Knights of Blood (various questions)

[Urauloth]

So, you don't see KoB very often, and while they don't get any representation in the codex - probably the whole "declared renegade" thing. I've been mulling over which successor to go for with my growing BA collection and I'm pretty attached to the idea of going with these guys, but I have a couple of questions and reservations I want to get the B&C community's opinions on.

 

Question 1: How much BA "bling" can I reasonably get away with, and with what excuses? I've always thought successors with close ties to their original legion had some leeway with this, since they can claim to be using the original legion symbol to honour the primarch, etc, but I'm probably looking at going overboard with BA icons even by my own flimsy justification standards if I just cram the sculpted pauldrons onto everything.

 

Question 2: How much leeway do I have to just make up fluff for my company and handwave it as a fun creative endeavour in the absence of any real lore and background for the chapter (outside a basic framework and a BL short) - am i likely to find that there's actually a whole bunch of contradictory stuff in one of Fantasy Flight's sourcebooks, for example? I know they're at least mentioned in Deathwatch, but that's all I know.

 

Question 3 (and this is probably my biggest reservation) How do I avoid my larger miniatures looking like Grey Knights? I can definitely keep my astartes identifiable as sons of Sanguinius (depending a little on how people feel about my first question) but without doing something drastic to the colour scheme, my tanks, dreads, drop pods etc will mostly just be metallic with some red accents, and that really screams GK. Wrong kind of knight, you know?

[Urauloth]

Question 4 is how to stop looking at the Angels Sanguine and thinking how cool they are, because no way in hell am I painting that colour scheme.

[sockwithaticket]

1. While they clearly have a chapter symbol that diverges significantly from most of the BA successors, they've not been renegades for all that long and are Sons of Sanguinius. I reckon chalices and non-winged blood drops are fine to have dotted around in limited quantities. Winged blood drops probably benefit from a hard rule of no more than one per model, unless it's a character/veteran, in which case, two. You could probably cast around for some Dark Angel  sword bits if you're after appropriate iconography. Non-winged swords would be great, maybe something like this?

http://images.dakkadakka.com/gallery/2015/1/14/678696_sm-.JPG

That's from the Ravenwing Upgrade sprue, the smallest size sword  icon with the wings clipped off. You can get similar, possibly smaller, ones from the Company Veterans box if you're prepare to trim the back pack icons. Of course there's a shoulder pad in that kit that is an non-winged sword, too.

2. Not overly familiar with Deathwatch stuff, but fluff from those books often makes its way onto Lexicanum and 40k wiki. If it's not on the Knights of Blood pages on those sites, then chances are it doesn't exist, or is so obscure that no one will mind/know if you deviate.

3. Use the right kind of silver (Reaper Master Series Blackened Steel is perfect imo, fairly dark, slightly blue). and use the right kind of red, I picture Knights of Blood as having a red with an almost purplis/magenta tint to it like the old Gory Red, whereas Grey Knights have a much flatter, more orange red.  Red and silver alone /= Grey Knights, most of their red heraldry also includes black and white designs on it, but it's the nature of those designs and patterns that mark them as Grey Knights more than anything else.  Another way to emphasise that they are Knights of Blood vehicles would perhaps be to use the red not as an accent colour but as a joint primary colour, so  it has a very strong presence on the model, far more so than would occur on the equivalent Grey Knight model.

4. Can't help. I think it's something all Sons of Sanguinius struggle with, up there with the Red Thirst.

[deathspectersgt7]

I say they are a tad bit mad. I would bling them up like any Son, It is a matter of choice. Look forward to see what you will do.

 

Angels Sanguine would approve.

[Urauloth]

Cheers for the feedback! I'll get started on a test mini and see how he looks.

 

As for sword icons, I was looking at ways of working those in, but I hadn't seen the Ravenwing sprue yet. I'll check it out. What I was seriously considering were Grey Knight tilt plates, because they're just small shields with swords on them, which is 2/3rds of the chapter symbol... might look good scattered around here and there. A few of the GK backpack with a sword symbol (no books, of course) might work too. Of course, then I'd have to double down on making them not look like GKs when painting them, but swings and roundabouts.

 

Since I'd generally be playing somewhat fast and loose with the "proper" iconography already, I was wondering about varying the way the chapter symbol might look on the pauldrons - partly to make things more interesting for myself as a painter, and partly because it's... not all that well thought out from a design perspective, imho. The white shield and red blood drop are great and I love them, but the black crossed swords underneath just get lost against the dark red field, and freehanding them at pauldron-scale is going to make them look like sticks if they show up at all. Proposal, then: leave the swords off, except for larger things like banners.