Hey Everybody!
It is I, the mysterious Co-author…
Oof, that title is a bit scary!
Anyway, my name on here will be the SUPER pretentious Tenebrae as I’m a Night Lords player at heart and there are only a limited number of darkness related names out there that don’t risk infringing on some heavy metal band out there. I’m now 100% certain there will be a band called Tenebrae that I’m not aware of.
So, first things first, a little about me and my hobby journey. I started playing at the dawn of 3rd edition when a demo game by Games Workshop at a local science show introduced me to the starter set and the wonderful world of scary post-humans and even scarier evil elves in space. My friend was stoked on the Marines, so I ended up playing as Dark Eldar a lot that weekend. And losing a lot too. I don’t remember that starter being terribly well balanced for such a small set of models. Anyway, suffice to say I was hooked and was soon looking at the different factions, buying White Dwarf magazine, and generally terrifying my parents with the cost of all this lead and plastic.
I soon fell in love with the dark side due to this guy:
Is he not amazing?? Well to pre-teen me he was the coolest thing ever.
A chaos army was soon bought and badly painted; a HQ, 2 troops and the codex for £38 from a GW store… ah those were the days. I even chose the Black Legion scheme as it looked easiest, but I still messed it up. No images exist of this dark time, I have made sure of it.
Fast forward too many years and I have never shaken off the chaos bug; after the Chaos Marines there was a Chaos Fleet for Battlefleet Gothic, a Chaos army for Warhammer Fantasy, Chaos teams for Blood Bowl and, now I can show my painted models without shame, a Hounds of Abaddon Black Legion army (too many points), a 5th Company Death Guard army (definitely too many points), and my third iteration of the Night Lords 16th Company (ha, don’t even think about asking). I am even debating another force or two so that me and my co-author can have all the Legions between us for an awesome Apocalypse game. Glutton for punishment.
A life on the dark side isn’t for everybody however, and it can be difficult explain to new players why they should play as the side wearing skin cloaks and not the superheroes wearing cool space-knight armour, and so I came up with the idea of making a club themed Chapter. This idea may, or may not have, sprung out of the series of articles in White Dwarf right now about making a custom chapter. I recommend you read them; they are rather good! These would be useable by new club members at the club if they wanted to try out Warhammer 40,000 and would form the core of the Imperial forces at out next big event game whenever the world returns to normal. So, with a shaky idea formed it was then a case of what colours we could use.
The club colours, thanks to our snazzy brand of club clothing and equally snazzy logo, are black and white, so that’s a nice, strong scheme off the bat. It could it be seen as too similar to the Black Templars though, and any attempt to differentiate it would just add more white, a notoriously difficult colour to paint, which is something we want to avoid if we want the Chapter to be available to painters of any skill level. Some trawling through the ever useful Lexicanum and 40kWiki led to me looking at some of the more unusual schemes already used, like those of the Howling Griffons, Scythes of the Emperor and the Solar Hawks.
Image credit - Warhammer40k.fandom.com
Now imagine them in black and white and you get what I was going for. A club member had already helped me out with some ideas and suggested a quartered scheme so that was the frontrunner at this point.
Black and white could look a little bland though, so I started thinking about spot colours to make it pop. From the front door of the club we are blessed with the lovely sight of Coity Castle, a Norman castle built circa 1100, and so I wanted to reference this in some way. The obvious way would be to use it in the Chapter symbol as we already do for the club symbol, but this would require some practice at freehand which might put gamers off and another member had already suggested a rook piece as a symbol to represent Coity castle and games/gamers, a simple idea that really works well I feel. With complex freehand out, and the quest for a spot colour continuing, I turned instead to the history of the castle and its heraldry.
As an aside, the first lord was named Payn "the Demon" de Turberville… How Warhammer is that name?!?
The Military wiki has the arms of the castle as this:
Image credit – Military.wikia.org
Red! Who doesn’t love painting red? Just me? Oh well.
But three colours doesn’t really work for quartering and I wanted them to look unique and so they ended up taking inspiration from the White Scar successor chapter the Solar Hawks and having a black body, single white arm, and red banding.
It was then pointed out by Macharius that this scheme has several benefits with regards to rules as it allows for so many of the First Founding Chapters to be a primogenitor. Now, I know colour scheme makes no difference on this count, look how many Scars successors are yellow for example, but some people do enjoy having a visual link. Visually we have a few nods here, including the red for the Angels of the 9th, a knight theme for the lordly 1st Legion and the stoic Fists of the 7th, black for the indomitable Iron 10th and the hidden Ravens of the 19th, and the white and red for the laughing killers of the 5th. Only missing are the Salamanders, who didn’t really have many successors anyway, the Wolves of Fenris, who only have one, and the War-Kings of Ultramar, and there isn’t really anything stopping them being the founder seeing as how they have a kaleidoscope of different successors already.
This goes with the “your dudes” philosophy that we wanted for the Chapter too as each player can choose a different codex or chapter tactic and use the justification that their Captain follows that doctrine and has influenced his Company.
I will go into more detail on how to paint it in a later post, but I made sure to use GW painting videos and guides where possible to keep it accessible. The only major touches I added to personalize it for my own collection was the idea that all sergeants would wear tilt shields to show their personal heraldry, which would then be used on the backpacks and knee pad of each squad member, and that sergeants would have earnt a fancy helmet of some sort keeping to a knight theme where possible. As for the quartered shoulder pad, some discussion came up with the idea of that being the company markings, allowing each player to put their own stamp on their collection. In this case I chose the quartering to make sure that the earlier suggestion from a club member for that scheme was used even if it was only in a small way. I‘m hoping to make this more detailed with some heraldic symbols but I’m not sure what to use yet.
Other decisions will also need to be made regarding rank markings; do we use the codex compliant helmet markings to denote sergeant, lieutenant and veteran ranks? Nothing really clashes colour wise if they are used so it is something to consider. Or do we just distinguish sergeants by the tilt shield and fancy helmet, like I have done for the test model? I think a white helmet for veterans works well so I’ll likely try that out, and that would leave red for the lieutenant. So many options! Captains may could be fancy enough without needing a different colour to stand out but, if they aren’t, maybe silver could work? I have also customized the Chaplain and Final Fantasy Sword-guy models by swapping their helmets for Grey Knight ones, so I’ll probably need to try a test scheme out for them too. Hmm, I’ve left myself some work here…
Anyway, I have rambled on long enough for a first post but I’ll be back soon with some painting recipes for you.
Tenebrae
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