Legio Funebris

[Uberlord Gendo]

Figured I might as well put up my Titan legio. I need to come up with logos, a low Gothic Cognomen, engine names, etc, but knowing me, if I keep trying to come up with that sort of thing before posting, I'll just never come up with specific fluff.

Core idea is that the Forge sees engine manifolds as housing portions of dead souls and thus see titan machine spirits as representing a gestalt will of the ancestors which is then channeled and focused into the realm of the living by the Princeps. In general, then, the nousphere serves as a bridge between the land of the dead and the living, where the anima-souls of the dead dwell and report back to the Greater Machine Spirits.

Pictures to come as soon as I figure out how to add them from my phone. Turns out my resolution is too high, so I'll need to figure that out, but here's some cropped pictures:

Edited August 19, 2020 by Uberlord Gendo

[Mandragola]

Cool. I like the marbling on the green. Always nice to see a load of warlords.

[Doctor Perils]

The green marble and ochre work really nicely together. For some reason I'd like to see some more heraldic markings on them, perhaps in red, while at the same time the orangey red on the Collegia Titanica emblem seems to not work super nicely: perhaps a kind of blood red might work better? (Note, it might just be the angle of the shot)

 

I really like the concept of ancestor summoning for these titans - any idea of where that belief comes from and how it interacts with the cult of the Machine God? Also, are the Principes more like descendents of these Warrior-lords, ie a kind of hereditary nobility; or are they viewed more like shamans and mediums? If not even necromancers? Are they seen as symbols of hope ("they called granny back from the dead! Oh and they also saved the world...") Or more of dread and disgust ("the dead should be allowed to rest. Let _us_ fight for the future while our forefathers sleep")

 

What would the Forge World's other fighters look like? Do they have any Knight Houses, Secutarii/Skitarii, Automata... Or only a horde of tribal warriors?

[noigrim]

For the red you should use a dark one to avoid the christmas effect.

About the ancestors their souls live on inside the titans when they die so the engines could be the focus of a familial cult

[Bjorn Firewalker]

Beautiful work on the models.

[Uberlord Gendo]

Thanks all!  I love the Warlord models and all the space on their plates, but I'm less enthused by the maniple choices for them, so we'll see what happens.  At the same time, I was one of the first to get into AT at my FLGS so I've been building and buying with an eye towards bringing enough for two.  At least that's how I've justified it to myself.

 

Also all of these names are pretty provisional, so if you've got ideas, throw them at me.

 

I hadn't thought of the color as ochre, but rather as bone-- you calling it that gives me a lot of ideas and fits really nicely.  I may try doing some markings in a sort of red ochre or perhaps a cinnabar- visually I'd been thinking of Bronze Age Chinese burials- I do a lot of work with that period for my day-job- and a lot of the earliest brush writing we have is in cinnabar ink (on oracle bones, no less)

The thing you were seeing on First Solstice is this:

I do my gears on Opus Mechanicum... Mechanicii? Blue and orange rather than black and white.  (Forgeworlds do what they must because they can.)  Horned Bear has a more subdued bronze thing going that I really like:

 

And on the Reaver Bone Watcher... crap.  Phrasing.  Hmm...  Well, anyway, I've been experimenting with some detail work in sharpie:

The whole engine:

 

(Also sorry for the weirdness with the pictures-- my phone's camera's resolution is too high to upload things unless I crop them and I don't have a way to make them smaller on my phone that I know of.  For so long, I wished for a non-potatocam and now that I have one!  Oh!  Alas!  My folly!)

 

So far as the cult goes I've been sketching it out under Ataginak for Broken Throne, though I'm not sure if this Ataginak is the same as that Ataginak, if that makes sense.  I use some of the same visual cues on my 40k Admech, so maybe they go together, maybe they don't?  I'm doing a lot of that dirty earth effect with a wash of Nihilak to get a sort of radioactive feel and I'm leaning towards Radiant Disciples (because who doesn't love radioactive Machine-Men, right?)- whereas Ataginak is very centered around Legio Cybernetica, which currently has no 40k rules... so... yeah... someday Fires of Cyraxus will come.  Someday.

Here's a Kataphron for comparison:

This said, I have minimal ability to stick with a color scheme, so other segments of my Admech forces are in a stormy sky with lightning deal and things like this Shadowsword I did:

That one is labeled as being from Tindalos, which is an old forge idea I had and that I now really want to do with an all Warhound list.  (Audax just seems like a fun rule set to play with, though I didn't want to do it as my main legio and I need to buy the warhounds for it.  And now I have to choose if my next AT purchase is to be another Reaver or a pair of Warhounds...)

 

The basic idea is that they see the the boundary between the nousphere, material universe, and the realm of the dead as porous, with the Omnissiah sort of flowing into all of them.  The person has several non-physical parts including the Motive Force, the Nous, and the Mirror-Soul.  Machine Spirits and the Spirits of the Dead differ from the living in that they don't have all the same parts.  The Mirror-Soul is what's in the warp and departs on death to be reincarnated.  The Nous is uploaded into the cogitator network and contains memories, personality, etc.  The Motive Force is kept within the community by distributing one's cybernetics on death.  The accumulated Nous of the Ancestors and the Machine Spirits in the planetary cogitators (which may store data on the planet's auroras because that'd be pretty cool) serve as a bridge to the Omnissiah.  Magi Cybernetica, Datasmiths, and Titan Principes serve as "Speakers", who allow the Nous of the Ancestors to speak through them.  Said Speakers also summon spirits from the cogitators and imbue new machines with Animus.  As a result, the Animus, being provided from the Forge also brings with it trace Nous.  The idea here is that they claim they get better performance that way, since their focus is essentially on Machine Spirits and (I can't believe it's not) AI.  However their machine spirits can prove difficult for others to use, usually becoming petulant when not treated properly, particularly since few off Ataginak are willing to perform the dances much less allow a Machine Spirit to speak through them.  In some cases, an unhappy Spirit will possess servitors and machines, requiring extensive feasting or a techorcism.  Such events have lead to occasional charges of Silica Animus, but Ataginak's argument that the portion of the Ancestral Nous each machine possesses provides the requisite human factor has been successful thus far.  Cynics have noted that the reason may have less to do with the soundness of the argument than with the questions that denying that doctrine would raise about heavily augmented Magi.  Such a stance also allows Orthodox datasmiths to explain otherwise troublesome behaviors of Ataginak Spirits without acknowledging the theory or praxis of their creators.  The Orthodox allege that the theory of mind and gnosology of the Ataginak Magi is, in fact, an attribution error; the heterodox rites of Ataginak work because the Nous of the deceased inside expect them to.  Regardless of the facts, this compromise has worked for both parties.

So the Titan legio is highly respected as some of the top-tier machine shamans and the Forge as a whole take the idea of Machine Spirits very seriously-- they seem themselves as surrounded by an endless array of spirits, both artificial and of the dead, though that boundary gets very, very fuzzy.

For inspiration, I'm looking, again, at things like Shang China, which is pretty interesting-- in the Near East, you get a toothache, you blame it on a demon, and you call for a priest to invoke the power of a good god to cast out the evil. In Shang China you get a toothache, you blame it on an ancestor, and then you contact them and ask them how much it'll cost you to make them make it go away. You can always negotiate. (Of course, for Ataginak, this only applies to non-warpy things. But the warp isn't their job anyway.)

 

The Knight House I've got atm is pretty fun-- they're already dead. The throne mechanicums have created gestalt personalities that largely overpower living pilots put inside or run the Knights requiring only a servitor as an interface. As a result, the Knights fight with a reckless abandon. They don't know they're dead, and in fact, the Sacristans spend a great deal of time and effort making dreams for the machine spirits so they don't remember that they're dead. (And so that way they don't get caught for possible Silica Animus, though that would be less "BEEP BOOP KILL ALL HUMANS" and more "WHERE IS MY SON?!") Since they don't know they're dead, but they're aware that they've come back from what should have been many a terminal encounter. Thing is, as long as the Black Box can be recovered or the backups can be downloaded into a new throne, they're good to go, so the "pilots" just assume that the Omnissiah watches over them and brings them back from the edge again and again. (It's my way of accounting for the fact that my Knights end up dying horribly every time I play, but are somehow always back and ready for more next time.)

 

There's definitely a lot of Automata running around, I'm picturing a lot of vorax and other sort of biological-feeling ones with the emphasis being on them as animals. (So an Ataginak automata going malefica is more like a tiger turning on the handler than a truly self-aware kind of deal. It just makes more sense to me than assuming that deep down, all robots are Bender.)

Edited August 19, 2020 by Uberlord Gendo

[Bjorn Firewalker]

Excellent work on the Reaver. Why is it named "Bone Watcher"? Did it ever face Nurgle plague zombies in battle, requiring the crew to undertake the duty of "watching over bones" to make sure they won't rise from the dead to attack and infect the living?

[Fajita Fan]

Dude I'm learning that Sharpie (and even smaller Micron markers) are the way to go.  I like it.

[Uberlord Gendo]

Ooh, I'll have to try the microns. On the name front, I was thinking in terms of an image like a tomb guardian, protector of the burial grounds. The name is kind of clunky, so...

[Fajita Fan]

Custos Sepulcrum according to Google.

Edited August 20, 2020 by Fajita Fan

[Uberlord Gendo]

That's actually a pretty badass name...

[Doctor Perils]

It does sound very good - perhaps worth looking into some Fantasy/D&D undead creatures, like Revenants and Liches, and gothicising those names as well?

[schoon]

Custos Sepulcrum according to Google.

That is rather good...

[Fajita Fan]

That's actually a pretty badass name...

Some things translated into Latin using Google don't sound cool at all but others sound badass. I do this at work since I have Google open almost all day.

[Uberlord Gendo]

I'm going to have to mess around with Latin-- that Reaver is definitely now named Custos Sepulcrum.

I'm experimenting with marble, meh on the initial result:

Any advice to get it to feel more natural?

Edited August 22, 2020 by Uberlord Gendo

[Doctor Perils]

I like it, the colour combination looks good. Perhaps have the black only over the light grey areas, and have the proportions less even? It sort of looks like 1/3 light, 1/3 medium and 1/3 dark in every section, which doesn't seem so natural? Perhaps add a bit of a slightly different colour inclusion (a light pink perhaps?)

 

The texture looks rough, is that normal?

[Uberlord Gendo]

Hmm. I think it may just be that it looks weird super close up. I'll get some more shots later.
In the meantime, I have discovered that micron pens are amazing.

BONUS ROUND:

Reinforcements from Tindalos have arrived! That and I have an inability to stick to a given color scheme for more than a minute at a time. The Hounds of Tindalos are probably going to use Audax tactics or just serve alongside the Titans of Legio Funebris as has been their ancient custom. I'm experimenting with colors:

Edited August 27, 2020 by Uberlord Gendo

[Mendi Warrior]

Cool work, very nice results with the micro pens. I can envision you'll might end up covering some titans with lots of scriptures

The texture on the cerastus looks indeed a it rough, might the paint have been a tad too thick?

[Uberlord Gendo]

That's the plan yeah!

I think you and Perils may have a point. My celestia grey is getting thicc and in this case that's not a good thing.

[Uberlord Gendo]

Finally got some engine kills! Since I've been teaching people to play, it usually runs slowly, but tonight we got through a full, albeit basic, game and due to a combination of positioning and awesome rolling, I managed to wipe my opponent's force. Which now raises the question of how to do kill markings. I'm thinking of doing tallies on the sides of engines, sorted by significance of the deed, as I get more, I'll put up a picture so you can see what I'm talking about. But I'm really not sure what to do with the Knights. They managed to martyr themselves bringing down a Reaver, so I'm not sure whether they all get a kill marking or if only the one that struck the killing blow gets the honor. (It was a fusion shot.) I'm thinking of putting the honors on the Lord Scion, but since they're so small and since actually bringing down a titan has been so rare, I'm thinking I want to do something grander.

Any ideas?

[schoon]

Any ideas?

 

Does your Lord Scion have a back banner? If not, it might be time to add one - that ought to give you plenty of room for battle honours.

[Uberlord Gendo]

Live from Thunderdome! It's Titan Tuesday!

Finally got back around to AT with a 1000 point "wait, how do these rules work" game. I brought a Legio Solaria Lupercal. Two had turbolaser destructors, one with two vulcans, and one with a Vulcan and a plasma. I put bastions on all of them and chameleoline on three. My opponent brought a basic venator with a banner for support. He had no legio so he took a apocalypse missile battery. Both of us took artillery support.

The combination of dynamic squadrons and camo was brutal. The opposing Princeps was overly cautious and missed some opportunities to inflict damage, but my list felt incredibly fluffy with the way I ended up having my titans work in pairs to take down his warhounds before using Witch Wolf to clear Knights away from [Tindalos Engine 2] so it could bring down the Reaver's voids which allowed Jade Falcon and [Tindalos Engine 1] to flank and bring it down.

I really liked the range on the camo'd Warhounds. Not sure if I'd rely on it in another legio, but for Solaria, it felt really good.

What do people think about the various light maniples- atm, it's looking like we're going to be slowly building up from 1000 and I'm trying to decide what to try next.

[General Zodd]

Double post, apologies, see below!

Edited September 8, 2022 by General Zodd

[General Zodd]

Well, it depends on whether you mean “Light” maniples, or just any maniple which is fairly Warhound heavy. I’ll start with those maniples described as “Light”.

- Venator; You’ve seen this in action already! It’s the original, and it still has a place. The main drawback is the fact your Reaver gets their free shot when shields go down, meaning you really need a weapon to crack open armour. In the Reaver armoury that really means Volcano (which risks your reactor getting out of hand) or Melta (which means getting up close). I’ve seen some people stick a Turbolaser on the roof for that 360 arc at Strength 8, but it’s not the most effective. You can definitely make it work, but it’s not super straightforward to really leverage those bonus shots, and sometimes chasing that ability can be a bit of a trap when you should be focussing down an already wounded enemy.

- Janissary; I’ll be honest, this is one of two of these I’ve not used. I don’t rate it particularly. Getting a Reaver and a unit of knights to charge the same target before the enemy can react can delete even a Warlord, but a lot of things have to line up for it happen, and often most uses of this ability just lose you activation advantage, so use with discretion!

- Ferrox; This is the light maniple I use and see used most often. For anyone wanting to get in amongst it, this is amazing and offers really powerful bonuses. However, this may not work well with Solaria, it’s going to turn off your cameleoline if you want to get in knife fighting range. So, a strong maniple, but you may not find it plays how you’d like to play with your Legio.

- Firmus; The other light maniple I’ve not used, this is just baffling to me. The only way I could see this being of benefit on a regular basis was if you had one of the Traitor Legios who can stack multiple negative mods to enemy Command values. It can potentially stop your opponent focus firing down your engines with a bit of careful positioning, but it demands a lot of you and your opponent’s dice to make it work.

- Ignis; I’ll be honest, I don’t think this is super competitive, but it is fun to throw lots of templates about! However, this is an even less comfortable fit with Solaria than Ferrox, so maybe not for you. Plus it demands you pay the Knight Castigator tax to get your compulsory Acherons!

That’s it for Light maniples (apart from Lupercal which you’ve used and Cannis which is Audax only) though there are others that aren’t technically “Light” that work well, such as Regia (if you get a second Warlord), Arcus (if you get a Warbringer) and Mandatum. All of which I’d advise you have a think about, especially as you have a Warlord already for the Mandatum.

One other thought is, with your ability to swap a Reaver for a Warhound, is the good old Axiom maniple. Not flashy, but it protects you a little from the lower Command value of your Warhounds.

One final thought on squadrons. The Lupercal is great because the benefits of squadroning are strong, but the downside of losing activations can be problematic. Lupercal allows you to balance those pros and cons turn by turn. Other maniples will mean you have to commit at the start of the game. There’s no “right” answer, but generally if you’re out activating your opponent, you can comfortably squadron your hounds until you’re down to level, but really you’ll have to experiment and see what works for your play style.

Have fun, and hunt some heretics for me!

[Mandragola]

On top of Zodd's excellent summary there are some other maniples that work well with Solaria, taking advantage of their ability to swap Reavers out for hounds.

When doing this, note that some maniples won't really work. If an ability says it works for a Reaver then it won't work for a Warhound - even one that is replacing that Reaver. But some maniples just give benefits to every engine in the maniple, which works fine.

Some options then:

Corsair is great for Solaria. You get warhounds that can run in any direction and turn however they want. There's no upgrade to durability or firepower, and any additional titans you take beyond the first three will be Reavers, but that's ok.

Dominus lets you take a Warlord, four Warhounds and some knights. In this way you can end up with a -2 modifier to hit warhounds with cameleoline, which will make them very hard to get rid of. Some knight lancers will also give you a bit of melee power. You do need that Warlord though. Lee Marshal plays this with his Solaria and does very well.

Fortis is another maniple that will force you to take a Warlord, plus up to two hounds. Note that it allows engines in the maniple to share shields without them being in a squadron. It's probably a bit of a minor benefit though and not especially good for hounds.

My favourite maniple to play is the Regia. Admittedly this is with my Astorum, who are great at repairing and make this a massively tough formation. For Solaria you'd be using cameleoline to make Warhounds hard to hit, while also sharing shields with the Warlords. Everyone would end up being pretty tough. For best effect try and keep hounds >2" but <3" from Warlords, to avoid some of the effects of things like concussive. A Warlord can accidentally kill a Warhound quite easily.

Thanks for the report by the way. I hope you enjoy many more games of Titanicus.