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.