The Undying Legion

This is a revisiting/revamping of an... ages old idea I had. I think I originally had this idea back in 4th, maybe 3rd edition. But it was back when "Legion of the Damned" didn't have official rules. So I had an idea to do a Legion of the... Legion of the Damned. Same general imagery as the LotD, lots of skulls and flame imagery. Almost no vehicles, all foot slogging, and silent save for the cry of the bolters and the crack of enemy skulls!

So the revamped idea is a bit more like the Black Templar in temperament, the undying loyalty and commitment to eradicating the enemies of the Imperium, even beyond death! Screaming from the skies comes the skull heralds of the legion, appearing to plow into the ground yet incurring no damage and hovering over top of the ground when the smoke clears. Hauntingly, the Legion then appear about the ghastly totem to bring the devine and fiery wrath to the enemies of the Imperium of man! So far I just have a couple little random bits for the army. But... here they are!

So surprise, surprise Halloween is coming up so lots of skulls for sale for super cheap. I was walking through Target when I found a bag of smaller skulls and larger fist sized skulls. Well this reminded me of my Undying Legion idea. So I grabbed some!

One of the first challenges was on the back of the skull, where in very predominate raised text it spelled out the various forms of "Made in china". That had to go. Started with an exacto blade and shaved off the raised letters. Then I came back with sand paper. I started with 600 grit and then moved onto 1200 grit. I wanted to keep the damaged and worn sort of look so I didn't want it perfectly smooth.

 

One of the first challenges was on the back of the skull, where in very predominate raised text it spelled out the various forms of "Made in china". That had to go. Started with an exacto blade and shaved off the raised letters. Then I came back with sand paper. I started with 600 grit and then moved onto 1200 grit. I wanted to keep the damaged and worn sort of look so I didn't want it perfectly smooth.

One of the defining images I had in my mind for this army was the idea of skulls that come screaming down from the skies, come to 'land' in a big plum of smoke and dust and then only as the dust settles do the enemy first catch a glimpse of the Legion forming ready for battle. So these larger fist sized skulls are going to be the 'counts as' drop pods and will be modeled on bases to be hovering above the ground.

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The legion is born...

This started as a random idea while I was doing a live stream one night. I was working on some Raptors when I had an idea for a Sorceror. So I went to work on the Sorcerer who has become known as Arian. The idea grew into being a Sorceror who has found a new way to produce new semi-chaos marines. In agreement with the Dark Magos Varagos, Arian takes bronze statues cast in the form of Chaos marines and puts the souls of his most 'loyal' thralls into them, casting powerful spells to animate the otherwise dense and un-moving bronze. By doing this he is able to create resilient, powerful warriors on par with most Chaos Marines with out the resource commitment normal Chaos Marines require. They are not perfect constructs as the souls exist in a sort of phase and they may be slow to react to the real world. Short version: These guys count as Thousand Sons!

 The Sorcerer himself in the making! Built on the base of a Dark Angles robed body with a chaos marine front torso, I used green stuff to build up an over robe and then cut off the handing bars from the Tzeentchian icon from the Chaos Space Marine box set and attached them to the front of the robe. Ultimately there will braiding that attaches to the bars so they are handing off his shoulders rather then hovering there. The arm is the icon bearer arm while the staff is from the Terminator Lord set.

In order to swap weapons and options I put a magnet in Arian's shoulder. The helmet is a Warp Talon's with the... erm... the antlers? carve down and smoothed out to give it more of a corrupted mark 3 helmet sort of look.

I once again used a pre-cast base from Dragon Force for my Brass legion. In order to help with painting, I put magnets in the feet of Arian so I can remove the model from the base to paint the base as needed.

To show his obsession with souls, I'm going to have a series of skulls hovering over his backpack. So I added 2 more exhaust vent arms, turned the vents upward, and pinned a skull hovering a couple millimeters over the exhaust vent. I'm going to come back with green stuff and add in flames. It's the same idea that I'm going to do with the heads of the Bronze Legion members themselves. Basically the idea is when the souls were infused into the statues, the heads of the statues shatter and a floating flame wreathed skull is the head of the marine.

The first couple members of the Brass Legion! To show the relative low quality of the statues, I added damage to the models. In the legs what I did was drill up into the leg with progressively larger drill bits until I had largely hollowed out the leg. Then I put a drill through the leg adding a hole, then came in with an exacto blade to rough up and break the holes. To help carry the idea of soul animated statues, I'm thinking about priming the model in 2 stages, the spaces inside the army and the neck and gorget will be primed in white while the rest of the armor is done in black. the areas that are white will be done up in bright blues and greens while the rest of the armor will be done in the darker bronze color. So... here we go.

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