This winter I didn’t spend a lot of time on Warhammer. The covid lockdown was once again on in full force and I decided to spend my time on my job, family and other hobbies. As the restrictions finally started lifting, warhammer activity once again blossomed a bit.
The first cool thing that happened was in december when the Horus Heresy group decided to organise a ‘secret santa’-like event but with Horus Heresy consuls. Each participant would convert and paint up a consul for another member in their legion colours. I ended up converting a master of signal in Iron Warrior colours for Arjan and was gifted a Raven Guard moritat by Naut (who normally plays Alpha Legion, so I don’t trust this moritat at all!). Afterwards we played a big battle that was as spectacular to play as it was to see.
January and february then saw some more battles. A casual AoS battle to try out the new edition against my brother and some zone mortalis at Arjan’s place to prepare for the first actual event we could go to since 2 years: Gurash Wars 5 in Assen.
The event was a blast and a great motivator to finally get some Word Bearers done. Here’s what I’ve finished of the army so far (not pictured: the 2 squads and characters I did earlier).
That’s about it so far. Since the end of february the local game store has opened again and I’ve been getting some more regular games in. 40k as well as Heresy. We’ve already seen some new people coming in and life is starting to slowly return to normal. So far we’ve planned a big mega battle for the summer to say goodbye to the old Heresy edition or welcome in the new one (depending on whether the rules will be out yet). My goal right now is to get 3k of Word Bearers finished by then. Hopefully my faith will see me through!
Here we are again after a crazy busy summer in which I mostly spent time working. Some hobby has been done however and there are some cool word bearers to show for it:
The second squad of Word Bearers was finished in June.Conversion heavy Chaplain and Apothecarion. Were done in august. Making the first 500 points complete.
What’s even better than all of this is the completion of a project that has been in the making since I recieved my tax return from the divorce. I haven’t mentioned this on the blog yet, since I wanted to avoid dissappointment if it somehow didn’t work out. Nonetheless It’s finally time to show some finished pictures of probably the most amazing piece in my warhammer collection:
Promise of Catastrophe: My actual Warlord Titan.
I love it to bitz.
This magnificent beast was painted by Scar’s Miniature Madness, who I’ve mentioned before on this blog. Amazing painter and someone I’ve been friends with for years. He deserves all the credit for this since I don’t think I could’ve done the project this much justice by myself. It means a lot to me that he was willing to tackle this and perform such an amazingly professional job on it.
Now, since there’s also been a lot of random battles since the last post I’ll sign off with this last gallery of battle pictures.
A lot of pictures this post and a lot of great battles. But including the battle reports would’ve made this post way too long.
Last blog post I was finally ready to work on the bearers. Then, of course, life happened. Now, almost 3 months since the last post: I finally have some progress to report!
The first of the holy zealotry march!
Sometimes when you realise that a project is taking longer than usual, it can be a good idea to roll with it. Instead of getting frustrated and settling for a less than stellar paint job, I decided halfway the first 5 marines that I’d just take the extra time to be completely happy with these. I’m glad I did and I can’t wait now to see the whole army come together like this.
In the meantime a few lockdown measures have been lifted in the Netherlands. So, between a couple of my most enthusiastic heresy friends, we decided we would be able to risk a 5 person megabattle at home.
Dirk’s Mechanicum
My Knight and Mor Deythan got wiped by a typhon pretty early on in the game
Sisters of Silence held out longer, but were killed by Alpha Legion and Ursurax eventually
World Eater mob looking menacing as usual
The Custodes made some brave charges
Alpharius is a beast and his abilities were definately game changers
The Mechanicum moved over kind of slowly, but still took out some jetbikes
Lerneans held on surprisingly long against the Custodes
Xiphon was one of the final things on the board for me. Helped take out the typhon so he did good.
Man! That was such a breath of fresh air to be able to play warhammer with more than 2 people again! I was playing with Arjan’s Custodes against Mechanicum (Dirk), World Earers (Bart) and Alpha Legion (Naut). For the occasion I brought along my Sisters of Silence and Knight allies as well. The game was lost in turn 3 when several key charges failed and at the end of turn 4 we decided to perform an orderly retreat for The Emperor.
Depite the long pauze in blogging I’m glad I finally had something to report in the aftermath of the Netherlands’ worst lockdown ever. As the world opens up again I hope to report more!
Here we are, quite a bit in the new year already. My last post was from November in which I had just finished my warcry terrain.
Since then I’ve mostly been attacking my ginormous pile of shame again. Although the pile is considerably smaller now than it was a year ago, there are still several armies worth of unassembled mini’s waiting for me to get started on them. With that in mind I’ve spent the final month of 2020 assembling and priming a bunch of old Skaven from the pile of shame and also worked on organizing the pile into some manageable projects for 2021.
After going through the whole thing I’ve decided to go for the completion of 3 old projects in 2021. Hopefully I can work on these simultaneously to keep my interest.
1: Skaven
I have a lot of Skaven models stocked up from years past. Some of them are metal models from more than 15 years old, a bunch of plastics from around 10 years ago (mostly clanrats) and some stuff from only a couple of years ago when I bought some start collecting pestilens boxes. Would be really great to get this finished since it’s been on my list literally since the beginning. Worth it for the peace of mind alone.
2: Word Bearers
Now that I’ve managed to completely finish my Raven Guard army as well as my small Talons force, the next Horus Heresy project has been in the making for at least 2-3 years. I’m done with planning and purchasing now and want to really get paint on these models. If I don’t have a finished word bearer by the end of january I’m going to feel very sad. Getting everything in the box done by the end of 2021 should leave me with something around 1 to 1,5k. Which should be perfect for ZM games or small centurion games. Really looking forward to that!
3: Indomitus Space Marines
This is going to be a completely new project! But should be very fun. I received my Made to Order Indomitus box in November, so I can also feel like I’m working on a new project this year. I really liked the space marines in this box and I have a lore idea to theme them as a successor chapter to my 30k Raven Guard. Going heavy with the Vulture theme I’ve already tested the colour scheme somewhere last year and was quite satisfied. Going to save these ones as a way to reward myself in between working on the Skaven and the Word Bearers.
In December, the only game I played was against Dirk’s new Thousand Sons army. It looked amazing, but the game was lost quickly when I threw everything at the blade occult, but failed all of my wound rolls on an orbital bombardment (6 ones on 8 dice).
I did manage to kill the Knight as my sole accomplishment during the game.
I also had a game in the new year already against Alpha Legion:
Once again I lost the game badly, but enjoyed using my new flyers again. Killing the AL warlord was a highlight for me (maybe I killed Alpharius?!).
The last game I played only recently against Dirk’s ogor army. Was a fun game and a real smash fest. We made a mistake on the objectives which, combined with Dirk’s double turn, swung the game heavily in his favor. I probably would have won if we had played the objective rules correctly.
Slaanesh army also looking gorge as usual.
Final thing I want to mention is that I spent some time last month looking into some foam and bags for old projects (Empire, Warmachine and Chaos Space Marines). Now 3 of my old armies are fully painted as well as safely packed and stored, which is a pretty nice feeling. Hopefully I’ll be able to do the same for my Slaanesh and Raven Guard as well soon.
So, that was that for the first 2021 update. Hopefully lots of progress in the next post!
Well, here we are. Smack in the center of the second wave of the covid pandemic. I’ve still been getting games in since we’re still allowed a maximum of 2 visitors at home, but work has become superbusy due to everyone falling ill. I find myself with increasingly less time to devote to writing blogs and keeping up with the hobby online. So here’s a simple post with a few cool foto’s and some super short battle reports.
The Alabaster Host once again enters conflict with Itiklik’s Starhost. Foiled in their attempt to defile the Seraphon Realmshaper, the Hedonites nevertheless cause a lot of pain and misery in the badly lit jungles of Ghyran.
The during the last battle (we were allowed to have) at the FLGS, the Raven Guard were out-infiltrated by the Alpha Legion and though the bloody battle on the ground was lost by the Ravens, the XIX dominated the skies with their twin Xiphon aces.
At the height of the raging pandemic, Legio Praesagius moved out on Legio Krytos as they were walking a retreival mission for a fallen titan crew. While the warhound Rubblemaker extracted the crew, the guns of the Praesagius titans faltered in the extreme atmosphere of the combat zone. Legio Krytos, perfectly at home in caustic environments, stole the victory as the reaver titan Warrior’s Scorn ambushed it’s counterpart. Legio Krytos only lost the warhound Ruinstalker in return as Rubblemaker left the battlezone with it’s objective intact.In need of some better Age of Sigmar terrain for home games I got this Warcry battlefield set. Maybe I will even play some warcry games on it sometime.
Final battle of this blogpost saw the Skaven of Clan Thikket move against a newly grown Sylvaneth force. Clan Thikket’s grey seer was unable to prevent the magical advance of the living trees, losing a warp lightning cannon and a doomwheel early in the battle. As the Treelord Ancient stood unmovable on it’s chosen place of power even the brave sacrifice of over 80 clanrats could not turn the tide in favor of Grey Seer Kreukel. Realising that these places of power were unvaluable to the Skaven cause anyway, Grey Seer Kreukel and Clawlord Hitskink proudly and safely exited the field.
In the last few weeks of the summer I’ve still been getting in games where I can. The way that local gaming has been hit by the crisis is starting to become increasingly disheartening. Everyone I know is doing their best to keep gaming, but without an open hobby night at the local gaming store a big part of my reason for being in the hobby is starting to fall apart. Some people (myself included) have tried to counter this by organising campaigns. Even though we can’t all participate at the same time, we’re hoping that linking the battles online will provide at least a little more motovation to keep us playing. I’ve therefore included a few report stories with the pictures. One campaign is an Age of Sigmar campaign that I’m participating in with my Hedonites of Slaanesh and the other is Titanicus which I’m doing with my Legio Krytos.
Age of Sigmar: The Alabaster Host
In the Seventy Fourth Palace of the Great Dark Prince ~ In the seventy fourth palace of the great dark prince We are waiting on the host We don’t have to boast but we’ll make a toast Bottoms up be sure to rinse ~ In the alabaster palace of the great dark prince Where we like to take things slow There will be a show we don’t have to go We are easy to convince ~ In the silent palace of the great dark prince A strange song always plays Like a winding maze it goes on for days If you heard it you would wince ~ In the neverending palace of the great dark prince People like to settle down Upside down they frown all around the town And we haven’t seen them since
Two mysterious statues flew down from the skies above the realm of Chaos. Although a riotous war was waged between the Maggotkin of Nurgle and the Alabaster Host of Slaanesh, both warhosts left the field with only a single statue in their possession.
“The Seraphon of the Koatl’s Claw constellation clashed with the hedonites of the Alabaster Host over a formation of five nurlge plague loci. After quickly claiming the prime locus, Greater Daemon Minertia the Elegant was banished by the Koatl Saurus Guard. Arcane infection and disease caused havoc among the closely cavorting daemons and saurus in the center. Meanwhile speed of the slaaneshi godseekers pushed the battles for the flanks past the saurus knights to claim even more loci in Dark Prince’s name. Abandoning all concern for claiming the plague loci, the saurus army unleashed their full bloodthirst and started tearing through the hedonites in earnest. With only a few daemonettes remaining after the battle, Koatl’s Claw returned to ghur satisfied. The plague loci however, were thoroughly drained and subverted by the power of Slaanesh.”
Adeptus Titanicus: Legio Krytos
simulation XX.IX.011 – sub axiom maniple engagement – blasted barrens – single fortification – nemesis: legio gryphonicus – prime stratagem: encircle and close engagement – result: loss / chronomatic insufficiency – prime causality: unreliability reaver class machine spirit / overdefensive warhound class stratagem
The shitty thing about this phase of the pandemic in the Netherlands is that our group can only play 1v1 battles at the gaming store as long as we book a table in advance. Also, the gaming store now only has room for 3 tables max. Gaming at home is still possible, but dependant on who you’ll allow in your house, how much terrain you have and how much room you have.
The part that falls away is the spontaneous, communal, social way of playing games. Megabattles, teambattles, campaigns, lengthy painting table converations. These were the kinds of things that were, to me, the ultimate reason for doing this hobby. Even though I’ve enjoyed most of the battles I’ve played since lockdown. It feels like dry bread compared to the mighty feasts that I’ve dedicated myself to for the past 15 years.
Long story short: I’m having a tough time with all of this and I can’t wait for the pandemic to be over. If this keeps going long enough I’m going to have to rethink my hobby in a fundametal way.
As a final thing I wanted to show a quick shot of my two Xiphon’s that are now finally done. Over the next few days/weeks I’ll be varnishing the entire army and declaring it finished. Hopefully I’ll have some time to make some full army shots.
The past weeks since my last post I’ve been deliberately taking it a bit more easy on the miniature painting front. Having finished my veteran squad, I’ve finally left myself with only a couple of projects in storage.
In the meantime I’ve been keeping busy with games. It’s been difficult coming to terms with the Covid rules effectively cancelling most of my favorite things about the hobby such as events, megabattles, communal painting, etc. I’ve tried to cope by organising more games at my house as well.
Classic dinnertable game against Niels’ Seraphon.Slaanesh and Skaven VS Chaos Dwarfs and Seraphon on the big table!And a Hesery game in the gameforce against Bart and his World Eaters/Iron Warriors.
In between the games I’ve spent some time on things that are not completely new models, but rather more cosmetic updates and chores that I’ve had on my list for a while now. Painting black edges to the bases for my Skaven army was one (they look a lot nicer beside my slaanesh army now) and magnetising my Storm Eagle was another. I also really quickly did some warp portals for my Slaanesh army in 30k.
Repainting the bases of 120+ skaven was quite a bit of work.
There is one new project I’ve started up. I’m currently painting two Xiphon interceptors for my Raven Guard. They’ll be the last project for that army and the finishing touch before I can start my new Heresy army. Hopefully next post I’ll be able to show them!
Now, with 2019 out of the way I can finally talk about what I’ve been up to recently. It’s been a lot and the world around hasn’t been boring about it either. I imagine everyone is like this now, but if I had known what a year 2020 would become…
Ok, so the year for me started out extremely optimistic. Even though I was still a bit shell shocked from the whole divorce ordeal, I was really happy with my new home:
I even got curtains and everything.
So I decided: New Year, New Army! The Pile was going to have to wait again. I needed something fresh to get excited about and a new way to play the game. I settled on Slaanesh Daemons at the local warhammer store birthday and got the slaanesh half of Wrath and Rapture.
My first batch of daemonettes.
The store manager told me he was going to organise a growth league and that, starting february, I could use the army to play an Age of Sigmar game each month. I was very hyped and all set to build and paint a quick new army.
I was so productive, that I pretty much finished the whole thing (aside from a Soulgrinder I still had to purchase) on the 12th of March. It was the exact weekend before the lockdown happened.
After the lockdown everything started to become a bit unreal. Life began drastically changing. I had to cancel my trip to warhammer world as well as my music festival tickets. I also had to keep working a lot seeing as I work in the pharmaceutical industry. Everything around the covid pandemic still feels unreal to me and even as I’m typing this I’m still afraid of the massive impact I feel this event is going to have on my future. Like a lot of people, I try to cope by concentrating on the things that are still possible, but I’m also kind of bracing for the worst. Making sure I’ve got my life together seems even more important now in 2020 than it did last year.
Hobbywise I decided to dive back into the Pile. I had a lot of heresy stuff as well as random small projects left to complete, so the images below are a good timeline of what I painted from the start of the lockdown until the current date.
Daemon Prince I bought to support my local store during the crisis.
Also needed some chariots in my army.
Almost 2000pts of Slaanesh.
One cannot simply paint 1 eternal warrior. This was a cool unit to paint.
The Fellowship of the Ring was made to order back in the summer of 2019. Finished it now in 2020.
Two porphyrions for titanicus.
Soulgrinder when GW started shipping again. Slaanesh army is finally complete!
5 Custodians from the Pile.
Aleya from the BL release to go with my Sisters of Silence
Random Primaris marine I was supposed to enter in a painting comp before corona.
RG praetor from the Pile.
RG bikes from the Pile.
Blackshield Jetbike from the Pile.
Veteran squad. Last RG I’ll be doing for a long time. Had a lot of fun with these.
Now, as the world is starting to walk the long and winding road to normality, I have even played a couple of games again (at 1,5m distance):
First post-lockdown game against Stephan’s titanicus.
During lockdown, my brother Niels started a Seraphon army.
Dirk finished his mechanicum during the lockdown.
Another titanicus game against Michael.
I even used my Daemons in a game of Heresy against Naut.
Niels already finished 2k of Seraphon at this point.
Also played another Heresy game against Naut to test out my custodes unit: They died fairly quickly from destroyers and a praetor-led command squad.
Now, finally, this weblog has arrived at the current day. The last thing I’ve finished from the Pile were the shattered legion vets and with them, the only things left there are Skaven, Word Bearers and the marines from Indomitus. Three projects, AoS, Heresy and 40k that I’ve decided I’m going to take my sweet time to complete. With the pandemic still controlling our daily lives I want to consolidate everything a bit and that includes my hobbies. Organising the stuff I have and fully enjoying the projects I’m working on. Hopefully from now on I’ll be able to post something new around once a month. Whether that’s Skaven, Word Bearers or 40k will be up to the mood I’m in.
This final thought also brings me back to what I was getting at the start of all these recaps: wargaming and painting miniatures is a great way to glue your life back together when it breaks. It’s fun, creative, social, rewarding of your diligence, able to match your pace and always has something new to find out about. I feel that as long as I manage to stick with it, it’ll help to carry me through whatever these roaring twenties have yet to throw at us.
This us the second part of a recap I’m doing of the period between blogs. Check out the first part here.
So, in the last part of the previous post I explained that during the whole divorce period I was still able to run and finish a Horus Heresy campaign. It was a really fun campaign and with our dedicated group of players it really helped me have some fun days to look forward to. There are too many battles to explain in detail, but I made a point to really take some nice pictures this time. So first up, here’s a gallery of some of my favorites:
Now, as I said in the previous post, I had been painting up Sisters of Silence to not only clear some backlog but also to take a really cool, unusual army to a bloodstorm event. I have long had the ambition to expand my Raven Guard into a company sized force, supported by Sisters of Silence, Knights and Militia. Basically, a small expeditionary fleet. This bloodstorm tournament was the first time my army started looking the part:
The rest of the Bloodstorm tournament went really well. So here are some more cool pictures:
I even won the Players Choice award for my army!
After Bloodstorm, it was straight on to preparation for Armies on Parade. I had promised to participate with a combined board built by Dirk, Stephan and myself. We would all build our boards seperately but they’d be able to ‘click’ together for the show. Here are some WIP pictures:
It was the most ambitious project I’ve ever done with scenery building, but it looked amazing on the parade day itself.
All of this was going on during the renovation of my new appartment so, needless to say, this was a very busy time for me. When the time came to attend the Gurash Wars in Groningen in oktober, I was truly spent and decided to stop attending events for a while and focus on getting my life back together and finally start painting that pile I was all on about way back in January.
Finally at ease in my new crib, I got myself a new car and started taking some vanity pictures of my titanicus as wel as adding a knight banner to the collection.
During the rest of the year I tried to spend some time relaxing and painting up a random assortment of stuff from the pile. Didn’t take a lot of pictures of most of it since a lot of it belonged to projects that I had basically completed already. It was a very productive time though and set me up nicely to have a great time 2020. I was super motivated to get back into dating as well as just enjoying life. I made plans for a trip to warhammer world as well as to attend a music festival again. Here are some final pictures of 2019 and I’ll leave the rest for the 2020 recap.
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:
The Siege of Xenides Prime
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!
Daan of War 