Sunday, 19 October 2014

GW Reading "Create a Space Marine Chapter" competition

Games Workshop Reading's store birthday is coming up on 1st November and they're running a few events on the day, one of which is the good old Create A Space Marine Chapter competition. Simple idea: come up with a colour scheme, paint a Marine, write up a bit of background and present all it on the day. I'm not normally one for in-store competitions and the like but it occurred to me that this one could serve a nice little purpose for me.

You see, back in Third Edition when I started in the hobby I had a Chaos Space Marine army, a fallen Sanguinary chapter called the Blades Of Sanguinius. They looked, I will be frank, bloody terrible because I was nineteen, had no idea how to paint and had no patience. They wore pale red armour (Blood Red right over white undercoat, oh the days before base paints...) with Midnight Blue trim and not much else. They were technically Tzeentchian except I couldn't afford the metal models for the daemons and back then you couldn't give generic Chaos Marines the Mark of Tzeentch because it automatically turned them into Thousand Sons.

You know, every time I discuss the Third Edition Chaos Marine book I end up wondering why I have such immense nostalgia for it. I remember Chaos Lieutenants fondly, I liked that the rules actually allowed you to give your Chaos Lord a greasy sidekick.

Anyway, the thing with the Blades Of Sanguinius is I never really gave any thought to what they looked like as loyalists (except that they were red, being a Sanguinary chapter) so that's my pitch: design and enter the loyal Blades. I've got a good starting point in that they'll be mostly red, probably, and I've plenty of Death Company bits to make the model visually interesting. I just have to be careful not to make the colour scheme over-busy, which is the temptation and the trap of these things.

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