Christmas Holiday To Do List

... Check.

Death to the False Emperor.

Mohsar the Desertwalker

So besides some random progres on my second defiler, here's what else I've been up to lately:

Made this at work so in case you're wondering, that red thing in the back is a pipette balloon.

The back of a model is also important!

The model is Mohsar the Desertwalker from the Circle of Orboros (Hordes/Privateer Press). This guy is definately one of my favorite warlocks and if I were to ever build a circle of orboros warband it'd probably be a Mohsar force. Right now though, I plan on using him to represent my cleric in a D&D game. I was torn up on whether to paint him in colors that would suit my cleric, or just try and paint him as Mohsar. In the end I decided that I wanted to paint him as Mohsar, just in case I ever decided to build an Orboros warband. I've seen too many roleplaying groups fall apart, only after I just painted a mini for my character, so this time I'd rather leave myself with something I can still use afterwards.

In other news, I also found out that I need more paints. How annoying is it that you can have over 30 different pots of paint and still need to compromise when you need to paint a model in a specific way? At 3 euro's a pop I can't even justify buying more than one or two pots a week nowadays. It's getting so bad I might even start asking people to get me paints for christmas. Damn these first world problems!

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!

No Rest For The Wicked

Going to the 40k GT today..

Wish I started painting earlier.

Right now I'm about this far:

It's 6 AM and I guess I need to print out some stuff, shower, eat breakfast and move out.

I'll be sure to get some pics up after the weekend.

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.

Badass cover art is badass.

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 loads of good reviews out there anyway.

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


....


Get ready for it people...


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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!