For some reason, Yellow wants pictures of the views from people’s windows. Or their plug sockets. Being an obliging sort, I have provided both:

But I don’t think those are really very interesting things to post pictures of. Much more interesting, I think, is my Epic Chaos Space Marine army. If you disagree, feel free to skip the rest of this post, since it just consists of pictures of my army and me waffling on about them.

(Incidentally, just in case you didn’t notice, the images below should all be links to larger versions.)

I posted pictures of my Ravager Titan a little while back, but I’ve done quite a few more things since then. To start off with, I’ll post the Ravager again, for the sake of completeness:

Now, the trouble with trying to put together an Epic Chaos army is that currently the available model range consists of the Chaos Horde infantry box and that’s it. Forge World also produce some aircraft, but that’s still not a particularly wide range of models. So Chaos players must instead either buy out-of-print models second-hand from Ebay and the like, or take the Imperial equivalents and either convert them or just paint them in Chaos colours. Since I already had a small Imperial Space Marine force, this second route seemed the most sensible.

The first models I painted were some Chaos Land Raiders. These are just the plastic Land Raiders from the (3rd edition) Epic 40,000 box. I have six in total.

Incidentally, the army is painted in the same colours as my Warhammer 40,000 and Battlefleet Gothic Chaos forces, i.e. that of my Tzeentchian force, the Screaming Fists. Exactly who they are within the setting I haven’t fully worked out yet, except that they worship Tzeentch. In Epic, where there is no generic Chaos Space Marine army list, I use the Black Legion rules.

Around about the same time as the Land Raiders, I also started on some Raptors. For these I used Space Marine assault squads. I have six stands of these, the last of which I gave a slightly fancier than usual paint job to represent a Chaos Lord:

Next up I started painting the dozen Rhino APCs that I had. I added aerials to a couple for command units, and then realised that to mobilise a whole retinue with or without all possible upgrades would require ten of the twelve, which wouldn’t leave nearly enough to mobilise another formation.
Below are three Rhinos. The one on the left is for stands that include a Chaos Champion, while the one on the right is for a Lord. The one in the middle is a ‘standard’ Rhino for transporting just plain old Chaos Space Marines.

Once I had nearly finished painting the ten Rhinos I needed, it occurred to me that the two remaining ones were exactly the right number to transport a Forlorn Hope. As a formation that works its way into forward positions I figured that a Forlorn hope would need to be a bit stealthier than the rest of the army, so this was a good opportunity to experiment with painting Rhinos in camo colours:

Since the third edition of Epic (the commercially unsuccessful Epic 40,000), the ‘standard’ way to base models riding on bikes or animals has been three to a stand. I had 12 Space Marines on bikes, which when based like this is enough for four stands. This is exactly the right number for an Imperial bike detachment, but Chaos bikers come in companies of eight units. However, in the first two editions of Epic, bikes were typically based two to a stand and the current rules allow between two and four. This would leave me only two units short, three if I wanted the option of whether or not to include an icon bearer. Figuring six additional bikes would be easier to get together than fifteen, I decided to go with stands of two bikes. At about the same time, it occurred to me that small Warhammer bases were not only allowed under the Epic rules, they were exactly the same size (20mm x 20mm) as the old square bases from the first two editions of Epic (but about three times as thick), and since I had plenty of these going spare, I started gluing my bikes to them right away. So far I’ve got two stands painted:

I’m not sure about what to do for an icon bearer yet. I tried adding a banner pole to the back of a bike, which looked fine, but when I tried to make a pennant out of Milliput it looked terrible. I’m not sure whether to go for a paper banner instead or go for something else entirely.

Obliterators are the one Chaos infantry unit for which there is no Imperial equivalent. Unfortunately, they are also really useful, being as they are both generally awesome and the Chaos army’s only source of anti-aircraft firepower (besides its own aircraft). This means converting some, which isn’t too difficult, although it is a bit fiddly. Using an Imperial robot and parts from Space Marine Terminators, I’ve put together the following:

Much as I’d like to take credit for this ingenious conversion job, it’s based closely on Audrey Ewing’s Obliterator conversions. The only problem with it is that it uses Colossus-class robots which are hard to get hold of (I’ve managed to get one from a friend and five from Ebay, enough for two stands of three), and while I have had some success with the more widely available Conqueror, they are more difficult, require more work, and still don’t look nearly as good as the Colossus-based models. Also, since I don’t have any spare straight bases at the moment, I can’t put them on proper bases, so I’ve only painted the one model so far, as much to see how it would look as anything else. Expect more pics once I’ve got some complete stands done.

For the Thousand Sons Rubric Marines in my army, I had originally been going to just use Imperial Space Marine models painted in Thousand Sons colours. However, having seen a few conversions on EpiComms, and especially having been successful in converting my Obliterators, I decided to try converting some of these as well. Much as unnecessarily converting 6mm infantry might sound like lunacy, the job was actually very simple and only a little bit fiddly (less so than the paint job, anyway). I just cut out some small trapeizoids from a piece of card and glued them to some Space Marines’ heads. I vaguely considered trying to do some loincloths from card as well, but concluded that they were (a) totally unnecessary, (b) likely to be significantly more difficult than the headdresses, and (c) might well end up looking crap and spoiling a conversion that thus far I was rather pleased with. So I didn’t. Here they are, next to one of the two Rhinos that I painted in Thousand Sons colours:

The one thing I’m not certain about is the base. The Cult Marines upgrade for a Chaos Space Marine Retinue consists of four stands of the appropriate troop stands. I am keen to make that two stands of four and two of five, so as to represent two squads of nine (nine being Tzeentch’s sacred number). I originally decided to use the old-style square bases because I thought they would look less like something was missing if I left out the model in the middle of one. However, in general I prefer the look of the modern straight bases (other than for artillery, which square bases suit better), and despite actually having a larger surface area, they’re easier to fit into ruins and such, too. So I’m wondering whether to keep them as they are or to rebase these models on straight bases. And if so, how to do it; whether to clip the end off a base so there’s only room for four, or whether to leave a gap somewhere, or whether to try and fill the gap with some scenic detail, or whether to try to spread the models out across the base, and not stick to the slots. Or should I just leave them as they are? Does anyone have any suggestions?