New hobbies

 Its been a little while since I've posted, about 3 weeks I think and while I haven't posted, I have been busy in the back ground with painting. However, I've also been busy with another of my hobbies.

Yep, that's my new Olympic style recurve bow and I've been playing with it and messing with settings since I got it a couple of weeks ago, I've also been watch every video I can find on YouTube about setting it up, tuning it and technique. Although I've only shot it a couple of times I've been shooting a club bow for several months and this was the logical next step. While I will never be an Olympic level athlete ( in any sport!) I'm not that bad at target sports, having started shooting target rifles at the tender age of 13 when I joined the army cadets. I've had a few years out since my eldest was born but it feels good to be back at it, even if I've changed bullets for arrows! Anyway, I've a few proper hobby posts coming up in the next couple of weeks, starting with a new terrain piece I've been working on.

Dark Guardians

 The last of my smaller marine forces is now complete, kind of anyway but I'll get to that in a bit.

First up as always, the group photo. Sorry for the rubbish quality but for some reason my photography skill seem to be getting worse the more photos I take, probably because I'm trying to rush getting the pictures.

As you can see, there are 3 Inceptors, 3 Outriders and a squad of Infiltrators, all lead by a librarian.

The librarian is the current leader of the force and is there to "sniff" out chaos wherever it maybe hiding. 

A couple of very bad shots of the Libby. I hadn't realised quite how bad these photos where until I posted them up here. I've been using transfers again this time and I'm quite proud of the one of his shoulder as I had to cut and trim it to get it to fit under the cloak.  

Next up are the Infiltrators. These are the first contact squad, going forth and finding the enemy. As such they contain a medic, to help keep them fighting a little bit longer. This is just a basic 5 man squad as they are not really the ones expected to do much of the heavy lifting. 

The units symbols and the chapter symbol have also changed. The new symbol, a mashup of a sisters symbol (order of the ardent shroud) and the DA logo, specifically the wings. Each unit also has a unique symbol on there opposite shoulder, these have a skull.

Out riders are next and one bit I like about these is the Eggs bike in the middle and his scroll work on the bike. This is a transfer from the betrayal of Calth set but it looks good on the bike, whether this is an oath, litany, battle or personal honours or list of victims I haven't decided but you cant read it anyway so it can be whatever I want really. The other bikes show the markings for company, squad and battlefield role, with the chapter symbols on the shoulder pads. 

You can't see here but the chapter symbol is different on these, being more aligned with the ravenwing. Again the sword has been replaced with the skull from the ardent shroud.

Lastly we have the Inceptors. These form the final prong of the attack, with the Infiltrators being the centre thrust and the bikes flanking, these guys are a hammer that drops from behind. Painting these models proved a little bit of a challenge, the Infiltrators are "greenwing", the Outriders Ravenwing, which should have made these Deathwing. However, they just don't fit the fluff for Deathwing as they really are just greenwing or possibly even fall under Ravenwing being a fast moving unit. In the end I kept them as normal marines and will.look to add something more Deathwing in future.

I have yet to.finish the bases for these guy, as I need to get some brass rod or something. I also need to do the Suspressors for the Stone Dragons, so I'll probably do them all at the same time. 

As I said the chapter symbol is the standard symbol, with the unit symbol being a lightning bolt, to signify their lighting assault from above. 

A better shoot of the different chapter symbols, the two standard symbols on the outside and the Ravenwing in the centre. For future Deathwing units, the symbols will be similar to the standard symbol but with red Wings on a bone background.

The squad markings, designating each squad and role.

Remember when I said that the force was kinda finished? Well here's the reason;

While online the Libby as the leader, while I was painting them I felt that they needed something else, something more in keeping with the Guardians, their chapter mission and this forces own mission and so a chaplain was born. Now I would love to have him as an Interrogator chaplain but as yet they are only 1st born and not Primaris marine scale, so he will be a normal chaplain for the time being.

Also, I really like this pack, it's a mix of sigmarines stuff and a chaos pack, but it goes together really well, with the vent ports reaching out past the details on the top of the pack. 

I've kitted him out some what, he has his crozius and pistol but also a chainsword, which he can't actually take. I was thinking about adding more stuff but ran out of room on him. 

As you can see, he has also been suitably adorned with purity seals, reliquaries and other trinkets, as any self respecting chaplain would be.

The figure itself is a mash up of marine, AoS sequitor, necron (head of crozius) chaos marine backpack, AoS retributor pack, and a bits box raid. The only issue now is how to paint him? His armour will be black, as the chapter has black armour, as well as chaplains but his robes will be coloured. I was wondering about red, the same as the shoulders on the normal marines but I'm not sure about that, so maybe white and green, like the DA ones? Or maybe go completely off base and go for purple or something? Anyway, right now the Eagle Knights are on the paint table, so it will be a little while until I get around to painting him, plenty of time to decide.

Random post

 

With the release of the new combined Aeldari codex containing all 3 flavours of Eldar, we have also received a new way for fielding the force without breaking the updated detachment rules in chapter approved. I have seen some arguement as to whether the new rules mean that as long as you have the same overall faction keyword, such as imperial or Adeptus Astartes, you can have different sub factions in different detachments or if you need to have the same subfraction across all the army, such as ultramarine or Cadian. This rule would suggest that the former is true rather than the latter. However, its main purpose is to give you a work around and allow a certain amount of souping. A patrol detachment is not a bad option for a detachment, being able to bring a number of useful units. In terms of Quin's, it would be very easy to bring a 1000 plus points to the table in a patrol detachment. But why am I talking about Eldar? For the same reason I talked about Kroot, the possibilities for the future guard codex. Now I realise that trying to predict the patterns of future codices by looking at past codicies is a fruitless task, however its fun to speculate.

Now, most of this reasoning works only if they split off the Militarum Tempestus in to a separate subfraction again, something they may well do as it has separate subfraction rules, keywords, stratagems, relics and warlord traits these days. If they do split it off, within the same codex as with the Quin's in the Aeldari book, then it makes sense that they might add in a similar rule, meaning that you can take a patrol of scions in a full guard army. Now this works quite well as scions really only have HQ's, Troops and transports, and rely on the guard for everything else. Therefore having a patrol of deep striking scions with a large formation of guard is perfectly sensible. A partial detachment of scions maxes out just over a thousand points unless you want to go full silly sausage and then you could push it up closer to 1500.

So this sort of extra detachment could work quite well for guard and retain the sort of flexibility that we currently have.