He knows.
The unit behind us won’t make it and we don’t have much time left ourself.
He will welcome us with open arms.
Let’s hope we’re worth it then.
The Lord of Fate has no use for hope.
“Well… fuck.” Karth Doomfist voxed out loud as the enemy librarian flung The Shadowcursed back into the warp. It took him a moment to realise his squad had stopped firing, in awe of the supernatural fenomenon as they were. “Keep firing, you jackasses!” He yelled again through the vox. Before the squad could properly target their foes, the roar of Blood Angel jump packs was already upon them. “Raaaargh! Damn you fools! I hate you all!” Karth roared as he completely lost his marbles after realising how stupid his squad had been. They were so entranced by the battle between the Daemon and the librarian that, before they realised things weren’t going their way, they had lost their only chance to escape.

Like a cornered beast, a primal instinct seemed to sieze Doomfist as he recklessly flung himself at the aproaching librarian and immediately got his head chopped off. The expression on Karth’s face, as it soared through the stormy air, was one of rabid astonishment. The last thing his eyes had seen was his own powerfist, punching through a librarian’s skull.

So ends another episode of Daan’s Dissapointing Battle Results. A loss against Michael’s Blood Angels was suffered in an Annihilation mission last night. Still a pretty fun battle though. At least the acid rain mechanic was kinda fun (S2 AP3 hit to every model not in cover).
As an excuse for the lack of updates, I spent the last few weeks going through some pretty life changing events. I finally graduated from college (I’m a Bachelor of Science now) and I got my first car. Next on the list is finding a job. Something I’ve been told won’t be the cake walk it should have been due to the current business climate blah blah blah. Further updates on the situation as it develops. In the meantime I kinda like not having to work all day for once and have finally found some time to catch up on all the anime, games and series I’ve been neglecting with my graduation.


“Quick! To the Daanmobile!”

As for 40k… Next week is Battle of the Clubs. I still need to paint a lot of terminators. I might post progress pics later this week, I might not. I will definately try and give a post-Battle of the Clubs report next week. Stay tuned.

Death to the False Emperor!

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!