It has taken a long time but I finally completed my Prospero Spire Guard’s heavy weapon teams that will be fielded as a henchmen squad with 6 warriors with boltguns, 3 plasma cannons servitors and my Hidden One Agent Inquisitor. I might be making some alternative weapons for the ‘Firestorms’ turrets most likely a missile launcher in case I wish to field them as Imperial Guard allies instead of henchmen.

Everyone’s been asking for a full army photographs and luckily there was someone at Open War with a quality camera that took several photos of them, so here they are provided by Andrew Moore.

You can see detailed picture of all the units here in the gallery > [link]

Now as some of you might know GW disapproves of my major use of non-gw parts on my terminators at GW events which makes sense, so I needed some suitable alternatives for Warhammer World events. It was originally going to be the robots but then Forgeworld released their pre-heresy terminators and I wanted a squad to convert and here they are...

Aside from the same weapon conversions of my previous terminators I added details such as the jewel scarab and horse hair plume to make them look similar to the terminators featured in this piece of artwork with the Primarch.

You can see a detailed image of a single terminator here > [link]

I might make another squad for larger GW events and to have the option of fielding 25 Grey Knight Terminators.

So which terminator variant do you like these ones or my robed conversions? [link]

I took the Thousand Sons to Open War this weekend and they were well received by players and did surprising well given their lacking numbers and mobility. The night before the tournament I completed a little detail I’d be working on that week.

I’ll say this; lighter colours are hard to blend, so I used the space wolf paint tutorial from a previous white dwarf (not mine of course) and painted his armour using painted highlights instead. I made sure to get the pre-heresy armour just right. I added the tutelary to the picture because they go together very well.

Since I’m using the henchmen squads for the Prospero Spire Guard I need to field Inquisitor Coteaz so I’ve converted the finecast Inquisitor to represent him as a general. First he was holding the hammer in his left hand which looked silly given how much it likely weights so I changed it to the other hand and gave him a heroic like pose with the hammer facing down, that was till I got this comment...

". . . he ends up looking like he's trying heroically . . . to play croquet."

After which I changed the pose immediately! I also later added in a steel scorpion, another conversion from my previous Machine Cult army to represent his cyber eagle or even a servo skull if I ever choose to use one.

Should I get the time and money I will likely add some more spire guard units to the army using guard allies which will include 1 of each of the following...

Command Squad; simple enough.
Penal Legion ; Need a troop choice but can't have veterans with poorer weapons than the basic troops and I'm not painting up an infantry platoon! Not sure how to convert them at the moment, most likely as a team of specialist spire guard?
Vendetta Gunship; Likely using the conversion concept I came up with for the Prospero disc speeder.
Leman Russ Executioner; Using the FW Deimos Pattern plasma predator to represent it.

Of course they'll have to wait as my next focus for this project will be the Cybernetica units.

I took the Thousand Sons to Open War this weekend and they were well received by players and did surprising well given their lacking numbers and mobility. The night before the tournament I completed a little detail I’d be working on that week.

You can see a more detailed picture of the sorcerer and the wolf here > [link]

Gotta say these old models do take a long time to paint, credit to the golden daemon winners who won with old models back in the day.
I’m very pleased with how the model came out using the chaos thousand sons paint scheme as described in the book, halfway through painting the model I decided to paint the upper half gold, which makes it look less like an ultramarine robot and more a thousand sons‘.

I was a bit worried about the blue and red clashing but I feel the gold ties the robots and thousand sons together really well.

I’m eager to hear your thoughts on this one.

Due to my slow progress with painting the white robes I decided it was time to consider the alternative, as I’ve mentioned before the only other colour than would suit them was purple similar to the sorcerer on the novel’s front cover. So after an evening of painting I ended up with this…

To be honest I didn’t expect it could work so well, I think the purple makes him look even more mystic and blends well with the rest of the model. I painted some gold icons round the rim but the dust effect covered most of them up.

I’m still debating trying it with white, however it’s hard to imagine the model working with that colour anymore. Anyway I’m anxious to hear feedback regarding the robe’s colour so let me know what you think?

3 more to go and the interceptors will be completed. I decided to make the thunder hammer into a staff like weapon as the original looked too brutish for a thousand son in power armour. The Omen class bolters are also coming out well.

Now if I can only get 3 more terminators and the Hidden One agent that is my Vindicare assassin done by the end of the month I’ll be set to make my deadline. Still dreading painting the white robes as I had enough trouble painting the small ones on these guys but I am improving.

Aside from Psychic marines the Grey Knight codex had one large benefit which was the ability to field human units aside Astartes (before 6th edition) and after three weeks of work the first Spire Guard strike team is complete. In game it is a henchmen squad consisting of 4 warriors with Boltguns and 5 warriors with carapace armour (the riot shields) with 2 Boltguns and 3 Plasma guns.

I created the Plasma Carbine weapons using guard flamers and a plasma pistol which are easy items to come across instead of buying the actual Plasmaguns themselves. If I get the time before the tournament next month I'll also add the ceremonial swords on their backs like the last squad.

Another model that will be added to the squad soon will be my Zanatorian Weaponsmith representing the Jokaero to give the squad some interesting gameplay, which I’ll build after the 2nd squad is completed > [link]