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

Thanks for reading