The British...I mean, Praetorians are coming!

A few posts back I showed a WIP Praetorian guard for 40k, well, I decided to go one step further and add the 208th Praetorian Infantry to my burgeoning Epic armies!

I've not quite got my head round photographing 6mm infantry, maybe I need to switch back to my actual camera and its macro settings as opposed to my (admittedly decent) phone camera.

These are the first 4 bases of what will be an 8 base Infantry Company, the models are from Baccus 6mm and aren't actually Imperial Guard, they are actually 6mm British Colonial troops with their long rifles cut down to more closely resemble lasguns.  They haven't got an extensive range of different troops so I think some creative greenstuffing will be in order to make Grenadiers/Stormtroopers.  I also managed to snag some Stormblades off eBay so the Praetorian's have the first of their armoured support.

208th Praetorian Infantry

Hailing from the Hive World of Praetoria the 208th were latecomers to the 73rd Expedition fleet, having been raised following the compliance of Dreska. The 73rd had lost almost the entirety of the 16th Michorian Samites during the compliance of the renegade humans and subsequent running space battles with nearby Orkoid forces which had been drawn towards the growing conflict.

The Praetorians were considered 'green' troops upon joining the expedition, have been recent formed and, as such, untested in the field.  Despite their untested status the Praetorians proved effective in the field, being deployed first against the Eldar during the purge of Jorn III alongside fellow Milita regiments of the 603rd Mødherne Brotherhood and the 9th Sumian Mamelukes and then again working directly alongside Legion elements of the IX and XII Legions during the Neverlight Compliance.

Being a recently founded company the 208th joined the expedition fleet with their full compliment of armoured fighting vehicles.  Standard battle tanks, such as the Leman Russ were in abundance as well as larger super heavy tanks such as the Stormblade.  

A relatively recent addition to the Armouries of the Imperial Militia the Stormblade was a tank of known provenance, having served for the early decades of the Great Crusade in the armouries of the Legiones Astartes.  However, with the discovery of STC data allowing for the creation of the Fellblade, Glaive and Falchion super heavy tanks the Stormblade found itself increasingly sidelined in favour of the more advanced tank designs.

As the crusade wore on these mothballed units found themselves being recommissioned into the rapidly expanding regiments of the Imperialis Mitia, or Imperial Army. Finding a new purpose amongst the human soldiery the Stormblade ground its way across the battlefields of the galaxy unleashing the fury of its Plasma Blastgun upon the enemies of humanity once more.

Legion Armour

As tanks such as the Stormblade fell out of favour with the Legions armoured behemoths such as the Legion Glaive were gaining a reputation as main line tanks within the Legions. Detachments such as the above, attached the the VI Grand Battalion, III Tagma of the IV Legion could be found on myriads of battlefields across the galaxy.  

Primarily deployed against infantry heavy positions the Glaive's Volkite Carronade was capable of reducing massed infantry to smoking ruin in moments and was even effective against light vehicles. The 73rd had an expansive armoury of Volkite weaponry going into the Neverlight compliance and then into the Mycenae campaign, effective as they were against the massed infantry assaults and ramshackle vehicles  

When they came under attack from, what the considered, renegade elements of the XII and XVII Legions they were forced to turn the deadly Volkite weapons on their erstwhile brethren.  The Carronades of the Glaive's proved particularly useful at scything through the packed ranks of degenerate cultists thrown before any assault by the Word Bearers.

Land Raiders and Rhinos were commonplace on the battlefields of the Great Crusade, so much so that their use extended beyond the Legions to the Imperial Army, or at least, those regiments capable of manufacturing their own.

 WIP Stuff

I've got quite a bit on the painting bench at the moment, including a pair of Mastodons, a Trio of Fellblades and a squadron of Leman Russ tanks.  But here's some shots of the next 4 bases of the Praetorians, a tiny Primarch and my first test paint for some Metalica Secutarii Titan guard.

Thats my weekend sorted!

Until Next Time

  

Legio Metalica Walks!

At last! An update with actual models, its been a weird few months and I have been in a bit of a lull.

However, the siren call of the new Adeptus Titanicus proved too strong for my, admittedly poor, impulse control.  And as such, here strides forth [I]Mors Incarnadine[/i] the first of my Legio Metalica engines.

I was a little slow off the mark (and also, too poor) to pick up the Grand Master Edition so I settled for the Warlord Bundle with the titan plus rules. I will say I really like the ruleset, which I know, everybody is saying the same thing. The rules are complex enough that the first time you play you'll find yourself keep going back to the rulebook to check stuff but once you get the majority of the basics set in your head there is a lot of tactical depth.  I wont go too much into detail in this post but I will do a full battle report once the Warhounds are out and we can run full maniples.

Mors Incarnadine and the war on Mycenae

Tasked as they were with the eradication of an Ork Waaagh! splinter which had found itself in the resource rich but otherwise unremarkable Mycenae system the 73rd Expedition fleet petitioned Legio Metalica for aid, given their long history of war against the Greenskins around Charadon it was the logical choice. The lords of Metalica agreed and a Demi Legio of 35 God Engines accompanied the 73rd Expedition to Mycenae.

In the shadow of the great war machine a stranded member of the IV Legion fends off the traitors.

The engine designated Mors Incarnadine acquitted itself well in the following four years of war, scoring a total of 8 confirmed Engine Kills on Gargant class Orkiod constructs, but it wasn't until the aftermath of the War that the engine proved its true worth.  Caught on the fringes of Lorgar's Ruinstorm the 73rd found itself isolated and ignorant of events taking place in the galaxy at large.

When a fleet of ships belonging to the XII and XVII Legions broke through the storms the 73rd at first thought reinforcements had arrived.  It quickly became clear that was not the case when the XVII Cruiser Epistle of Fire launched a devastating torpedo salvo detonating the plasma reactor of the Solar Auxillia Bulk Carrier Flame of Jupiter crippling the IV legion Cruiser Thunderhead.

The fleet of the 73rd scattered from the oncoming ships, attempting to extricate themselves from the incoming lance and macrocannon salvos.  While the orbital forces retreated in good order, suffering no further casualties, it allowed a window for the enemy to launch transports and landers onto the planets surface.

One of the most hotly contested zones in the first assault wave were the landing fields on the great crystal plane.  One of the few area in Mycanea's vast deserts open and stable enough to facilitate the landing of Titan and Ordinatus assets.  

When the enemy forces began to land, having received news of the attack from orbit Mors Incarnadine along with its Reaver Class escorts Hastati Lux and Pyroclastia held the landing field, along with support elements from the 208th Praetorian Infantry and a garrison force from the IX Legion, for 7 hours of bitter fighting, buying the defenders in other locations time to prepare their defences.  When it became clear they could not stop the flow of enemy landers the trio of titans were the last defenders to pull back from the landing fields.  Although Pyroclastia suffered catastrophic damage its weapon systems which would see it sidelined from the fighting until the very last days of the war, to have held their ground as long as they did was a truly magnificent feat.

So I still have a little more work to do on the titan, it needs decals and markings etc, though I'm not certain whether to get decals printed from the BOLS Metalica Transfer Sheet or to do a bit of a redesign on the, admittedly dated, Legio icon. We shall see.

Now, something I've been toying with the idea of for a while,  This guy is just the first test paint for the regiment (because why do one militia list when you can do more), but here is the first soldier of the 208th Praetorian Infantry.  The pants came out a bit on the shiny side which was odd but a blast of matt varnish once I've finished the rest of the squad will sort that out.  

Fluffing it.

So I’ve had a pretty quiet hobby week,  between one thing or another I’ve not got nearly as much done on my ETL Vow as I’d have liked.  In the meantime however I have started working on the background for my army a little more so I thought it would be a good time to discuss army background and what that means to you.

I think we’re quite lucky in the Horus Heresy community.  Not only do we have some amazingly talented modellers & painters, many of whom write amazing backgrounds for their creations (check out Death of a Rubricist for example) but we also seem to have a lot less of the win at all cost type of players prevalent in standard 40k, I’m not saying there aren’t some out there, they’re just less common. 

Also between Black Library and Forgeworld we have an excellent starting point to go from.

 

Something like that…

 

Now obviously the amount of backstory you want to give your army is entirely up to you, you might just want to go as far as their current campaign, a few campaigns worth or (if you’re a bit OCD with it like me) their entire campaign history! And it can be as detailed or vague as you like, especially if its written as a retrospective (in a similar fashion to how FW writes their HH series) as a person reviewing data and records from a time already past, that way gaps in the timeline can be explained as missing or damaged records that you can fill in later.

 

I'm sure it was nothing important.

That’s the approach I’ve taken, I started off with their current campaign and has kinda been working backwards from there.  The other things you’ll want to think about are where your army is fighting, who they’re fighting and one that is less obvious, when.

Where they’re fighting will mostly just dictate your choice of basing, but it will also have an effect on how much source material you have to begin with, if you set your army in the heart of the crusade fleets like the 63^rd for example, there is much, much more information available, which means your slightly more tied down to established events than if you choose the fringes of the expansion which that then gives you more creative freedom, so both have their merits and drawbacks.

Who is an interesting question in the context of the Great Crusade/early Heresy Era, since the Expedition Fleets were conquering worlds over the breadth of the galaxy it really gives you scope to come up with some totally bizarre concepts for enemies and obviously ,the later into the Crusade and then into the Heresy you get your enemies will change again as you inevitably get drawn into the civil war, no matter which side you’re on.

Which brings you finally to when, and not just when in the timeline, if your backstory is part of a campaign, how long has your army been in the field?  If you set your army mid campaign it can make for some interesting list decisions, using odd numbered troops in squads to represent casualties that haven’t yet been replaced or using full squads but with a few members having slightly different markings to represent units that have been amalgamated due to casualties but not yet had time to update their designations.

I like to make work for myself, so I settled on an expedition fleet not mentioned in the books set in an area of space with very little background information.  The locations changed twice, originally it was to be an extended campaign in the Halo Stars, that then moved to the Ghoul Stars (for somewhere a little more remote) and finally to the region known as the Death of Reason to tie in with something I have in mind for the armies future. I did give myself one concession however in that I picked Orks and Eldar as the primary adversaries for my army although I do plan to explore some xenos and human foes for their backstory as I fill in the gaps of the expeditions history.

From reading other people’s backgrounds as well as writing my own I’ve noticed everyone has a slightly different style, much like novel writing, which I suppose isn’t that surprising, it’s still worldbuilding, just within an established canon. I find I work best when I start with broad strokes, for example I decided early on that the company would aid in the defence of Metalica Forge World at some point, thus being joined by a demi-legion of titans from the Legio Metalica, they would also fight at Neverlight, simply because I liked the name and there’ve very little information about it giving me free reign, I knew the company would remain loyalist once news of the Heresy reached them and that in trying to return to the Imperium their journey would take them, battered and a fraction of their former strength, to Macragge,  I had to do a bit of rethinking with dates once Betrayer came out as the ruinstorm would essentially block them from getting to the Ultramarines until the end of the war, so now they arrive around the time that Know no Fear ends.  Sometimes you have to go back and change things, sometimes you don’t have to but you want to because you think of something that appeals to you more, makes more sense, or just works better.

Forgeworlds timeline has been very useful (check out Battle Bunnies for their timeline going back into the Crusade)

 

It’s also worth mentioning as it is in a similar vein, your army is what you choose to make it.  I’ve been criticised in the past that my Iron Warriors don’t have enough siege guns in the list, but the legions are so vast and varied at this point, sure the Iron Warriors might be known for their siegecraft, and in the background I write for them I certainly intend to show that the 6^th can bring the heavy guns out, but their current campaign, fighting small to mid-sized skirmishes against speed freak Orks and fending off intermittent hit and run raids by Eldar, doesn’t call for them.  At least not in the numbers everyone seems to expect me to field.

Ultimately, whatever you choose, there’s no wrong way to flesh out your backstory.

Until next time.