Legion Project - World Eaters Command Squad

World Eaters Legion Command group

More stuff from the recent Easter weekend - a command group to accompany the Space Marine Centurion I finished a few weeks ago. There is a standard bearer and two "chosen" marines to accompany it to battle.

Standard Bearer in Mark IV power armour from Forge World - you can't see the banner too well, but trust me - you're not missing anything there...

In my last post I mentioned that I prefer most of my Space Marine troops to look a little more plain. But for these fellows I wanted the full-on ornate look - seals, tabards, sculpted shoulder plates etc.  These are the elite veteran troops of a Chapter (and in the Horus Heresy, a Chapter is a sub-group of the overall Legion - very cool).  They have seen a lot of action, and have the honour of guarding the standard in battle, so they will have received fancy armour and very cool guns.

I tossed a Terminator honour on his shoulder pad...I figured a guy carrying a Legion banner would have been bad-ass enough to have racked up some serious time served in a Terminator company

The standard bearer figure is straight from Forge World, the other half of the two-figure Mark IV command pack.  I really kind of whiffed the workup on the banner with this figure...it is quite large, and I should have gone with a larger decal or symbol or something to dominate it and make it more effective.  This is what happens sometimes when you improvise too much, as I often do.  I tried to fill it up, but it looks much more busy/silly than "experienced" :) A giant World Eater's symbol, with a simple colour band or something would have done the trick...I may yet go back and repaint it at a later time.

If you are going to carry a 20-foot banner to a shooting war, might as well wear a really nice cloak too, right?

As I am sure many experienced 40k gamers/painters out there will already have noted, the "Chosen" body guard Marines are in fact mostly plastic figures from the current range - "Sternguard Veterans" - with Forge World Mark IV Power Armour helmets and Mark III embossed shoulder plates.

Space Marine "Chosen" - bodyguards for the standard bearer

The Sternguard figures, with their tabards/cloaks, were a pretty good style match to the Forge World Mark IV command figures, who have fancy crested helmets and big cloaks of their own. The plastic bolters are of course much fancier than the "Tigrus Pattern" bolt guns carried by the grunts, but again that suits the elite seniority these troops would have.

The sword is handy, because in the grim darkness of the far future, sometimes it is better to whack a guy than shoot him, I guess...

In fact, overall the Forge World legion figures mix and match very, very well with the plastic components from the "current" Warhammer 40k range.  It works the best with the Mark IV & later power armour, as they are quite close in look and feel to the Mark VII suits, but is still quite workable even for the older Mark II and Mark III armour suits.  That Sternguard Veteran box was a treasure trove of bits, many of which will find use as this project continues.

Again, I am addicted to the embossed shoulder plates from Forge World - I love how they look on these fancy armour sets

The Space Marine command elements really capture the proto-feudal-sci-fi feel of the 40k/30k genre.  On the one hand, they are large armoured warriors with scary guns.  But the fancy armour, the tabards, the banner...all really silly when you think about them in the context of a shooting war, but all still really interesting/fun from a gaming/fluff perspective. I hope the ornate nature of this command group will reinforce the somewhat more grim simplicity of the regular Marines.

The resin Mark IV helmets dropped perfectly into the plastic figures

I have 29 World Eater Space Marines painted now - enough to field a very small force for a game of 30k, even to plug into a bare-bones force org (one HQ, two troop and one heavy support).  I still have more World Eaters I want to add - a tactical support squad, an assault squad, a veteran marine squad, and some more bits like a medic, a comms guy and a Legion Champion.  I've already started building the next wave of figures and I hope I can start priming them by the weekend!  And while the primer dries, I am knocking off some more 15mm WW2 stuff...