Age of Sigmar and Another Squad

Once again a long period in between blogs, but no matter. It's been a busy month mostly because I've spent a lot of time playing guitar. Now that my music school's yearly rock-night is over, I can afford to free up some warhammer time again. First off some updates from april that I forgot to mention: the arrival of my birthday goodies and a painted land speeder!

Contents of this pile are: Master of Signal/Legion Champion, Darkwing Pattern Storm Eagle, Deathstorm Drop Pod, Dark Furies, Mor Deythan and Corvus Corax.

This was a quick foto at the time. I stayed at home on King's Day purely to paint this one up.

This month I spent a friday night playing my first proper Age of Sigmar battle. Finally found someone from the local club who was also eager to try out the game and we decided to just take some random stuff and use a scenario from the Quest for Ghal Maraz book. I forget what the mission was called, but it involved me being the invader and having to rescue a hero model from my opponents army.

This was the set up, I think, because I can't even look at this picture due to the woefully unpainted state of my skaven warband.

The game was good fun and though we still had to look up a whole lot the gameplay still felt fast. I liked the doomflayer and doomwheel warscrolls. They're still random and fit the all or nothing Skaven style of gameplay that I enjoy. The clanrats and rat swarms made great tar pits although the clanrats would've been better in a larger unit. AoS has, so far, been winning me over more and more. The only thing I still don't really like is the way they dispense the story. The big books are too expensive for me to buy them all and I don't like that they're basically the only way to keep up with what's happening in the storyline. I mean, nice and everything that we have an advancing narrative now, but why keep it locked behind a 60 euro per 3 month paywall? Anyhow, the game itself is great and building armies in the mortal realms is fun as hell.

Here you can see my unpainted clanrats falling apart after a saurus charge and my rat swarms holding up a bunch of kroxigors and skinks.

Aside from my AoS adventures I haven't played much else and spent the rest of the month painting up a new unit of Raven Guard marines instead. It's the same unit as the other one with the exception of a power spear instead of a power sword for the squad sergeant.

The spear is actually a chaos sorcerer staff that has been heavilly modified.

Starting to look like a proper army, right?

That's about it. The new squad took a long time to paint and I'm going to have to paint up even more marines if I want to be ready for the next round in the campaign. The next guys will be in a drop pod though.

Victory or Death!

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..

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.