Night Lords Update.

Well...after a long, unannounced and unplanned hiatus I'm coming back.  I have nothing to say to excuse such a long time without update so I won't even try.  At best I can apologize to our readers; I'm sorry for casting aside your continued support over the years and walking away from the blog for the past few weeks.  Thank you for reading, commenting, and contributing to this community in the past, present and future.

SPOILER ALERT: Just as a fair warning, there are some book spoilers in the explanation of my progress.



With that, I'm back. Here is some update work on what I've been doing and simply not blogging about;  My Night Lords project.  Again to remind the readers I've read Soul Hunter and Blood Reaver and listened to Thorne of Lies by Aaron Dembski-Bowden (Congratulations to you, sir) and for the first time in my life I understand why my wife is always excited when a new book from one of her favorite authors is coming out soon because may of 2012 cannot get her soon enough for his next book Void Stalker.

So with that background aside here's the hobby update.  This is the first foot squad I'll be doing.  They're not complete yet and I still have to finish their bases and the lightning on the guys (which is painstaking but totally worth it).  I left the basic troops in their pre heresy armor.  I used the MKII armor but upon reflection would have liked the MKV.  I was pretty torn and have justified myself by saying that I like the idea that they haven't been updated in a very very very long time.  For the dying Company that Dembski writes about they haven't and since they're the inspiration, MKII was and really still is my hearts desire.

I kept the iconography of the night lords as well as the imperium off of them for two reasons.  First, I didn't have any shoulders and didn't really feel like greenstuffing them up. Second, these are going to be my counts as plague marines.

I want to stick to Dembski's image of the Company and they hate the ruinous powers.  Unlike most Chaos Legions this Company is torn because though they have renounced and cast away the false god of the corpse emperor, they have just as much hatred for the ruinous powers.  I want that to stay as part of my Legion.

Instead of being rottened and Nurge worshiping, my Plague Marines will be composed completely of Marines who have taken the Sinner's Oath.  In the Blood Reaver Uza, a member of Talos' Claw, has basically become a berzerker.  Thought this is acceptable (and Dembski uses this as comic relief even as early as Soul Hunter) the Claw keeps him (at a distance) and over time consider him a burden but still a brother (which I always thought they meant brother as in we both belong to the Masons, so we're brothers, but after reading a bunch of 40k books during my hiatus from blogging, I've realized they mean brother from the same mother..well..father in a space marine's case).  For reasons I won't spoil too much, Uza has to take the Sinner's Oath.  Its old school and not many of the Night Lord's companies use it, but my company will have a lot of them.  Having a lot of them is only thing I don't like about this fluff explaining my plague marines but another Night Lord army took the idea of using ghosts of dead Night Lords.

So the Sinner's Oath is a delayed death sentence.  They paint their hands red and have sworn to die for the legion, even more so than a normal marine who understands there is no retirement package in this army.  So there are the Plague Marines;  FNP and extra toughness due to their fanaticism. 

I made these bases because I'm not really impressed with a lot of what I'm seeing in the world as far as custom bases go.  Sure they have bases comprised entirely of skulls which is cool, but its old and busted.  I made ten different ones and they all do have skulls on them but I wanted to have more of the idea of discarded skulls.  Also, I wanted to make it look like a cave floor. Night Lords, Bats, Bat wings on their icon, batman lives in a cave, night lords live in caves with skulls.  That was my thought process....COCAINE FOR THE COCAINE THRONE!

Any how, there they are.  I'll be doing a post on custom bases in the next few days and I'll have a shot of each of the bases but they're mostly stalagmites and skulls; perfect for every home cave decorator's needs.  I put the grass on there because I didn't want to go full cave and I like how they turned out and they'll give more character to my army than just some slate rocks and cork board would.

  I also really like the busted space marine helmet with skull in it look. I put them on a few of the bases. That'll go up on the in-depth look at my bases as well.  They're super easy to make and I'll show you guys how.  Keep an eye out!

After I got really bored with doing lightning effect I wanted to put together some jump marines.  For a long time I wanted to do a Blood Angels jump infantry army and now I'm going to.  OST chastised me for turning back to the corpse god's codex but I'll still stick to chaos appearance.  

These are made up of the berzerker box.  I took the skull faced helmets and clipped the bunny ears to use for the basic troops for the terror factor the Night Lords would bring.  

Then I used only the running legs to give them all a great motion.  I used only the skull shoulders because the skull shoulders are flippin sweet looking.  

I also green stuffed some Night Lords shoulders for a few of them just to tie them in.  Making the Night Lords shoulders was actually pretty easy.  Many of the chaos shoulders have a tiny skull in the middle and just start with that and add wings.  Sure its not the horned skull in the icon, but whatever, that a really minuet detail, even for me.  And obviously, these are all sporting the winged backpack from the possessed box.

I removed all the Khorne iconography from the chest, guns, belt, anywhere it was.  I like the running body and dual weapons but I wasn't looking to make Khorne Berzerkers.  Night Lords have no allegiance to a particular chaos god and are at best, undivided.

For the melta gunners I used the iron warriors melta gun because that open mouthed skull is just awesomely awesome without being crazy chaos.  I'd use that melta gun even if this was a codex marine army just because its thats cool looking.  For the helm I tried to set them apart a little by using a head from the venerable dreadnought kit.  I'm a big fan of this helmet and was happy to use it.

Lastly for the champion I green stuffed a chest piece from out of the MKVIII armor that comes in a tactical marine box, got rid of the eagle and replaced it with a bat wing spread and a little skull in the middle.  Then I used the combi-melta from the iron warriors upgrade kit.  I had to switch hands with it so that I could use the hand from the Talos kit as a powerfist.  Lastly, that is the helm from the iron warriors kit.  When I first saw it in OST's bit box, I said "Oh wow, that's one of those cool black templar heads!"  He chuckled and with a hint of disdain said "No, we just all (local evo players) think that around here because there was that templar army that every guy in it had that helmet.  Its iron warriors."  This is going to be my small effort to bring that helm back in line locally with chaos.