The Sacrificed Sons

   One of the things I don't think gets picked up on enough my most Horus Heresy players is the wide mix of chapter markings that a heresy legion can show. While there isn't much of an ability to canonically make up your own colour scheme for a space marine legion - unlike 40k where you can go nuts and still fit the fluff - there is a fair bit of wiggle room.

   There are a few legions where the legion badge changes across the chapters - pretty sure Word Bearers and Iron Hands are good examples of this, plus loads of examples of extra badges being worn by chapters that became the basis of 40k chapters during the second founding. My 30k Ultramarines have always relied on this with the Unicorn badge on being put on all my tanks as a supplementary icon and my Sons of Horus had always been planned to have something similar.

   I've mentioned before on this blog that my Sons of Horus army is made up of the 523rd Expeditionary Fleet which itself was made up of the 56th and 84th companies. As I lost so many games and didn't use any of the elite troops allowed by my faction, it became a bit of a joke amongst my mates that my army was probably where the Warmaster sent those units that failed him as a punishment to do those jobs he didn't want to waste regular marines on - thus the name The Sacrificed Sons was born.

   I had been fishing for an idea for a badge to add to my units before I contacted a company in the US who's whole business was custom designed decals, who I had been recommended by a friend. Not having kids, I paid an extortionate amount of money for them to do the service and send me a few sheets of the design for my models and I got on with everything else. Over the course of 6 months or so I sent the odd email just to see how it was going and got something along the lines of "you are next in line, you'll get a design to check next week". Eventually emails stopped being replied to and Facebook messages were ignored before I got fed up and just asked for a refund. The last reply I got from them was them saying I was actually next in line, attached the design they had created and gave me a refund but that any future orders would just be cancelled.

   Over the next few years I tried printing them myself using various printers and just couldn't get something I was happy with. I then ordered a sheet of decals from a guy in Germany which included an image I sent him (my August Lions logo) which has applied beautifully to my model's shoulder pads. So, one day I was out and about when I had a "why not" moment and just messaged him with the logo the US company had sent and asked if he could print me a sheet of various sizes so I could test it on my models.

   The guy replied that while the design was nice, the pixel quality just wasn't good enough to print and there were some small details that just wouldn't survive, would I mind if he tweaked it. He then sent me 4 options, a fixed version of the original, then 3 where he'd tried to improve it and one of these was the one I picked.

   I've applied the logo to a couple of figures to test out the concept before I order more so I have enough to do everything I plan to use them for. I was fairly confident it would still look bright on the green of the SoH but it was the black pad of the Chaos Marine that I wasn't as confident of, but it looks bright enough to me.

I have a lot of figures to apply these decals to now

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Scenery Project 1 - Fields Of White Gold

   One thing I plan to lean into heavily next year is sorting my scenery collections out. I suspect I won't be playing many games in 2025, so I'd like to get each of them to be as good as I can. The first project I'm going to focus on is my desert scenery as I have a few gaming projects that need that to be up and running.

   I'll be calling Project 1 "Desert Scenery" but that covers a lot of sins, this could be the full on deserts to arid grassland and fields, some of this scenery can work for the Mediterranean as well as Palestine and North Africa, so I want choices of items that I can place on a table to suit the area the game is supposed to be taking place.

   One thing I wanted to add was fields for those areas that aren't just sandy desert and on my list to do last time I made "desert scenery" was cotton fields. I've been trying to work out how to do this for a few years now, but recently I had an idea I wanted to test out.

This is what the internet says fields of cotton in Afghanistan look like, so I had something to work from.

   My test piece of scenery before I try to mass produce them in the new year. Material wise its just a place mat, door mat cut up and some white foliage flock but I'm pretty pleased with the outcome. I didn't want to make multiples of this so I could cover a bit area of table and then decide the idea looked terrible.

   The gap between rows is eyeballed to about right to put 25mm bases flat on the ground with some slight deviations from this. Blocks of infantry can just be sat on top.

All in all, I'm pleased with my test piece, I just need a new source of place mats as I always bought mine from Wilko . . .

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The Duke Of Norfolk Arrives

   I'm all over the place at the moment with my projects* but I had a two and a bit hour drive for work and for some reason my brain decided it wanted to stress over why I hadn't started my War of the Roses Yorkists from a planned purchase in 2020(!). As I normally do for a historical period, I bought enough figures to do about 24-30 points for both sides, with a slight weight towards the army I thought I would end up using more often as I know I have an opponent who would be painting those up.

*as per

   Back in 2022, I ended up stealing some figures from this project to get my Lancastrians up to a slightly bigger than planned points size for a couple of games and while I've not replaced those figures yet, I do have enough in this backlog to get an army on the table, and the more I think about this project the more I want to get a game in in 2025**.

**Hopefully, Wayland Games 2.0 comes online asap

   I've gone back through my notebooks and collection of Freezywater flags for the Towton period of the war and it looks like I didn't have an exact plan on who I was going to painting and had a list of options. I then initally decided to paint the Earl of Essex's livery on my troops, but with it being Green and Black, it is a tad close to my main Lancastrian colours, so I've decided on the Duke of Norfolk with it's plain Red.

   This is my first batch which is a single sprue of troops made up of 8 archers and 4 billmen. There will be a couple more batches of these and then I can start on the various sprues of foot knights. Not looking forward to having to replace my mounted knights but that's a separate issue.

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Sons Of Horus Legion Imperialis

   Having been given the starter box for Legion Imperialis for Christmas (2023) and then having planned to get some test games in as early in the year as I could manage, here I am towards the end of 2024 without having played any games*.

*its been a bit of a year

   I had been planning something Horus Heresy in this scale for ages - I've had a mate print some epic scale marines in the past but could never do something I was happy with. After reading the novels and playing a lot of 30k, the scale of the 32mm game just never felt right. The heresy is about companies of marines, with big support vehicles bashing it out, while the average pick up game of 30k tends to be a Primarch or Preatorian with an elite bodyguard and a squad or two in support, I've seen 3000 point games (about as big as you can do on a 6/4 table) with less than 30 figures a side. LI means you can have 100+ figures a side and still be playing a small game**

**plus multiple titans without needing to re-mortgage

  I've been painting these on and off all year without getting very far, so with Christmas coming up fast, I thought I had better get moving. It turns out they are really hard to photograph, but the green is a touch brighter in real life and matches my 28mm Sons of Horus. I'm compromised on the colour scheme slightly - I am never going to manage a brass trim on the shoulder pads with my eyesight but the big block colours are in place and I think they look about right when viewed from my 3 foot standpoint. 

   I have based to match my Adeptas Titanicus stuff as they will be used in this game as well.

Command base and Terminators

9 bases of Tactical Marines - using a spare command to bulk up

The specialists - Plasma squad, Missile squad and Assault Marines

Contemptor Dreadnoughts

Squadrons of Predators and Sicarans

   What I have painted is just the Space Marine side of the starter box and by all accounts online I need at least double the amount of infantry just to keep stuff on the board in a regular game - although the advice seems to be 3 or 4 times this really. My aim at this point is just to have two matched sides to actually play a game before I start bulking up - far better to have an achievable aim to play than unachievable and never try.

While I was at it I did a test base of trees just to fill a board quickly. While the trees are probably out of scale - possibly better suited to a 15mm figure size - I don't hate the idea and I will mass produce a few more bases of these as well as really start the buildings.

This stuff does not photograph well. . .

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Big Gunned, Chaos Chicken

   While we aren't doing much in the way of gaming I wanted to try and make sure the combat patrols for the Chaos 40k campaign were ready to go at a moment's notice. Then I could start working on the stuff for bigger games knowing I had a bit more time to do them.

   The Sentinel walker was the last model I needed for my Traitor Guard, so I had to get it moving. It's been built, sprayed and washed, sitting on my painting desk for a couple of months while I tried to decide how to tackle it. In the end, I just put a picture of one on the screen and went in with my gun metal paint for the joints as this broke the big stretch of desert yellow up allowing me to get past my mind block.

   I then added loads of red decals from the Chaos Knight sheet to look like hand painted glyphs, again to break up the single colour. I did this at a much earlier stage than I normally would, again, as I just needed to not have a model in a single block of colour.

Now its been leaked that the new Guard combat patrol is completely different . . .

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31st Hervictus Artillery

   Like my Traitor Imperial Guard combat patrol, my Hervictus guard also needed the requisite artillery pieces, but I found these harder to do, which is why they were put off for so long. My traitors could just have converted crew that came with the guns, they don't have a real uniform anyway, so a slight variation on the gun crew was no big deal. My Hervictus guard use Steel Legion bodies, which just didn't come close to the supplied crew.

   I had a couple of plans of either using regular Steel Legion figures posed around the guns to represent a crew maybe grabbing their small arms but I wasn't convinced when I tested it on the kit I bought for my traitors. My second plan was just to assume there wasn't a Hervictus artillery regiment, so the guns would be supplied by somewhere else*, but I thought it would just look odd on my main Imperial Guard army.

*which is something I plan to do with the other regiments I have in my head

   Then I found someone in Poland selling 3d prints of Steel Legion gun crew, designed for this kit and I was sold. Until I saw the postage costs and I put it off until I just couldn't think of a better plan.

   The markings on the front of the guns show the regimental badge, the regiment number and the platoon colour and gun position, so both the guns are from different platoon**, but hold the same position in their platoon (e.g.yellow might be platoon 1, with white showing gun 1 in that platoon).

**allowing me to expand in the future and have batteries for bigger games

I really fancy another 4 of these now. Oh and a command squad for these?

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The Dark Angels

   My second ever army for 40k was a fallen Dark Angel army using Chaos Space Marines (they were also all dedicated to Slaanesh but that's a different story). I keep starting a fallen Angel squad for my current Chaos Marines but mostly I can't decide what I'm trying to achieve with them - are they a Slaaneshi squad, or a regular marine squad, should they have Noise Marine guns?

   Then I had a thought - why not do a separate Fallen Angel Combat Patrol? Using the Chaos Marine rules (as they will be fighting on the Chaos side anyway) all I needed was a 10 man tactical squad, a Master of Possession, 5 Possessed and 10 Cultists.

   My head canon for this army is that they are Dark Angels from Luther's side on Caliban swept into the void when the planet fell. The Chaplain is a 30k Chaplain, so not the religious nut jobs of 40k but moral leaders whose job is the mental health of marines - if a marine is faltering its their job to fix them. So, 15 lost marines are looking to their Chaplain to explain why their father attacked them and where they now are - except he doesn't have an answer to hand. Then at some point a voice starts giving him answers and leading them to supplies, which is seen as some sort of miracle, however, little does he know but he's being set up by a daemon. As the corruption spreads his men are blind to it, even when the voice explains there is something he can do that would make his men even stronger.

The Chaplain/Master of Possession 

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A Red Sun Rises?

   Painting time has been nearly non-existent over the past couple of weeks but a unit that missed this blog are 10 Khorne Bloodletters that I bought from a second hand model shop in Norfolk to bulk up my Khorne Daemon numbers.

   It was only after I had sprayed them (as I bought them built) that I noticed I had 3 horn blowers, but as I went without any upgrades on the other 3 units I have, this shouldn't be an issue*. Otherwise, they were painted to match the rest of my Khorne Daemons and have been mixed into the box with the rest since this photo.

*although barely any of the rest of this army has made it onto the blog for some reason?

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Bring The Fire

   Carrying on with the models needed for a second Space Marine combat patrol from the aptly named Combat Patrol magazine with a unit of Infernus Marines.

   These guys show a bit better than the captain I paint for the August Lions the chapter colour scheme. Should I have halved both shoulder pads as well as the bodies? In hindsight, probably not, but I'm pleased with how they look at 3 foot.

I am at the point with this project where I both never want to paint another model in the colour scheme and want to buy another box of something for it straight away. Its tough.

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Hosokawa Samurai

   Last for this side of the project we have the units of Samurai. There were a few moving parts on this one when it came to building the units and painting them.

   The first big decision was how big to do the units as Lion Rampant does regular units sizes and halves the unit size for "elite" units like knights, however, reading how most gamers who play this period do, they treat Samurai as slightly better regular troops and save the elite slot for Hatamoto Retinue, which seem to be elite Samurai. So, that is what I did.

   The second was a colour scheme. I decided to make this units a bit more interesting and to stand out for their Ashigaru regulars by letting each guy wear their own colours - to an extent - so the units are mixed. I think this helps the models stand out as elite, while not needing to be very elite in their rules. I then gave them all their back banners to tie them into the army again.

The two units of Samurai

The Samurai Archers

The Commander

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15mm Ashigaru Archers

   The next unit finished for my 15mm Feudal Japanese project is a unit of Ashigaru Archers, again, from the Hosokawa clan. Painted in the same way as they melee weapon carrying colleagues, the thing I struggled to find out was what the rule for their back banners was as half my guys have their hats on their back so can't fit a flag. As far as I can work out, there isn't really a rule for who does and does not wear them, but having a 50/50 split in a unit probably isn't massively historical, but limited by the figures I've done what I can.

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The Horror Of Fire

   As mentioned before, Pink Horrors need Blue Horrors, Blue Horrors need Brimstone Horrors, so here they are. Both units done as one big batch as their complexity level was pretty low.

   Nice easy job of Iyanden Yellow contrast over Wraithbone, with a couple of darker 'highlights' to really get some flames going.

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More Horrors From The Deep Blue

   When building and painting an army, whether planned or not, I always think it is important to get some troops in first. I know a lot of people who always do elite armies that ignore troops, but my theory is that you need two of three units of the absolute bog standard regulars in your collection as you never know what might happen with army lists*. 

   To back this theory up, I bought myself a second box of Blue Horrors and got on with them while the project was fresh in my head.

*I recently saw someone complaining that Warlord Games has done a GW by making his army illegal. Army in question was a minor nation (in Warlord's terms) where a single Theatre Selector allowed him to build his infantry units with different weapons - I believe this was entirely SMGs instead of rifles - so now the army was worthless and going into his bin. While painting a handful of riflemen when he did the army would have future proofed him to an extent.**

**This is not to say I haven't been burnt in the past

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Horrors Of The Deep Blue Kind

   Speaking to one of my brothers before my birthday and I was half joking and half threatening about doing a small Tzeentch Daemon army to compliment his Thousand Sons in our next campaign (before the news that our gaming venue was shutting down). I already have a single unit of Pink Horrors that I don't think ever made it onto this blog, but that need a real tidy up anyway. However, Pink Horrors need a unit of Blue Horrors to be able to be used*.

*and Blue Horrors need Brimestone Horrors . . .

   So a month after my birthday, my other brother turns up at the door with a pile of wrapped presents, one of which is a box of Blue Horrors.

   This things are painted in contrast - just perfect for this job - with a highlight on the top and then painted fairly normally from that stage onwards. Yellow is also contrast as Iyanden Yellow over Wraithbone is just superior to any other yellow I have ever used.

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Hervictus Topup

   A few months back when we were chatting about our next campaign and I was saying I wanted the regular troops on both sides to play a bigger part, but the other 3 players are all going to be using Space Marines of one flavour or another, or Sisters of Battle, which meant the Imperial Guard/Traitor Guard would fall to me to represent.

   While I have everything for the Traitor version of the Combat Patrol, the Imperial side was lacking quite a bit despite have a decent guard collection due to the limitations of the old metal Steel Legion range. I still need to work out what to do with the heavy artillery but the figures below solves most of the infantry gaps.

   The figures are sculpted by someone on Cults3D that I paid for and then printed for me by someone on Bluesky. I initially asked for about 8 guys to be printed but the price for printing was per base plate, which was about 12 figures a go, so I bought a set of rifle armed sculpts and just went for two prints.

   The figures in this batch are a couple of flamers, couple of melta guns, an officer, a rifle I converted with a chainsword, a medic and some of the rifles.

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The Swarm Pt 15

   A post that wasn't published for some reason. At the end of the Fratribusia campaign, I decided to have a push towards getting my Tyranid projects as close to finished as I could, even if I had no plans to use the figures themselves. These Ripper bases were caught up in that push as a fairly simple unit to just get done.

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The Land Of the Rising Sun - but 15mm

   Someone at our club was having a clear out and one of the boxes I managed to pick up was a box of 15mm Samurai. I think they were bought to play DBA but I was thinking Lion Rampant.

   I normally do bases of 24 for 15mm Lion Rampant but I wanted this project to be fairly quick and cheap, so I've gone with 10 on a half depth base - I can always double up bases and get someone that looks ok against my other stuff that way.

   Upon checking the box, I think the only figures supplied were actual Samurai from Two Dragons, so I looked online and added some Ashigaru to my collection along with back banners for every figure that could have one as none were supplied.

   I decided to go with the same colours as my 28mm, which meant I had to check what decals my 28mm Samurai were painted in as I had no idea and it turns out that it is Hosokawa clan - although the symbol doesn't seem quite right to me. Then I found one of their opponents from the Ōnin War in a different enough scheme to be interesting and this seemed to be the Ōuchi clan. This is not my area of expertise, so any mistakes are completely due to my own ignorance.

I should probably get on with the rest of the project

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August Lions Captain

   With the Combat Patrol magazine, I've decided to do another combat patrol of space marines but in a different colour scheme to my current chapter. I've decided to go with a chapter I created for my Death Watch - the August Lions - vaguely based on the name we called the Royal Knight Lego Castle faction when we were kids, the Kingly Lions.

  While the Lego figures don't wear halved uniforms, I took their shield design straight to heart with halved white and red as the basic colours with blue as their accent. This being the captain, he also has a fair bit of gold.

   The Lego King for this era was called Richard, so I suspect that might be this guy's name too.

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Anarchy Knights

   Carrying on with the Anarchy project are the knights, these are a much later paint job being started in the last couple of weeks. I see these as more a knight and his mounted troops rather than lots of knights exactly.

   Painted in a similar way to the infantry, except I batch by horse colour initially, then mix those up to batch paint clothing.

There is one unit to finish but I needed these done for a game.

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Anarchy In England

   One of the big projects I wanted to do last year was an army for the Anarchy, the wars between the (true heir) Empress Matilda and her cousin King Stephen that followed the death of Henry I. Its a period that fascinates me* but I've never known where to start.

*Thanks Griff Hosker

   What I decided was that Conquest Games comes the closest to having the right models, their medieval knights are pretty perfect, along with the archers, but the infantry is where the problems start. As far as my research was showing, I was looking at somewhere between Norman infantry and the early 100 Years War in terms of figures - Footsore's Baron's War stuff gets close but is still not quite right, plus is just too expensive. So what I decided to do was use mostly Norman infantry, with some shield swaps mixed in to update those figures as needed, plus sprinkle in some early crusades figures for other armour types.

   Shields then became my next issue. My research seemed to suggest that heraldry and liveries had started to appear but this wasn't the uniform of 100 Years Wars retinues, so I decided, historically or not, to do a single (varied) shield design across the army, but let each guy have their own clothes. This would also stop it being a new second Norman army.

   As I tend to do with these projects now, I painted mixed batches of figures using the same colour. So batch one might be 10 figures in a mix of archers, crossbows and regular infantry all with orange tunics as they standard thing. The first batch was finished in February and I've painted a batch whenever time and motivation came together.

Archers

Crossbows

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Watch Company Tertius Command

   Lastly, we have the command elements from the Deathwatch box (although I did add an extra Space Wolf Lieutenant as it had more chapter feel to it). 

   I went with the following chapters for these three; Lt Wolf Spear, Lt Black Shield and Apothecary Blood Angel.

   That is the project finished, although, I suspect I need to go back and split squad Valiant into two legal squads in the future,

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