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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The Perfect Space Wolf insult

This is an idea I originally came up a couple years ago for a counts as Thousand Sons unit. The idea is pretty straight forward: Enemy marines that have been captured have been handed over to the Dark Mechanicum and converted into combat servitors. Then in agreement with their Chaos Marine allies, they lead units of these lobotomized marines into combat. The AP 3 bolters is explained by saying they are using Vengence rounds in the bolters while the 5+ invulnerable is explainable by saying they use some sort of force field when in combat.

I sold the original servitor-wolves a while back when I sold my last Chaos army. But I'm starting another one and the whole servitorized captured space wolves that count as thousand sons.... god I just love that irony, I'm putting models of the space wolves on the table that count as thousand sons all it really needs is for them to be lead by a Dark Angels Librarian (hmmm....).... anyway. Sorry ADHD kicking in there. I really love this idea so I'm revisiting it. Last time I got hung up on the counts as aspiring sorcerer model. Well I think I've got it hammered out:

The Adept of the Dark Mechanicum counts at an aspiring Sorcerer.

The mecha-axe is way bigger then I originally thought it would be, but after building the model and looking at it I've found I like it more like this. Gives this look of an over-burdened menial level worker. Like he pissed off his magos so he got assigned to lead the combat servitors into battle in agreement with whatever Chaos lord we're serving this week.

"But master, I am no warrior. I have no weapons." he pleads.

"Error! Condition: No weapons. Rectified." The Dark Magos tones in his digital logic influenced speak as he shoves the Atomic Glave at the menial.

"But... my lord... I can not wield such a weapon." The menial whines.

"Statement: Unable to wield weapon. Condition: True. Subject: Verehnass Omicron Psi 91168. Conclusion: Learn. Communication status: Terminated!" The Dark Magos replies coldly.

Anyway, the model itself is based on the Cairn Wraith model, though it's been rather extensively modified. The only parts from the model I actually used were the cloak and skull face. Everything else was added. I stuck a big wad of Green stuff into the empty cavity to give me a body to work with. Then I took a pair of mechanical legs from Anvil Industries Bionic Legs set and cut the legs from the groin and use wire to mount the legs into the green stuff. I had to cut and chop down the length of the cloak on the model to allow it to accommodate the fact that it's not going to be floating any more. Once the legs where mounted I went to work on the mecha-dendrites. I used a set of Servo Skulls from Forge World  and added the small tools to the end of the tubing I got from Dragon Forge Design. Bending the tubing proved to be a new exercise for me. I used a series of pen bodies, and tool handles of various sizes to provide a form to bend the cables around that way it would 'coil' as opposed to bend. For the left hand... er.... thing, I decided to go with something a bit different and took a small section of medium sized tubing, drilled out a hole in the center of the tubing and glued in a set of three segments of small wire. My intent was to make it look like the adepts hand disassembled and this data connection/micro manipulator/whatever extended out of his wrist. Not sure I succeeded or not.

The weapon was a whole different ball game. I got the axe it self from Max Mini's Steam Punk weapons line, cut down the length of the shaft to better accommodate the size of the model and went to work on the head (jesus that sounds like a lead in for a bad porno). The Emitter Matrix is made from a cut down section of a Necron sniper rifle and then attached to the back of the axe head.

Wow, I just listed off parts that I got from 5 separate companies. I gotta say that kinda surprises me. Anyway, I'm gonna try and base it later today.

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