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.