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.

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.

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 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.