Glimpse into the Golden Age: Battle 7

Apologies for the long wait (it's almost been a whole month..), but we're finally back with the 7th battle of the ongoing campaign: Glimpse into the Golden Age. My opponent, Rob (Grimzilla on the forum), had apparently taken some crap before the battle about the list he was using. His previous list was something along the lines of 2 necron fliers and 3 annihilation barges, but today he was going to try a new list. His new list consisted mainly of a unit of 7 necron lords. The rest of the list was filled up with 2 mandatory warrior units and a C'Tan. The unit of 7 lords was something he was curious to try. A unit like that is so hard that it has the ability to kill virtualy every unit it comes into contact with. The question of course, is whether it will be able to kill enough of those units to earn their points back.

I myself am using the new chaos dex for the first time. I made the list in a hurry and all I could say about it at that poin that I was kind of dissapointed that the daemon prince and defilers got more expensive. I also didn't like that my cheap and effective daemon weapon option for the lord was gone.

After turn 1: My daemon prince is trying to distract the lord unit while my rhino unit and defiler go for the (comparetively) squishy C'Tan and warriors.

The mission had us deployed in wierd, vertical lines throughout the battlefield and it also prevented Rob's lord unit from deep striking anywhere else than the deployment zones. This was a great advantage to me since he was kind of relying on his teleportation ability (which worked like deep strike) to get to the important combats.

Turn 3: Rhino unit with lord kills the warrior units and makes contact with the C'Tan. Epic combat between chaos lord with  murder sword and C'Tan begins.

The lord unit managed to take out an obliterator and a daemon prince while my rhino unit and defiler took out the 2 warrior units and the C'Tan. The C'Tan combat was unusually epic though. The C'Tan was locked in a challenge with my lord and between his initiative test forcing bolt, my activated murder sword and his wound regenerating ability, the combat lasted at least a full 4 rounds. In the end my lord died to an initiative test right before he was about to knock of the C'Tan's last wound. The defiler came in afterwards and cleaned up the mess though.

C'Tan kills chaos lord. Defiler is not amused.

Once the C'Tan was dead, all I could do was grab as many objectives as possible and keep his lord unit from doing anything. I had to use some tricky tactics but with his assault rolls sucking balls I managed to accomplish all of this and bring it home for the win.

This fine tactic is called my 'lets grab this objective but keep just out of range of those necron lords'-maneuvre.

So, since it took so much time to post this report you might have guessed it already: there haven't been much other battles for the campaign since. I never heard the full story, but some people wanted to quit the campaign while other people then also didn't want to keep it going anymore and basically: drama.

Oh well, at least nobody can say that we didn't see it coming.

Hopefully this won't be the last campaign batrep, but if you've been following along, just letting you know it might be. I've had a lot of fun and the goal we had in mind in the first place (getting experience with 6th ed) has been accomplished pretty nicely. I'm going to try and keep the blog posts coming though. I'm slowly but steadily finishing my raptors as well as reading the new chaos codex, so I might blog some stuff about that in the near future and until then...

Death to the False Emperor!

Glimpse into the Golden Age: Battle 6

Battle 6 for the campaign was against Piers (Str10_hurts on the forum). Piers is the one organizing the campaign and I had a feeling his necrons were going to be a tough opponent to deal with. He had a destroyer lord, a bodyguard of some sort, two big units of immortals, 3 tomb spiders, loads of scarabs, a couple of wraiths and a small unit of warriors carrying his relic. The mission objective was for each player to carry his own relic to a 'doorway' in the middle/back of the board. Otherwise the mission was just kill points (or whatever they call it nowadays). I went for a big unit of 20 marines accompanied by a lord, a small unit of 10 in a rhino, some lesser daemons, some termies, a defiler and an obliterator. 

This was how it looked after the first turn. Big marine unit would be going to try and punch through to the objective (the big tower in the back) to deliver the package.

It soon turned out though, that punching through the scarab wave wouldn't be going as easy as I would have hoped and my big marine unit got stuck in bad. Also, my 10 man unit was thrown out of their rhino almost immediately by the wraiths and also got stuck in. In turn two I decided to throw in my daemons and termies with the 10 man squad, hopefully killing the wraiths as soon as possible.

Turn 2: Big unit stuck in scarabs, about to get assaulted by necron lord/spiders and 10 man squad + daemons duking it out with the wraiths.

Unfortunately, none of those quick breakthroughs happened and at a couple of points I was wondering if they were ever going to happen at all. Luckilly, the termies charging in with the 10 man squad and the defiler helping out with the big unit was enough to break all of Piers' units eventually.

Epic challenge between chaos lord and necron lord. Necron lord reanimated himself twice and had to be beaten down repeatedly by awesome daemon weapon rolls.

The battle ended with me having a major lead in killpoints and piers having been able to deliver his package. I made a last ditch effort to reach the objective zone, but was stopped by a distinct lack of a turn 7.

My poor marines, stopped dead in their tracks by sheer lack of turnage.

In the end the battle was a draw and all in all a nice way to sound out the old codex. Piers has a great necron army that's proven tough to beat by everyone else so far, so fighting him to a standstill counts as a solid result in my book.

As for the new book...

I'll try and give a proper review next week since I just didn't have any time to do anything with it except look at the pretty pictures.

At least the back of the book has a cool line on it.

Death to the False Emperor!

Glimpse into the Golden Age: Battle 5

So, last friday, another battle for the campaign went down. It's kinda scary because we're about over half-time with the campaign and it's still going! I'd have to knock on wood, but it almost seems like this one might actually be able to make it to the end...

The battle I played was against Remco (Confessor Theodoris on the forums) with his sisters of battle. His list is kind of famous at the club for doing well in tournaments and stuff "despite" it being a sisters list. This kinda put me on my guard and also pretty much halfway into writing down a loss.

Totally unnessescary of course as the battle turned out to be just a plain 'ol draw. Well, not quite plain as it was a really tense battle in the end which could have swung a lot of ways before the final dice was rolled.

Turn 1: The big trench in the middle is supposed to represent a river (something that was required for the mission). We obviously didn't have a lot of river terrain at the store.

The battle started out bad for me as my defiler got shot down right away and my lord got killed by Saint Celestine (which I believe his unkillable special character was called) a couple turns later. My rhino unit compensated a bit by surviving an outflanking sister unit and killing them off in revenge, claiming a special mission objective afterwards (you needed to get two of those for 1 vp). When my deepstrikers came tried to use a termicide unit (3 guys with combi meltas) and an obliterator to kill off his two nasty S8 AP1 tanks, but I only managed to kill one before I lost both units. I used my daemons to kill off celestine and her unit of flying sisters1.

Celestine is apparently best dealt with though superiority in numbers.

At the end of the battle my only shot at a draw was to hold on to my home objective, as I wasn't going to be able to get him off of his, and score 2 mission objectives, for a single vp, to counter his 'first blood' vp. I also had to hope Celestine stayed dead of course...

End of the battle: I only had a single daemon claiming that objective... Thank the gods for fearless units!

So a draw it was!

In other news: I am getting the new Horus Heresy book from forgeworld. I'm not planning on starting a pre-heresy force in any sense of the idea (at least not before I win a fucking lottery or something), but just think of all that juicy fluff, people. Oh that juicy fluff!

I'll also be getting the new chaos codex of course. But so far I find most of the models ugly. Especially the dragon. It looks really wierd and not at all like anything that would fit into my chaos army as I built it. Wtf is it even? A mechanical dragon? It doesn't have a crew as far as I can see... Is it some sort of daemon? Why would it wanna help chaos marines? Is this something that one would see regularly among a random chaos marine warband or is it tied to a particular legion? It's just too much nonsense for me right now.

Left: Awesomeness. Right: Dafuq..

Oh well, I guess I'll read all about it next week and in the meantime...

Death to the False Emperor!

1) You might have noticed that I don't remember unit names for sisters very well by now..

Glimpse into the Golden Age: Battle 4

Back again with another recap of yesterday's battle.

This week's fighting was done against Dirk (Papa Papaja on the forum) and his nurgle chaos marines / daemon allies. Despite using lots of proxies and unpainted models (what kind of horrible, horrible person would do such a thing is beyond me), Dirk's army could have actually been pretty fun to play against. It had lots of big nasties, healthy heavy support and enough solid troops. If only it hadn't looked like a big, confusing pile of crap... *sigh*.

For clarification purposes: the upside-down spider is a wrecked soulgrinder, the unfinished hellbrute is a great unclean one, the dreadnought is a greater (summoned) daemon, the blue/orange rhino is a plague marine rhino and the green terminators are actually obliterators....

Hopefully having sufficiently illustrated my distaste for unpainted/proxied models, I'll explain a bit about the battle itself. The mission was "The Relic" and the mission said we could only use forests as terrain. The only time this really mattered was when Dirk's daemon prince landed in a piece of terrain that made him hit himself for 1 wound (that was pretty funny). The battle went back and forth a lot of the time and although Dirk had some bad luck with his daemon prince and greater daemon. Only the great unclean one seemed to be performing as it should and totally murdered one of my marine units, an obliterator and half of my termies. My terminators were pretty useful in taking out the greater daemon and a plague marine unit.

When the game ended at turn six I was extremely relieved, having only a single troop model left (that was holding the relic) while my termies were desperately holding off the great unclean one and a full plague marine unit.

Sometimes, dumping a unit of 10 terminators on a table is worth it for the psychological bonus alone.

If you're wondering whether I actually got any painting done after all those promises I made last week...

Erhm...

No.

...

Death to the False Emperor!

Glimpse into the Golden Age: Battle 3

So, round 3 of the campaign totally went down last night. 

I played against Koen this round, who was also sporting his chaos marines. The third mission was Big Guns Never Tire which means heavy support can claim objectives and are worth an extra victory point if you kill them. Koen used two defilers and a squad of 2 obliterators while I used 2 squads with 1 obliterator each. For our other units, Koen used a lash sorcerer, a regular squad with plasma and some khorne bezerkers. I used two regular squads with melta's in rhino's, a termicide unit, 5 lesser daemons and a daemon prince. 

The battle as a whole was really wierd and had many wtf dice roll moments. A single chaos space marine squad killing off the daemon prince with a single rapid fire bolter volley was one of them and the khorne bezerkers killing off two out of three terminators with boltpistols was another. Luckilly, there were some good rolls for my side as well (the chaos marine unit running away after 2 plasma cannon shots and being able to blow up both defilers in 1 turn), so the battle ended in a draw with both armies almost completely wiped out.

Battlefield overview at turn 2. Interesting to note is the empty area in the center of the table where my daemon prince used to be.

I was pretty happy with the result anyway. My plan was to keep my obliterators on the objective and have my other guys disrupt and distract Koen's army. So it was nice to have a plan actually work for a change. The downside was that pretty much everything had to die for that to happen. I'll have to work on that. 

Units that can shoot, ie.: obliterators, are apparently the shit in this edition.

Now, with the campaign update out of the way I'm going to try and get an actual painting session in tonight. Among the list of things to do are: glue back some bits that fell off the sorcerer and terminator lord, glue new bases underneath the raptors, assemble abaddon, paint the storm laser for the decimator and get serious about painting the raptors. If I can get all of this done, I'll be a happy gamer. But first:

Death to the False Emperor!

Quick Campaign Update

A quicky this week. Purely for the purpose of updating my progress on the campaign. Last friday I battled against Imperial Guard.

The fun thing about my opponents army was that it was mostly infantry. He only had a single tank (not counting the chimera) that shot a S10 AP2 template and a forgeworld flyer. The game was mostly about objectives and I actually thought I had a chance in the beginning since most of the objectives were in my deployment zone and his army was clearly not going to be legging it across the table any time soon. I figured if I managed to kill off his troops quickly enough, I would be able to deny his objectives and my marines would be resilient enough to hold on to whatever they found. Most importantly: I wanted to take the decimator out for a test drive.

Start of turn 2. I killed a chimera, he immobilized a rhino. Everything was still looking pretty even.

I can be long and short about it, but in the end, despite the fact that my plan mostly worked, I just didn't have enough troops left at the end to keep my objectives. Once the decimator and the daemon prince were dead I only had 20 marines who were in no good position to defend themselves (cover saves having really taken a blow in the new edition). Furthermore, since I'm fairly new with the 6th edition ruleset, I was also taken by surprise by some of the additional objectives that the game has now. Having your general killed will give a point to your opponent, which I see now, drastically diminishes the usefulness of certain HQ choices that are designed for combat (...such as Daemon Princes). Also, the decimator is just a big ol' point sink and despite being awesome to look at, won't be a repeat guest in my 1000 point lists.

So there you have it. The campaign battle has been reported.

Another thing I'd like to point out is this:

...

Pretty much everything I was able to say about this when I saw it was:

"...

Why Khorne?"

Death to the False Emperor!

End of Summer Update Part 2: The Updating

Hey everyone!

You'll be glad to know that Part 2 of the End of Summer Update is now upon you. In the last post I pretty much talked about some personal stuff, the decimator and the megabattle. Now I'd like to show some stuff I've been up to for the past few weeks. First off: Games Day Germany.

Games Day Germany!

The golden daemon cabinets and viewing crowds at Games Day (Image posted at dakkadakka.com) 

Yes, yes. I went to a Games Day convention. For the first time as well, I might add. To cut right to the point: I kinda have mixed feelings about the whole experience. Looking back I feel like I had a pretty good time. I went there with a great bunch of friends and things like the Golden Daemon (painting) competition, the seminars and several of the army/store displays were absolutely fantastic. Köln is also a pretty cool city and though we didn't get to sight see much, the whole thing had a kind of 'holiday' feel to it. Getting a limited edition mini was also very nice. 

Some Golden Daemon entries were just sickeningly cool.

The world's most expensive gaming table (left) and the world's most original 'huge combined army effort' (right).

"The guys" doing what they do best: Fail at speed painting competitions (left) and more sick-ass GD entries (right).

Despite these awesome things, most of the day actually consisted of waiting for my friends to get through the forgeworld line and walking around stores that sold stuff we could buy cheaper at home. Pretty much 50% of the convention area was some sort of store and besides enabling you to look at cool stuff, a lot of the rest of the convention wasn't all that interactive. In fact, the terrain workshop and the scrap daemon (two of the most interactive things of the day) were pretty much picked clean of their bits after the first two or three hours. Also: the whole convention kinda had a Games-Workshop propaganda feel about it that I never really understood about the company. What I guess I'm saying is that the unfortunate fact that GW has a pretty close-knit inner culture, where their own products are never really criticized and ignorance of the rest of the miniatures hobby is encouraged, really leaps out to me at an all-GW convention such as this.

So, despite having had a fun day out with my gaming buddies, I doubt we'll feel the need to spend our money on more Games Day tickets any time soon. As for other recent developments:

Glimpse of the Golden Age Campaign!

Our store doesn't usually do very well in finishing campaigns (as might have been deduced by my previous attempts at campaign reports), but this one actually looks like a keeper for once!

The campaign was set up by Str10_Hurts (aka Piers) from our local club and he's reporting the campaign extrensively on warseer.

Last friday I played my first mission against Scar/Peter (the guy who painted the fortress of redemption from the last post) and his lovely Grey Knights.

Everything looked to be going well at the start of turn 2...

The battle was great fun and it was a challenge to fight Scar's twin dreadknights. I blame my loss on my lack of experience with the new edition and the unfortunate demise of my warlord/daemon prince. He basically got gunned down by random bolterfire in a single turn, which was a bit of a wierd moment for me, being forced to change my entire plan and go on the defensive.

I'll be playing another battle this friday against Jordy with his Imperial guard so I'll be sure to update the blog after that as well. In the meantime:

Death to the False Emperor!

End of Summer Update

Hello Readers! Welcome back to Daan of War!

The past couple of months have been kinda busy. Big thing was that I finally have a proper job! For about a month now I've been working as a cell culture biotechnician at a large pharmaceutical company and it's going pretty well so far.

Another cool thing was the trip to Ireland for the "Magic is Might" conference. Me and my dad (Berry Eggen) wrote a paper on magical objects in Harry Potter and how they relate to the design of intelligent, everyday technology. It's all some pretty interesting stuff when you think about it and the conference itself was a big hit as well. So big in fact that it got featured in the 9 'o clock news on one of Ireland's main TV stations along with most newspapers and radio shows: http://www.rte.ie/news/av/2012/0724/media-3351559.html

Before that we also got to present the article at the Dutch Technology Week alongside some very renowned scientists, including two Nobel prize winners! http://dutchtechnologyweek.com/nl/events/1/smart-meets-smart-kick-off-dutch-technology-week

Now, with all of that non-hobby-related stuff out of the way, let's move on to more important things:

I Finished My Decimator!

Yes people, the decimator has been painted and looking exactly like a giant daemonic dreadnought from hell should look:

Also in the background one might notice the long forgotten Fortress of Redemption: A dusty relic of an ancient time (a time when I used to volunteer for Games Workshop and didn't know what to get for all the free credits I was building up). It has recently been revitalised and painted up properly by one guys at the club. He did the entire thing free of charge on the premise that we'd keep the fortress in the Gameforce for public use. The guy's online handle is "Scar" by the way and he has a pretty cool painting service that you should check out. How come these two amazing projects have been painted all of a sudden, you ask? Well, it was mostly because...

We Had a Megabattle!

And an epic megabattle it was. Below are some pics:

Thanks go to Marcus for all the great photo's!

The whole thing was pretty epic and was mainly cool because everybody had a painted army to field. Unfortunately though, we had some issues due to a power unbalance between the two sides along with some weird deployment decisions, which caused the game to come to an end before we were even able to get started on turn four. A bit of a pity, but a lot has been learned and hopefully we'll be able to do a better one in the future, which basically everyone agreed on that we should. 

Well, for now I'll leave it at this and tip my hat to anyone who's still reading. Maybe I'll be able to post up some stuff from my more recent activities tomorrow.

Death to the False Emperor!

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!