The Story So Far...

As I previously mentioned, we've actually played a few games already, and we didn't take any pictures and so on, mainly because I hadn't thought about blogging any of this before recently.

So, prior to any further games, I thought a summary of the action so far was worth putting together, to set the scene.

The battles so far have taken place in the Brimstone Peninsula, within the Realm of Aqshy. Here, Khorne's forces have overrun much of the land, destroying previous civilizations, and generally killing, maiming and possibly even burning their way across the realm.

Enter the Stormcast Eternals. The original starter box and the book The Gates of Azyr, by Chris Wraight, cover these events. In short, the Hammers of Sigmar end up with a beachhead in the Brimstone Peninsula, having successfully opened a Realmgate to Azyr, allowing both reinforcements to arrive, and possibly crucially, allowing Stormcasts to return to Azyr without dying, and being reforged. During this battle, Vandus Hammerhand, the Lord Celestant of the Hammers of Sigmar (aka "big boss man") faces off against Korghos Khul, the leader of the Khorne Goretide. Vandus smacks Khul around a bit, but has a vision mid battle which distracts him enough that he doesn't get a chance to stave Khul's skull in, meaning that everyone's favorite psychopath gets to become a reoccurring villain.

This is where we come in - three battles that follow in the Brimstone Peninsula, following the Stormcast as they attempt to drive towards Khul's Realmgate, which leads to the Realm of Chaos. If Khul can defeat the Stormcasts, and claim Vandus' head for his stupidly massive skull pile, he'll (a) get to be a daemon prince, and fight eternally against others, and (b) it'll mean more daemons spill over the lands, and presumably obliterate everything that hasn't already been obliterated before.

Just look at that big old pile o' skulls.

The first game follows the rescue of a small group of Stormcasts, led by the brilliantly named, but presumably tactically incompetent, Jactos Goldenmane, in Hold or Die. Jactos has managed to get himself, and a few of his golden armoured buddies, trapped by a large amount of frothing loonies. Here, Jactos and co have to hold out long enough for reinforcements from Vandus Hammerhand to sweep in and extract them from the tricky situation they've managed to get themselves in.

There's Jactos, in control, clearly. About to be Juggered.

Since this was our first game for a while, we decided to keep things easy. The Stormcast forces were somewhat outnumbered by the Khorne forces originally, but had a number of sturdy units, in the form of Liberators and Retributors. Waves of howling weirdos threw themselves against a gradually shrinking circle of Stormcasts, but were ultimately wiped out when Vandus Hammerhand and a large number of Prosecutors managed to enter the fray, and attack the Bloodbound from behind. While the Stormcasts had lost most of their numbers, a few characters remained from the original force, meaning that the Stormcasts triumphed. Not before Jactos had managed to get himself killed, but I'm not convinced anyone really missed his leadership.

The second game followed Lord Relictor Ionus Cryptborn's attempt to capture and demolish a series of defensive towers surrounding the Goretide's main power base, in the appropriately named The Watchtower Battleplan.

These Juggers look mean. My Juggers were not. Oh well...

In our case, Cryptborn quickly advanced towards the tower with a group of various Paladins (Retributors, Protectors and Decimators), as well as a number of Prosecutors. The tower, garrisoned by a large number of Bloodreavers and a Bloodsecrator, was quickly overwhelmed once the Decimators reached it, and was soon captured. A wave of daemonic cavalry and beasts caused some consternation, but while good at killing things on the charge, it turned out that the Juggernauts were actually rather incompetent when it came to killing anything during normal melee. Correspondingly, the Khornate forces were ground down and wiped out once again by the end of the forth battle round. 

The third game followed Vandus Hammerhand's attempts to close the Gate of Wrath, and generally duff up Korghos Khul once more, in The Ritual. 

Khul looks like he might get to fight someone here. In our game, Khul did not get to fight anyone, and keeled over with an arrow in his stomach. He isn't doing very well, to be honest.

This is a rather interesting Battleplan, where the defender has a ritual site that they must defend, and rolls dice each turn towards a total which will determine how far they have got enacting the ritual that will bring around their domination of the local area, begin the apocalypse, or deliver them a vast quantity of ice cream, straight from the Gods. The attacker has to get their general, or a substitute should the general die, into base contact with the ritual site and use a command ability to destroy it.

While our ritual site was not as large as Khul's Red Pyramid, we tried to get something relatively skull covered. Enter the Ossiarch Bonereaper's Bone-tithe Nexus, which has more bones than you could shake another bone at.

Seriously, it's pretty boney.

Loading up a large number of heavily armoured killers on both sides proved to be a bloody affair, and the troops from both sides pretty much annihilated each other. Unfortunately for Korghus Khul, he didn't even get a chance to duel anyone, let alone Vandus, and was killed by a combination of Prosecutor's Javelins and the Knight-Venator's bow. With a whirl of his pennant, the Knight-Vexillor launched Vandus Hammerhand across the battlefield (using its once per battle teleportation ability) and he quickly managed to destroy the ritual site, after a hairy incident involving an Exalted Deathbringer and his spikey gauntlet (one more 6 on a saving throw and Vandus would have impaled himself on it...oh well, better luck next time I guess...).

Having duffed up Khul once more, and broken up his boney pyramid and Realmgate, the Stormcasts set to congratulating themselves on a job well done.

Stormcast celebration time. Not that all of these were actually involved (and particularly not you, mister Celestant Prime), but this is all the painted and based models for the Stormcast at present.

We can only assume that Khul once again woke up, and snuck off to some dark corner to plot his revenge/murder his friends.

So what's next?

Well, the next few scenarios take place in the realm of Ghyran, and involve not the raging nutters of the Khorne Bloodbound, but their rather larger and smellier frenemies: the legions of Nurgle. Fortunately, I've got quite a few diseased warriors painted up already, and have just finished painting some reinforcements for them.

Nurgle receives reinforcements. Lets see how they do in the next few games. Hopefully more successfully than the Bloodbound!

For our next game, we're actually intending to play a game with the Sylvaneth and the Nurgle Rotbringers - mainly as this will allow me to paint a couple more Stormcast units off first, and because my partner already has a large army of fully painted tree-beasts.