Days of thunder

The Earth was being torn apart. Continuous warfare was ravaging its surface into a desolate, apocalyptic wasteland. The last scraps of its long depleted resources were being fought over by hordes of brutal, genhanced warriors. Humanity, at one time unified in its conquest of the stars, was now, once again, in the midst of bitter infighting. Techno-barbarian warlords were attempting to seize and consolidate power, splitting the planet into powerful, feuding factions, while swathes of mankind's collective knowledge were becoming lost forever. All while massive Warp storms swept the galaxy, cutting off Earth from its interstellar colonies, and ushering in an era of fear, anarchy and collapse.

In Warhammer 40,000 lore this was the Age of Strife, around the 27th or 28th Millennium, roughly 13 thousand years before the game's current timeline. It was against this backdrop that the mysterious individual, who would later become the Emperor, stepped from the shadows and declared his intent to reunite the planet.

Into the turbulent affray he unleashed his Legio Cataegis, precursors to the Space Marines; larger, tougher and more savage than his later warriors, but prone to both physical and mental instability. These troops came to be known as Thunder Warriors, due to the Emperor's thunderbolt and lightning symbol often sported on the torso of their proto-power-armour.

They wrestled back control of the planet, and by the 30th Millennium the Emperor was ready to continue his crusade off planet. He phased out his now defunct Thunder Warriors, replacing them instead with the first Astartes (or Space Marines) – more rounded warriors, better suited to the wider theatre of battle, the decentralised leadership, and the potential need for diplomatic solutions.

His earlier troops were thought all but extinct.

But that was not quite the case. At least a handful of Thunder Warriors managed to deny their genetically imposed expiration, and survive right through to the end of the Great Crusade and the beginning of the Horus Heresy. Exactly what happened to these cunning champions is clouded by time, but by the 41st Millennium they must surely all have perished?

A few years ago, hot on the heels of my little Custodes project, I thought I'd have a crack at making a single Thunder Warrior – one of the Emperor's first attempts at creating genetically and surgically enhanced super soldiers, designed to fight in the Unification Wars on Earth. Bigger, but more basic than their Astartes successors, they were meant to be all but wiped out by the beginning of the Great Crusade, circa 30,000 AD. But this is WH40K and, let's face it, anything can happen. Strange relativity effects (a là Interstellar), or weird Warp-based time dilations, or poorly understood arcane techno-magic, or even just because Chaos fancied it, somehow this lone warrior survived long enough to join my collection of 40th-Millennium-era toy soldiers.

His construction involved quite a bit of jiggery pokery, and took a ridiculous amount of time for a single miniature. Here are some of the initial pieces I put together for him.

The greaves on the front of the legs were recast (using Instamold) from one of the Slaughterpriest models. These were then combined with boots from a Chaos Warrior, armour plates from Mark II or III Space Marine legs, plasticard and a bunch of badly hand-sculpted chainmail of some description.

A bit further down the line, the sifted, sculpted and combined pieces started to look like this:

Which, with the inclusion of arms (from what was then the freshly released bona fide Custodes models) plus a load of straps, packs, grenades and armament, ended up looking like this, when assembled:

And now, after a conversation with my five year old son, where he told me he wanted to see a 'tiny soldier man wearing green' my somewhat-slim-thighed Thunder Warrior is finally sporting a little pigment.

As the last of his kind, this model has given me an inkling as to how he may become the first of my new challenge. But I'll talk more about that at some point in the future.

Bigger and badder than ever before

The new Death Guard are a bit bigger and bulkier than a standard Space Marine miniature. I imagine the scale of these genetically-enhanced giants has crept up in order to have them more consistent in size with the recently released Primaris Marines.

It makes sense for Games Workshop to have bulked them up a little, as they don't have any interchangeable parts with the old range, so there are very few compatibility issues. Apart from the obvious visual one, that is.

But the new miniatures are only a tiny bit bigger. Just enough to not look ridiculously out-of-place when standing next to an old marine.

I've got quite a few old marines, sitting on their sprues, waiting for the moment when I get all excited at the prospect of putting together an entire power-armoured army. But in that lies the rub. I'm not very keen on the idea of building hundreds of under-sized warriors, and yet neither do I like the idea of disposing of them. And complicated conversions are just out of the question for that number of troops, so what I really need is a nice, simple answer.

At the end of my last post, I had decided I wanted to build two more Plague Marines, based on regular marines, but using up some of the off-cuts from my trimming of the Dark Imperium Death Guard. I decided I could use this opportunity as an experiment to see if there was a quick way of giving some of my old marine models a little extra height.

My solution was to add a couple of spacers to their lower legs, and another to their abdomen. I did this by making as straight a cut as I could (working at a fairly hasty speed) and glueing small squares of plasticard into the join.

Once the spacers had set, they were trimmed roughly into place with a knife, then filed down until the fit was pretty good. If you ignore the drying time it was only a few extra minutes of work per model.

The results are not perfect, especially when doing it at speed, but I think the most inaccurate areas could be fairly easily covered by dirt or battle damage.

Once I'd established this basic technique, I then moved on to the fun bit: converting my two upscaled troopers into extra members of my Death Guard squad.

The resultant characters are noticeably larger than a regular Joe...

... yet seem to blend nicely with one of the new Death Guard...

... and don't even look too minuscule next to a Primaris.

Now all I need to do is repeat the process about 100 times, and I'll have a fully upscaled Space Marine company.

ADDICTION CHALLENGE
REMAINING: 92

Noxious, nefarious nightmares to add to my numerous nasties

Hobby progress has been slight these last couple of weeks. I've only really managed to build the Death Guard models from the Dark Imperium boxset. I'm going to add them to my handful of existing Plague Marines, in preparation for trying to paint them all in one go, and hopefully put a significant dent in my Addiction Challenge.

The building of ten marines isn't much of a feat, except that I did manage to chop a few of them up to better suit my tastes.

The Plague Champion (above left) was the first to feel the touch of my knife. I wasn't keen on the miniature's existing face, so I cut the whole thing off and swapped it for a Mark III 'Iron Armour' helmet (from the Burning Of Prospero boxset), then sculpted a replacement hood. I'm quite a fan of the addition of cloaks and hoods to some of the Death Guard figures in this release, so I wanted to make sure I kept them wherever possible.

Next up was the Noxious Blightbringer (above middle). I cut off the giant bell hanging from the huge horny spike growing out of his backpack, as I figured there were enough bells elsewhere on the model (at least six), for it not to be missed. I also reasoned that the loss of the oversized bell would put the focus of the model back to the face – and the somewhat unique helmet he's wearing.

With a lot of these miniatures I've tried to cut back some of the horns and spikes growing through the armour. I like seeing one or two of them, but felt that at least a few may have been added simply to hide mould lines, rather than because they look great on the model. The trooper above left is a fairly dramatic example of my tinkering, having had the horns on his helmet significantly reduced (or removed altogether). 

The Malignant Plaguecaster (above middle) was probably the trickiest to convert. I wanted to turn him into a standard trooper, whilst keeping a bare face beneath the spikey hood. However the existing face just didn't cut the mustard-gas, so I had to graft in a new one (with rebreather), while also replacing both his arms. It ended up taking a good couple of hours – or rather a bad couple of hours –  involving the standard glued fingers and uninventive cursing, plus lots of accidental inhalation of noxious glue vapours. In other words, exactly what the Death Guard would have wanted.

The three troopers in the above picture have had very little work done to them. The most significant change was the head swap on the middle one. He's got a Forge World Mark II 'Crusade Armour' helmet with an added spike.

And finally the Lord of Contagion with Plaguereaper. This is a great model and I really didn't want to do too much to him. The only thing I wasn't sure about was the huge icon mounted on his back. Although it was quite cool, I felt it drew focus away from his head to the wrong part of the model. 

Yet it was simple enough to fix – I just cut it off.

But then he looked a bit bare, so I scouted through the bits that had been cut off the other models and found a censer leaking some kind of airborne toxin. It was similar to one already carried by this Terminator Lord, and small enough not to detract the focus from his helmet, so it seemed like a pretty good fit.

In fact this whole process has left me with quite a few random off-cuts that could look excellent on some further conversions, so I'm going to try to make two final Plague Marines, before I start painting. With a little luck this won't take too long and I should be able to share them in the next post at the end of this month.

Everything on this page is a work in progress – there's nothing finished here – so, for now, my Addiction Challenge score remains untouched.

ADDICTION CHALLENGE
REMAINING: 92

Here come the nasties

Auto-cast pict-capts have been received from an extraction facility on Ancora Prime. The disturbing images show the mining compound being overrun by dishevelled warriors in heavily-adapted Astartes battle plate – their disordered appearance belying their precise teamwork and accurate marksmanship. Although most likely human, many of the warriors appear to be hideously mutated. In some instances they are not so much wearing their armour as biologically fused with it.

The new WH40K boxset (along with the Addiction Challenge) has rekindled my interest in the Death Guard and their fellow Plague Marines. This is a squad leader – my first finished model for this potential new faction. I've only just finished painting him, even though I did most of the conversion work quite a few years ago. Back then I vaguely remember wanting to see if I could cram some kind of narrative on to one of the smaller 25mm bases (the newer, 32mm base he's on now came later). I was taken by the idea that a Plague Knife would inflict some real nastiness on its victims, sucking out life and causing almost instant decay. The dismembered Marine on the base has been partially modelled into the ground to represent this.*

The Death Guard's head was taken from an out-of-print metal Chaos Champion of Nurgle, while his torso started life as part of the plastic Chaos Marauders sprue. There was a fair bit of green-stuffing involved to build up the rolls of flesh, so I used the larger shoulders from the Ork Boyz sprue to match the bulk. Both the Power Fists started life somewhere in the loyalist Marine arsenal – with one of them, I think, coming from the original RTB01 box. The legs are nearly as old, originally belonging to the push-fit, static-posed Space Marines that came in the 2nd edition WH40K boxset. I chopped them up and reposed them a bit, and gave them extra detail wherever possible. As far as I can tell, the only orthodox Chaos Space Marine part is the backpack.

When starting a new army or project, especially one involving a lot of conversion work, I usually begin by sketching out a few of the ideas that interest me. It's a quick way of collecting my thoughts and means some of the experimenting can be done on paper, much faster than trying it all on the actual model.

Yet equally as shoddy

A lot of the ideas that are blurted on to paper will never see fruition. But that's no bad thing. Far better to discard a five minute sketch than a model that's sucked up hours of work.

Anyway, another complete miniature means I am officially one twentieth of the way through my painting challenge. That's pretty good going for me and my sloth-like pace as we're only about a month in. It's almost cause for celebration.

Especially if that celebration involves painting the remaining ninety-five miniatures.

ADDICTION CHALLENGE
REMAINING: 95

*The dead Marine is painted in the colours of my old homegrown chapter, the Storm Guard, nodding to the fact that I'm thinking of retiring them now.

Ultima Ratio

So things are taking a little longer than expected. The green stuff work on the small squad of Arbites is quite involved, but not the main problem.

The baby waking up and reducing our nights to just a few hours sleep is also taking a toll, but again, not the main problem.

Having all my work deadlines meet at once sucks up a great deal of time, but, yet again, this is not the main problem.

No, the main problem is my complete lack of attention span. I got about a third of the way through the rest of the Arbites Enforcers when I found another little project to work on. It's a piece of hardware for them, but I won't go into any further detail here. I promise I'll get both jobs to a stage worth sharing at some point in the near future, but in the meantime I thought I'd post some pictures of another old model.

A few years ago my good friend Sergeant Gavertson, the man who introduced me to Airsoft, and the person who played the best game of Space Hulk I have ever witnessed (quickly earning him a promotion to Brother Captain) asked me to do him a favour. He wanted me to paint him an Ultramarines Baneblade.

So I did.

And it took ages. 

But I enjoyed the experience, and used the opportunity to learn a few new techniques. Here are the results.

I haven't seen this model for years. I miss it a little

It's a bit weird to miss a toy tank, right?

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, France was the era's equivalent of a major superpower. This seems to have had a great deal to do with a single individual, Louis XIV. Without turning this into a half-baked history lesson he seems to have been a little bit like a certain Roboute Guilliman, Primarch of the Ultramarines, in that he successfully consolidated domestic power, and used it to further extend his influence across the world (or in Guilliman's case, worlds).

On the side of Louis XIV's cannons he had the words "Ultima Ratio Regum" stamped. Latin for "the last argument of kings". I'm not sure Guilliman would ever refer to himself as a king, but I thought the sentiment of resorting to warfare only after all other avenues have been pursued was a nice fit for the Ultramarines. And a rare superheavy tank, more of a relic than part of their regular arsenal, felt like exactly the kind of weapon upon which such an idealistic name would be bestowed.