Night Lords or Black Legion?

[Xenith]

I don't think you grasp the difference between warband and legion. A warband can be made up of CSM of different legions, but you don't switch legions. As I stated, it is due to the geneseed. Warbands change all the time, legions do not.

If geneseed determines what legion you are from...Honsou would like a word with you...

 

Back to the OP: Read the books, Lord of the night and the first 3 of the horus heresy series. Add ADB's trilogy to counterpoint LotN.

 

Your warband is what you make of it, you can paint different units as different legions, with a main legion as the centre, or have a mish mash.

 

Get a box of marines, paint 5 of them NL, 5 of them BL, and see what you can deal with painting the most.

[Possessed Marine]

Ok, for the Night Lords vs Black Legion question... let me ask you one question...

 

Evil Batman or Watered-down Lucifer?

 

Take your time and think it through. When you answer that question, you will have your legion.

[Bulwyf]

You can have a straight Legion warband or a mixmash of legions and other renegade chapters. It is completely up to you the player to field and paint whatever you want. I personally have a NL army that is straight NL and another warband that is a mixmash that formed its own unique colors and background.

[Sception]

After the Legions were defeated and driven into the eye of Terror, most of them did break down or break up into warbands. I think the Alpha Legion and the Iron Warriors kept it mostly together, but otherwise the Children and the Eaters tore each other apart, the Sons just fell apart with their primarch dead, others fell apart as their primarchs died, abandoned them, or withdrew to daemon worlds. Powerful individual leaders emerged controlling break away warbands and personal retinues - and while internally these warbands mostly came from the same legion, the legions themselves weren't very coherent. Eventually the most powerful warlords gathered other warbands together, and the legions were pulled back together in this manner, rebuilding their numbers using post-heresy traitors and newly created chaos marines using stolen geneseed (chaos geneseed being generally too corrupted to function) or Bile's more esoteric methods. In this way the legions were slowly reforged over the centuries following the Heresy.

 

The Black Legion in particular rejected its former heritage, denied its dead primarch. While the core of the Black Legion, and it's bitter, hateful warmaster are former Sons of Horus, the Black Legion as it currently exists rejects former legion allegiances, and all black legion warriors ritually paint over their old colors with black, symbolizing the shame of their failure during the Heresy, and their new found unity and identity in the eternal hatred of the Black Legion.

 

The Black Legion, more than any other legion, has absorbed splinter warbands from every other chaos faction, and preaches a credo of unity in hatred. A Black Legion warband of mostly former Night Lords, under the command of a warlord formerly of that legion is well within the established fluff. Put together an army as you would for Night Lords - maybe a jump pack lord or winged prince, a bunch of raptors, marines in transports, outflanking chosen, and give them batwing helms and other similar conversions, maybe more lightning claws than you might otherwise be inclined to field. Then just paint them black, as if they painted black legion colors right over their alpha legion armor. Because they did. As a note - the skull painted on helmets in bone color sometimes seen on Night Lords is an awesome touch, and I sincerely doubt the Despoiler would begrudge such a distinguishing feature, particularly on your HQ and elites.

 

 

And while the individual disposition of Black Legion warbands varies dramatically from warlord to warlord, the overall attitude of the Black Legion towards the malevolent powers is very much the same as that typically associated with the Night Lords - viewing chaos as a tool and little more. Some Black Legionaries hold an extra place of respect for possessed - those able to accept chaos into their bodies and master it. Indeed, it was Black Legion sorcerers who first developed the means of binding possessing daemons, and eventually expelling them without harm to the host, as the legion was loosing too many of its number to voluntary possessions gone wrong. But that's about as far as their reverence for chaos goes. Summoning daemons as an advance wave is a favorite black legion tactic, and most black legion commanders think nothing of throwing away daemonic "lives" in this manner, viewing them as even more expendable then cultists and other mortal rabble. As such, some allied daemons wouldn't go wrong, and when the new codex is released some cultists and whatever new flier we get wouldn't do you wrong, either.

[Artein]

The Legions are dead, bro.

The Word Bearers and Iron Warriors would like a word with you ;) And maybe the Alpha Legion... :huh:

Well, Honsou had different Chaos Marines, renegades, xenos and daemons in his Iron Warriors warband.