Darien Vasco the next legion: Emperor's Children

Hello all!

I have spent the last 10-11 months working non stop on my Sons of Horus First Company. I am running out of steam and models to paint for them, having finished about 5500 points! I still have a little bit to finish off and I will hopefully be completing a few more bits ready for the Shadow War campaign at the end of October.

I am now looking to get going on my next legion, The Emperor's Children.

I found coming up with a list to be quite straight forward. I wanted to include elements that I felt suited the legion as well as those that Fulgrim was known to favour. I also wanted to make sure they play very differently to the Sons of Horus. As such I have planned to include lots of marines, some fast moving elements and of course the legion specific units. The legion will be set in the great crusade era so will be seen at its high and before it starts it fall to Chaos, meaning I won't be making any use of  Kakophoni or Sonic Shriekers.

The army will be headed up by a bunch of different characters depending on the campaign they are fighting at the time. Fulgrim, Saul Travitz, Eidolon and Darien Vasco will be main leaders. The current line up for the army is as follows:

Troops:
2 x 20 man tactical marines
2x 10 man tactical marines with rhino's

Elites:
10 Phoenix Terminators
2 x 10 man Platine Blades (I think with jump packs but I haven't decided yet.)

Fast attack
6 Jetbikes
3 Javelin attack speeders
Xiphon

Heavy support
10 heavy support marines with lascannons
Sicaran
3 Predators with lascannons

Lords of War:
Fellblade

It will mostly be used with the Emperor's Children Rite of War The Maru Skara. Which will add another different level of play feel over the rest of legions.

As for painting I am planning on getting some test models done soon, I think I will be using a metallic scheme to match the art from the black books. Base coat leadbleacher, zenith highlight with runefang, wash with nuln oil and then wash with Eidolon clear from forgeworld. I am not sure what gold to use yet, so any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated. Hopefully this will then look like this:

I would love to know your thoughts on the list and paint scheme plan!

Happy Hobbying!

Darien

Sokar Pattern Stormbird

Hello Bunnies

Check this out! The Sokar Pattern Stormbird is now up for pre-orders on the Forge World website.

It is available on its own or as part of a bundle with the Mars Pattern Imperialis Landing Pad or with a Betrayal at Calth box set (that will fill the Stormbird with a handful of models to spare!)

Anyone planning on picking up one of these beautiful models?

Hector

Pre Heresy Dark Angels; Chapter Master Castiel Druas

Hello everyone!

Tonight I would like to introduce you to my 30k avatar; Castiel Druas. I will go in to his rules in a later post, so today I will be looking at the model that I have kitbashed/converted.

The base model is the Commander from Dark Vengeance, I then replaced the helmet with one of the Forge World, Dark Angel specific heads and then glued the wings back on. I wanted Castiel to be obviously Caliban born and I hope that comes across in his attire and the equipment that he uses (which I will discuss more next time).

Castiel and his bodyguard of despoilers launched a counter-attack at the Death Guard breachers on the desert planet Karadrex.

Plasma Repeater marines took aim and fired as Castiel approached.

Fighting his way to the marines, an aggressive combat ensued with casualties on both sides.

In the end, Castiel was victorious and returned to the main thrust of the Dark Angel assault.



I hope that you have enjoyed my post. For my next one I will be showing you more of Castiels rules and a discussion around them.

Castiel

Boxed Games and 30k - alternative ways to play

Howdy Guys and Girls =)

Today I want to do something different - a little overview of ways to play with your 30k models besides the "standard" AoD game. Basically there are 3 big groups - boxed games from GW that can be adepted, different gaming modes within the Age of Darkness rulesframe, and specialist games. Today I want to talk about the first two - the time for Specialist Games will come once FW released new versions of them. That said - I can see Inquisitor, Necromunda or Gothic used for games set during 30k.

Victory is Vengeance and Kill Team:

Kaelo's Raven Guard sneeks their way through the ruins - they will get their revenge ...

The Victory is Vengeance Campaign Expansion can be found within the HH Book III - Extermination. It's basically a narrative driven, campaign based kill team mode.

Intended for two or more players, one side represents warbands of the Shattered Legions, the other Traitor Forces unleashed by Horus to hunt them down. That said - you can use the rules to also represent other battles and forces.

Core changes is that your army isn't build around a Force Organisation Chart, but a group of character models, aswell as individual Marines chosen from the army list rather than full squads. You also have ressources and action points for your campaign, and your characters can level up and get new special rules.

I think this game mode is especially great if you are currently creating a new force - you can play with your newly painted models even if you don't have enough for a normal 30k game.

An alternative to this (especially if you don't want to do a campaign) would be Kill Team. Kaelo had some fun with it in the past weeks. You can buy the 40k Kill Team rules as ebook too, in case you aren't a fan of Tau and Mark VII:
http://www.blacklibrary.com/all-products/kill-team-2016.html

Zone Mortalis:

Ok, many readers will already know it - I love Zone Mortalis. Deadly fights within a battle ship or bunker system - yep, that's awesome. You can find the 30k rules for it in the first and third black book - the first has the normal rules for bunker fights under Istvaan III, the third an expansion for "Blood in the Void" - ship to ship combat, including some cool strategems like ship crew and murder servitors.

Zone Mortalis games are usualy played on boards between 2'x2' or 4'x4', with 500-1000 points per side. You can't use dedicated transports, and all miniatures must fit within the hallways.

Of course Forgeworld has released their own tiles for ZM games - but if you are worried about the price, there are some alternatives out there. From scratchbuild stuff to Space Hulk tiles - infact my first ZM game was played using said tiles.

Here you can also download the basic rules from the FW site:
https://www.forgeworld.co.uk/resources/fw_site/fw_pdfs/Warhammer_40000/Zone_Mortalis_Expansion.pdf

Boxed Games:

When you think about boxed games, you will probably have Betrayal at Calth in mind. I only tried a few scenarios so far, but it's a great game to introduce someone to the hobby, and it also has some depth. Most of you will already have it, so if you didn't try the game itself yet - do it! GW also published some new rules for daemons and alternate forces via the White Dwarf magazine.

Of course you don't have to use a 30k specific game to play it in the Horus Heresy setting - a good example for this would be Assassinorum: Execution Force - another game that plays fast, is great for introduction and also got some additional rules support already (you now can use daemons in your games!).

Now you may ask - but how to make it more 30k friendly? Well, I plan to use my Word Bearers for the Chaos side - but you could also use other Legions, or even whole other factions instead. What's with some Mechanicum units, representing a traitor Magus who tries to awake an army of forbidden AI-controlled Robots? You could easily use Tech Thralls instead of Cultists, and Skitarii instead of Chaos Space Marines. This goes for most of the recent and future boxed games - use your fantasy, and you may detect a new way to play 30k.

I hope you enjoyed this little article, and maybe you found some inspiration for your own games, out of big 2k points battles ^.^

regards,
Lady Atia

Kaelo Rylanus; Raven Guard Scorpius

  Hello all!

Back this evening with another post showing a completed unit from my Raven Guard army. After some play testing with Aveinus, against his Iron Hands, prior to the Throne of Skulls event, it became very obvious that my army needed a bit of armoured support and a 'threat' unit to draw some of the enemies firepower. After throwing a few options around a Scorpius became a very strong contender (I dismissed Jet Bikes and Javelins as - in my opinion - they are a bit pap).

Here is Stormbeak eyeing up some traitors at the planet Anuupis months after the flee from Istvaan V. Much of the Raven Guards armoured might was destroyed during the extermination but Stormbeak was retrieved and fought alongside the shattered legions. It is rumoured to have even been under the command of Meduson during those blighted times, enforcing his will to destroy the heretics in droves.

The Scorpius is a lovely kit that went together easily enough. It was painted using the same method as the rest of my army and I used the Forge World transfers to bring in some detail to break up the black. 

Mission accomplished:

It performed well during the Throne of Skulls weekend, its range and AP making it a fantastic choice when fighting Marines, Mechanicum or Solar Auxillia. 

Time to cheese it!!

I hope that you have enjoyed looking at my latest unit. Check back soon for my next unit - a Raven Guard Veteran Squad.

Until next time, stay fluffy!!

Kaelo

Fortifications: Why would you use them?

Hi all,

Today I am going to be talking about something that I rarely see people discussing in the context of Horus Heresy era gaming – fortifications! Yes I know… the Imperial Fist player talking about the merits of fortifications is somewhat predictable but believe it or not, I have not really encountered many Imperial Fist players actually using fortifications at the Horus Heresy Throne of Skulls tournaments – our legion rules give us bonuses for using them so why don’t we?

At a guess, people may perceive them as a bit of a points-sink – to sum up what I have heard on the subject of fortifications:

• paying points for a fortification means you have less points available for the rest of your army
• objective-based games using tactical objectives require you to be mobile – why would you deliberately lock down a unit to a set location when you could use a transport instead?
• there’s no good fortification like a ruined fortification

All fair points… well… maybe not the last one; a ruined fortification is not good at all… but the point really is this: If you want to take fortification(s) you do have to plan around them but they do provide value to your army in ways standard terrain may not be able to. To highlight this, I am going to start talking about the humble Imperial Bunker…

For a little bit more than a Rhino APC, you can take an Imperial Bunker as a fortification in most FoCs in Horus Heresy. With the same armour value as a Land Raider and two large fire points that allow up to 8 models to fire out of the building and ramparts on top to provide a decent cover save to anybody up there, you suddenly have a pretty resilient little fire base for a heavy support squad for instance.

You can buy an ammo dump for the building which improved the accuracy of the squad in the building, you can pay for a comms relay to help make your reserve rolls that much more reliable, you can even give the building a void shield if you want to be extra sure that a destroyer weapon won't wreck your bunker in one shot. Escape hatches, barricades, tank traps… You can build a small defence network just from the bunker and its standard upgrades if you really wanted!

Worried that it is taking valuable points away from your army? Keep it cheap! The basic bunker is great value for the amount of points you pay for it, bubble wrapping a heavy support squad as it forces your opponent to make a choice – ignore the bunker and receive the punishment being dished out by the heavy support squad or throw a good portion of their anti-tank capability at it to try to crack it.

Worried that it is static? This needn’t be a concern; the bunker is really cheap and you can easily deploy this to cover multiple objectives. Besides – you can design the rest of your list to be mobile so you can easily hold the objectives on your side of the table while still have the capability to threaten your opponent’s objectives.

I hope I have at the very least highlighted the merits of fortifications in Horus Heresy – I feel they are somewhat overlooked. There are armies that wouldn’t really make use of them – Raven Guard and Night Lords for instance – but I hope I can at least convince some of you that it might be worth trying them out or possibly even design a scenario around them!

Until next time!

Hector Cephas

Weekly Progress Report 25/09/2016

Another week in hobby land:

Atia managed to finish Zardu Layak, the Crimson Apostle. Next on the painting table are the first 5 Gal Vorbak. And there are whispers that the Plague Cult will arrive soon to support the Bearers of the Word on their attack on Calth ....

This week King Fluff has been getting some treefolk ready for Age of Sigmar games in October. He's also been play testing the Demiurg and making a start on the basic Demiurg and Exo-armoured models.

He's also been equipping done of his Imperial Fist 1st company.

Hector has continued working on his cargo containers and magnetised weapons this week. He is not expecting to be able to do much hobby work next week due to a very busy schedule fortifying Terra.

Drake Seta has had a few hours of progress this week. He has started to add rusted paintwork to his two Warhounds and has prepped them for red airbrushing. He is very conscious that he is incredibly busy over the next four weeks so his content may be low. 

Darien spent the week finishing off his 2 trukks for his local clubs 40k tournament today. Here's the army that he used with the completed trukks!

Aveinus, Castiel, Kaelo and Tylar have no progress this week due to life commitments. 

Battle Bunnies

The Great Crusade: Enemies of the Emperor

Good afternoon all.

After writing my post last week it occurred to me that I'd been a Battle Bunny for nearly a year. I started reflecting on the day I sat down with Kaelo and Drake to discuss projects I was working on that they wanted to have a home on the Battle Bunnies blog, and it occurred to me that after nearly a year I haven't as yet made good on any of those things.

You've seen a lot of Mechanicum from me and some legion but what I'm really interested in is offering a genuine flip side to legion forces to truly make the Great Crusade a feasible gaming experience.

As you know I'd spent a fair few years (almost 10 years ago now) at the forefront of pre-heresy gaming as part of a fringe and moderately exclusive group of gamers, I had lots of fun converting and scratch building models for legion forces (and towards the end Mechanicum forces too) it was after playing several campaign weekends that I started to feel that legion vs legion or human vs human was a little limited in its scope so I began the Enemies of the Emperor project.

The project was an attempt to provide more flavour to heresy era games but to form the main stay of any pre-heresy games set during the Great Crusade era.

Cue the bad guys (or in fact the guys oppressed and destroyed by an invading alien army).

The project initially started with the Laer, I was captivated by how alien they were and how they tied in seemlesley in to the 40k universe. After researching them in the novel Fulgrim and digitally sketching them out I decided to write rules for them which matched the fluffy descriptions of them in the book. From there it snowballed and after about 9 months I had a book of 6 unique alien races, with unique wargear and special rules. The book went through vigorous play testing at my FLGS and I was finally happy to get it saved as a PDF to share around.

The first draft took a while as each new novel presented more races or more info on races previously introduced. I trawled through each book in order to get the rules and descriptions as accurately as possible - as it was also my intention to build a 1000pt force for each of the races in order to play games. Then the inevitable happened - I started book 2. There was such a wealth of character out there in the Heresy novels that 6 races just didn't cover it - so book 2 (and another 6 races were nessecary).

The first book looked at the Laer, The Nurthene, The Nephilim, The Olamic Quietude, The Storm Scions and the Megarachnids. To date I have an army for the Megarachnids, half an army for the Nephilim and sone units made for the other races.

In the new book I'm focusing on The Demiurg, The Keylekid, The Jorgall, The Hrud, The Exodites and the Interex. I've begun models for the Jorgall, Keylekid, Demiurg and Hrud but as you can imagine it's a big job for one man 😊

Here's a line up of some of the models I'm working on. 

(L-R Megarachnid Warrior, Keylekid, Nephilim, Jorgall, Storm Scion Militiaman, Hrud day warrior and an imperial fist space marine - for scale)

What I would like to do is every so often show you the progress that I'm making with each army - and possibly farm out the painting of some to the other Battle Bunnies to paint up for the blog and potential campaigns and one off battle reports.

So if you too would like to build and play an army firmly enshrined in the Great Crusade era that isn't fighting for the Emperor then I'm happy to help where I can - it would be great to see lots of variety out there and who knows there might be events in the future where we can pit aliens against each other and against legion forces.

Here's the link to the Great Crusade Book 1 - Conquest:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7eugwq8pcz1z3db/TheGreatCrusadeConquest%20%281%29.pdf?dl=0

I will be revisiting the book in the near future with amendments to the Nephilim human forces and a few little tweeks but for now it's a completely usable addition to 30K gaming.

Here's some page previews of the new races from Book 2 - Conflict but they are mainly untested as yet so may well change in the future.

Well I hope I've whet your appetite for more Xenos and insurgents in the coming months and look forward to showing you a bit more of the process involved in each respective army along the way.

Remember: if you can't beat em join em.

KF

Leman Russ, The Wolf King, Lord of Winter and War

Hello Bunnies

So check this guy out! I think we all knew Russ was going to be a popular Primarch and FW have really produced a model to live up to it.

First available at the European Open Day! What a treat for all our EU readers!

What do you all think of the model?

Kaelo

Pre-Heresy Iron Hands: Cataphractii Terminators WIP

Hello everyone,

Just a quick update today, work hasn't been kind this week on my hobby time so I have little progress to speak off. However, I did decide to just concentrate on one model in order to figure out how the scheme will look on the Cataphractii Terminators.

This model has unfortunately been a bit of a test model so I think the other four will have a nicer finish. I have struggled to find the right colour for the leather? hanging from the shoulders and waist (I'm not sure what the correct word for these would be lol) So I did try going with white initially, however, I found it was almost too bright on the model and I didn't think it worked very well. I have used white throughout my Iron Hands force but it is just used for the cog iconography and the transfers. So having the leather in white made the model really stick out amongst the army and made it look out of place, as the white on my other models is quite subtle. I will be having some white on these models but it will come from having the white Iron Hands transfers on the knees.

Eventually I decided to go with a darker red for the leather, but I am still undecided on how I will highlight the red as I do want it to remain quite dark. I am probably going to get each model to this stage before I go any further and it is still a work in progress so there are still a few mistakes and highlights that need to be corrected and applied.

Hopefully over the weekend and next week I will be able to make some more progress and show you a more comprehensive post with more photos!

Thanks for reading,

Aveinus Kaane