A Thousand Sons of the Crimson King: Old and New

Good morning you crazy kids, I hope you're all looking forward to the big day with promises of hobby glory wrapped in paper and ribbon.

I've been more excited than usual this Christmas with the promise of a new legion on the horizon (well two really but that's for another day) - namely the Sons of the Crimson King, The Thousand Sons.

Now the Thousand Sons hold a special place in my hobby heart, these were the first army I began collecting in the 30K time frame over 7 years ago. Back then we had nothing in the way of Heresy or Pre-heresy materials to work with (no Forge World kits or books - not even the Badab marine kit releases), we used a fan written codex to play with and had to make our armies from endlessly surfing bits sites and some cunning combinations with plasticard.

I began the Thousand Sons as I had always been a Space Wolves player and wanted to explore the flip side of the coin and at the time I was seduced by the idea of creating a 'different' looking space marine army and armed with the artworks which later became Collected Visions I had the inspiration to start.

Each marine was converted and as such it was never a large army. The basic marines were chaos space marine torsos (carefully selected) and legs with the horns trimmed off and turned into gem mounts and little greenstuff beetles sculpted on to the torsos. The heads were made from a particular chaos warrior helmet with a particular grille, i trimmed off the horns and added a section of plastic cylinder to make it look more tech and then cut a piece of thin plasticard to make the detailing on the centre of the faceplate. I also added some plasticard detailing to the waist to make the tabbards. As you can imagine this was immensely time consuming and luckily as I began completing a playable army (using the space marine codex of the time) gaming events set in the M.31 started to be advertised for gamers to get involved with - this gave me the reason to complete the army and join in the fun.

Here are some of the units I completed for my original Thousand Sons army back in day...

Tactical Squad with Melta gun and Missile Launcher

Heavy Support Squad with Conversion Beamers
(made before a conversion beamer model was available - made from a lascannon and bits of Necron models)

Assault Squad (these were the most heavily converted models in the army and use the old metal Rogue Trader Jump Packs)

Phosis T'kar and Cataphractii Bodyguard (T'kar alone consisted of 20 individual parts)

MKI whirlwind (converted from razorback, SoB Immolator, Baneblade and Stompa parts)

My Magnus the Red, made as part of a primarch project I was working on where I kit bashed most of the primarchs
(Magnus and Leman Russ were the only two that saw paint before Forge World released Angron)

Legion Jetbike (made from the master of the Ravenwing, a BFG ship and the exhausts from a Baneblade)

Phosis T'kar

Ahzek Ahriman

Cataphractii terminators

Legion Dreadnought

Assault Squad

And so now looking forward. You've perhaps read my hypothetical army list from the fifteenth day of Christmas post here, what I think I may do is do a unit for each of the squads depicted on the HHCCG (although this doesn't necessarily work as an army list but more as a collection). This is obviously easier now that the upgrade packs from Forge World have arrived.

I'm really looking forward to starting the 15th legion in the new year and I will be using the Betrayal of Calth box as my starting point, initially starting with 2 x 10 man tactical squads and a tactical support squad with flamers. If Santa is generous and the Birthday Bunny delivers then I may get a Xiphon or a Sicarian as the legions first armoured units and I will definitely will be adding a Praevian and a unit of blue robots at some point too.

Look out for more Thousand Sons posts from me towards the end of January.

Til Xmas Eve...

Be excellent to each other.