Skip to main content

In Death, Redemption

One of the most enduring and interesting things about the Blood Angels is their flaw, the terrible Black Rage that dwells within them. As a result of their having to use the preserved blood of their dead Primarch and the Primarch's ability to store their memories genetically, the Blood Angels that succumb to the Rage find themselves reliving Sanguinius' terrible last hours.


Rather than let them slide into degredation, the Blood Angels mark those taken by the Black Rage out with black armour and the red saltires of Sanguinius' wounding and let them throw themselves into battle. Within my army there are already 5 jump pack Death Company marines and these 10 bring it up to quite a lot of them for a single company. I'm justifying this lore-wise by the fact that my Captain is apparently the Master of Sacrifice, a nebulously defined role that I've chosen to mean: Finds opportunities to spend the lives of the afflicted. The 3rd Company are on a constant war footing to have these opportunities.


The painting for these is quite straightforward, my standard scheme for black armour is to drybrush grey - very dry brush - until it looks like a concrete statue. Then a couple of thin washes of black wash over the armour to shade and darken it to black. The red elements are painted same way as the normal blood angel armour I do.


Some might be wondering: why a bolter-armed Death Company? Well, given that they replace their bolt pistols but not their chainswords with bolters they stay just as combat effective. But I always saw Death Company less as berserkers and more as deranged. They don't know where they are and see all enemy forces as Horus' marines. There's no reason that they can't be fighting as normal tactical marines. So what I have is a unit of bolter firing, objective holding, difficult to winkle out of cover chaps. Who ignore a sixth of all damage coming in and if you get close they turn into minimum 3 attack psychopaths rising to 4 attacks if you are unlucky enough to be charged. I can see value in that!


I'm liking how these came out, the nice rich gold (I'm using purple shading these days) and the deep red gemstones are pleasing. Top tip: use water effects rather than varnish to gloss gems. It self-levels out brushstrokes and seemingly has a higher refractive index than gloss varnish so creates a deeper effect on the gem. All in all, a pleasing bunch of nutters and another step along the road to having all my Bangles painted. Huzzah! Till next time...

TTFN

Comments

  1. Lovely, but Bolters... they'll lose the round of pistol shots in CC now - but I guess you bank on not having any enemy left in the 2nd round of combat to make use of the pistols? I guess the Bolters give you that longer reach out and touch whilst objective holding and being DC the deterrent to charge them to remove from the objective.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I hear ya Siph. Part of it is these guys were assembled way back when that was just not an option. But given that they're not jump-pack-bouncy-nutters I figured they'd still work as the 3 attacks in cc each waaaay outweighs the one shot and the turns that they would otherwise spend affecting nothing will instead be adding to the weight of fire from the rest of the army. I see these guys being "area denial" rather than assault forces :D

      Delete
  2. Very cunning, Jeff. I like it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment