It is an Age of Darkness.
The Galaxy is aflame.
Brother turns on Brother.
This is M.31.
*****
They had been given the assault orders eighteen minutes ago, judging by their internal chronometers and many of the warriors had been raging to be on with the assault.
Instead they had been forced to wait until everything was ready. Then with an apocalyptic barrage of firepower, the assault pods were launched and the Siege of Terra had began proper. They had fought past Pluto, the Jupiter Dockyards, Mars in the grip of its own civil war and the Lunar defences.
Now they fell like hungry predators upon Terra...like Warhounds slipped the leash.
With a thunderous roar the retro rockets burned and the assault pod hit the ground, causing a burned crater twenty meters wide beneath it. Other from the assault wave landed around it, smashed through buildings or were caught by lacing anti-aircraft fire as they fell from orbit.
Another slew of supporting fire exploded before the Dreadclaw lifted itself clear of the troops it had brought to the battlefield.
Ancient Tyche, Banner-Bearer of the company moved forwards from under the transport's shadow and hefted the adamantium banner high, unfurling the material as it went. A huge pair of red jaws sinking their teeth into a lush green and blue world appeared, imposing upon the white background of the Legion Colour.
His two chosen veterans stalked up beside him as the Dreadclaw lifted itself off in a deafening roar of rockets firing. Their Praetor, Kharn had already disappeared into the hazy dust seeking heads to cleave for the Blood God.
They sought out Centurion Brond, greeting him on the vox, in order to organise the assault.
Since the nails were implanted in the legion, they had always had discipline problems during actions, but things had become exponentially worse after Kharn began giving in to them over the last few years of the campaign.
With the banner flying, underlie by the plasma glow of the Chosen, the World Eaters moved forward en-masse from their landing positions, ready to kill, maim and burn for the Blood God.
*****
Whilst it has its flaws from a customer standpoint (being overly drawn out by black library, being mega expensive to begin with due to being FW resin and leather bound books, being seen as slightly elitist because of said FW production) the Horus Heresy is one of my favourite periods of 40k lore.
More specifically, the Siege of Terra era is my favourite, as seen in this Post on the blog, and the desperate nature of the fighting in the lore really stuck with me.
I loved the thought of the ragged armies, having fought themselves almost to exhaustion, pushing on for the final gambit and, for the traitors at least, revealing just how corrupted by Chaos their forces they have become over the war.
To this end, when I was asked about possibly playing Horus Heresy with the second edition of the rules being released last year, I hesitantly said yes, as I didn't fancy spending a month's salary on an army from FW, and even with the plastics from GW it's not a cheap endeavour.
With a friend owning these classic books, which I requested to borrow for inspiration, and looking at the old diorama GW made, I decided upon a course of action.
Now, unfortunately, he only had books 1, 2 and 4 of the set (and to find book 3 at a reasonable price is an impossible task), I had a root through the bitz boxes and a few searches on eBay and how I wanted my army to look started to come together.
Rather then everyone being in shiny, smooth, new mk.3, 4, 5 or 6 armour, I was going to mix and match parts with older Chaos Space Marines.
And, rather given away in the title, older Khorne Berzerker mini's which I could pull apart and paint strip, then reassemble everything together randomly to get that ragged, hodge-podge of armour, corrupted look I wanted from a bunch of traitorous veterans.
A flick through the artbooks found this piece:
Kharn the Bloody.
Command Squad.
Alright, alright, I know it's meant to be Sons of Horus, but it was the best I could find. The archaic looking armour and lack of uniformity spoke to me, so I decided to press on with my own World Eaters version:
The squad, along with an extra marine whom we'll get to in time.
Why the World Eaters?
For one thing, their colour scheme is just awesome and I've always loved armies which charge across the battlefield before chopping everyone to pieces in melee combat!
Although I don't really like Angron as a Primarch, and the way GW/FW/BL have written him and the Emperor (just help him in that final stand with his slave army for fuck sake!), I do find the expanded story of the legion just wanting to emulate their father quite sympathetic to read, when you consider they become psychopathic blood hungry killers in the long run.
There has also been an excellent series of unofficial audio drama's by the excellent A Vox in the Void channel on YouTube.
So it HAS to be the World Eaters I do first, but let's not forget Kharn in this because he's just awesome.
Looking at the models, as these were veterans I decided to build them mostly from Berzerker parts to get the Khorne symbols I wanted.
The axe wielding guy on the left of the photo actually has a Mk.VII backpack (because I had them and they look close enough) and a Raptor Plasma Pistol arm, because those were the only parts I could strip off this particular model with any accuracy and not bending and snapping the model. His base was built up a little using my techniques from here in order to get him charging downwards into the enemy:
The Chainsword toting veteran on the right only has a Khorne Berzerker body and legs pairing, his head and Plasma Pistol again come from the Raptors kit, a Mk.VII backpack finishes off his armour. His left arm however is an Ork Shoota arm (for the musculature) and a Chaos Marine Chainsword, talk about an eclectic mix of parts:
Onto the focal point of the command squad, the Banner Bearer.
This was the first model I converted for the unit actually, he's more Chaos Marine then Berzerker, but still got a Khorne Torso.
Aside from the Chainaxe and banner, everything else about him comes from the regular Chaos Space Marines kit, even the banner holding arm.
The banner itself however is a mixture of a Bloodletters banner and the Khornate banner topper from the Chaos Marines kit added as I felt the daemonic standard topper was a little too much:
For the legion symbol, I traced out what I wanted with pencil first onto the banner itself, then went from there, asking for advice from Cardboard Fortress along the way.
Originally I was going to include a white Roman numeral XII, for the twelfth legion across the center of the world on the banner. But once I'd gotten this far I realised how easily I could mess the entire thing up, so just highlighted the differing colours and called it a day there:
Painting wise, I used the normal World Eaters scheme of white and blue armour trimmed with brass.
In this case it was Ulthuan Grey for the armour.
Calgar Blue for the blue areas, and Hashut Copper for the brass.
The real work is done by "Marine Juice", the mixed wash which the Army Painter team use to pump out the big HH armies they needed for the book photography.
Marine Juice is an equal parts mixture of Nuln Oil, Riekland Fleshshade and Lahmian Medium.
Once mixed, it's washed over everything on the mini, including the base.
From there it's just a matter of layering things up and highlighting them, or in the case of the white armour, just highlighting with Ulthuan Grey.
Not the fastest paint scheme in the world, but a striking one and one which I am proud of, especially as it works so well with the urban rubble basing, which I am using for the ruins of the Imperial Palace.
*****
I'll keep a tally of what gets finished as the army progresses, but The full list (currently***) is as follows:
HQ:
Terminator Praetor.
Centurion.
Elites:
Red Butchers Squad.
Dreadnaught Talon.
Apothecarion Detachment.
Troops:
Tactical Squad.
Assault Squad.
Breacher Siege Squad.
Fast Attack:
Rampager Squad.
Heavy Support:
Leviathan Dreadnaught.
Bodyguard:
According to Battlescribe, this lot comes out at 2,500 points in the 1st edition* rules**, obviously each unit has gear and I'll go into it as and when I complete them and post them up. But the plan is to get this army done so that we can play some games, and then I can continue on with stuff for the Siege of Terra project.
So that's the start of my Horus Heresy World Eaters force, I'm aiming to have these done by the end of September (yeah right) as we have a longer term project planned for the last three months of the year, and it's nice to visit friends, play a game and roll the bones on the table once in a while.
Until next time, have nice day...
*We've chosen 1st edition, as we have all our 7th edition 40k rulebook which the system runs off of, and the red books for Legiones Astartes, Mechanicum and Cults Imperialis.
**This is currently, as there has been talk of 2nd edition rearing it's head amongst us recently, and I've made a 2,000 point list for HH2.0 which contains most of the 1st edition list and a few extra things as stuff is really cheap points wise.
***I say currently, because I have half an idea to convert some drop pods into dreadclaws following this tutorial to give them some mobility when deploying, maybe.
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