Season of War

Long time no post yet again!

Fret not though my dear imaginary readership: the lack in blog updates the past few months has only been surpassed by the incredible progress that has been made on all my projects.

There's so much to show that I'm going to spread this stuff out over two posts. This one is going to cover all the AoS games I've been playing over the summer. 

Despite a lot of anti-AoS sentiments at the local store, I got asked by the owner to run GW's Season of War campaign for whomever was interested. I got the campaign box and the generals handbook and basically spent five consecutive fridays focussed on promoting Age of Sigmar at the store.

All things considered, the campaign was actually a really fun experience! I'm impressed with how GW handled things, seeing as I had a somewhat sour after taste with Storm of Chaos and the Nemesis Crown. AoS also seems a lot more suited to global campaigning than the old world ever was. The campaign was also fun because it unexpectedly got some new people excited for AoS again. A long time friend of mine got back into things with the Death alliance, another local guy went along with Seraphon, another Skaven player joined in a couple of times and me and Joyce with our Skaven and Sylvaneth were there as well.

Here are some of the best pics we shot during the course of the campaign:

First battle of the campaign was between two of my friends who had only recently decided to give AoS a try. Lizardmen VS Empire took some getting used to with the new system, but both players ended up having a great time.

The Empire player from the first shot wanted to try out AoS against something else than Lizards, so I obliged by fielding my budding Skaven force.

My custom-made Hell Pit Abomination got stuck in pretty quick.

The next week we did a 2 VS 2 battle with Skaven + Sylvaneth VS Seraphon + Dark Elves.

The Dark Elf + Seraphon side looked nicely ranked.

This was one of the first battles Joyce (Sylvaneth) had ever fought with a treelord and perhaps teleported towards the opposing armies a bit too soon. All in all it was a fun battle and mainly served to show how deadly a shooty force could be.

Another week another battle. This one was a 4 player free for all and shows my rats marching towards Death, Seraphon and another Skaven army.

The Empire guy from the first pictures is actually the one who started up this new Death Alliance army during the course of the campaign. I played against him a bunch of times to get him started with the game.

He got started with the Get Started set for the deathrattle faction. I will say this: Neferata is so far the nastiest thing I have faced in Age of Sigmar.

We closed off the campaign with a 3 player free for all, which ended once again in favor of our local Death player, who wisely kept back while the Sylvaneth threw themselves against my rats en masse.

So, that's about it for this post. Next post I'll post up some reports of the matches I did for our ongoing Horus Heresy campaign this summer.

Glory to the Horned Rat!

In with the old, in with the new!

It's been almost two weeks since the last post and this is mostly because I accidentally my old laptop. I have a new one now so everything is a-ok again and that means it's time for a new post!

I took some time off from work as well these weeks, so besides relaxing, I managed to do quite a bit of work on both Clan Thikket and the Dust Vultures.

Clan Thikket has grown considerably from the lone clanrat I posted last time and is joined by 4 of his mates as well as a freshly painted Warlock Engineer and two Doom-flayer Weapon Teams. Next on the list for new paint things are the rest of the clanrats and a doomwheel.

It's been so long since I painted anything fantasy I almost forgot about command groups.

This model gets the award for 'most rewarding to paint' this week.

These two were really tough to paint. Too many random things I had trouble identifying and I had to glue and paint the giant wheels on seperately. I make it a point to always assemble something completely before I paint it, but this time there was really no way around it.

I also took the time to rebase two models I had left over from my old Skaven army: A Master Moulder and a Hell Pit Abomination. Both of these are heavily converted and were staples of my old Skaven force so it feels good to see them on new bases, ready for action again. It's also nice to have these two make up a small moulder theme to go along with my skryre and verminous guys.

Don't know if I ever posted these on this blog, but they're some golden oldies for sure.

Already posted these last time, but I changed the basing a little and they're officially Moulder now in AoS I found.

For the Dust Vultures I painted up a small support squad of plasma gunners. These are to arrive via a Drop Pod that I still hope to finish painting this month.

This pic was made with infinitely better lighting at GameForce.

I used them right away in a battle for the 30k campaign this friday against Michiel's Mechanicum army. The game was a total massacre. I didn't have a single thing left by the end of turn 4. Most of this has to do with the mission, which was a break through style thing where I had to run a table length in order to score objective points. Unfortunately, running all out all the time against an army that's perfectly capable of decimating your squads with a couple of standard troop volleys, is not such a great thing to be required to do in a game of 30k. It was interesting though to see the mechanicum in action and next time I hope I don't have to play a mission like this against them again.

This is how things were after my turn 1.

Close up shot of the new guys in action.

So, lots of pics this time, but that's ok. Hopefully next post will have a finished drop pod and some progress on some new raven guard stuff for the 1250 point mark of the campaign.

Victory or Death!

Raven Guard Wins and Clan Thikket!

Suddenly, out of nothing, I seem to be totally on the ball with the hobby again.

First thing I did this week was go out of my way to paint this experiential revelation:

Perfection.

"The other side."

Please, please, please people! Don't all pull down your pants at once! This is but the first of the gimongous Skaven army that is currently in the works and shall soon flood like a swarming tide the great gaming tables of the known world!

In all seriousness, I'm really glad I got this out of my system. I've been putting off painting a clanrat because I wasn't sure about it tying me down on a colour scheme, I wasn't sure how to do fur right and I didn't have a plan for the skin either, and all sorts of silly excuses. I finally did it and it was amazing fun. I'm happy with my choice to go for a dark green with blue accent and although the skin took me a couple of tries, I'm really happy with the end result. The base is not done yet obviously and I plan to add some high summer grass tufts to get a sort of 'forest' look for my rats. Asuming I'm going on with the dark green/forest rat theme I've also decided on a name for the clan: Clan Thikket. Maybe it sound dumb but somehow this is the stuff that get's me inspired for an army.

Then, on friday, I finally had the 750 points battle for the ongoing Horus Heresy campaign and boy was it a good one. I was playing against Michael who had a combination of Blood and Dark Angels but was using them as Iron Warriors (because there weren't enough traitor armies in the campaign). He had 6 special terminators with cyclone launchers, a unit of 20 marines and a unit of dakka predators. I had a land speeder with multi melta and grav gun, a close combat contemptor, 2 units of marines and a chaplain. We had to claim objectives and were under raging inferno rules which meant we each had a 40mm, 3d6 scattering, S5 within 6" inferno bomb to drop on eachother. These rules were insane and almost all casualties suffered were due to inferno hits.

Turn one had me infiltrating and advancing in an attempt to go for the throat. This plan immediately backfired when one of the inferno bombs landed right in front of my path.

Due to the nature and 40mm + 6" radius of the inferno templates (we used Naut's half-painted terminators), both our plans fell apart quite fast and by turn 5 we were reduced to simply trying to claim an objective and stay alive with the models we had left.

One of the last turns my second squad had arrived from outflank in turn 3 to claim an objective while the first squad was reduced to the chaplain and the sergeant. Contemtor was long gone and the land speeder arrived in turn 4.

In the end we both managed to hold on to two objectives and it came down to the special victory conditions. Due to my chaplain and sergeant surviving and managing to wreck his tanks, Michael only had First Blood, while I could claim Last Man Standing and Slay The Warlord. Basically pulling this victory right out of my ass on the last turn. It was a great game though and every dice roll we made felt like a make or break situation. Battles like these make me curious to see what's going to happen at the 1000 point level. Winning this battle was pretty critical as well because a loss for me would have meant that this round would have went to the traitor side. 750 is now the first time the loyalists came out ahead which was nice to see for a change.

So, that's about it for this week. Now on to the next batch of rats and ravens!

Victory or Death!