Tuesday 15 February 2011

Naming the 5th Company

I started my research into the Mantis Warriors on Codex: Lexicanum and did several searches online, first for 'Sartaq', which only returned links to the Sartaq of the Mantis Warriors, then for 'Khoisan Neotera', Chapter Master after Sartaq's death. Neotera returned nothing, but Khoisan returned a result of two South African tribes, the Khoi and the San.

This was before I had managed to find any information from Imperial Armour 10, so I had no knowledge of what the Mantis Warriors might look like, so I decided that they would be dark skinned tribal warriors, the planet Ootheca on which they were based sounded like it could be a great African death world, jungles and snakes and huge insects (the mantis being one which had grown larger than normal, possibly so it could eat snakes and medium sized mammals, humans even?).

A short while later Codex: Lexicanum was updated with details from IA10 (which have now sadly been rolled back, not sure why, possibly copyright issues) which stated that a) the Mantis Warriors were founded from the Marauders chapter, a founding chapter of the White Scars and b) Mantis Warriors had pale skin, dark hair and green eyes.

So my plan for an African tribe was foiled and I started to gather more Mongolian style names, but none of them sounded as good as the South African names I had found.

"Sod It", said I, I want my chaps to have South African names. They sound strong and interesting, it gives them character, and if no warrior in my army is without helm, I can pretend in my mind that they are proud dark skinned warriors, and everyone else can assume they're the Mongolian pretty boys that the book describes.

I gathered names from baby names sites to begin with. Most baby name sites are lazy with uncommon names, but I found one site which had meanings beside each of the few names they had which were of South African provenance.

So I had a list of names and was ready to start planning my first 1000pt army...

Monday 14 February 2011

Pictures join the thread

So I got some pictures taken with my phone, not particularly good, but as good as I can do for the time being.

I put all the guys together, some are painted and ready, others are part way there, and a few are still in their pre-Mantis Warrior guises (badly painted Space Wolves and White Panthers mostly).

First of all, introducing Ahazra Redth and his personal Sternguard entourage, Kopano Lesedi.
The sternguard are just normal plastic Space Marines, I am painting them with a base of Ork Hide, Overbrushing roughly with Snot green and then highlighting with Goblin green. The helms are Chaos black and an old citadel colour called 'Ash Waste Grey', which is quite similar to Rotting Flesh.

Ahazra himself started out as a pair of Space Wolf walking legs and a Space marine plastic body. I sculpted on (roughly, I'm not great with green stuff) a cloak, though it doesn't quite work, as he would not be able to walk very fast with the amount of material that is there. The head is from the old Khorne Berkerkers box (by old, I mean around the time the 3rd ed Chaos plastics first came out I think), I trimmed off the raised helm parts carefully, I really like the grill mouth on it, quite scary and ascetic looking. The sword is a Glaive Encarmine, I attached it to the wrist of an old SM biker arm I had lying around, while the Bolt Pistol is from a CSM. The hood and the gorget were made from green stuff, both of which I am rather proud of as they have come out well.

Secondly introducing the beginnings of Assault Squad Kefentse. This shows the painting scheme mentioned above a little better. The Jump packs have been highlighted with goblin green, but the bodies have only got so far as the snot green overbrush.

The two completed tactical squads. In the front, Squad Uuka, lead by Veteran Sergeant Uuka. They are ten strong and field a Missile Launcher and Meltagun for tank and marine killing. The plastic marines of the squad are made up of 2nd Edition and current edition marines, with 1 old metal marine (the melta gunner).

Behind them we can see squad Lefu. These also sport a Missile Launcher and Meltagun, and are made up of the marines from the 2nd Ed boxed set. As I said, I am in major recycling mode!


In the corner there you can see the yet to be painted marines for my third, unnamed Tactical squad.

Finally introducing the first of the LandSpeeder Tornados (Multi-Melta, Heavy Flamer loadout) and the first of the two Dreadnoughts. 

This has been a very picture heavy post, so I shall end it here and speak more about the background, the names and the future of this army in a soon to come blog post.

Thursday 10 February 2011

Mantis Warriors

I have agreed to take part in a Badab War era campaign based upon the Imperial Armour books 9 and 10. All players will play Space Marine chapters, except two wild card 'Renegade Imperial Guard' and Ork players, who will fight anyone and everyone, according to their whims. The only rule was that every army had to be led by a special character detailed in IA9 or IA10.

After a little searching through the history of the Badab war, and knowing I wanted to get in on the Seccesionist side (Soul Drinkers was a fun series of books that I really connected with better than I have with any other Vanilla marine series), I selected the Mantis Warriors. The simple colours appealed to my less than fantastic painting ability and I had my eye on playing Sartaq, chapter master at the beginning of the Badab War with his ability to infiltrate all units.

This plan almost came to a grinding halt when I found out that a) Sartaq was not a special character and that b) the only Mantis Warriors special character detailed in IA10 was their Chief Librarian, Ahazra Redth. I have never been a fan of playing Librarians, so I nearly switched to another faction, until a friend (who is collecting a Lamenters force for the same campaign) pointed out that this was as much about trying something different as it was about collecting a painting a force to play with. And hey, at least Ahazra still made everything infiltrate in the army! So I was sold, and the collecting and painting began in earnest.

The first major hurdle was money. I am getting married in July of this year, and we are still saving for the wedding, so I had to use as many models as possible from my current (quite extensive) marine collection. I rifled through my old 3rd Edition Space Wolves and pulled out all the models carrying Bolters and not adorned with too much in the way of wolfy iconography. I also grabbed all the marines I'd thrown aside or turned into random single squad painting projects and threw them in together. The sixty or so marines would be the start of my force.

I then preceded to beg my fiancee to firstly let me buy a few models (grudging agreement) and to have a bunch of her Space Marine models which she hadn't got around to doing anything with. This was agreed to rather more easily, as she is currently painting Malifaux miniatures and Space Hulk Terminators (she's an amazing painter, but much slower than I am).

So my box of potential models grew. Within I had about 50 standard marines, a few sergeants (various weaponry), a few special weapons (mostly flamers, bleh) and 10 heavy weapons, 2 dreadnoughts, a vindicator and 8 assault marines. All of this sat alongside a fairly impressive bits case (it's beyond a box now!)

Next post I will include some pictures of the marines painted to date and my Ahazra Redth conversion.