Daan of War

2019 Part 1

This is the first part of a recap of what I’ve been up to in the period in between blogs. Second part will be coming up soon.

In january I posted ‘the year of the pile’ where I vowed to start clearing out my backlog. Terrain was to be my first challenge but first I had to spend some time on the Horus Heresy campaign I started running back in 2018. It was going to be the halfway point in january so I organised a massive megabattle:

Small selection of the many awesome pictures we took.

After the megabattle there was also another Bloodstorm Heresy tournament early february which was again an absolute blast.

Dutch Heresy scene is quite small, but everyone there is an amazing army builder. That’s why heresy remains one of my favorite game systems.

Then I finally finished the terrain I said I’d build in my post and a miniature for the dungeons and dragons campaign I was participating in. However, this was going to be the last hobby I was going to do for a while.

March and April 2019 were completely dominated by the divorce for me and I was not able to do any painting at all during this time. The heresy campaign kept running and I played some games here and there, but it wasn’t until early May that I was able to pick up a paintbrush again.

With all of my warhammer in storage, I wasn’t able to work on any of my existing projects. So much for the year of the pile… Nevertheless, around this time I was starting to recover a bit and I treated myself to a starting box of titanicus as well as an eternal guard box to make myself another D&D character.

During the rest of the summer, the titanicus helped keep me going until I finally had the time to dig up some stuff from the storage box. There was a new bloodstorm tournament coming up so I decided I was finally going to paint my Sisters of Silence.

I finally finished my last Sisters model in september and that brings me to the end of Part 1. I’ll spend one more post to show some stuff from the campaign that finished around this time and the bloodstorm tournament I had prepared for. Because by september I was done with most of the mess from the divorce and I had even bought myself a new apartment that I had to spend time redecorating. So, I’ll end this post with some postive new home pictures and continue with the warhammer in the next post!

Thanks for reading!

Daan of War 2020 Restart

This is the first post of the restarted Daan of War wargaming blog where I explain what I’m doing here and why I’ve decided to restart. Posts from my old wargaming blogs will occasionally be editted and posted retroactively under the [Classic] tag.

Hello again reader!

Welcome to the restarted Daan of War wargaming weblog. I’ve had my own wargaming blog since 2010 and this year I’ve decided to come back to it after more than a year and a half of inactivity. There’s been a good reason for this inactivity and I’ll briefly go into it further down in this post. First though, I want to welcome any new people reading this by telling a bit about myself and what I hope to achieve with the Daan of War weblog.

Hobby History

I started wargaming around the beginning of 2004. Someone in my magic: the gathering / dungeons and dragons high school friendgroup brought along some fantasy dark elves and that immediately set the rest of us off to the local warhammer stores. My friends had called dibs on Brettonians, Dwarfs, High Elves and Dark Elves, which left me to peruse the 6th edition rulebook for something unique. I found Skaven.

The Legendary Clan Rikket in it’s full glory.

In the early years I not only became very active in my local scene, but also online as a member (and eventually administrator) of UnderEmpire.net. Working on my Skaven soon became my favorite thing to do at home and having a fully painted army was my top priority. I got the hang of army building after my Skaven and by 2008 I had also built an Empire army and started cautiously getting into 40k with Tau. After 4 years I was also regularly attending tournaments and even organising international meet-ups with friends I met on warhammer internet forums.

The Knightly Order of the Grey Veil. A raggedy bunch, but already looking a lot better than the rats that they’re hunting.

The full Tau army right before I sold it. Tau just didn’t turn out to suit my playstyle.

The struggle between my Skaven and Niels’ Seraphon is as old as time itself.

Despite my love for warhammer, 2008 was a difficult time for me as I had to drop out of university, work a part time job and move out. This eventually led to me spending less time on the hobby for a few years. I still did the odd tournament in between and that was also the time Warmachine and Hordes really kicked off in my area. When I was done with my first warmachine armies I sold my Tau and started up Chaos Space Marines to get back into warhammer. By the time 2011 rolled around I was much happier and in a way better place. My Chaos marines were in for a serious repaint (I speed-painted them earlier), so I deleted all my old blogposts and started writing this one.

The early beginnings of perhaps what was to be my best army yet.

The Gap Year

So, from the summer of 2011 until the start of 2019 I have been blogging intermittently. These posts will all be reposted in the following weeks and I will also begin adding new posts on a regular basis (weekly I hope). As to why I haven’t been active during the past year there’s a simple explanation: I went through a divorce.

It was just me and my cat, back at my parents’ home.

Only a couple of weeks after my first ambitious post of 2019 (Ironically titled: The Year of the Pile) I was starting to realise my relationship was failing. The decision to divorce came soon after. These were hard times. I lived with my parents for a time as I went through the legal shenannigans, sold off our old house and made arangements for a new appartment. 2019 became a terrible year for me, but at the end of it I felt a lot stronger and better about myself. At the start of 2020 I was feeling very optimistic again and was all set to make 2020 one of the best years yet.

Life apparently had something different in mind.

But then of course: COVID-19 happened. Normally, you’d say you’d get a lot of hobby done when the world is in a lockdown. As it happens though, my job is one of the ones that got busier during the crisis and I also just started dating again. Which basically means that only now, during the summer, as things are slowly beginning to normalise, I felt compelled to start blogging.

The Plan

I have to admit that if it werent for this hobby, and the friends I’ve made through it, I would never have been able to handle last year the way that I did. That’s why I want to continue this weblog as my way of celebrating the hobby.

The next posts are going to be very big updates in which I’ll try to collect everything miniature related I’ve been up to in the meantime. From then on, I hope for this to be a place where I can post occasional hobby updates without too much fuss. Mostly with the aim of entertaining myself and maintaining a diary through the years. Hopefully concentrating on typing some english every once in a while will also help with keeping up my writing standard.

Thanks for reading!

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.

Scaling Down

Coming back from the madness that was september and october, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to settle back down with my hobby output.

Just because I need to turn it back from 100% though, doesn’t mean I need to stop doing anything at all. I’ve just really tried to focus on 1: not buying any new stuff and 2: only painting stuff that has been on my to-do list for ages.

First I needed to get two mini’s out of the way though:

This was an ork that I bought at the local GW store for a pretty cool initiative. The idea was that each customer paint up 1 ork and add it to a waagh! I’m also pretty pleased with how my ork turned out and I tried some new things on him such as the hazard stripes.

Another project that I really wanted to finish was this character:

It’s based off of a mandrake miniature with an empire sword soldered on. I painted him up how I wanted my Elf Warlock character to look in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign I’m participating in. It’s been a long time since I got to be a player in a D&D campaign so I wanted to make sure I had a good looking miniature for my character. I also really like the mandrake miniature and I had one lying around for ages that I knew I liked, but didn’t know what to do with until now.

After that it was on to the real to-do pile:

This guy is something I bought off of a friend ages ago that wanted to get rid of his chaos stuff and has been one of the many things I had lying around the workstation. Now that he’s done I have no more nurgle stuff left on my pile and that is a nice feeling to have.

The next most urgent things on ‘the pile’ as it looks now are Abbadon (who I’ve been meaning to paint for a looong time) and a whole bunch of terrain. Since the terrain should go reasonably fast and Abbadon is only a single miniature I hope to have these finished before christmas. Right now I’m thinking it would be really nice to find a way to clear out all the 40k off of ‘the pile’ before january so that I can go into the new year only focussing on AoS and Heresy.

I’m not going to rush myself though. The whole idea was that I would take it a bit more easy from now on.

Death to the False Emperor!

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!

September + October Hell Part 1

I’ve been so busy with the hobby these past months that I simply didn’t have time to blog about it! So, to make up for lost time I’m going to do a two part summary of all the amazing things that happened this autumn.

First up is the bloodstorm AoS tournament I was prepping for in the last post. Preparations mostly involved painting some characters and an abomination which you can see included in the army shot above. The games themselves were really fun and with a loss, a draw and a win I felt pretty good about my perfomance gamewise.

The first battle was against the Maggotkin of Nurgle. Basically a lot of trees, daemons, the glottkin and blightkings. Didn’t mind the loss because the battle was pretty fun and my rats held up pretty well despite the power difference in the lists.

Second battle was against someone who hadn’t played a lot of AoS before, but had a pretty fun Slaves to Darkness list with SLAMBO! of all things in it. It was fun to not worry about strategy too much and just create a bunch of cool combats. It ended up as a draw even though it was an incredible game.

Last battle was Horde VS Horde against bonesplitters. My opponent was wielding the infamous arrer boys unit of 90 shots a turn, but thanks to my stormfiends coming in from the flank, that unit didn’t quite perform to its full potential. The rest of the battle was just us slamming our lines into eachother and I won in the end mostly because our time was up. Which is kind of what you get when just moving your guys takes 20 minutes per side.

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Next on the agenda was the third Gurash Wars event. Didn’t have to do a lot of painting for it since it was a centurion event at 1500 points, so I could just take some stuff from my larger army and call it a day. The day was still pretty taxing though. Groningen is roughly around 2 hours away from where I live by car. Not really a fan of driving so any day where I spend at least 4 hours simply staring at a road is not an easy day for me. The event itself was pretty damn cool though. Lots of whacky scenarios and crazy happenings thanks to the points of interest system and the warlord progression table.

First game was against an amazingly painted Emperor’s Children army. Got pasted pretty bad even though my opponent said he was deathly afraid of my plasmagunners and terminators. In the end the terminators proved too slow and the plasma squads were easily taken out by kheres. Got some cool points of interest rolls and some nice warlord bonusses, so that was pretty nice as well.

Second game against Iron Warriors on a zone mortalis board. The zone mortalis and my infiltrate ability caused this game to become a draw (I think), but we mostly just shot at eachother a bit and tried to keep our stuff from dying too much.

This game against Thousand Sons was again a draw if I recall correctly. It all looked to be going really well, until my terminators got creamed by too many bolters and my warlord failed to kill a delegatus. On the other side of the table things evened out as my contemptor killed a sorcerer and some castelax, but the game was really fun in the end. Lots of objectives and points of interest claimed for me.

The last game was a really wierd scenario where the whole game revolved around basically whose warlord could attack the hardest. Luckilly for me my warlord was buffed pretty hard at that point with an extra toughness, extra attack, extra initiative and whatnot, so he proceeded to create so many victory points in the first couple of turns that it didn’t matter that the rest of my army got massacred.

So, that’s it right now for part 1. I’ll try to write up another blog post later this week to post some pictures of the Armies on Parade and Scale Model Challenge events that I went to in october. See you soon!

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.

Summer Break

Time for another short update post!

It’s been about a month since I participated in the Age of Sigmar Bloodstorm event and the amount of time I spent painting has been so off the charts that I’ve had to take a small break from painting and hobby for a while. I played some games here and there, but I’ve deliberately stayed away from my paintbrushes and tend to some of the other aspects of my daily life that I might have left somewhat neglected in my clanrat frenzy. Here’s some shots from one of the few battles that I did play during the past month.

Now that the dust has settled I’m starting to feel energized for the hobby again. Thanks to the new AoS book as well as some old Heresy black library books, I’m probably going to start spending some time painting again. With some luck I’ll be able to expand my growing Skaven force and also put some effort into organising that narrative Horus Heresy campaign I’ve been thinking about for a while now.

Hopefully I’ll have more to say about it in the next post!

120 Clanrats

The reason for the lack of blog posts in the past month is that I had to think of it like this: “If I have time to write a blog post, I have time to paint some clanrats.”

The mentality that I had to be in for the past couple of weeks was insane. In the last post I made on the subject I showed my doomwheel and had just started work on my Stormfiends. So since that post I still had literally one hundred clanrats to paint, a warp lightning cannon, an abomination and 3 stormfiends. I simply had to give up on all of my other free time activities in order to finish it all in time.

In this post though, I’m glad to announce that I did it. Despite having to replace the abomination with 6 jezzails and having to stay up until 3 am the night before the tournament, I managed to paint every single model to a nice tabletop standard.

Here’s some WIP shots of the stormfiends and a picture from the army display at the event itself:

As for the event itself, it was a lot of fun to see so many well painted AoS armies at a Dutch tournament. With 21 players (if I remember correctly) it was the biggest AoS event in the Netherlands so far.

The first game I played was a bye against an amazing Stormcast Eternal army that had been painted to look like weathered statues. It was great fun and because it was a bye game, we both threw competition out the window and focussed on having a fun game with lots of combat.

The second game was against a good friend who also brought his Stormcasts along. This game started out extremely epic with two classic battlelines staring eachother down, but quickly turned into a slaughter. As it appeared I had made some tactical errors with my brand new force, which were compounded by being on the recieving end of a double-turn. The game was still pretty fun despite the one sided result and it gave me some much needed experience.

The third game was against sylvaneth. This game was a lot more balanced casualty-wise as I applied some lessons from the second game and used some pretty effective screening tactics. The scenario and the mobility of the sylvaneth put me at a severe disadvantage however and I lost the game at 2 against 6 vp’s. My opponent was a chill guy though and it was a really fun game. He also obviously put a lot of effort in his painting which was also cool to see.

Once again I can’t overstate how happy I am to have finished my Skaven army finally and being able to use it at the event was the cherry on top. Next post might have some heresy or 40k in it again or perhaps even an abomination?

Glory to The Horned Rat!

Achaia +II+

‘Rejoice, my children. For today we battle beneath the Changer’s Eye! Let your ambitions shine proudly under his eternal gaze! Behold the fate of those who in their arrogance fight against His great scheme. Though they claim themselves master over the etherium, today we will prove they are naught but dust in their shells. Go forth, my Shades, and conquer!‘

Hathos shuddered as he unleashed the spell. Since the Shadowcursed had sent the rest of the warband against the Thousans Sons, Hathos had spent the entire battle casting his magic. Spell after spell he spent augmenting his fellow renegades as well as hurling black, shadowy bolts of death at the enemy. Even between incantations Hathos was forced to chant countercurses and negate the worst of what the Thousand Sons were throwing back at them. Briefly using the short moment after the completion of his spell to savour the cracking noise of several rubricae breaking open in the distance, Hathos drew a large breath of misty webway air into his superhuman lungs.

He was suprised, really. The ease by which the spells came and by which the energies were summoned was astounding in itself. Given that they were battling so many other warp users and in the company of two daemon princes, Hathos would’ve expected to feel some sort of resistance. As a true devotee, Hathos reasoned that it must surely be the sign of his God’s presence that the influence of the warp came so strongly in this alien dimension.

Torn from his musings by a bolter shell encased in warpflames detonating beside his location, the sorcerer decided to keep moving and start working on his next enchantment.

‘Neratafata gormanoramos!‘ he exclaimed, grasping the final energies of his prescience inducing incantation into his power-armoured fist. Just before he could unleash his latest sorcery however, Hathos was temporarily blinded and rocked backwards by a terrible flare. Regaining his composure, the renegade slowly waited for his sight to recalibrate itself. Seeing the battlefield before him once more, Hathos was reminded on how bad things were going. It seemed to be going well when the Shadowcursed took down the enemy general, but once the two giant statues started firing in earnest, everything quickly went sour for the renegades.

The Shadowcursed’s energy seemed to have disapeared from the field and now even Hubrecht Payll and his terminator guard were nowhere to be seen. It all seemed due to this new daemonic entity that wielded some sort of baleful lightsource.

‘A burning sword?’ Kretchar, one of the traitor astartes firing his bolter by Hathor’s side, openly asked. ‘Never seen one do that before’.

‘Count yourself lucky. I’ve heard of only one sword lately that shines so.’ Hathor spoke ominously from behind the firing line. ‘Thankfully for us, it is impossible that that particular sword resides in the hands of such a creature. You’re all under the effect of a blinding charm.’ Hathor lied. ‘Shake it off and focus fire!’

Gasping and panting, Hathos leapt ungraciously behind the cover of a building wall. Whichever ancient civilisation built these ruins had his thanks. Each and every renegade of the Shades of Tranquil was either destroyed, incapacitated or fleeing. Even though he was likely the last remaining warrior on the field, Hathos was not about to give up yet. All the spells, twists and turns that occured during this battle seemed to have pleased his patron deity and Hathos himself had never felt more chosen than when he personally banished the hooded daemon.

Visible as a bright blue nebula that pierced the alien mists, the energy of Tzeentch was permeating this battlefield, just waiting to be reaped. Hathos could not resist at least an attempt to harness that power for himself. He began to envision the ritual he would need to perform and the circles and diagrams he would need to prepare.

A large crack sounded above him as a piece of rockrete fell down loudly beside the sorcerer.

Yes. A grand ritual. That would be the first thing he’d do if only the statues’ guns would stop firing.