Blackstone Fortress: Gotfred de Montbard

It’s mid November, the nights are increasing cold and dark and the days aren’t much better. We’re reaching the time of year when staying indoors and playing Blackstone Fortress is very appealing. Time to get a wiggle on with painting the rest of the box then. Breaking myself in gently (on the grounds that batch painting traitor guardsmen isn’t that much of a break from batch painting orks) I decided to tackle one of the new heroes, the crusader Gotfred de Montbard.

He’s quite a strange looking character, clearly a knight but seen through the lens of the 41st Millennium, and that very oddness was one of the main things that attracted me to him. I’ll admit that I was also drawn to him in part because I thought he’d be fairly straightforward to paint, after all he’s mostly just armour and cloak right? Well, it turns out he’s not quite as simple as that, there’s enough to him to keep him interesting but not so much that I ran out of time and energy to make a start on those traitor guardsmen. Before I get back to working on them however here he is next to his new friends and colleagues who’ll be joining him in exploring the dark corridors of the fortress.

Not too shabby I reckon – heretics beware! Of course, now I need to bash on and actually paint said heretics…

The Emperor’s Angels – Part 7

With not a lot of month left to go the Space Marine squad I pledged to complete for Azazel’s Junit challenge is done. First off here’s a battle-brother with a heavy bolter ready to lay waste to the enemies of the Emperor.

I tried to get him looking battle-worn and battered, and indeed almost got too carried away, so that in the end considerable time was wasted cleaning him up again.

Alongside him here’s the squad’s sergeant to lead them into battle.

With this one I wanted to deliberately reference (perhaps even pastiche) some of the clichés about space marine sergeants. It’s become something of a running gag, unfortunately emphasised by GW with every release, that the one without his helmet who’s pointing at something must be in charge. Thus this was something I couldn’t resist referencing here, hopefully with tongue firmly in cheek rather than just reiterating the cliché.

In the long term I’m planning to expand the squad to ten and create a more elaborate sergeant to lead them, at which point this chap is hopefully generic enough to be demoted to the line without looking overdressed.

Before I called the squad done I also went back and, as suggested by the inimitable KrautScientist, added a blue glow to the gizmos on their arms, plus a little more in the way of freehand livery by adding their squad designation to their knees.

Of course now I find myself very short on time to get those pesky plague monks finished and I’m less than convinced that, even with the best will in the world, I’ll be able to make it. At least I can take up my brushes safe in the knowledge that humanity’s most stalwart defenders are at hand. All together now; “For The Emperor!”

Disposable Heroes – Part 12

Back at the tail end of last year I took my first steps into assembling the Imperial Guard regiment I’ve always imagined. Inspired by the Iron Sleet Invitational I put together a little band of guardsmen capturing the aesthetic I’ve long associated with the Guard, and yet which rarely comes across in the official models. I even waxed philosophical on the topic if you’re interested in reading more about my reasoning. At the time I made four guardsmen and, hitting something of an inspirational dry spell, rounded out the squad with a specialist agent sent to the Thorn Moons by the Imperial invaders. However that left several unfinished guardsmen sitting on the corner of the desk, neither fit to be included in the group nor ready to be cast back into the bitsbox, but waiting for inspiration to return and raise them up as fully finished models. Feeling the call of the guard once again I grabbed one of those unfinished miniatures and gave him the additional touches needed for him to join the Imperial war-machine.

I see him as very much a devout soul who, believing he has been called to serve in battle as part of the Emperor’s great plan for humanity, has requested dispensation to leave his allotted labours in the manufactorums and join the Guard. The fellow members of his congregation, believing that his mission is a holy one, have gifted him the small icon from their church to carry into battle, hoping that this will ensure his protection until he has completed whatever task the Emperor has set before him.

Of course this isn’t my first experiment with the Imperial Guard. A while ago I put together this chap as a “proof of concept” to test the waters and iron out some of my ideas.

Given my return to the guard I took the opportunity to give him a quick repaint to bring him into the ranks of my new squad. And yes, I know I’ve got paint on the rim of his base and, due to the selective blindness that seems to affect me whenever I do this, I overlooked it. Don’t make me go and take the photos again, just trust me that I’ll get it fixed. It’s mostly at the back, nobody will notice right?

Whether this has been enough to cure my urge to paint guardsmen and let me focus on other projects, or if this is only the beginning of a mass recruitment drive remains to be seen. In the meantime any thoughts or feedback are very welcome.

Infested! – Part 3

Killing two birds with one stone here my next contribution to the corrupted civilians of the Nestorian Infestation is also part of my goal for Fembruary. For those who’ve not heard of it yet Fembruary is the creation of Alex at Leadballoony, a chance to add some models with a second X chromosome to our collections, challenge some of the male dominated stereotypes surrounding our hobby and remind ourselves that when it comes to brutal warfare in the 41st Millennium, the Mortal Realms or anywhere else for that matter, girls are just as entitled to get stuck in as boys. To quote Alex himself is a chance for us…

” …to collectively challenge the male domination of our collections, and commit to painting some female miniatures for a change… Sisters of Battle and/or Silence, Witch Elves, Sorceresses, Inquisitrixes, Escher gangers, Daemonettes and Shield Maidens – whatever female minis you have on the to-do list, I challenge you to bump them to number one in the queue for the month and get some paint on ‘em… Let’s do something cool ok? Ok???  Ok. “

The first lady I’ll be adding to my collection then is this Imperial huntress, sent to infiltrate the genestealer infested world of Efesos VI and kill any targets of opportunity – including Nestorian himself if the chance arises. Like everything else in the Imperium it seemed likely that numerous different departments and Inquisitorial ordos would have an interest in Efesos VI, probably all without any knowledge of each other, and so there was no reason to assume that just because one Imperial force is inbound there aren’t others already in play.

Of course with the arrival of the Deathwatch as part of the Nestorian Infestation game itself she may have been rendered rather superfluous but, assuming she doesn’t catch a bullet mid battle, if things go against the Imperial counter-invasion at least they can take comfort knowing there are still agents of the Golden Throne at work in the shadows.

 

The Golden Legion

It is often stated that in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war and this may well be the case. Nonetheless two battles stand out, head and shoulders above all others both in scale and importance. The great tank battle at Talarn, the sacking of Prospero, the devastation of Baal or the Fall of Cadia? These are mere skirmishes! Armageddon, Calth, Isstvan, Macragge? Simple border disputes! The great conflicts which rage unseen in Octarius, the Legion Wars in the Eye of Terror or the long lost struggles between the Old Ones and the Necrontyr? Hardly the stuff to define the Imperium-centric universe of the 41^st Millennium. No, the battles of which I speak are of course the First Siege of Terra – in which two Primarchs are slain, the Emperor is placed within the Golden Throne and an age of darkness truly dawns, and the Second Siege of Terra, the one yet to come in which Abaddon brings the traitor legions and their daemonic primarchs back to humanity’s birth world for the final, apocalyptic showdown to define our species’ fate.

For those immersed in the world of the 41^st Millennium one is the cornerstone of all history, the other the overshadowing conclusion to the future, the ultimate Ragnarok and day of judgement rolled into one. One cries out to be chronicled in a series of novels, the other demands to be left purely to the imagination.

I don’t want to see the final battle for Terra, either through official rules, global campaigns or Black Library novels. I don’t want the Long War to end. Yet with the ghoulish fascination that makes us rubberneck at car crashes my eye is drawn back to it, to that final apocalypse which ends only with chaos standing triumphant over the Emperor’s broken realm or breaking against its defences like a failing wave.

This is mankind defining our own fate. We shall come to this war in many guises, be it the common soldiers of the Astra Militarum or the frothing cultists that oppose them, the astartes rebuilt in the Emperor’s image, the Primarchs fabricated to be demi-gods among men, the bestial creatures of chaos or even the daemons grown from our nightmares and ambitions like the mould that sprouts from the yeast in bread. Xenos will not fight in this war, at least not in a major, defining way. There may be the odd Eldar sneaking about, a genestealer cultist or two in the shadows, an ork who heard this was the place to come for an especially good fight, but ultimately this is our war, fought amongst ourselves for the soul of our species. This is us taking back control.

Of course, one can’t think of war on Terra without thinking of the Adeptus Custodes. For a long time they’ve floated at the edge of 40k fans’ wildest imaginings, yet for all we dreamed of seeing them on our tabletops and bestriding the battlefields of the 41^st Millennium, it seemed at best a pipe-dream. After all the custodes were confined to Terra, having sworn oaths of penance in the wake of the Emperor’s death at the hands of his son Horus. GW were never going to make an army that only fought on one planet out of the hundreds of thousands in the galaxy, especially a planet that, almost by definition, wouldn’t see war on a grand scale until the setting itself reaches its ultimate end.

Times however have changed and 40k is an evolving beast. Like the Imperium itself stagnation has been replaced by transformation, and we’re yet to see for sure what shape its final form shall be. Many of us, myself included, cried out against the changes being wrought to the setting. Yet so far whilst the universe has developed it hasn’t strayed as far from the darkness at its core as many feared. We may have raged against the Primaris marines for the disregard of the background lore but we forgave them for giving us easy access to true-scale marines. Likewise I may not be thrilled to see the custodes leaving Terra at long last but I’ll let it pass because we now have the range of glorious golden-armoured warriors we long dreamed of.

That said my pleasure at seeing the custodes doesn’t mean they get a free pass from criticism.  After all the custodes may be the Emperor’s golden boys with a long list of victories (almost) unmarred by defeat but they’re still a long way from perfect. They say the man who never made a mistake never made anything and true enough the custodes have spent the last ten millennia making damn sure they never made a mistake.

For those unfamiliar with the background to the custodes the crux of the matter is this; after a history in which they had never known defeat the custodes, sworn to protect the Emperor from all threats, were separated from him as they teleported aboard Horus’ battle barge. By the time they reached their master’s side he had been mortally wounded. Failure strengthens us, it teaches us both how to avoid failing again and how to cope if we do. The custodes had never failed before and now that they had they didn’t know how to cope. They carried the Emperor back to Terra and swore an oath never again to leave the Imperial Palace (admittedly a loosely defined area around the Sol system).

In many ways the custodes exemplified the ignorant, inward-looking nature of the Imperium and its cruelly wasteful treatment of its resources – most notably human lives. It’s always been one of the great ironies of the Imperium that whilst ork waarrghs and black crusades smashed thousands of worlds to rubble and whole chapters of space marines and regiments of imperial guard were being swallowed up by war the finest army at the Imperium’s disposal sat idle. Where were the custodes when Armageddon or Macragge were burning? Sitting on Terra feeling sorry for themselves that’s where.

Was it dereliction of duty on their part that saw the Emperor slain? I feel that’s a harsh judgement. Blame for Horus’ invasion of Terra, and the Emperor’s fateful decision to teleport aboard the Vengeful Spirit and take the fight to his wayward son, could hardly be laid at the custodes’ door. Yet the ten millennia of mourning and self-recrimination and penance that followed, whilst all around them the galaxy burned, that can be called dereliction of duty of the highest order.

Yet whilst the custodes have exemplified the stubborn ignorance of their era they are not of it. Almost uniquely amongst the people of the Imperium they are granted access to all knowledge and trained in all things. Beyond their superlative combat abilities each is educated to the very limit that their superhuman brains can handle. They are statesmen, philosophers, artists and historians, cartographers of the heavens and a thousand other things beside. They are not oblivious to the threats that fall upon the Imperium, or to the state of decline into which that once great empire has fallen. They must have seen the doom that was swallowing everyone, from the lowliest tech-serf to the Emperor Himself, yet they chose to stay on Terra anyway, allowing self-indulgent misery at the failings of their long-dead ancestors to blind them to the fact that they’d been letting the side down for rather a long time.

They’ve sat on their hands, gathering dust whilst the Imperium collapsed around them. This isn’t a complaint mind you – although if they knew the truth a denizen of the 41^st Millennium might feel otherwise. Rather I’ve always found it to be a wonderful part of the 40k background, the idea of a superlative army able to overcome any foe standing idle whilst enemies rage unchecked simply because they believe that they failed ten thousand years ago.

Of course they’ve not been entirely shiftless, there have been shadow wars and hidden conflicts conducted out of sight in the veiled byways and alleys of Terra as the forces of the arch-enemy attempt to corrupt the throne world. From the grander conflicts that the Imperium has endured however they have been absent, leaving the space marines and Imperial Guard to do the leg work.

As far as we’ve seen the wars in which the custodes have taken part have hardly been taxing. Whilst many space marine chapters have come close to extinction the Golden Legion have managed to maintain their numbers at a rough ten thousand. This leads me to wonder; if the custodes are functionally immortal and can only be killed by catastrophic trauma, and they never leave the Emperor’s palace – the most heavily defended site in the galaxy, and when they do have to fight it is almost certainly against someone less skilled than themselves, then how do they ever die at all? The codex describes some as being over a thousand years old but surely many of them should be even older than that.

What happens to them? Surely the warriors who fought in the Horus Heresy aren’t still standing vigil now? It’s something I’ve often wondered, especially nowadays when Bjorn the Fell-handed’s claim to being the oldest living human has been knocked aside by the return of other Heresy-era oldsters like Guilliman and Cawl.

Thankfully we now have an answer. If a custodian finds himself no longer at the peak of fighting perfection he returns his equipment, resigns from his watch and, clad in hooded black robes, set’s off into the galaxy to act as a watchman, spying out any threats to the Emperor and sending word back to his former brothers. It’s a powerful image; a hooded giant, face almost hidden, watching from the shadows with his retinue of agents gathered around him, and I’d be surprised if it doesn’t inspire a few Inq28 warbands.

Now in the Imperium’s darkest hour the custodes are unleashed. With a loyalist primarch back in the fight, a new, more pro-active Captain-General at the helm and an attack by Khornate daemons at the very gates of the Imperial Palace to goad them into action, they begin to strike out into the galaxy at large. Cue much back-patting at GW HQ as they finally have the excuse to make the range of models they know we’re always wanted.

It would have been all too easy to make these golden armoured supermen into two-dimensional goodies but, perhaps learning from the accusations fired at the Stormcast Eternals, the writers have done a good job of describing a well rounded and distinctly human force. The custodes may have grown in stature, prowess and intellect above the common man but their flaws have grown with them and this keeps them rooted firmly in the 41^st Millennium. Of course with the Sol system under threat from several directions one cannot help but wonder if the final battle might not be close at hand. Is it the wisest move on the part of the custodes to be abandoning their posts and going in search of battle at the precise moment that the battle they have long prepared for is finally coming to them? Perhaps not, but have pity on the Golden Legion as they attempt to find the right path through the pitiless horror of the 41^st Millennium. They’re only human after all.

All artwork is copyright Games Workshop and is used without permission.

Disposable Heroes – Part 11

Having painted four Imperial Guardsmen for the Iron Sleet Thorn Moons Invitational the fifth and final model to tackle the Thorn Moons is someone rather different. Stuck for inspiration amongst the ranks of the Guard I took on an Imperial agent, a shadowy, mendicant figure, tasked with enacting the Emperor’s will without support from the greater Imperial war-machine.

…And yes, I’ve not drilled out the barrel because that would have almost certainly broken the gun. Am I proud? Not a bit of it!

Of course, all this leaves for us is to delve into the background of the regiment – the Sarkisian 7th.

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When the Imperium called for troops to join the crusade the Sarkis system, one of the closest along a stable warp route, was a natural choice of recruiting ground. Raised from the densely packed hive streets of Sarkis V, the men of the Sarkisian 7th were naturals at fighting in the narrow crawlspaces and elaborate trench works of their homeworld. Alas the forests of the Thorn Moons, so similar on paper to the hive-warrens, proved disastrously different once they made planetfall. Against the deadly forests of those hell-worlds the Sarkisian 7th were soon whittled down into small bands of survivors, each attempting to find their way to their own lines after their initial triumphant advance.

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All manner of unclean creatures assailed us beneath those terrible trees. Emperor preserve our souls! Have we failed?

Even against the foulest of heretics we fought on, whilst the dank forest closed around us like a fist.

We needed leadership – someone who understood those twisting forests as well as the enemy, someone who could guide us to our dreamed of vengeance.

She will not tell us where she comes from but, in contrast to our struggling, blundering steps, she walks the forests of the Moons like a native. Was she born here I wonder, beneath these hungry boughs? Did she run through a childhood spent amongst these glades and thickets? It is hard to image her as an innocent, just as it is hard to imagine a childhood spent upon these strange worlds with their all devouring forests. Give me my hive streets once more, the warrens of mankind’s great cities rolling beneath my feet! What foul death-world first spawned such unclean xenos things as trees?

I do not even know her name, nor her rank or duties. It does not seem to matter however. She has led us, when the forest grew darkest. Without her this nightmare world would have consumed us long ago. If we endure here it shall be by her actions and the Emperor’s will alone.

Once again huge thanks to the team at Iron Sleet for putting the Invitational together and to all the other hobbyists who’ve been involved. If you’ve not already do take the time to head over to Iron Sleet and take a look at the showcase of work they’ve been building, a treasure trove of inspiration awaits!

Disposable Heroes – Part 4

Your appointed duty is to bear the mortal remains of Colonel Idris to the front. Let him see battle once more. Let him gaze upon the faces of the heretics and they shall know that against an Imperial martyr there can be no victory.

There’s definitely a need for more work here, both on Colonel Idris himself and to remove the rictus grin from the soldier charged with bearing him into battle. Otherwise though I’m rather pleased with him (or should that be them). And yes, I know the brief was for five individuals and I’m sneaking in a sixth… Leave the poor Colonel alone though – it’s bad enough the chap’s dead without you trying to stop him enjoying the war!