Starting a Fallen Army

[DieJerks]

Hi Guys and Girls,

 

I'm pretty new to the hobby, started in January.  I was interested in starting an army of Fallen.  Any tips?  I have a pack of the dark angels veterans i thought i could convert to fallen. Where should i go from here?

 

Regards,

 

Morgan Eastwood

[Commissar K.]

Cool plan, I think Cypher is a must. You can use your Dark Angels but might want to include a Chaos Space marine bit and sculpt a ripped robe here and there.

 

[Cynicus]

You might also want to consider grabbing Mk3 or Mk4 marines to reflect the cobbled-together, ancient armour patterns the fallen would use, and you could look at the FW dark angels bits too.

[Azekai]

The hooded veteran heads could be picked up on ebay or other aftermarket vendors, and then you could swap those onto tactical marines; maybe mix in some chaos bodies/backpacks or legs for that 'archaic' look without delving into Forge World. 

That said, if you are willing to spend the change, Forge World has some really nice stuff. A few of the older mark armors (like III or IV) would go a long way for making your army look ancient.

[DieJerks]

Awesome thanks for the advice guys. I have one of the old cypher models, the metal ones, but am currently trying to get one of the new models without buying the whole triumvirate pack.  What other types of units could i include in a fallen army? I'm not particularity sure how it works.

[Commissar K.]

Awesome thanks for the advice guys. I have one of the old cypher models, the metal ones, but am currently trying to get one of the new models without buying the whole triumvirate pack.  What other types of units could i include in a fallen army? I'm not particularity sure how it works.

I'm sure Ebay could get you the newer Cypher. I would try to get him, I think he looks wicked and can be a really nice model to base your army around.

 

The types of units you would include from a narrative perspective would be very much the same as those of Dark Angels. They are a renegade chapter of Dark Angels after all. Some googling and wiki will lead you to the right path.

 

From that same perspective the old narrative focusses Dark Angels on Plasma weaponry. In this case you can even go as far as equiping other Lords with a Combi Plasma Bolter and Plsma gun if you feel inclined to do so.

 

Source for a lot of inspiration: http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Fallen_Angels

 

Cheers,

[MoK]

For my Fallen army I've used a good mixture of Mk3, Mk4, FW Mk5 and DA vets kit.

As for units, I have Cypher and three 10 man Fallen squads.

Then using Black Legion Rules I have a Fallen Librarian (Sorcerer), 3x 5 man Fallen Terminators (Chaos Terminators) using Cataphractti Termies. 3 squads of Chaos Marines and 3 squads of Havocs. Again all made up of Mk3/4/5 armour. At some point I want to get some FW outriders to be Fallen Ravenwing.

[DieJerks]

For my Fallen army I've used a good mixture of Mk3, Mk4, FW Mk5 and DA vets kit.

As for units, I have Cypher and three 10 man Fallen squads.

Then using Black Legion Rules I have a Fallen Librarian (Sorcerer), 3x 5 man Fallen Terminators (Chaos Terminators) using Cataphractti Termies. 3 squads of Chaos Marines and 3 squads of Havocs. Again all made up of Mk3/4/5 armour. At some point I want to get some FW outriders to be Fallen Ravenwing.

 

That sounds awesome. Is there any chance you could post some pictures for me? Would love to see how they look.

[MoK]

Not really, I'm not on photobucket. But if you look up any 30k Dark Angels made using the plastic MkIII and MKIV Marines and plastic Cataphracttis with DA pads, that's pretty much my Army.

[Sception]

for models, I'd go with a mix of loyalist, chaos, and third party bits:

 

Bodies & heads: Dark Angels Robed Veterans.  Because of course.

 

Arms:  Ideally?  chaos raptors.  Try trading for bits w/ chaos players who made warp talons.  If that doesn't work, you can get them from 3rd party bits sellers.  Unfortunately, you only get two bolter-holding arms per box, when most if not all of your chosen (depending on the size of the squad) probably want to be holding combi-plasmaguns.  So if raptor arms just aren't going to work out, regular chaos marine arms are ok.  Try to find a CSM player who gave their dudes bolt pistols & close combat weapons.

 

Weapons: I'd use raptor bits for the champion.  maybe plasma pistol, power sword, or power fist chain sword, or whatever.  the rest of the squad probably wants plasma guns or combi plasma, maybe one heavy weapon.  If the squad is bigger than 6 models, leftover guys will probably want bolters (CSM arms & weapons are fine), but I think bolt pistol/ccwep looks more interesting (CSM arms are ok, but raptor arms are better).  As for those plasma guns or combi plasma, raptors and basic CSMs are a decent source of interesting looking plasma guns.  Combi plasma's a bit harder to find.  Evil Craft does some, along with heavy weapons if you want those, but as with most of their models they're a bit busy.  FW is another option, though their heresy bits might be not-busy-enough.  FW sells combi weapons in a pack with several of each type, but you might try emailing them to see if they'd sell you a pack of just combi plasma.  They also sell heavy weapon kits that fit CSM bolter arms reasonably well with a bit of work.  The drum-magazine autocannons are nice.  The belt fed ones look great too, though the ammo box can be a pain to fit onto non-heresy backpacks.

 

Shoulder pads:  I'd go flat loyalist pads with squad markings on the right side, and these 3rd party fallen angel chapter pads for the left: https://www.shapeways.com/product/MY6Q76F69/fallen-angels-gen7-stnd-shoulder-x10

 

Backpacks: the ideal would be the old metal cypher backpacks, which GW used to sell in a bundle of four along with one of biles packs, but those don't seem to be available anymore.  If you can find enough to outfit all your fallen with them, I'd still use those, but failing that you might order a bunch of dark vengeance chosen and use their backpacks for a bit of chaos taint without being as distractingly oversized as the regular chaos packs.  The DV chosen aren't as cheap on the secondary market as they used to be now that DV itself is getting retired and 8e is increasing interest in 40k, but they're not so pricey that you should feel terrible buying them for just the backpacks.  Heck, you might be able to trade the leftover, backpackless models to a chaos player for some of those raptor arm bits.

 

Bases: 32mm of course.  The sector imperialis ones are pretty nice.

 

And for cypher, of course, you'll want to get the new model.

 

 

Set up wise, there's not a lot of army to the fallen yet, just one unit and one character.  Due to keyword restrictions, nothing else can be 'Fallen'.  Presumably they'll have options expanded in the future with a codex that will probably grant them basic vehicles (rhinos, predators, etc) or the like, but that might just be wishful thinking on my part.

 

In the mean time, cypher plus 3 units of fallen makes an alright elite detachment.  Personally, I'd give each squad a melee armed champion (plasma & power sword or fist being my personal preference), 4 combi plasma, one autocannon, plus maybe some ablative dudes with either bolters or bolt pistol close combat weapons.  Some other, more competitively minded player might be able to give you a better gear outfit suggestion, but then again a more competitively minded player would probably pass on fallen until their options are expanded a bit more.  The lack of transports in particular is rather painful, especially since they don't infiltrate or anything anymore.  I wouldn't run them at all unless you play on relatively cluttered city-type terrain boards, and even then they're super vulnerable to deep striking enemy units.

 

Cool units, though.

Edited July 3, 2017 by malisteen

[MoK]

It depends how chaotic you want them to be. My Fallen haven't necessarily fallen to Chaos, they are simply 30k Dark Angels doing whatever Cypher needs them to do. So no Chaos stuff at all, its all 30k stuff with some 40k DA stuff thrown in.

[Closet Skeleton]

 What other types of units could i include in a fallen army? I'm not particularity sure how it works.

 

Officially, none.

 

The fallen rules are for a small allied force because the official fluff has pretty much always been that Fallen don't have armies because they only gather in small numbers and only then if Cypher is present.

 

Now plenty of people have ignored that to make Fallen armies, but that puts them in the same boat as other canon-bending armies that have to rely on using an official set of rules with non-standard modelling.

 

So basically you just decide if you're going to use the loyalist or chaos rules for your space marines and then follow those when equipping your units.

[Sception]

yeah, right now only the following units can have the fallen keyword:

 

Cypher

Fallen

 

No vehicles (including transports), no terminators, no sorcerers, etc.  That's not really enough to make a whole army.  Fallen right now are more of an auxilliary option in chaos or imperial armies.  They'll probably see their own codex in the future, probably, but until then...

[MoK]

I can't see Fallen ever getting a Codex, as Closet Skeleton said, they don't tend to gather in such large numbers, in fact as far as I know the largest group of them are the couple of squads hanging round with Cypher in Rise of the Primarch. But there have been stories in the past of Fallen Dreadnoughts, In the Book Deathwing I believe, and because of that I have made the assumption that a few Terminators squads might have fallen as well as a few bike squads.

There is also the theory that there are loyalist DAs out there from 30k who are assumed by the current DAs to be Fallen because they still wear black. Canon bending doesn't really apply when the fluff is out there.