Second Sphere

I'm back, for we have completed the first round of our Crusade campaign.

5x players, we faced each other player twice for a total of 8 games each.
I opted to use two different army lists and give each one an outing against each enemy faction,

The first patrol consisted of; Lieutenant Arto, 5x Reivers, 5x Infiltrators, 3x Suppressors and 3x Eliminators. This list did not perform well, some matches were close, others went very poorly and I was down 0-4 at the end of the first half.
The second patrol consisted of: Brother Castandro the Sanguinary Priest, 5x Sanguinary Guard, 5x Incursors and Persephyka Shayde the Culexus Assassin. This list either did very well or very badly, mostly dependant on whether the Sanguinary Guard survived. In their first game they rolled very poorly (new model syndrome is real), in another they received a turn 1 charge from some very angry Sisters Repentia (that game was probably decided by the roll to see who went first), whereas this list performed very well against Ad Mech and Necrons. At the end of the second half, the score was 2-6.

This particular Campaign has fixed points at which our Crusade Rosters and Army Lists each increase by 250pts. So I shall be playing 750pt games from a Roster of 1250. The lastest Munitorum Field Manual saw numerous points drops (to make up for the loss of Armour of Contempt) and I have been hard at work preparing for the next round.

Firstly, I have increased the size of my Reiver squad to 10 (they haven't performed very well so far, maybe returning to my ancient Orkish ways (rolling buckets of dice) will succeed where they have been failing so far). I also already had 10 Reivers (as shown above), so that was easy.

Now we move on to the first new model. Clearly displeased by the poor performance of his Lieutenant, the Captain of the Carmine Blades 10th Company is taking to the field himself...

Presenting the Master of Recruits and Recconnaisance, Taharius Turah







More to follow as I finish painting it.

I heard about this site when I was looking into what happened to a forum I used to post on ages ago. I was really impressed by some of the community projects that were done and I intend to share some of what I happened to save. 

Well that didn't take too long;

Presenting my Ironclad Dreadnought:






As the toughest of all Dreadnoughts I decided that the Ironclad fitted best with the Outcast Anvils. Whilst the background for the chapter mostly revolves around the Firstborn banishing the Primaris to a world of total war, such an policy is likely to have its detractors and this is as good a way as any to make them disappear too.

I intend to put him on the table with the weapon loadout from the first image but I figured I might as well paint both as you don't need to glue any of the arms in place. I also magnetised the waist for limited posability but the bond isn't very strong so after their first outing on the battlefield tomorrow I might just decide to pick a pose and glue the sarcophagus to the waist.

The hunter-killer missile array is constructed from the magna-grapple from a Blood Angels Furioso Dreadnought with the warheads of the actual Ironclad's HKs sliced off and attached to the component.


And so, my first 500pts of Outcast Anvils are complete, here's a group photo to celebrate...

And now for my Inquisitor's first big friend, the Captain of my Outcast Anvils.

On the tabletop he will be given the Forge Master Warlord Trait and the relic, The Salamander's Mantle. Toughness 7 and -1 to enemy wound rolls means that you'd need a Banesword's Quake Cannon to wound him on any less than a 4+

The model is almost entirely the new Gravis Captain, with only the additions of the scaly loincloth that I ordered from Spellcrow (one of nine so I plan to give them to all of the Marines) and the hand emerging from the mud which was a spare component I had left lying around after giving my Eldar Corsair Felarch a power sword.






The chapter icon started off very simplistic, I thought that a downfacing triangle would work as a stylised anvil. I messed around with a small rectangle as a base for the anvil but it never really worked. Some friends suggested that it needed a little something else and I eventually settled on half of an iron halo transfer. The triangle itself is the top part of a tactical squad icon (Battleline to the new kids) from the Tome Keepers transfer sheet that came in a couple of issues of White Dwarf, the icons will appear in their entirety on the right shoulder pads of my upcoming line infantry.

The cloak took some thought as I'm not at all experienced with greenstuff besides filling in small gaps so I decided to try some Agrellan Earth texture paint on some spare Stormcast Eternals and the effect seemed to work. I tried it a little thicker on the Gravis Captain's cloak and I couldn't be happier with how it turned out.

Coming next will be the Heavy Intercessors. Watch this space...

I have begun work on a new project, putting aside the clean reds, whites and golds of the Carmine Blades and descending into the mud.

When Games Workshop first revealed the Heavy Intercessors my first thought was of them as First World War tanks, slowly grinding across the No-Man's Land of the Somme. From there I developed a colour scheme and a few army lists, steadily increasing in points value from a simple 500pt Combat Patrol up to an unfeasible 5000pt mess that will never see the light of day.

From here I began to construct the lore of this custom Chapter, a successor to the Salamanders (for rules reasons as much as fluff), These marines would be amongst the first new Primaris Marines to be gifted to their parent (as-of-yet unnamed Salamander's successor) chapter from Guilliman's Grey Shields. While it was rare, some chapters of Firstborn really disliked these new boys and they were immediately thrown into the middle of an endless global conflict, two sides completely entrenched, the fighting taking place underground in tunnels beneath the surface more than out in the sun. They were positioned at the front, between the loyalist Imperial defenders and the oncoming traitorous forces (possibly Nurgle-worshipping cultists, that sounds fitting). They were to be the anvil whilst their Firstborn brothers would form the hammer, to smash apart the heretics in a pincer action. But the hammer never came, the chapter above decided the war was unwinnable and, while the traitor forces were otherwise occupied, they launched a devastating salvo of orbital ordnance at the planet before leaving, assuming the work was done. But it was not done, the opposing armies had dug in so deep that even a Battlebarge barrage couldn't reach them all. Those who survived were the heaviest-armoured, the Gravis-equipped living tanks who now hold the line for their friendly neighbourhood subterranean Guardsmen. They were abandoned by their chapter, so deep beneath the surface, they formed their own. The Outcast Anvils.

Going from this, I decided that maybe they changed their colours using all they had to hand, Munitorum-issue paint that the Guard would use for their tanks. Supplies would be limited so they'll be weathered, grimy and another synonym that I haven't thought up right now. I also wanted to include some Firstborn Dreadnoughts so we'll assume that they were left down there as well, it would have been too difficult to recover them without tipping off the Primaris.



So now we get onto the models. I currently have everything I need to construct a 500pt list but so far I have only finished one, and this one isn't actually a Space Marine. Presenting my as-of-yet unnamed Inquisitor of the Ordo Malleus, up to her ankles in AK-Interactive's Wet Ground diorama texture.





Mostly constructed from plastic Death Korps of Krieg and various assorted components from Space Marine sprues. Her head is a Forge World Stormcast Eternals piece and her backpack is from the original metal Kasrkin.

Stay tuned for more...