Mechanicum Project Log: The Scions of Clovis

[Cithaeron]

These folks started out as a little 'diversion' while I worked on my Sororitas force... aaaand then they sorta became my main (read: only vaguely-complete) army, not least because I quickly grew to love the lore behind the Priesthood of Mars. So as I pondered what direction to take my army in, and how best to make them synergise with my other decidedly more doctrinally orthodox Imperial forces (the aforementioned Sisters and an Imperial Guard regiment recruited from a Shrine World, with all the Gothic pomp that that implies), the character of my Magos-Dominus started to materialise and the whole thing started to take off from there.

These are all the 'painted' miniatures (all well beyond the three-colour tournament benchmark but still at various degrees of completion) that I have amassed so far - the one exception being a second Sydonian Dragoon who is currently gracing the display cabinet of my FLGS/place of part-time employment.

I'll be updating this as I finish them off, start new units and otherwise tinker around with the army.

Some completed Skitarii - a bog-standard Ranger and Vanguard just to demonstrate the colour scheme and what the others will look like when they're completed.

The Galvanic Rifles are all slightly trimmed down in length so as to be slightly less cartoonishly massive - the one exception being the Alpha, whose full-length rifle helps to distinguish him a little more from his squadmates.

The 'C' is a symbol of Clovis. There are other more complex and esoteric sigils representing the mother-forge that appear here and there, but most of the rank-and-file soldiery bear just this simple, easily-recognisable mark to denote their origins.

Each Skitarii squad is designated a letter of the Greek alphabet, and a two-digit number. Where other forge worlds might emblazon each squad's numeral onto the robes of its warriors, standard practice on Clovis is to bear the numerals painted onto the shoulder pads, leaving only the letter to be sewn onto the robes and thereby only requiring two dozen different stitching patterns. This has the dual advantage of allowing squads in smaller forces to be identified by a letter alone (thereby eliminating redundant identification codes and saving precious milliseconds when relaying combat data) and significantly expediting the process of recycling and redistributing the vestments of those unfortunate Skitarii whose useful service has expired.

Like the galvanic rifles, the radium carbines wielded by the Vanguard have also been chopped down somewhat - although in this case the aesthetic changes are rather more pronounced. Trimming the longer canister under the receiver, filing down the top of the glowy ring things slightly, chopping the end off the forearm at the end of the aforementioned glowy things and re-arranging the barrel and sling bracket helps, I think, to give the carbine a rather sleeker and less cumbersome profile.

The trim of the robes terminates in a split fleur-de-lis motif - something of a common Imperial decorative element of late and naturally one that occurs frequently in my Ecclesiastical forces. Its ready adoption by Magos Eisenbarth's forces is one of many outward gestures of his desire to ingratiate himself with the Adeptus Ministorum - something I'll mention more of at another time.


[Completion Level: 90%]
Speaking of which, here's the man himself - Magos-Dominus Wikus Eisenbarth. Bit of a naff picture I'm afraid and I've still got to tidy up some of the paintwork and add a few more layers and details, but you get the general idea.


[Completion Level: 95%]
Eisenbarth's partner in crime THE QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE - Magos-Explorator Caecilius Rohm. Rules-wise he counts-as an Ordo Malleus Inquisitor with a Hellrifle (represented by the laser cannon thingy that seemed to make more sense than yet another telescope).


The Solar Auxilia Strategos is an absolutely beautiful model - and well-suited, I figured, to the grandiose eccentricity of a high-ranking Explorator with a love of Archaeotech and a burning need to unceasingly record anything and everything he sees on his travels.

I'll be posting some more detail shots of some of the other units and characters as I tweak them, along with some more of the background fluff behind the forge world and the army as a whole. For now, sorry again about the slightly naff photos but I hope you enjoy nonetheless!

[Cithaeron]

Magos-Majoris Lucien Langstrom

Lucien Langstrom is an utterly single-minded devotee of the path of the Myrmidon – or rather of one particular aspect of that path. Almost from the moment of his induction into the mysteries of the Mechanicum some two centuries ago, Langstrom has devoted every ounce of his mental and physical energy – his very life, even – to the study and application of grav-weaponry. The unnerving, faceless constructs that surround him in battle are but one result of his labours in this field: adaptions of the ancient Scyllax Guardian-Automata that Langstrom has repurposed to house a modified grav-amp of his own design, each slaved to his own targeting protocols. When focused on anything or anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves within their master’s crosshairs, these automata can amplify the already horrific destructive potential of Langstrom’s torsion cannon to equal or even better that of a full-strength unit of Kataphrons. While at present he is still ironing out some of the kinks in the system, Langstrom hopes eventually to perfect it to the point where it can feasibly be used to augment a significant number of the forge world’s Kataphrons – and for the meantime, the more practical testing he can conduct by way of tearing apart the enemies of the Omnissiah, the better.

[Completion Level: 95%]

Something (I'm still not quite sure exactly what) never quite sat right with me about the aesthetics of the Kataphron models, so the few I have in this force are counts-as kitbashes.

[Bjorn Firewalker]

Excellent work.

[Xisor]

Utterly gorgeous. I love the grubby, dilapidated grandeur of them. It works brilliantly; you've done a great job on them.

 

I really like your explanations/accounting of them too.

 

---

 

I know what you mean with the Kataphrons - I've been slightly holding back with them and pressing myself to try to come up with a good idea for how to better work 'em - though part of my thinking is simply to make them look less "part of the army", more... part of the furniture.

 

Quite how that is to be achieved I haven't a clue, but I thoroughly approve of heavy kitbashing and count-as where it fits really well, and yours fit excellently.

[Chaeron]

I really like the various bits of fluff and backstory you've come up with Cithaeron, it's a great theme and the subtle conversions work so well! I'm looking forward to the force growing further!

[Vel'Cona]

Awesome army!  I'm a huge fan of dark, muted colours (just look at my own AdMech), though I'm especially envious of the wonderfully contrasting freehand.  Bravo all around!

[Cithaeron]

Cheers for the feedback folks! ‘Grubby, dilapidated grandeur’ is pretty much exactly the sort of aesthetic I was aiming for with this army so it’s heartening to see that I got that across even with these rather shoddy photographs.

Now onto a conversion that’s ‘subtle’ in a different way. The Onager in the back in the first photo?

Yeah, that’s got full interior detailing.

I’m a huge fan of interior details on vehicles and given that the Skitarii codex gives some idea of what’s inside one (Ranger gunner, Vanguard driver immersed in a tank of gross radioactive sludge, pretty cramped) but there’s no actual canon artwork of the insides, I could build on what we DO know about it and let my imagination go nuts a bit without having to worry about being accurate to existing canon depictions. The gears are from a job lot of bits of clock mechanisms that I picked up for like a quid or so a while back – and yes, they mesh properly and turn along with the weapon mount.

The interior is about 60% complete painting-wise at present – I’ll post pics when it’s finished.

[Battybattybats]

The 'like' button is woefully inadequate in this instance.
Cithaeron, i've seen some amazingly good stuff converted for this faction, from John Blanche's gorgeous kitbashed miniatures to CommodusXIII's magnificent terrain (and everything else Commodus has done) but this, this Onager Interior, this is the coolest.

 

[Cithaeron]

Well now… THAT is high praise indeed. :o

[Reyner]

The interior for the Onager is amazing man. The rest of the force is great too.

[Charlo]

Top top top stuff!

 

Really like the deep dark red :)

[Akrim]

Very cool stuff here! Really like Rohm, i havent seen much of the Auxilia outside the FW page.

 

Neat idea with the Onager interior too. Keep it going man

[Akrim]

<edit oops double post> Are the cloak markings freehand?

[Vel'Cona]

+1000 on that Onager interior!  That amount of detail is simply outstanding.  Please post update pics when you've got it painted up!  :D

[Cithaeron]

:D
Akrim: Yep, the cloak details are indeed freehand – as is everything else. I’ve never really liked using transfers if I can possibly help it because the glossy sheen always seems to make them stick out like a sore thumb. The clinical crispness of their lines tends to clash with my more ‘painterly’ sort of style as well which just makes them stick out even more.

That being said, I have been considering relaxing my policy on transfers a little by using some of the warning glyphs on the Skitarii transfer sheet for my vehicles, seeing as they’re really beautifully designed and also labels like that are something that would likely be a ‘transfer’ of sorts irl. I’d probably still paint over them a bit to try and tone down the glossiness though.

[Bjorn Firewalker]

Excellent work on the Onager interior. Did you actually scratch build the entire thing?

[Cithaeron]

Bjorn: Cheers! And yup, I sure did! Though ‘scratch-build’ would probably imply rather more plasticard-work than I actually did – much of it was simply a case of repurposing various bits and gubbins into something sorta resembling the layout I had in mind. The gunner’s chair and the driver’s tank were probably the bits that required the most in terms of real scratch-building – the former is entirely sculpted from plasticard and plastic rod with another watch gear below it meshing with a rack going up the wall (made by rolling the watch gear along a strip of green stuff, so ensuring that the cogs would mesh properly) to represent the mechanism by which it would be raised to or lowered down from the cupola, while the latter I cobbled together out of bits of a 00-scale model railway girder bridge, some more plasticard and a sheet of textured clear styrene from a model railway scenery kit that supposed to be for representing the surface of a pond or somesuch thing that I used to create the impression of the filthy irradiated liquid into which the unfortunate driver is inserted (and let me tell you, trying to cut that stuff to fit exactly around the driver, the sides of the tank and the awkward curvature of the front armour was exactly as much of a pain in the rear to do as you might imagine, and then some). The various bits of pipe are obviously just plastic rod bent and glued to suit, and the rest is mostly bits from other GW kits: Land Raider computer panels and screens (with a door panel from the Munitorum Containers kit to serve as a suitably gothic warning panel-cum-reliquary – the skull no doubt belonging to some honoured former crewman of that same vehicle); a comm-link made by chopping the side of a Skitarii backpack, spare gimp-servitor legs from my Ironstriders connected to the reactor for more completely incomprehensible but doubtless vitally important techno-gubbins (I was particularly chuffed with how that part turned out, actually!); the gunner’s controls are his standard stubber-shootin’ arms, attached together with a bit of plasticard and linked to the main controls via the cables from a Corpuscarii, who also provided the cog-and-skull-adorned end-plate for the interior portion of the reactor; and then finally there’s the ladder rungs from a Leman Russ, various dials and gauges from the Dominus and Sicarian sprues and the two little techy-box things, one housing the motor driving the gears of the main weapon mount and the other at the base of the comm-station, which are actually the headlights that come with those Kromlech ‘Leman Russ’ turrets.

Phew… well, rather too many run-on sentences later; but I do believe that’s all of it accounted for!

[Cithaeron]

Welp, looks like I finished the interior of the Onager (exterior is still very much a WIP so pay that no heed):

I’d made a few minor alterations since I took the unpainted pics – just added a few more copper pipes and slightly adjusted the placement of the reliquary panel. Painting’s essentially done now, though I daresay I’ll come back and tweak it a bit later if/when I notice something that needs doing.

[Vel'Cona]

Great work!  It's possibly not intentional but I love how the Skitarii is sort of glancing at the targeting reticule to his right, as if confirming a kill or confirming a target or something!  :)

[WarriorFish]

Fantastic work on the interior, maybe you should model it open topped so everyone can see? :P

[Battybattybats]

Utterly gorgeous!

Forgeworld should build an interior kit based of that!

[Cithaeron]

Lo again, folks!

It's been a while, I'll grant you - largely because I haven't really added any new models to my collection for a while, so there's really been nothing to report! All that changed after one too many instances of being tabled in close combat lately, however... anyway, the end result of that is that I finally decided to build up some of the Electro-Priests that have been gathering dust on their sprues since I got them so many moons ago (mostly to cannibalise for parts).

The first four Fulgurites (it would have been five, but the aforementioned cannibalisation left me an Electroleech Stave short) I assembled exactly as the instructions would suggest save for leaving off the bulky cog-halo-things, which I decided detracted from the model more than they added to it. The painting is pretty by-the-book as well, though I chose to tone down the blueness a bit in favour of a more pallid look, with the Electoos picked out in a muted Celestra Grey.

While I don't dislike the Electro-Priest models quite as much as some, they certainly aren't without their flaws - not least of which is their monopose design, which becomes particularly egregious when you remember they can be fielded in numbers of up to twenty. Rather than have five lots of identically cloned quadruplets running around striking the same dumbass pose as each other, I figured the best way to fill out the squad a bit was to look to alternative modelling solutions.

Enter the Empire Flagellants.

I'm certainly not the first person to turn the Flagellants into Electro-Priests and I daresay I won't be the last either, and as I had a few spares lying around from when I turned a bunch of them into non-electric Ministorum Priests the choice of base model was a no-brainer. What proved more vexing was how to get them to look like they should be in the same unit, fulfilling the same role, as their Fulgurite brethren. Of course the Flagellants do come with plenty of pointy and inelegant bludgeoning tools that could conceivably have the same basic profile as an Electroleech Stave, but it's all a bit low-tech and not at all uniform - not necessarily a problem for other armies, especially ones that might be going for more of a Knight World aesthetic, but not something that really had any precedent in my army. After much brain-wracking, I came up with a solution with the parts I had available and a narrative behind it that almost sort of makes sense if you don't think about it too hard - and here it is.

Electro-Flagellants (yeah, I know, real imaginative...)

As on a thousand other Forge Worlds, the Electro-Priests of Clovis are a bunch of fractious, obsessive schismatics who celebrate the Motive Force in their own very particular manner and hold only disdain for those who don't follow their particular brand of devotion to the glowing, Electoo-implanted letter. The members of their Fulgurite Brotherhood, however, are somewhat unique even within their famously bellicose order in the extremes to which they take their zealotry. They are utterly intolerant of any kind of perceived failure, weakness or doctrinal deviation, and initiates who fail to meet their exacting standards are punished brutally.

First, one of the offender's arms is cut off (the question of which arm to remove having been resolved by a panel of their peers poring over oil-auguries and vid-playbacks to determine exactly which arm was the most responsible for offending the Omnissiah) and replaced with a vicious contraption known as an Electroleech Agoniser - a huge, hyperconductive spearhead borne by servo-cables and linked to a minoris-level capacitor embedded in the luckless Fulgurite's chest cavity. When it is plunged into the body of a foe with all the strength the disgraced priest can muster with their one remaining arm (the servo-cables having insufficient strength on their own to do much more than support the device's weight), the full power of the Voltagheist field which their squadmates maintain rips through target and conduit alike before it returns, taking the energies of the newly-slain foe with it. The process is exhausting, awkward and almost as painful for the killer as it is for the killed - but only through such sacrifice can the penitent ever hope to one day rejoin their brothers on an equal footing.

The conversion itself is pretty simple. Corpuscarii arms are shaved down and fiddled around with until it looks like they sort of fit, with the other arm being replaced by Corpuscarii cables and something suitably pointy - in this case some spikes from the fencing of the Garden of Morr, but any Chaos player could probably find plenty of pointy bits that would do just as well or better. The lack of big thick rubber shoes is probably an issue, fluff-wise, but I'm just going to go ahead and pretend that there's some kind of 'because Omnissiah' reason why they can do whatever it is they do and not get fried to death - hell, it's not like the Fulgurite fluff in general makes that much logical sense anyway. The blue-grey colour that I often use in small patches on these models generally isn't used much on clothing apart from on the bodysuits of Servitors - another visual mark of their disgrace and low standing.

The other three Electro-Flagellants - still got some more painting to do on them compared to the first one.

A side-by-side comparison with a 'normal' Fulgurite

Well, that's that then... nothing much more to say, except that if anyone has any comments or suggestions on how I could do it differently I'd be all ears. Oh, and it's good to be back!

[Bjorn Firewalker]

Impressive works. The term "electro-flagellant" may make others mistake those models for arco-flagellants assume your army one for the Ecclesiarchy or Adepta Sororitas, though.