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.

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.

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.