Drop Pod Hell

The past month I've been spending most of my time doing drop pods.

Man these things are rough. Not only are they hard to paint on the outside, but they're twice as much work on the inside as well!

They're so much work that I still didn't manage to complete my army in time for the game I had scheduled at Koen's place:

How things looked after my first turn: one plasma marine got hot and the rest of the army did nothing.

The game itself went really bad dice-wise for me and the first two turns resulted in a lot of dead marines on my side, starting me off with a big disadvantage. The turns afterwards only got worse and I only managed to take out the mortars in the end of the game. My only hope and plan to salvage the game was to destroy the two objectives in one fell strike of my deathstorm drop pod, but even that was not to be as my dice failed me again. I damaged one of the objectives with it, while my dark furies finished off another one in turn 5. In hindsight I should have used my newly assembled mor deythan to take out one of the objectives, but since I've never used snipers before I was stumbling around a lot with their deployment and usage.

At this halfway point it is evident that my army has been thoroughly chipped away. Hah!

Despite my low rolls the game was pretty fun and it was nice to play on Koen's well painted table with all the cool terrain. Koen's attic (where we played) was stuffed to the brim with 40k and 30k stuff and keeps, so far, the largest private collection of painted citadel miniatures I've ever seen in my life.

The weekend afterwards I didn't do much painting either as I spent my sunday at the Scale Model Challenge. This is an amazing event that's practically next door to me and definately worth checking out for any miniature fan. Here's a video (in dutch) from the event where you can see some of the highlights from the painting competition the event is best known for:

Then, for the last two weeks I finally got my inspiration for the title of this blog post. As I was trying to finish most of my raven guard for the Armies on Parade event I got overambitious and set my
goals way too high, hoping to finish all four drop pods that are going to be in the final army. Just painting 2 of those bastards (along with my display board) almost got the best of me.

I started out trying to paint the 'pods with a drybrush technique, but this turned out to be really ugly as you can probably see in this image. I'll try and get some better pictures tomorrow, but just going with the edge highlights proved to be the better option in the end.

So, once I'm done making this post I'm going to go to sleep and prepare myself for displaying what I've got so far for my ravens at the Armies on Parade event. I'll do a proper report on it next week when I've also had my next Horus Heresy campaign battle.

Wish me luck!

Victory or Death!