Ares Campaign

[Authorization Confirmed]

[Psy-conduit Beta 81 Secudus opened]

[Accessing File V5/00819IV – Ares System]

[Incoming data…]

[Data Received]

Originally brought into compliance by the Raven Guard

early during the God Emperor’s Great Crusade

, Ares was a shining example of an isolated human world brought back into the light of the Emperor and the fold of humanity. It quickly grew to be an important manufacturing hub and primary Mechanicum forge world for the segmentum and outlying sectors.

At the outset of the [Reference deleted] heresy, Ares immediately declared itself for the Emperor; and because of its ideal locale forces were able to launch multiple successful counter-offensives against the traitor's fleets. Despite being subjected to attack numerous times Ares was able to repel them all; its massive munitions foundries and forges remaining operational and forming a lynchpin in the Imperium’s struggle.

One such engagement...

[Advancing data]

...raised in His likeness.

For thousands of years Ares enjoyed peace and prosperity within the light of the Emperor. However, during the 37m Ares became engulfed in a giant warp storm the size and intensity of which had not been seen since before the Great Crusade. There had been little or no warning, one moment the shipping lanes were calm and safe to navigate, the next moment all communications were down, hundreds of ships were lost. No-one had escaped off-world let alone out-system.

The same warp storm has raged unabated ever since. That is until seven Terran weeks ago. As quickly as it began it has vanished. Some have called it a blessing from the Emperor himself, while others see it as an omen of doom. The reasons however, are immaterial. What is for certain is that the Mechanicum forges once thought lost to the Imperium are lost no longer. Artifacts and technology from the days of the Great Crusade and possibly even earlier are now unguarded.

[Checking clearance…]

[…level alpha 5]

[Access granted]

There are those that believe that Ares Forge possessed an STC of unknown design. It cannot be stressed that if this is the case any and all means of securing and extracting the artifact come above any and all other concerns. The consequences of such technology falling into the hands of xenos or worse still the forces of chaos is unthinkable.

[Resuming standard data stream…]

It is of vital importance that the forges are secured and ultimately Ares is brought back within the fold of the Imperium once again.

It is of such a high priority that these orders come down from the High Lords of Terra

themselves. Already entire Imperial regiments and fleets have been rerouted from current engagements to reach Ares as soon as possible. Any and all Space Marine chapters are expected to respond as well.

However, while the Imperium has responded with the utmost haste, it has been discovered that the traitorous servants of the ruinous powers are also en route to the system with designs on the lost technology for themselves. While no intel is clear it is also likely that foul species of xenos are being drawn to Ares for their own corrupt reasons.

Your orders are clear. Divert to the Ares system immediately, secure the forges and safeguard any and all technology found within. Suffer not the xenos, the mutant or the traitor to live.

[End of Data File]

[Psy-conduit Beta 81 Secudus Closed]

[User interface disconnecting…]

[Session terminated]

December 11th, 9.30 am

Players need a fun 1700 point army, there is no award for best general. Tickets are available from FA

blood angels army carrying case

Its been a while since I've blogged about warhammer 40k. A recent game I played with pure grey knights against Ethrion's marine gt list got me rejuvenated into the hobby after a brief hiatus. I've been working on heavily touching up my blood angels army. I dunno, grey knights were disgustingly point and click which inspired me to play again. The only thing stopping me from experimenting with my blood angels army was the fact that I had nothing to safely transport my storm ravens to the store. With this set up, problems are solved...

www.evgnhobbies.com now open!!!

New webstore finally up and running! New products are being updated weekly. Head on over to www.evgnhobbies.com to show your support!!!

We specialize in army carrying cases as well as table-top miniature modeling supplies.

We will soon be carrying resin conversion parts as well.

Titan Apocalypse Battle

http://s112.photobucket.com/albums/n199/alexdarvell/Titan%20Battle/

We fought this battle a while ago, my bad for taking so long to upload the pictures. Sorry I haven't bothered to annotate the photos and do a proper battle report but basically we only included warhounds, super heavy tanks and flyers in this Apocalypse battle.

The opening turns saw both sides titans stalk forwards tentatively trying to gauge the right distances for their weapons. The board was long enough that even the turbo lasers were way out of range at the outset!

The super heavy tanks were massively hampered by being so far out of range and rushed forwards to try and close the gap. However as soon as they got within range of the chaos titans' weapons they really started to get punished. Just not able to return the same kind of firepower.

Any terrain that was in the line of sight of a shot that gave the target a cover save was removed to represent it being hit and destroyed in the process. As a result the no-man's land in between the two sides started to get leveled pretty quickly.

Loyalist fighters targeted the chaos warhounds and scored first blood when one titan went critical and detonated spectacularly. Luckily the gods were watching and there wasn't much friendly armour nearby to get caught in the blast. Only the buildings were reduced to smouldering slag and the ground turned to glass.

Soon after, the Emperor's forces suffered horrendously as one of their warhounds went critical. In this case however, the loyalist armour was quite bunched up and traffic jammed. As the titan exploded it took lots of armour with it. The blow would prove to be the critical turning point in the battle.

Loyalist fighter bombers kept up the attacks on the chaos titans but were repeatedly shot down in the hurricane of bolts fired from the vulkan mega bolter of the rearmost warhound.

Eventually the last loyal Titan charged forwards as his chaos counterpart did the same. Both exchanged turbo laser fire and while the chaos shots were initially wide of the mark and seemingly allowing the Emperor's titan off the hook they reacquired and finished the job.

Victory for chaos!

Notes: While overall this battle was a shining success and great fun (the lack of pesky troops on the ground really made a difference and made for a whole different type of game) we will definitely make some changes the next time.

Firstly, we will make the board more of an 'L' shape so that both sides have the same starting layout. The chaos forces really had an advantage in its deployment zone, whereas the loyalists had to deploy in a very narrow alleyway which hampered them considerably. As was felt when the titan went critical and took over half of the army with it.

Secondly, because this is a titan only battle they really needed to be able to move more freely and still shoot. To represent the warhounds' ability to move rapidly. So next time we will allow for a larger movement distance as standard. What we found was once we were all in range we just stopped moving and traded fire. It would have been nice to have warhounds moving around trying to flank and using the terrain to hide behind.

Thirdly and finally, we will probably try and balance the weapon loadouts more fairly and allow the super heavies to move further as well. They were at a massive disadvantage for too long and didn't really get going in the battle.

But overall a great inaugural titan only battle!

Ethrion's Pre-Heresy Ultramarines

Half of legion tactical squad 'Rianorix' led by Diocletian who favours wielding two gladii in combat.





The first two of my pre-Ullanor Ultramarines.

"Ten seconds until hull breach" intoned the machine spirit of the craft as it shuddered and pitched making the last few course corrections. Elsewhere scores of similar craft were making their final approaches to the enemy vessel and so far thankfully none had been destroyed on route.

"Courage and honour, brother" growled Procyon to his battle-brother in front of him. Gracchus grinned in anticipation of the battle to come and kept his eyes fixed firmly on the assault ramp.

"...two...one..." With a bone pulverizing punch the ram tore through the six feet of armour plating and ploughed into the flank of the hostile cruiser. Moments later the explosive bolts fired and the assault craft's doors smashed down.

"Courage and honour!" roared Gracchus as nineteen other space marines responded in kind and charged.

Contemptor Dreadnought WIP 4

I managed to get 2 coats of paint airbrushed into my Contemptor Dreadnought. After the matte black basecoat, I airbrushed on scorched brown which made my model look like a chocolate followed by bleached bone. As you can see, some areas around the joints I have purposely left black/brown for the boltgun metal colored bits.
I wanted to give the model a richer sense of color depth by doing brown first followed by bone. As you can see the effect is kinda weird. It looks more like rotting flesh/nurgle/death guard color than deathwing bone.
I think tonight I will try remedying this by doing diluted layers of devlan mud in successive layers to build up the tone I’m looking for.

Contemptor Dreadnought WIP 3

In this entry, I have added a kitbashed assault cannon arm from the blood angels furioso kit for my contemptor dreadnought. I’m very pleased with the results especially since the whole build utilized GW parts with the exception of the tip of the assault cannon barrel. Managed to prime the model with resin primer/black basecoat.

Contemptor Dreadnought WIP 2

For my contemptor dreadnought, I’ve managed to articulate the entire upper + the head. Sadly the thigh and the knee joints were too small for me to effective bevel out a rectangular niche for to install a joint housing. I tried to pin/glue the legs in a dynamic pose. As for the dreadnought close combat weapon, since a flamer is housed inside the middle of the fist/palm I plan on drilling more holes around the circular forearm bit so that the fist can rotate by plugging into different holes. Still left to do is adding some dark angels bling. I’ve been having a difficult time finding suitable bits as dark angels only have 1 upgrade sprue to choose from. I think I’ll need to use plenty of blood angel bits to chop/convert.

Contemptor Dreadnought WIP 1

I'm trying to build this dreadnought with as much of the original resin bits as possible. As the pre-heresy dreadnoughts are more humanoid in shape, I didn't want to mess with the proportions like I do with the recycle bin pattern dreadnoughts.

The following pictures showed how I made the arm movable.

How to make simple but effective bases

Not much going on with the blog of late so thought I would post a quick tutorial on how to throw together some easy to do but effective looking bases. Maybe we could make this 'How to' a regular monthly feature on the blog. Next up: how to dry brush marines because apparently it's just not possible!


Step 1: Using super glue stick down any pieces of terrain you want. In this case shattered tile made from plasticard and a sheared section of 'I' beam also from plasticard. Bought from any good model shop.

Step 2: Apply wood glue to the cracks before adding grit/sand.

Step 3: Undercoat the base with black spray.


Step 4: Then drybrush the overall base colour. In this case because the tiles and the grit is supposed to be stone I've used Fortress Grey.


Step 5: Add in any other colours. Here the 'I' beam has been painted Bolt Gun Metal


Step 6: Apply various washes to the base to break up the colours. In this example Badab Black, Gryphonne Sepia and the indispensable Devlan Mud have been used.


Step 7: Once the washes have dried either add grass flock or leave bare for a more industrial barren look.


Either way the whole process to do about 10 bases takes no more than 30mins and makes the models when they are on them look just that little bit better and more impressive. See Justin's Elysian drop troops on industrial bases to get the best example of how good it can look.

New Chessex Dice

Been rolling so badly recently, decided I needed new army specific dice.

@ a table near you soon...!

GW Oxford Street Terrain

Interesting use of the landing pad for our moon base terrain

Artemis' Word Bearer Warband

As part of an escalation session running at our local gamestore, I've started a Word Bearer warband. To be honest, I don't really have any super thorough plan for this army except that I want it to include a lot of daemons. Going back to the Chaos Space Marines codex for a while is going to make a nice change from playing Blood Angels for a while and I chose Word Bearers because I wanted something quintessentially Chaos-ey. Of all the Chaos legions, Word Bearers are undoubtedly the biggest Chaos fanatics and so in my army I plan to include quite a lot of lesser daemons and greater daemons, as well as lot of vanilla Chaos Space Marine squads. Cult troops like noise marines or whatever may make their way into the list later but right now the focus is on the good old basic chaos space marine.

Russ' Pre Heresy Iron Hands

It's Ferrus' Day off please check back soon!

Moon Base WIP

Sneak peeks of the new moon base table...