THE LEGIONS

Silver is such a whore to paint.

When painting my v2 Iron Warriors, I based (copied) my paint scheme on Christian Byrne’s from White Dwarf. The lovely man actually put a step-by-step guide on how he painted the Gold and Metal, which I duly stole for my own marines.

Just a note - the pictures I posted yesterday do not do the models any justice. It’s an Iphone camera with some instagram filters to make the detail actually visible. They look loads better in real life.

Anyway, when I was round Jon’s house one night and decided to get back into the hobby, we were talking about what army I would do. As much as I really wanted to do Iron Warriors again, thinking about painting metal again made me gip (gipping is where you burp and a little bit of sick comes up - you know the feeling…). Bang, Iron Warriors were out of the question, though aside from the painting there was another reason.

Jon and I (grammar), we’re keen modellers. In our youth we could have been viewed as beardy little power gamers (I came 3rd at London conflict when I was about 14/15), but our local gw community was always about making background for our armies. Now we’re older we get most of our enjoyment out of modelling, as opposed to making grown men seethe with rage (see previous post) in battle, and we want to make every model in our armies have character. The second reason I didn’t want to reboot v3 my Iron Warriors was because…god am I going to say this…they kind of lack character.

The way I see it is that each legion has a major characteristic bestowed upon it by GW, and then a minor characteristic that makes the army unique and ‘yours’. Now with iron warriors, the characteristic is siege stuff; they’re really good in sieges/ city fights. How do you model that?? Ok, well they’re also quite bionic-y; hmm so are Iron Hands, and they are loads better at being bionic…-y. Now Jon’s Night Lords, on the other hand, they’ve got all the cool imagery of skulls, wings and severed body parts etc, and after reading the night lords books, his characteristic is scavenged armour and weapons. What followed was a discussion over what legions are really cool. I decided on Salamanders, as they had been my first ‘proper’ army that I started a few months before the Armageddon campaign in 2000.

Dan.

5 years ago I was working for Games Workshop as a part-timer whilst at college.

Since I started collecting GW games when I was little, like 10 years old, I’d always wanted to work in my local shop. I’d grown up through my teenage as one of the ‘regulars’ and thought ‘how fucking sick would be to just sit around painting toys and playing games every day’. I would even go so far as to say it was my childhood dream. Then as I got older I realised I’d actually need a career (hence college) but as it was coming up to my 18th birthday, working in my first job at a bakers on £4 per hour, the manager at GW offered me the job, commencing the week after my 18th.

I remember my 18th really vaguely; when I say remember, I mean so in the same was as I’d say ‘oh yeah I remember that part of that book’ or ‘I remember when cans of coke were 30p’, absolutely not in the sense of remembering the actual events that took place nor any kind of visual clue. So it was me and my best mates (all GW regulars) and we went out somewhere (either Hemel Hempstead or Watford) and it was Games Day the next day. My only actual memory of that night is getting to GW Hemel at about 4am and curling up into a ball in the doorway to sleep for a couple of hours til everyone arrived for the coach, then getting woken up by the (my new) manager and the guy who was doing manager training. I don’t know what they thought, but my bet is something along the lines of ‘What a dedicated ambassador for the hobby; that boy will make an exemplary staff member’.

Life story aside, while I was working there I re-booted my Iron Warriors. I love chaos marines; I’d played Black Legion when the first plastic chaos marines came out (the codex with the filthy possessed rules in 3rd ed. The ones that made the previous GW Hemel manager ask to be shown said filthy rules in the shop-copy codex after I’d raped his brand new Necron army in 2 turns, who then tore out the page and stuffed it into his mouth in blind rage. True story). Then the Index Astartes articles started being released, and I remember Iron Warriors being one of the first. I thought they were pretty cool, but it was reading Storm of Iron that got me hooked, and around that time was the Eye Of Terror campaign that saw me leading my Iron Warriors and building a story around Warsmith Danius Smithe and the 4th Grand Company (I actually started an Iron Warriors forum called the 4th Grand Company that was pretty popular).

So ever since then, back in 2003, they have been my army. I’m terrible for starting armies, painting half the models and then never finishing them, and alas that happened to the Iron Warriors. Skip forward to 2007, I decided to reboot the 4th Grand Company, in the mind of making a massive army of lovingly crafted models, so that each model you could pick up and be interesting on it’s own, each worthy of Golden Daemon.

I finished two.

They are the two in my picture, and those 2 single models are the inspiration behind this blog. I stopped collecting and playing shortly after I went to University in Sept. 2007, but my best mate Jon continued. His army is Night Lords, and after reading the Soul Hunter series, about a year ago he started making a new Night Lords army, inspired by the army of customised, individual marines concept interred within these 2 models. And thanks to graduating, getting a real job for a loans company and subsequently loathing ‘real’ working life, a little bit of regression-cum-denial-cum-escapism-cum-longingforthecarefreedaysofmyadolescence has got me back into the hobby.

This blog is just a way of showing all our cool conversions to you bored nerds at home.

Dan.

THE LEGIONS

25th Apr 2012 | Nº 1

24th Apr 2012 | Nº 7

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