#eclipse cavaliers

First time using colored primer went pretty well! Certainly saved me a lot of time and Mephiston Red paint

Angron is progressing! Since my last post I’ve primed him and most of his subassemblies. I’m painting him sort of in half, with his left arm and wing detached, as well as his bronze armor plating. I’m doing this so that I can get in and color the backsides of his wings properly.

This guy has been a big challenge so far. A model this large is both imposing and resource-intensive, and I’ve done literally no painting as of recent, so I’m likely not going to finish him for a long while, but I’m excited for when I eventually do.

Formerly known as Urayen’s Reavers, the Eclipse Cavaliers are a band of opportunistic Aeldari Corsairs who all seek one thing and one thing alone: profit

Moving on. As I mentioned previously, I started playing Kill Team this year, and I gotta say, KT fucking rocks! The rules are super approachable and the small scale of the game allows for much more focused and cinematic battles. It’s also a lot quicker, which makes it much easier to get pickup games in, which means I can actually play some 40k sometimes nowadays.

These xenos boys are known as the Eclipse Cavaliers. They’re a band of scumbag Corsairs and my squad of choice. I’ve written a lot of backstory for these boys so as to texture my games a bit more for myself, so I’m gonna put all that stuff in another post where I can talk about these characters in a bit more detail.

The 2nd Company is lead by the boisterous Captain Zaraf Gorfried Redfale. They specialize in the utilization of heavy war implements, such as Gravis armor, tanks, and artillery vehicles

Now that we’re onto more conceptual subject matter, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how the Thunderbearers actually function as a Chapter. Each Company of the Thunderbearers controls a massive warfleet—much larger than the average fleet of most Successor Chapters—and acts as a semi-autonomous fighting force in and of itself, with the ability to prosecute independent campaigns so long as they remain aligned and in accordance with the Chapter as a whole. The 1st Company is functionally the “core” of the Chapter, made up of the Chapter’s command fleet, veteran company, and portions of the 10th.

The 2nd Company is technically the first of the Chapter’s autonomous fighting forces, and they’re also the only Company for which I own a Captain (the big Gravis fucker who I show off pretty often). The 2nd Company’s culture can largely be sourced to that of a feudal desert world known as Manticore. As the 2nd Company makes up a good amount of the Chapter’s infantry regiments, I felt it necessary to give them their own heraldry.

The special heraldry on their armor pays respect to Manticore in a few different ways. First and foremost, the red armor is a visual homage to the cold, crimson dunes that cover Manticore, but secondarily, it is a holdover tradition that comes from Manticoran warrior culture, wherein it was standard practice to color one’s armor with any number of red pigments so as to camouflage themselves in the dunes. Over time, different colorations of red grew to signify different things, with the 2nd Company’s crimson and gold coming to represent wealth and nobility.

I think that having a squad or two with a splash of red will really make my Space Marines pop out a little bit, and will definitely add some variation into my annoyingly uniform army. I’m thinking of doing little streaks of red on a few of the vehicles, as well, which will make them stand out too.

Speaking of vehicles, the Thunderbearers have received some reinforcements!

This is a Ballistus Dreadnought that I got my hands on through a friend of mine who was selling his Astartes. I kitbashed him a little but tried not to overdo it with the baubles, since my Redemptor is a bit of a piece. Design-wise, I tried to make this a sort of “Primaris update” of one of my first models, Big Harold.

The Aurum Eternatus, one of the Chapter’s most sanctified relics, is a Venerable Dreadnought whose chassis contains the body of the previous fallen Chapter-Master

The thing that I like the most about the Venerable Dreadnought is the ornate look to it. It’s got a lot of trim and fancy panels everywhere and kind of looks like a church-mech.

This aesthetic choice is most noticeable in the lascannon, in my opinion. Combined with the gold trim, the cool indented archway designs on the side panel of the las sorta gives “Gothic castle wall.”

While I couldn’t really replicate the trim, I did use a bunch of bits from the Venerable Dreadnought kit to up the Gothic factor. There’s also a noticeable lack of purity seals on Big Harold, which was something that I absolutely had to remedy. There’s 7 seals! Now we’ve got a proper 7-times blessed Primaris-scale lascannon to snipe tanks with.

Harold has sort of fallen out of use in my lists recently because, uh, Venerable Dreadnoughts do not exist anymore. Awesome! The older Dreads just aren’t as good as Redemptors as well, so Harold has sort of retired to a more ritualistic position on the Chapter.

In his stead, though, we’ve got quite a few new additions to the army alongside our Ballistus. Not included here is another drop pod and a bunch of new infantry units.

Sternguard Veterans of the Thunderbearers 1st Company

Here’s one of ‘em! This is my first squad of Sternguard Veterans, but I’m in the process of building another. Like the Ballistus, these dudes are as of yet unnamed, but I like them quite a bit! To be critical, though, I think I overdid it with some of the bits, but I’m sure the silhouettes will look less obnoxious once they’re all painted and voluminous.

My favorite of the bunch is probably the Veteran Sergeant. His heroic pose and classic bits give “default Space Marine.” And the Veteran on the left is using a bit of a unique shoulder pad that may or may not be a cleansed and sanctified Chaos relic, which may or may not be a common practice in the Thunderbearers Reclusiam Cataegis.