INTRO
Last year I read ‘A Thousand Sons’ and they’re by far the most interesting Space Marine legion ever. Of course I was already interested in them thanks to the Horus Heresy Artbooks so when I brought it I already knew a bit about the Thousands Son interesting background and suspected that I would want to build an army of them after reading it. As expected I started work on a Scarab Occult army sortly after finishing the book.
WHO ARE THE SCARAB OCCULT
For those of you who haven’t read the book the Scarab Occult were the Thousand Sons veteran psykers and I believe made up the entire first company. It consisted of several cults, each specialising in a unique use of psychic sorcerery…
The Corvidae - Able to see the future and warn the brothers of threats in the middle of a fight.
The Pyrae - Skilled Pyrokinetics able to generate and control fire. Shields projectiles you name it and control robots.
The Pavoni - Able to manipulate body chemisty; boil blood, evaporate oxygen in the lungs. Disturbing stuff.
The Athanaeans - Powerful telepaths used for reading enemy squad leaders minds and communicate to their brothers.
The Raptora - Telekines that can offensively hurl things at enemies or attack them directly or defensibly generate ’kine shields’ powerful invisible barriers.
Luckily at the time the two best releases required for such a project came out Codex: Grey Knights an army of psychic Astartes and Tomb Kings with some nice bitz to use. I’m also keen to build an army with a small amount of models after completing 64 infantry and 19 tanks for my last project. Lugging that stuff up a hill to my gaming club ain't fun lol.
UNIT CONCEPTS SO FAR!
Magnus The Red
I considered including the Primarch at first using Lord Draigo but then thought how unpractical it was as Magnus destroyed 3 xenos titans in the book by himself, so unless I was going to use count as stats from a titan he wasn’t going to be in the army.
Little Magnus
So I decided to create a captain nicknamed 'little Magnus' due to his resemblance to the Primarch similar to little Horus of the Luna Wolves/Sons Of Horus. I then found the prefect model…
True I won’t be able to use it in GW stores but I think he’d make a great Draigo counts as with storm shield in one hand. I’m also debating if I should attempt to green stuff some more hair on him?
One Of The Captains
I plan to convert one of the Thousand Sons captains from the book, not Ahriman thou as everyone does him and I think there are much better ones to choose from.
Interceptors
I been considering the idea of using artificer armoured marine as ‘counts as’ terminators for a while as marines are always spoken of in the 40k fiction of being able to take down hold squads of infantry and having an small army of elite dramatically posed marines was tempting.
Of course as you can see from these three I plan to model every warrior to look like a hardened veteran, attached wargear and robes, the iron armour should represent artificer armour very well and I've also modelled a personal teleporter on the backpack. Thou storm bolters would be represented by magical bolts with the heavier weapons being modelled as powerful spells being cast.
However after asking around on forums about it was decided that they looked too much like interceptors and would be confusing. So these guys will be used as my interceptors.
Terminators
So given on how my artificer armour idea wasn’t going to work I decided to focus on converting terminator armour, I had already come up with some ideas on how I could do it with the legs being the only problem then I saw the micro art studio legs and everything fitted into place.
I also used a pair of chapterhouse shoulder pads I had ordered during a previous project out of curiosity and the Scibor Scarab Shield to replace the storm bolter plus a few other bits. I went with the power armoured helm because I prefer it to the angular terminator version.
I've also decided to scrap the invisible magic bolts for actual weapons so I’ve brought several of the SM commander’s storm bolter which was the easiest to convert. However rather than trying to remove the awkward mould line on the top detail I got rid of it and was going to replace it with a bolter sight from the tactical box set, but instead I made my own sights using the parts of the interceptor teleporter packs instead.
My favourite squad member is the hammer user, I love seeing thunder hammers in Dawn Of War and Space Marine as you really feel the impacts. So I decided to copy the animation when the force commander raises it in the air then brings it down on an enemy from DOW.
Finally there’s the reaper Autocannon which will represent my Psycannons, I got rid of the skull and added a eagles wing to the side to make it less chaos themed, I also swapped a halberd to the left hand.
I’m looking forward to seeing one of my squads charge for the first time as they completely dwarf standard models, just look at their size compared to the black reach marine. The dreadnoughts will be quite big as well so this will be an army of giants!
Dreadnoughts
It took a while but I final got a hold of a pair of relic contemptors and after a bit of work the first one was completed.
Aside the basic bits such as putting a scarab over the Aquila and a nice head crest on the helmet I converted the heavy bolters to Autocannons. I shorted down the IG Heavy weapon team Autocannons because I felt they would have looked odd if I had kept them at their original length.
Another edition was 2 strong magnets to make the arms exchangeable, now they weren’t wide enough so I brought some plastic tubing the same width as the arms to put them in and thanks to the Dread‘s size this hasn‘t effected the model too much.
I'll talk about the specialised boltgun that the interceptor has in my next post.
& MUCH MORE
Now I know that people using the Grey Knight codex for Pre-Heresy Thousand Sons is common. But I feel one of the biggest benefits to the codex is it’s ability to allow me to field the other forces of Prospero alongside the thousand sons. Will get to each of them later in the log but for now here’s a quick recap.
Warrior henchmen allow me to field an attachment of Prospero Spire Guard with a general representing Coteaz.
The Legio Cybernetica robotic units can be represented by basic dreadnought and paladins.
& the Thousand Sons Hidden One Operatives can be represented by assassins and inquisitors.
LAST BUT NOT LEAST
Due to GW’s attitude towards the hobby side of their business, and continuing price rise I’ve decided to make this army my last, but with so much potential I feel it will be my best project ever.
Anyway I look forward to hearing your feedback on the current and future conversions for this project.
