EidolonDragon's First Project - Chaos Salamanders

[EidolonDragon]

Hello everyone! It's sure been a while since my introductory post. I have no idea how long and to not worry about myself being too slow to make projects and share them, I'm not going to investigate. It's been a lot of IRL stuff anyway, as well as being slow to work in general. Anyway, I did not really have an idea of how much I should have done to show before posting on here, being a bit socially nervous and weird and all, but after talking to my husband carnosaur93, it would appear that I've been worrying a lot over nothing. 

The idea for the chaos dragon-salamanders came from my long-time liking of honorable people, dragons of course, and grimdark tragedies in general. Carnosaur93 and I workshopped together what the story of them is, but also some inspiration came from dark souls dragon cults. People would join the cult to become dragons, either for power, eternal life, or just because they are cool and being a dragon would be the best thing ever. It's also a bit of a project for myself to make something that is not just dragons or other scaley bois like lizardmen of which I have a few and a daemon prince carnosaur93 assisted me in making; something that can be dragon-esque a bit more than just full on, and to join more with my husbando in 40k lore and themes for when we play our custom tabletop wargame together (which can be found here in the homebrew section for those who are curious)

 We have other ideas, but I decided this would be my first space marine project; dragony salamanders.

As for the lore idea, essentially everything started as normal salamanders, as to be expected, honorable and wanting genuinely to do good and not be evil, no matter how difficult the imperium makes it. Speaking of, at some point the dragon-salamanders (official name still pending or I just can't remember it as I am writing this) got roped into an operation with my husband's idea of loyalist iron warriors. The Iron Warriors wanted to in the most efficient fashion just eradicate the population of the planet or planets under threat by either chaos or tyranids, I think it was genestealers maybe? In any case, the loss of innocent life would be far, far too great for my chapter of salamanders to be on board with, leaving them with only the option of declining and resisting the Iron Warriors.
Driven to battle against them for the sake of honor and value of life itself, the salamanders were hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned. It is at this point Khorne gets his bloody nose into the ongoing battles and of course offers assistance to the honorable salamanders. The salamanders, despite knowing that they would lose themselves in all this, make the ultimate decision that the sacrifice of themselves to save so many lives would be worth it, and accept Khorne's blessing. With the newly gained strength, they are able to drive back the iron warriors and eventually manage to force the loyalist Iron Warriors to retreat. The tragedy in the end is that despite making the Iron Warriors retreat, they did not manage to save the people they had sacrificed themselves for in desperation.
Now they just try their best to hold onto the identity and honor that they had that now slowly slips away from them. Some try to embrace the dragon-mutations (cosmetically how I am choosing for them to manifest) as a symbol of their ultimate sacrifice and to try to remember who they are/were, and some their original salamanders gear and iconography. This is what I would like anyway, so I can kinda explain mixing and matching chaos parts and non-chaos parts.
I don't know how well-fitting this is into all the other ideas out there and might have messed up some details or forgotten some really juicy bits that I can update later (husbando save me plis).

Visually, I am intending to make cool metal spikey salamander-ey marines with lots of flamers and power claws, although due to availability of parts and lots of 3D printer jank so far I haven't made too many with those ideas. I haven't really finished any at all actually, but as aforementioned I am still going to post what I have so far, and hopefully learn the right etiquette and timing for when to post updates and what to say that people are interested in.
So far, I have printed out some custom chaos terminator parts as well as some generic chaos parts, some salamander heads, and had to do a bit of green stuff work to fill in some gaps where my printer left little fun empty places for me. The poses have been a little weird for me to work with, as I am quite the noob when it comes to miniatures and have made very little. When I get a third or 4th done and their shoulderpads put on and backpacks and maybe a few pouches and some more backswept spikes or other dragony detail with my unwashed unskilled green-stuff handling hands, it will be time for my first time priming literally anything and then painted in deathguard green primarily, and some spot colors I am not sure about but remember as either fiery orange/red for the fire/Khorne associations or just gray/black cuz I like gray and black. Here's some pictures so far:
 

This was when I first started putting heads on the torsos. It's been difficult to find good head poses that look interesting and I can make sense of with the other parts I have. I am pretty sure with some husbanderific feedback, I changed them after this.
 

 

 

This is the current mix of dudes who I have worked on at all past just dry fitting parts onto. There are some notable issues and I am still not too confident with all of their poses, since the bodies I printed out all have wide stances that are a little difficult to make sense of without heavy melee weapons. The marine who is wielding his gun in two hands I accidentally gave a print-error melted sort of gun and am trying to figure out how to fix it. This resin is pretty brittle and hard to work with, so if anyone has any good ideas I'd love to hear them. I sculpted the loincloth armor during my first round of raising up all the heads for the spacemans with my spare green stuff because I didn't halve the amount I thought I needed enough times, and it turned out sort of okay. I'm not sure whether I want to leave it kind of messy and hope that it looks like a weird organic scale-like mutation or clean it up a bit.

 

 

These are some of the print errors that I filled in. I'm not sure how passable it will be though, but I am hoping it will be good enough.

 

I'm gonna try to figure out how to not sideways the images if they come out sideways in the post; they are showing in my computer as portrait but are landscape here on the preview.

 

 

Anyway, that's the progress I've done so far. Feel free to let me know what you think, if you have any suggestions or if you just like any part of what I've got going on or the lore or anything. Currently, the ongoing plan is that I finish 3 dudes without any notable errors, who still need the backpacks I printed and gotta find and the terminatory shoulderpads I have for them put on, then I'll prime and paint them, so I can finally say I have fully assembled and painted a mini. I also hope I haven't butchered too much lore or terminology or anything xD

Cheers everyone and thank you for looking!

Edited October 23, 2023 by EidolonDragon
cropped all the images to simplify/un-sideways them

[Firedrake Cordova]

Sounds like a fun project.  

 

Have you had a look at the background for the Black Dragons? There's not much on them, and they're not the same as your idea but they're a fallen Salamanders successor, so I don't know if there's anything in there you can "borrow"  

[carnosaur93]

hey its me, the husband guy :D

i think you got the lore down, only couple little things to add is that the loyalist iron warrior dudes are a homebrew primaris chapter: "The Stormhounds", not actually true iron warriors, just a loyalist primaris chapter founded using their geneseed. made specifically to wage slow-burn siege warfare across the great rift spanning the galaxy, to retake and secure imperial worlds (sounds nitpicky, but its an important difference i guess xD)

other than than its just that there was also some lamenters there, who kinda got caught in the middle first siding with the salmanders in their noble idea of "we can't just sacrifice billions to potentially save more down the line", for whom things then turned really freaking awkward when their salmander allies suddenly turned to chaos to win the day and rout the Stormhounds



also for the model-dudes, remember if the greenstuff is a little rough, you can just cut and sand it to clean it up after the fact^^

 

[EidolonDragon]

Hi husband :3

And hello Firedrake also! My husband has told me about the black dragons, I remember them being quite prideful in their bone spike weapons/mutations at the least, and that the material that comprises said mutations is either valuable or sought after or both. The link refresher is quite helpful, thank you! I didn't remember that they grew extra big in some cases though, I do like that. It might be interesting to relate to them in some way and create some more story though. I do like bone spikes, since I was exposed to Togera from war of the monsters as a kid, but I think I would struggle to model them well. Although trying one as a one-off should some parts become available to me or my being able to make things better does seem tempting...