Rogue Trader Project Finished

Pedro Cantor and his surviving Crimson Fists.

Earlier this year, as GW (sort of) marked the 25th Anniversary of the game Rogue Trader, I embarked on a little anniversary project of my own - collecting and painting the small detachment of Crimson Fist Space Marines featured in "The Battle At The Farm", the starter scenario from the original Rogue Trader game.

A sergeant holds some kind of scanner...or maybe a cell phone from the grime darkness of the far future...

The detachment consists of Commander Pedro Cantor and three five-man squads, one of which has a missile launcher.  By the standards of the current 40k game, the detachment represents a rounding error beneath an Apocalypse template, but in the Rogue Trader game it's quite a few troops.

The missile launcher was very difficult to assemble...it did not fit well with the pewter shoulder pads.

To help them stand out a bit, I added some after market bits from GW with the famous "fist" iconography.   This makes them look a little sharper, and also compensates for the fact that the Crimson Fist decals do not fit at all on the old Rogue Trader shoulder pads, and my painting skills are not at all up to the job of painting the logos by free hand!

Another officer with a Crimson Fist PDA.

These figures were fun to build from a nostalgia standpoint, but GW's current lineup is much easier to work with from an assembly and modelling standpoint.  It took a fair bit of hacking to get the pewter bits on.

A close up of the officer figures in the detachment.

I painted some test models a couple of weeks ago, while in the midst of Curt C's painting challenge (which was for historical figures).  Now that the challenge is over, I got back to these in fairly short order and they painted up pretty fast.

Pedro Cantor - ready to lead his survivors - an old Rogue Trader model.

To represent Pedro Cantor, I tracked down a very average looking Space Marine Sergeant figure that closely resembled the drawing of the character in the Rogue Trader book (and also had the right equipment - pistol and a power fist).  I hacked the shoulder pad off to replace it with another of the newer pewter shoulder pads.  I also applied a newer pewter backpack (again, with a handy "fist" symbol on it).

Close-up of the missile launcher dude.

One thing that really stood out when painting these old figures is how spartan they were - the models are not draped in scrolls, shoot-the-demon reminder scripts and other stuff.  And they have no skull symbols - none! It's refreshing.

So we are ready to play "The Battle At The Farm" - and kick-off a little mini-campaign set in the battle for Rynn's World.