Very WIP update

Hobby's been on the back-burner for some time now, and in the chances I had to get some progress made, I ended up splitting it between multiple projects...I guess because I have poor attentiveness?

Anyway, here's what's sitting on my table:

• An unfinished "disc-speeder" kitbash made from some Necron and Age of Sigmar kits
• The Lotus, I keep fiddling with it but not making major improvements, to be honest
• Penthu, as I was trying out edge-highlighting gold
• 5 unfinished Breachers, who turned out to be a bit more complicated than had been hoping.

What I'm really struggling with, is naming the disc-speeder.  They appear in A Thousand Sons, but aren't given a proper name.  I'm intending to make three, to act as Skyhunter Support Jetbikes.  I've got a couple of ideas for their class name, but can't settle on one.  Suggestions gratefully received!

I ate the Lotus

Well, not quite.

 

I have been a little sleepy with my hobby lately, however.  I got the kitbashed fighter up to the above condition, then put it aside for fear of ruining it further with bad edgework.  I've put a lot of transfers on most of the guys I've shown so far, but not doubt they'll show up in more photos down the line.

 

After that, I got about halfway through assembly and layering an Ammitara squad, before falling off.  I've decided to make another stupid kitbash nobody else will like, and have been planning some unholy fusion of more Necron vehicles and some AoS chariots.

Isidorus

Hello, Isidorus

Aside from Sanakht, Isidorus was the character I most wanted to make.  Which may strike you as odd considering he's just a Rubric Marine.  But, if you've read John French's Ahriman novels, you will be aware of how thematically important his existence is, and that several scenes with him pay off tremendously.

Originally I thought a clever idea would just to nominate one standard bolter-marine in one of my Veteran squads to be Isidorus, perhaps giving him a slightly fancier tabard or hanging some stuff off his shoulder guard.  Him being a typical line marine does kind of appeal in terms of his role in the narrative. 

However, once I'd decided to convert the Severin Loth model into Ahriman, the notion of creating a command squad out of Loth's honour guard appealed.  The minimum spec for a command squad is one standard bearer and two marines.  A named Thousand Sons standard bearer exists in the fiction, so that's that guy sorted.  For the other two marines...well, there was Isidorus and Mabius Ro.

These two show up as Rubrics accompanying Tolbek in Ahriman: Exile, and are mentioned as being together repeatedly thereafter.  Looking at the loadout options for a command squad, it seemed that I could add another marine to the default if I wanted, so the notion of creating Tolbek, Mabius Ro and Isidorus as this grouping took hold.

Despite just being a Rubricae, I wanted my Heresy-era Isidorus to be cool, and while I still thought about just giving him a bolter, there were a lot of cooler weapon options available to him, and I gave in.  Hence the big axe and volkite charger.  I think that'll be the only volkite in my army, so I guess him being a rifleman will make him unique in a sort of way.  

Obviously, using so much of the Loth honour guard kit means that he doesn't really look too Thousand Sons-y, so I gave him my favourite upgrade head and added some detailing to his axe that I sliced off  Rubric weapons.  As usual, transfers and detailing will follow.

Look what just got finally confirmed for going on sale

I wants it.

That Thousand Sons Praetor must be mine.  And I even know who he's going to be.  Looks like Mordant Hex will soon be joining Ahriman's Circle.

Primus Medicae Consul Penthu Daast

Who?  No, really this time 

Yeah, he's about as minor a character as you can get, featuring in one chapter of Crimson King and a colour plate in Inferno.  I didn't even remember he was in Inferno until after I'd already started on his model.

So, you may have noticed I haven't posted my Ahriman yet.  This is because I didn't start on him until very recently, and while the original reason was that I was scared of mucking him up, I quickly came to realise that I didn't like his model.  Yeah, the guy who's model I'd waited years on, and I ended up thinking it was bleh.  I'll moan more about that later, no doubt, but for the moment just know that I wanted to make him more like how I saw Ahriman.  So I ordered the Sevrin Loth + Honour Guard kit for all those juicy conversion pieces.  This of course would allow me to make the game unit 'Ahriman's Coven', ie his Brotherhood of Psykers command squad. I already knew who had to be on this squad - Isodorus and Mabius Ro - but when looking over the bits, the idea of making an Apothecary really appealed.  I remembered that a named Apothecary had just shown up in Crimson King, so he would be the one donating his name to my miniature.  Welcome aboard, Penthu.

Putting him together
 

I'm still trying to use up all these Mark III plastics I have, so that's where his legs came from. While there's a plastic Apothecary torso in the honour guard kit, I wanted to use the resin ones on everyone i built from it, and I loved the 'smock' look of this tabard cloth.  Now, I'm unsure how Penthu will actually be used in my army.  I guess he'll either be a Primus Medicae or a simple Apothecary depending on how other Force Org choices are made.  So I wanted him to have wargear that reflected both.  This is a bit awkward as Primus Medicae's need to have a needle pistol, which Apothecaries can't upgrade to.  So his gun had to kind of look like both a needler and a bolt pistol?  This stumped me until I was looking through my new Tempestus Scions sprues (more on why I have those later) and saw the officer pistol with the chain-bayonet.  Perfect!  Space Marine Apothecaries always have chain weapons for battlefield surgery and the pistol looks both chunky and slim enough in places that I hope no-one will be upset with me if I want to say it's either a needler or a bolter.

About now was when I went flicking through Inferno to see how Apothecary shoulders should be painted.  And so it was that I got the pleasant surprise of finding Penthu in there, which is where I guess Graham got the idea to take him from?  Or vice-versa.  As my model was missing shoulder-pads and head at this point, it was really easy for me to just copy the image for those.  I decided to use the Achaen shoulders on mine to keep him a bit fancy and a little different, but painted the same way, and gave him a cloak as I like my officers to have those.  He's also sporting a transfer on his right knee to match the one in the drawing as I just wanted to try it out.

WIP - Lotus Fighter

Let it rain

While all my photographs are technically Work In Progress, everything I've posted so far has been tabletop ready. I'm working up to trying paint techniques I consider 'big boy' stuff (and everyone else probably thinks of as easy).  However, I've been working on this thing all week and, as it's now approaching assembly, thought I'd document an earlier stage than I have typically been showing.

In A Thousand Sons, Graham McNeil briefly (like, in one line) mentions "Lotus fighters" and "Apis bombers" are supporting a Thousand Sons campaign on a world where airpower is required.  While they aren't explicitly said to be Legion craft, the names imply - at least to me - that they were Prosperine in nature.  I noted them down as Legion craft in the back of my head at the time and moved on.

Later, the Thousand Sons are mentioned as having two patterns of Stormbird unique to their legion, the Khonsu and the Apophis (the latter being so big it was nicknamed 'Sunkiller' because it blotted out the sun), and so I took this unusual emphasis on unique craft as an indicator that the Legion had an airwing of either some size, or one of specialised nature.

Eventually, in Inferno, it is indeed stated that the Thousand Sons have a cadre of skilled pilots, who take to the skies to defend Tizca...in Xiphons.  Well, gotta mention the Forgeworld toys, I guess.

I had been toying with the idea of getting a Xiphon or a Lightning, as both models look amazing.  However, as my force is heavy on both custom looks and drawing from Black Library fluff, I settled on the idea of making a Lotus, and eventually an Apis as well.  This is my attempt at the fighter, and as you can see, it's basically a Stormtalon with Necron Scythe wings on backwards.  People I've showed it too aren't super-keen, but I'm digging it and I guess that's what matters.

It's sporting lascannons in the nose, and I'm going to say the ports in the wings contain missiles, so I guess I can use it as a 'counts-as' Xiphon or Lightning if opponents let me?  We'll see how that goes, I guess.

I have the larger engine variants from the Stormtalon built, painted and ready to stick onto the sides, and I tentatively hit it with an attempt at edge highlights and scuffing similar to the Rhino.  I'm going to work on it while alternating with an Ammitara squad, so it might be a few entries before it turns up again.

Updated Legion Rhino and new Ctesias information

An improvement?

I decided to try some edge highlighting and scuffing on my Rhino.  I'm not up to trying proper weathering yet, but figured some silver on the edges could easily be painted over if I screwed it up.  I don't think that happened, but you can definitely see my low skill level.  However, considering this is the first time I've tried this, I think it came out okay.  I'll keep it and hopefully get better going forward.

I've ordered some micro set and micro sol, so later on in the week I think I'll test it out on the Rhino. Next time you see it, it should be sporting some transfers.

Ctesias and the Aquilae

In my entry about my version of Ctesias, the summoner who I'm running as a Librarian, I mentioned that I didn't know what cult arcana to give him, and that I had recently contacted his creator, John French, to ask what arcana he thought Ctesias would have. I've been fortunate to get a reply, which is that Mr French reckons Ctesias would have possibly been in the Aquilae cult, and when it was disbanded, transferred to the Corvidae temple.

I hope it would be obvious from this entire project and the things I've previously typed, but I value John French's creations and impact upon my conception of the Thousand Sons tremendously.  This answer was fantastic.

The Aquilae are only mentioned in Inferno, where they are referred to as "the denied sixth cult".  They were concerned with researching the nature of the Warp itself, but were closed down by Magnus personally.  Presumably, because they were delving too far and were in danger of gaining an understanding of what, in 40K terms, we consider daemonic.  This is a fascinating bit of fluff, and Ctesias - who ends up being a guy who pacts with, binds and summons daemons - being one of them is perfect.

It also pleases me because it means the spread bird motif I picked for his shoulder guard now can have another explanation beyond my 'white birds are common in Egyptian imagery' thing.  I don't have an updated photo of him, so I'll just repost this one so you can see what I did.  Him being once of the Aquilae, or eagle cult, makes this choice, in retrospect, even better.
This also means that he'll be Corvidae in my list, which is fine.  The cult discipline doesn't really matter a great deal in gameplay terms for my plan with him, it was just a niggle that I needed to get 'right'.  He'll still attempt to cast Sanctic Daemonology without getting gibbed by something from the Warp that he's previously annoyed.

Numinous Occulum

I figured my guys needed a clubhouse.

I already have some gift-shop Egyptian pieces which actually look quite nice next to my miniatures, but I decided that something to display them around would be neat, and terrain is always handy anyway.  I wanted the look to be space-wizard over the industrial look of almost all Games Workshop's 40K terrain, so a quick dip into the Age of Sigmar collection and I found like, three pieces that can fit a Thousand Sons vibe.  After a trip to the local shop to see their display terrain, I went for this...thing.

This was supposed to be hard to put together, according to YouTube, and while it's not fiddly at all, the larger parts don't fit together flush out of the box. I think that's a bit of a joke for a huge company like Citadel, especially at they're just flat edges.  Still a fun build, however.

Khenentai Blademaster Sanakht

Who?

One of the main characters in the Ahriman series, who's taken to also popping up in the Horus Heresy, making a Sanakht miniature was one of the main reasons I took on this whole project.  The very first mini I put together, he remained unpainted for around six months.  This was due to a combination of my hesitance about messing up the model with my painting, and then settling on where he should be in the army list became a pain.

Sanakht is a Legion Champion, and so I was pleased that such a unit option turned out to exist in the rulebook.  However, seeing as his only mentioned gear loadout is having two swords, and multiple re-readings of the Centurion Champion option of 'exchanging their default pistol and/or blade for one sword' didn't make that seem likely, I was a bit disappointed to learn I would have to tell people that one of his swords was just cosmetic.  I modeled on a pistol as well in case I was misreading everything and because it's weird not having a pistol.  WYSIWYG players please don't beat me up I'll only ever play him rules legally.

Anyway, you can see where I replaced his default weapons with the two swords and tilted the hand positions.  The swords are from the Sisters of Silence kit, which (ironically?) turns out to have provided quite a few bits for my witches.

Sanakht is specifically stated to have one power sword and one force sword, so I wanted to differentiate them beyond the hilt details.  When I decided I wanted the Ctesias model to have a magic flame in his hand, it was easy to jump to Sanakht's force sword having a similar effect.  I eventually found a model by, I think, Wizards of the Coast, that had clear plastic flames with it, so I cut them up, stuck them to his sword and tried the blue paint.  It stands out nicely, like all my stuff I wish I painted better, but it'll do for now.  I like it.

As one of the first models I built, I didn't have any 40K Thousand Sons parts or anything to make him look a bit different from the base Praetor model.  So I went looking for a helmet, and dug up this sweet jackal helm.  I immediately decided to use it because jackal iconography is cool and I like saying Annubis.  Annubis.

So you can imagine my delight when Inferno was released and revealed that the Thousand Sons have a thing called the Order of the Jackal, which includes a cadre of psychic swordsmen who sport two blades.  I pretty much picked the best possible helmet months in advance, and so now I like this miniature even more.

With this development, and the Khenetai Blades becoming a thing, it became clear to me that Sanakht would be best served in my army by taking a drop in rank and becoming my Blade Occult squad leader.  This gives him his two-swords-one-pistol thing legally.  I'm not averse to running him as a Legion Champion or Praetor mandatory HQ in smaller or more themed games and saying both swords count as a single weapon (like a Paragon Blade), but it feels great to be able to put him with the Khenetai.  I mean, it seems likely that they were based on his character to begin with.

The final pleasing part about this miniature was that the colour choices on the helm were mainly based on feel, I decided to give him the white faceplate just because I think it's cool and a great contrast to the gold jackal.  Even though the pealescent paint looks a bit rough.  I guess I was doing this subconsciously, as the next time I reread the Ahriman books, I realised that it's stated that he has a silver deathmask faceplate.  So while the paintjob is pretty low quality for a miniature I'm kind of invested in, it's my miniature and my painting and I'm fond of everything to do with this guy and how it all came together.  I love Ctesias, but I think Sanakht is my boy.

Zabaia and Siamak, the Khenetai Twins

Well, they're Khenetai in my version of all this.

Now despite all that talk in the last entry about trying hard to make the Blade Occult squad members all look dynamic and different, I noticed early on that I'd made two of one legs+torso+arms combinations.  Or more accurately, that the only pieces I had left ended up making a double.  I had accidentally made twin bodies.

In the typically fortunate way that things have tended to work out on this project, however, there actually are a set of twins in the fiction: Zabaia and Siamak.  These guys only feature in Ahriman: Exile, and exist just to be a threat to be overcome by the rest of Ahriman's crew.  They're still cool, however, and the idea of my army background means they could very easily be running around in Ahriman's old Circle.

I decided to make both of them look almost identical, but also make them stand out from the rest of the squad.  They got upgrade helmets and some spare old shoulder-pads with huge scarabs on them to mark them out as elite.  The other pad has a double-headed snake on it. 
I also gave them the two feathery-ish cloaks from the Sisters of Silence kit.  To make them further stand out, I decided to avoid the white feathers everyone else has and gave them shiny blued feathers.  I know I said I wanted to avoid random blue appearing on units like the writers keep trying to jam in just because the 40K Thousand Sons are blue, but I figured this was pretty subtle and suited their role as 'bad guys' in their scant fluff appearance. 
Though in taking this photo I noticed I'd forgotten to do a bit of Siamak's backpack.  Siamak is the one with the stripe in his cloak, I decided, as he's got the cooler name.  Sorry, Zabaia.

Khenetai Occult Blade Cabal Sanakht

"By the power of Middle Eastern historical references!"

Batteries recharged a little after messing about with the remembrancers, I dived into these guys, who were great fun.

I'm going to have a separate blog about Sanakht, the squad leader, but I think a lot of my enthusiasm for making this unit was down to a combination of how much I like him as a character and being really tickled that Inferno made a squad of psychic dual-wield swordsmen into a thing. 
A couple Blade Occult upgrade kits were duly picked up at Forgeworld the next time I was passing.

Conscious that I still had twenty or so possible mark III guys still sitting on the very first sprues I bought for this project, I thought quite seriously about using them for my Blade Occult.  Even though it's the 'heavy' armour mark, I thought it might look cool, and imagined the high pauldron rims protecting against return strokes and the like.  However, for an elite squad, I wanted the shoulder pauldrons to have molded detailing on them, so ordered some upgrade bits.  Once they arrived and I dry-fitted a guy, you could see that the big chunky rims just didn't look too good with the thin swords. I thought about switching the overly-stepped khopeshes of the upgrade out for straight swords, of which I had enough various kinds lying about.  But that would kind of dilute the look, even if the khopeshes were a bit cartoony.  I cut up one of them to see about making it look more like a real khopesh, or even a scimitar, but it ended up too short.  So I just settled for using the original khopeshes, and they actually grew on me quite a bit as I built the squad.  I like them a lot now.

So I scrapped the mark III idea and looked to see how many mark IV legs I had left.  Turns out I was a couple short.  But I had all those Dark Angel veteran kit legs left to use up!  The image of the robed legs on swordsmen immediately seemed cool.  A quick rake through my bits, and I decided to use the cloaks from the Sisters of Silence sprues on these guys as well.  Swordsmen have to look badass, right?  To complete the Legion look, I gave them shoulder pads from the 40K Rubric set. 

So, with everyone just armed with two swords, and there only being a few variants of the sword arm position in the kit, I was really concerned with making these guys look as individually cool as possible, which the variant in legs really helped with.  A lot of people I've spoken to kind of want or expect Horus Heresy system armies to have squads that all look identical, and I appreciate that idea. However, modelling infantry is my favourite part of the hobby, and I like them all to have something different about them before the painting.  Especially as my painting is pretty basic. I feel I was able to pull this off, and was so pleased with the assembly that I dared to try and push my quite basic painting a little, and made my first attempt at edge highlighting a few of the squad.  While still quite scrappy and lacking in confidence in the application, I think it did make a positive difference, and intend to try and improve at it.

Remembrancer Camille Shivani

Something a bit different

I was in need of a short break from power armour.  I could've ordered that Eddy I want, or a Land Raider, or even a Thudd Gun Rapier or something, but I still wanted to add another person to my collection.  It's the characters I care about, after all.

Every now and then I consider that I'd like to add some Prosperine Spireguard to my force, once all the marines are done.  I've looked through a lot of options for human miniatures, and most are unsatisfying to be perfectly honest.  In comparison to the astartes, anyway.  I still want to get some in there somehow, as militia or something perhaps.

While doing this, I did note that many of the Infinity game system models were quite cool, and it was while browsing through their catalogue I had my next idea.  I was going to make the remembrancers.

In A Thousand Sons by Graham McNeil, the main characters roll around with three remembrancers hanging off their coat-tails. Pretty decent characters all, one of them even becomes Ahriman's apprentice.  Ahriman's developed a kind of teacher vibe in many of his modern appearances, which suits him.  It gives him a little something else, with his arrogance and personality flaws eventually ruining the teacher-student relationship he seems to prize having, in both A Thousand Sons and John French's Ahriman series.

The XVth in general have a vaguely parental, encouraging attitude to humans that, while of course inflected with arrogance and superiority, is something I like as a concept.  Many of the marine legions, while ostensibly defenders of humanity, can barely tolerate the presence of ordinary mortals.  McNeil's Thousand Sons, however, can be found sitting chatting with humans about archaeology, wine or a good book.  Further, and made explicitly clear in Inferno, the Legionaries cared about the lives of the civilian inhabitants of Tizca, and made just as much effort to protect and save them as they did anything else.

I picked up three Infinity models to use as Gaumon, Shivani and Eris.  I initially thought to paint them as first described in the book, but realised they would stand out and clash with the Legion colour scheme, Gaumon especially.  So Legion colours it would be.  Camille Shivani is a psychometric archaeologist, practical, can handle herself in a dangerous situation, and is one of the first gay characters I can think of in the setting.  I had gotten Shivani up to the basecoat and first layer you see in these pictures when Crimson King came out, and wouldn't you know it, the Remembrancers return for that novel.  Nothing I read about their fates put me off on working on them, but I think having them fresh in my mind made thinking about them more kind of unappealing, so this is where I stopped on the project.  To be continued.

In game terms, they will be used as Objective markers for my army to secure and protect.

Legion Seeker Squad Menkaura

Or Veteran squad?  Sometimes?  Maybe?

I mentioned the goal not just being modelling and (badly) painting the characters I like, but having a legal army as well.  I didn't mention Rites of War, but the obvious first choice was Pride of the Legion; easy to make and suits the low-numbers, elite troops vibe of the Thousand Sons.  This gives us the option to load up on Veterans and Terminators.  After Inferno launched, we also have Guard of the Crimson King, allowing deep-striking Terminators as troops.  Due to the amount of plastic Terminators I have, and the flexibility of Sekhmet being able to be both Cataphracti and Tartaros, I'm going to have 2 Terminator squads.  One might just be a Legion Terminator Squad instead of a second Sekhmet, we'll see.  So GotCK could work for me.  However, that second Terminator squad is going to be one of the last things I do.  And, most importantly, the whole point of this is to run Ahriman as my Warlord, and if you do that, your compulsory troops have to be Corvidae.  Which means I'd rather run PotL with two Corvidae veteran squads.  I already made one I haven't shown yet as it needs re-worked.  So, a second one will have to be made.  And you can get away with just five guys in the squad.  Though that is dangerous in terms of giving away victory points.

All that preamble was to show the thinking behind my choice to make a bare minimum Seeker squad that I could also sub in for all or part of a Veteran squad.  Well that and they can take a Land Raider as a dedicated transport.  Which I might do, I mean, I'm going to get one of the old-school Land Raiders at some point.  Anyway, I decided to quickly knock out some Seekers.  And once more, a couple of different thoughts merged in my mind.

Sneaky Beakies

Seekers, well, seek.  They're a bit sneaky.  And I absolutely love the sneaky beaky marines.  While I never had a full marine army, the first GW kit I ever owned was the original box of Imperial Space Marines, and so I'm quite nostalgic about corvus armour.  I had to have some.  So let's make them the sneaky Seekers.  How could I justify the XVth having mark VI armour?  I dunno, a Hidden One stole the plans and the XVth's allied Forge World built it for them, who cares.

More importantly, who would be the character in charge of the squad?  I knew instantly.  Menkaura.

I love this guy almost as much as I love Ctesias, even though he's just  a minor supporting character.  Originating in John French's work, he appears also in McNeil's Crimson King.  Having fallen for the trap of seeking for and then gaining true prescience (clearly the work of Frank Herbert was not in any of the Tizcan libraries), Menkaura ultimately becomes the Oracle of Many Eyes, trapped in a prison of inaction of his own making, but able to tell any who ask of their future, if they are prepared to pay his price.  In this post-Heresy fate, he is described as wearing a silver-fronted helm with no eye-lenses, instead being orbited by many silver eye-orbs.  To me, this suggested I represent him in his red armour with a silver faceplate and reinforcement studs.  I hit his studs with some pearlescent paint over steel, instead of the inked boltgun metal the other guys have on their shoulders.  He also uses the torso, legs and cloths from the Rubric squad leader.  I just figured Menkaura would be a bit into looking fancy.

I had gotten the vibe that he was slightly younger than most of his contemporaries in Ahriman's Coven, and slightly naive, but in Crimson King he's presented as older and bit easily distracted.  He later makes some choices in the novel that almost make him a kind of semi-antagonist in terms of plot terms.  This seems to go against the feeling of naivety and over-focus being his downfall presented in the earlier written (but set later) novel, as well as his seemingly resignedly sad loyalty and affection for Ahriman.  While people can easily change over the potentially thousands of years worth of experiences marines living in the Eye of Terror can have, I definitely have opinions about some of the things McNeil does.  Don't get me started on Master of Prospero.  One thing Graham did that I could get behind was giving him a staff and a plasma pistol as his personal weapons.  I gave him a bladed staff, it seems like Thousand Sons tend to have weapons that can be both sword and stave (Ahriman, Mhotep), which is kind of cool.

As for his squadmates, I was running out of loincloths, so had to get creative.  I'd came up with an emergency plan for this eventuality as soon as I looked at the sprues in Burning of Prospero.  People say you should sell the Custodes and Sisters if you, for example, play Thousand Sons, who will hardly be likely to ally with them.  Good advice, but I knew I could use several of their bits.  So, I cut off the bottoms of their tabards and re-purposed them as loincloths for my Seekers.

The fit wasn't always great, so a few other bits got stuck on alongside them, I think it all worked out.  One thing beaky armour - as awesome as it is - brought to my guys that was a concern was the lack of obvious ways to introduce gold and white to their colour scheme.  For my earlier mark III guys I gave them alternating gold and white belts, which you can barely see, but I know are there.  I was able to continue that idea on the mark VI guys using their chest power cabling.  It just helps tie things together.

The four marines all have combi-plasma, which seems like a flexible loadout for unleashing dakka, although I don't know if they'll all be alive long enough to get good use out of both their plasma and their special ammunition.  The squad will be Corvidae, so I guess the plan would be to Scout them forward using Ahriman's Warlord trait and just hole them up as long as possible in one place to shoot the crap out of anyone that comes near.  They might get a Land Raider Proteus at some point, I'm not sure yet.
 

Castellax-Achaea Battle Automata Credence

Try saying that nine times fast.

If you know about Ignis, you can imagine I also wanted to have Credence in my army.

Just like his master, Credence had a couple of potential forms, although I didn't get around to actually building any for him, unlike the two attempts at an Ignis.  He's not actually described as a Castellax (or indeed at all, beyond his colours and shoulder-mounted bolt cannon), and so my first job was to pore over the Cybernetica units Legions could take.  The options effectively narrowed it down to a Castellax if I wanted the hulking bodyguard with a bolt cannon vibe, so during a trip to Forgeworld I picked one up.  What with constantly pushing Ignis back as I wasn't sure about what role or model he would take form as for so long, Inferno was actually published before I could build the Castellax.  And in it, my problems were taken away, by revealing that Thousand Sons have their own pattern of Cybernetica unit, the Castellax-Achea.  Well, Credence had to be one of them, then! Anybody wanna buy a Castellax, never been opened?

While Credence, by the time of the Ahriman series, basically has independent intelligence, operating without Ignis constantly pulling his strings, this wouldn't have been the case during the Heresy, when he was presumably - at least to begin with - a standard combat robot.  It's the journey that would have made him Credence. So perhaps my Castellax-Achea could be that particular unit near the beginning of that journey.

Castellax appear to have about zero dynamic poses natural to the mold, unless you decide to go at them with the blade.  I decided to do the kind of silly looking rabbit paws pose as A) it means all his weapons are engaged and B) it kind of reminds me of a certain robotic T-Rex, or C) a mummy.

Part of my rationalising him as an ordinary Castellax-Achea is to do with that orange colour scheme.  There's no getting around it, it wouldn't look good next to my red.  And all that's separate from the first description, back in A Thousand Sons, of Thousand Sons robots being blue!

It seems the authors are determined to sneak something blue into the Crusade / Heresy-era XVth, just for the call-forward to their eventual colours, despite it making little sense.  I'm not going to be painting my Ammitara blue either.  Fortunately, Forgeworld's own examples are in Legion colours, so the silly blue idea obviously got ditched.

Perhaps if I did a metallic bronze like the Forge World allied to the Thousand Sons, I thought.  But these Castellex-Achea aren't just allied robots, they're actual Legion members.  So they have to be in the scheme.  The model has some small flame detailing molded into the shoulder bosses, so I toyed with making that orange.  I might still do it, or work up the gold to a bronze, at least.

The other thing I'm considering is adding a big loincloth to him.  I have something that is mostly suitable, it just looks a bit cheap, even for my paintjob.  I might be able to cut something out of a standard.  We'll see, something to consider when I come back to highlight and decal him.

Credence's origin was recently - I feel - a bit needlessly jammed into Crimson King by McNeill, somewhat muddying this idea of mine.  In it, Ignis seems to randomly or even accidentally just end up with a wrecked orange robot once belonging to an enemy force, and is last seen looking at it in satisfaction.  A bit of a 'so what?' moment.  I think there may have been an additional plot element that didn't survive the editing process, as there's an enemy Cybernetica Magos called Credence in the novel who disappears halfway through. A rather unfortunate dropped plot, would have been better to excise it completely.

Credence takes up a whole force org slot by himself (it doesn't seem right to add more to the maniple unless I can figure out something else to do to him to personalise him), but such are the sacrifices one makes for one's giant robot pet.

Sekhmet Inceptor Ignis

Third time's the charm

Originally, I had thought to make Ignis either a Praevian or a Forge Lord.  To that end, I picked up the Iron Hands Forge Lord Terminator model and did some heavy conversion work on it.  I was about halfway through when Inferno arrived, and made it so the Thousand Sons could just take Castellax robots as a troop type, making an HQ that unlocked Cybernetica essentially pointless.  As being in Terminator armour was his next distinguishing mark, it became about which kind of armour he would appear in.  Before Inferno came out, I had toyed with the idea of making a Cataphracti Legion Terminator Squad and fluffing them as Order of Ruin, so using Ignis as the squad leader for this squad appealed, and I decided to use the plastic Praetor model.  Upon thinking about Sekhmet, however, it really became clear that prioritising a Sekhmet squad as my army's Terminators would be sensible, due to their combination of rules effectiveness, fluffyness, and the Scarab Occult 40K model kit.  Switching Ignis to the Tartaros squad appealed due to the more ornate and characterful model, and from there the thought process suddenly felt better.  While Ignis' cult power is never mentioned in the fluff, his name lends...credence...to the idea that he would be Pyrae, and so now I would have a squad of Tartaros Sekhmet pyrokines. 

It's always all about the cloaks

While deciding how to represent Ignis was a difficult process, once it became clear he had to be a Tartaros Sekhmet sergeant, actually putting him together was much easier.  As I mentioned in the previous post, the Scarab Occult have even more static poses than ordinary Tartaros, which isn't ideal for a character model.  In an attempt to add some movement to Ignis, I gave him the 30K limbs instead of the 40K ones, and tilted him on on a base with a slightly raised section.  Also, the most "firey" parts of the Rubric kit were put aside for him; it seemed fitting.

Ignis' distinguishing features in the fiction are his Terminator armament of boltgun and single lightning claw, and possessing orange and black armour amidst a bunch of guys who switch from red and white to blue and yellow.  I'm not sure what that's about, but he needed some orange and black on him somewhere.  Fortunately, as if this was all meticulously planned and not just a series of flashes of inspiration and fortunate coincidences, the Scarab Occult sergeant has a cloak with a flame pattern on it.  I thought about trying to paint it so it would be as pretty as I could, but then realised that my lower skill level would perhaps be best used making it look like a black leather rocker coat. So that had to be done.  There's obviously a lot of that kind of cheesy metal vibe to Warhammer, and the Thousand Sons are a prog rock kind of concept, so the skeevy orange and black glossy fire cloak makes me really happy.

As constantly mentioned, he and the rest of his squad are without highlights and transfers, but you can see where those things will be, and I can't wait to increase my game by attempting these.  I put transfers on the Rotor squad, and it was a kind of pain what with all the curved surfaces.  I need to get around ordering one of those glue and solvent sets and moving on with the transfers, but I guess that can wait until near the end of the project.  Who knows, perhaps by then my paints might be a bit thinner.  There's going to be a temptation to overdo the tiny text transfers on Ignis (and / or maybe use the geometric Word Bearers ones cut up a little instead), so I'll have to be careful in balancing out what is already a really busy model.

Sekhmet Terminator Cabal Ignis

Oh, boy

These guys took forever.

Every other unit I've mentioned previously was either finished, or as good as, between the launches of the Burning of Prospero boxed set and the Inferno book.  This Sekhmet squad were my first thing after Inferno, and it wasn't just the intricate detailing of Scarab Occult models that made it take a while.

I wanted to make Ignis, another character from the Ahriman series. A cold-on-the-surface, hot-on-the-inside master calculator and numerologist who rolls about with a pet giant robot, how could anyone not love this guy?  I'd been trying to work out how to include him for months, debating between a Praevian or a Forge Lord, working out how I could get the combination of Terminator armour, boltgun, lightning claw, and unlocking a battle-automata into a legal army, how to represent the Order of Ruin, and worst of all, how to make a guy with orange and black armour fit into a Thousand Sons Heresy-era colour scheme.

Eventually I made my first Ignis out of the Cataphracti Praetor plastic model, figuring I'd work out how to fit him in later, like I had with Ctesias.  I figured a Legion Terminator squad could be an Order of Ruin unit, and painted one up.  It was okay.

Then Inferno dropped and well...Sekhmet.  Extraordinarily fluffy and cost-effective, I struggled with making Ignis one of them or keeping him as an ordinary Terminator, as well as what cult arcana to give him...I ended up just starting on the Tartaros unit and left the sergeant to last, hoping my ideas would crystalise.  Maybe it could be Gaumata or Gilgamos?  But they weren't Terminators.  Ugh.  Ignis deserves his own project entry, basically.

These Sekhmet Terminators were made from the obvious - surely intended - Scarab Occult plastics from the 40K range.  I gave them ordinary Tartaros combi-bolters, as the 40K ones are overly ornate.  The 40K kit also doesn't have a lot of flexibility in the statue-like poses, which works great for Rubric terminators - and in some ways for the infamously unflappable Sekhmet - so I made small effort to get them posed somewhat non-statically.

As always, my painting is quite thick and missing edge highlights and transfers, but I felt a learned a lot while working on these guys and believe me, they're better than I would have managed at the beginning of this project.  It sounds like a plead for mercy, but the red looks better in the...plastic...than it does in photographs.  In reality, the red is the same shade all over the models, with a natural blend of shadow and highlights depending on the lighting conditions in the room, as well as being uniformly, visibly metallic.  In photographs, it turns into a jumble of almost artificially distinct different tones, most of which appear flat. 

I kept their loadout as stock, mostly for the fluff image of advancing Terminators blazing away with bolters, force swords at the ready...but also because Sekhmet seem easy to make a little broken if you give them some of the better weapons.  I'm not even going to go into the whole arguments about whether they can choose powers or not.

As for their cult arcana, well, while Raptora seemed like a good idea to get the better invulnerable save, I'd ended up convincing myself that Ignis needed to lead this squad.  I could make the Tartaros sergeant look way cooler than the Cataphracti guy.  And if Ignis was to end up leading the squad, well...with a name like that, he'd have to be Pyrae, right? I'd always known that, but as the pyrokines are normally portrayed to be the aggressive and bellicose legionaries, my mind kept sliding off the idea of Ignis being one.  But I think anything else would just feel extremely weird.  I'll show more of Ignis, as well as him together with his squad, in the next post.

Legion Contemptor Dreadnought

Or an Osiron?

This chap was picked up at the same time as my Rhino, before the launch of Inferno.  I think I had a common reaction to him, thinking he looked rather plain compared to other Legion Contemptors, but his clean lines quickly grew on me.  It turns out, of course, that the sculptors were saving all their insane detailing for the Thousand Sons Osiron variant, have you seen that thing?

Anyway, there's no Thousand Sons dreadnought character in the Horus Heresy.  Which is someone dropping the ball if you ask me, we're talking about dudes who have the whole eternal servitude / mummies / returning after death thing as a primary image in their fluff here.  Maybe I just think that because I like Dreadnoughts...but I think one of the Forgeworld writers had similar ideas. In Inferno it's mentioned that a cadre of Dreadnoughts act as guardians to one of the Pyramids of Tizca, and come crashing out the wall (like mummies from their sarcophagi) when the invaders penetrate the interior.  How cool is that?

Chuck, Eddy, Fury...and Oz

 

As a guy who was around from the start, I have nostalgia about the original named patterns of Dreadnoughts, so getting a Contemptor and a Deredeo was always on the cards once I started on the project.  It's just a shame there's no Furibundus.

For my Chuck's loadout, I wanted an assault cannon as they're a classic Dreadnought look, especially once I found out the Contemptor variant is called the Kheres, which sounds like a weapon the numerologists of the Thousand Sons would like.  The other arm, I asked my better half to pick, and she plumped for a fist over another gun.  This turned out to be a provident choice when Osirons were revealed, as with the simple addition of a spare blade too big for a marine, you can turn a Chuck into an Oz.  It looks a bit cheap, but livable with for someone at my level.  When I get a bit better at painting blades, I'll return to this guy and try and make it a bit classier.

The cannon is on a swivel, the fist arm is fixed.

Naming the dead

My Dreadnought needed a name.  A quick scan through an encyclopedia of mythology, and I'd discovered an Egyptian goddess of wisdom and war called Neith.  Deciding to homage Phosis T'Kar's name (because I wouldn't be including him in my army despite him being cool, due to him having a bad case of being dead during my army fluff), I ended up with T'Neith.  For a first name, I just used the area Neith was worshiped, and so now we have Ancient Sais T'Neith.

He's really just meant to be a standard Contemptor, but the blade addition to the model means I can run him as an Osiron, although I'm not sure about the 50 points for that upgrade.  Ouch.  Also, nobody can agree upon which Force Org slot the Osiron goes into, which just makes ignoring the whole option all the easier.  Write clear rules if you want stuff to be used, I guess.  In the meantime, this guy will be guarding my base. 

Legion Rhino Armoured Carrier

Yep, that's a Rhino

Let's not spend too long on this, it's a badly painted, half-done Rhino.  Aside from the white panels (because it's going to be assigned to a Veteran Squad), it's not even a unique colour scheme, I cribbed it from Inferno.

Like almost all my models, I took it up to layer and recess shade, then stopped.  I paint quite thickly anyway, then add my lack of skill to brushing tamiya clear red and...yeah. Doing the straight lines on this guy also kicked my ass.  I have plenty of transfers to add to it eventually, and hopefully by that point I'll have learned how to edge highlight decently.  This chap will then end up as my test-bed for weathering.

It doesn't have a name.  Perhaps I should look up latin for Wreckage, Brother.

It's got a multi-melta on top because, even at this stage, I could see my army would be low on anti-armour ability.  I think the guys who jump out of this Rhino should probably have a couple combi-Meltas as well, but more of that later.

Librarian Consul Ctesias

Who?

With a squad and a minor character under my belt, it was time to chance my arm at something a little more important.  I decided to make a Heresy-era version of Ctesias, the Summoner.

I love this guy.  A creation of John French, he appears in the Ahriman series, narrating a half dozen short stories and acting as a main viewpoint character.  He's got a bit of a mysterious background as neither Prosperine nor Terran, and Ctesias isn't even his birth-name.  Hell, I'm not even sure he was rolling with the Thousand Sons during the Great Crusade.  Despite perhaps not technically existing during the era of the game, I'm including him in my force anyway, because he's great.  The level of uncertainty around him also tickles me, because the historical Ctesias (an ancient Persian historian) is considered a grade-A liar.

The Build

The beneficiary of a flashback scene when he's in crimson armour, Ctesias' distinguishing feature is a black cloak and robe, lined with white and gold markings.  As will become clear with most of my models, I've stopped before getting to the point of applying transfers, highlights and fine detailing, so he doesn't have any of that past the black part.  He will one day, though.

I didn't own any models with cloaks, of course.  So one trip to the Warhammer store later, I could now add a Dark Angels veteran squad box to my rapidly growing collection of sprues...which by now also included the newly released 40K Rubric marine and Scarab Occult kits, as well as a bunch of Forgeworld upgrade options.
Originally intending to use one of the full cloak affairs, complete with hood, I quickly realised this wouldn't look that 'Thousand Son-y'.  The knife came out, and the striding forward body got halved, the legs being attached to a Legion upgrade torso.  Ctesias is physically frail (for a Space Marine) and uses a staff, so one from the Rubric kit was added, with the Chaos stuff replaced with a blade from the Scarab Occult box.  I was going to use some eagle wings from the Dark Angel box to make an axe at first, but settled on the more obvious Thousand Son route after some thinking.  In A Thousand Sons, Ahriman's khopesh has an extendable haft, allowing it to attach to a staff and become a polearm, so I used the same idea here.  With that modelling and background, this means I can kind of get away with 'counts-as-ing' the staff as pretty much any kind of power or force weapon, though I'd never actually claim it as a sword.

For his other arm, I really wanted him to be holding a book or a scroll (something he was poring over in his one flashback scene), so a standard Rubric bolter arm seemed to work, the open hand being prime to hold something.  I made a scroll out of some paper and it actually looked good, so it sat in his hand for months.  However, I eventually fell victim to wanting him to look both cooler and a little eviler, and came up with adding a translucent plastic 'magic flame' effect.  I got quite hung up on this idea and hunted through all my stuff to try and find something.  Unable to locate what I wanted, I eventually gave in and carved something out of a bigger lump.  Painting it was trial and error, but the finished result is good enough for now.

As for the head, I struggled over that for a while.  For a Thousand Sons obsessive, I'm not that into the giant headcrests.  I keep thinking of them banging their heads on doors.  However, as a character I wanted to stand out and look cool, with a big tall spear, it became clear Ctesias had to have one.  Fortunately, I managed to get my hands on one that I think looks fitting for a 30K force, over the more sorcerously styled Rubric ones.  I want to add more to him, but not too much.  Maybe that scroll, or a book, can hang from his belt.  Perhaps I can get one of those sorcerer cloaks and attach it to his back.

 Painting

As to painting...well, when I was planning my army, I wanted all my guys to have silver trim.  The books all say they're silver, early pictures show various shades of ivory and white...and then the brand new interpretations say they're gold-trimmed.  I struggled with this for a while, before deciding I'd make Veterans and officers have the white trim.  I also decided I'd also go for a shiny look on the white, so grabbed some pearlescent paint.  So when it came to Ctesias, I was all ready to give him white trim.  But, looking through my shoulder pad box for something cool, I settled on the idea that I could use a lot of the typical winged icons in my force, but instead of painting them as black raven feathers, I'd make them the additional white element.  There are several white-feathered birds in Egyptian natural history, including the sacred Ibis.  That seemed fitting.

The Crunch

I made Ctesias with no idea what I was going to use him for.  A squint into the rulebook, and it seemed natural just to make him a Librarian.  Inferno hadn't come out by the time I finished him, so if I wanted psychic powers, that was the way to go.

After Inferno landed, I wasn't sure that a Librarian was still the best use of him, considering you can throw powers and a force weapon at any old Consul now.  However, I didn't see making Ctesias anything else to be especially fluffy.  He doesn't really do anything else except truck with daemons. Ahriman uses him as a kind of herald or delegate at one point, but Ctesias seems to dislike most of his brothers, so I didn't go down that route.  Librarian it would be.  Granting him the correct Cult Arcana and powers, however, is a lot more difficult, and I still think about it.  I just contacted John French to ask his opinion, so hopefully he'll have the answer.

Ctesias in the series is a binder and summoner of daemons.  At first, my thinking went along the lines of "Well, he'd have to be telepathic to do that, so let's make him Athanean".  The idea of jumping out of a Rhino and firing off a Psychic Shriek does appeal, rather.
While him being Athanean is okay, overall, using those powers didn't sit well with me in terms of his fluff, and so in the end - as fluff conquers all - I've decided there really is no other way to run Ctesias than with Sanctic Daemonology.  I know this is nerfing myself, but it just feels right.  I only really foresee getting one power off with Ctesias a game (after the aforesaid jumping-out-of-a-Rhino), so with Arcane Litanies attached to his belt, he should hopefully manage to do it and not damn himself in the process.

Legion Tactical Support Squad Sobek

A Rotor Squad?

Well, I needed to do something with all those mark III plastics from the Prospero box.  But I didn't want to do a big squad in case I messed it up, and I wasn't sure if I should be making a Tactical Squad or a Veteran Squad. I put together several bolter guys and tentatively tried painting them, learning more of what not to do than actually how to go about getting what I wanted.  I decided to start again, and to start with a planned, legal squad, instead of just attacking some bolter guys in the assumed idea that I'd need them.
Reading the Age of Darkness army list to see what legal squads even were in the Horus Heresy game, I realised to my great delight that I could make a Rotor Squad.  Looking around the internet to see what was thought of them, I discovered Rotor Squads were largely considered terrible.  This didn't put me off in the slightest.  I thought it was hilarious that they even existed.

Reapers

 

There's this bit in A Thousand Sons were Ahriman looks around at his men, and sees a squad spooling up their newly issued rotary assault cannons.  Now, from reading the text, it appears that McNeill was trying to suggest that the Thousand Sons had just gotten their hands on actual assault cannons, replacing an old and crap model called the Reaper cannon.  To me, this read as if the Legion had recently ditched their Reaper autocannons (a typical Chaos marine weapon in 40K) for assault cannons (a weapon Chaos marines aren't typically allowed, for...reasons).  Kind of cool.  Perhaps to get around the idea that 'chaos marines' (as the Thousand Sons would become) didn't have assault cannons, Ahriman notes that they all still call them Reaper cannons because they like the numerology of the name.  That's gonna confuse your quartermaster serfs, but whatever.

Now I don't know if this passage had an influence on Forgeworld, but I did know that, before I even found out such a thing existed, I wanted at least one squad to somehow be lugging around old-looking rotary cannons, and wondered if I could dig up some old or third party assault cannons to counts-as autocannons.  So you can imagine my delight when I found that Forgeworld not only made some actual rotor cannons, but there were rules for them that said they were old and crap.  There were two patterns, and I decided on the one that came with cool backpacks. The set gives you enough parts to make 5 rotor-neers, but I ended up just doing 4, as I wanted the squad sergeant to not actually be carrying one...

Sobek

As my goal was to have as many fluff characters in my army as possible, this meant working out not only who I wanted, but how I'd get them in there.  One of Graham's I wanted in was Sobek.  The kind of dour, snobby Practicus to Ahriman, he had to be rolling with his boss.

As buying my paints had to be organised, I took to flicking through the Visions of Heresy artbook to see how the Thousand Sons colour scheme was being presented that week (more on that in another post), and I discovered a picture of him!  Leading a Heavy Support Squad.  Well, too bad, Sobek, you're a tac support squad Sergeant now.

Shiny marines

I think the modelling came out okay.  The painting, not so much.  I've always been a shiny Thousand Sons guy, and so trying to work that out without an airbrush was an early step.  Originally I went with a silver undercoat, and thought it looked okay.  However, after much staring, I decided it was too dark.  It made me think Word Bearers instead of Thousand Sons, which I felt were a warmer red.
Rather than strip Sobek (I hadn't discovered how to do that yet), I just re-basecoated him and tried again with a gold undercoat.  He's therefore quite THICK.  And I may as well mention it here: I haven't learned how to properly edge highlight yet.  I've started on a few later models, with the intention of going back and adding highlights to my first ones, like good old Sobek and pals here.  I did at least drill the barrel of his pistol, a simple and great idea I read about online that I'm sure everyone else already knows to do.

The rest of the squad started from the gold, so are warmer and look pretty much how I want them to in terms of red.  You can also see that I ordered some upgrade kits from Forgeworld, as Sobek is sporting the upgrade shoulder pads.  Along with the shiny style, I was long a believer that Thousand Sons were red and white (or silver, as some sources say), and didn't at first like the newer studio vision of them being red and gold.  However, I decided to paint this squad with gold edging as it did look cool, and I figured I would rationalise it by saying that gold trim was for line troops, with silver restricted to officers or veteran troops.  Inferno would later legitimise this decision.

You can also note the absolute pain in the arse trying to photograph shiny miniatures is thanks to this guy, especially with a ghetto cardboard box set up like mine.  The red doesn't come out as deep and rich as it is in person, and of course, it has natural highlights that move around as you move the miniature.

Update: a legal miniature?

It was recently brought to my attention that the Sobek model may not actually be legal.  Someone pointed out that, following the wording of the loadout rules, a Tactical Support Squad Sergeant is noted as being able to swap out his flamer (his default weapon) for a close combat weapon.  It doesn't mention being able to swap out any of his other options.  Additionally, the unit entry says that if the squad swaps out their flamers (again, the default), all models in the squad must have the same weapon.  So, the gentlemen said, the sergeant must also have a rotor cannon.

Of course, some other people then said that this was a too strict reading of the rules and it would be implied that the sergeant could swap out whatever weapon for a close combat weapon, following up with some anecdotal evidence that this was allowed in a Warhammer World tournament.  Now, I think giving up dakka for a sword the unit will probably never get much use out of is actually nerfing myself instead of gaining advantage, but I'm not an active gamer.  What I will say is that the point of making this model was to make it look like Sobek, and that's what he looks like.  As said, I have the parts to make another rotor cannon gunner, so if I ever enter a tournament and someone complains, I guess I'll just swap him out.

Old and Crap? More like Over and Powered

I'd actually finished these guys before Inferno came out and made everyone who isn't a witch-sympathiser hate the Thousand Sons even more.  So it was with some happiness that I read the Legion options that allow Thousand Sons Rotor squads to gain the Shred rule.  Combine them with Corvidae cult arcana, and they gain some good re-rolls.  Handy that my guys were already fluffed to be Corvidae thanks to Sobek, and my army being planned to be Corvidae heavy thanks to Ahriman.  However, adding all those options to even just five guys does cost points, and anecdotes from the internet (obviously always trustworthy) seem to indicate that even Thousand Sons rotor squads do crap all in the grand scheme of things.

Hope, snatched away by reality.  Rotor squads in the XVth Legion are fluffy as all heck.