Ultramarines 4th Company Support, 2nd Land Speeder Squadron, "The Iron Fingertips"
One of my happiest achievements with these tiny speeders was the Roman numeral transfers from one to five to denote each speeder's place in the squadron. |
Tales of 40K collecting, modeling, and painting ... and maybe comics and a few other things thrown in from time to time
One of my happiest achievements with these tiny speeders was the Roman numeral transfers from one to five to denote each speeder's place in the squadron. |
Since ten marines used to cost more than 350 points in second edition, the banner per combat squad at least made them look a little larger than life on the battlefield. |
"He almost took my head off the first time he unsheathed that damned-fool giant sword of his in the narrow corridor of Stack Nineteen. The orbital station chief had warned me that old Jorus could act with the impulses of a man a quarter of his age, but I always assumed an Inquisitor would have been more... restrained in his choice of actions. As soon as we arrived at the meet, I had a suspicion something wasn’t quite, ah, completely human about Karde and his men. Fast as that realization had dawned on me the old man was moving even faster and if my ears hadn’t caught the hum of that power sword igniting I’d be several inches shorter and just as deceased as Karde and his men were a few seconds later. Although Jorus had told the planetary governor he was on the trail of dangerous xenos technology being sold on the black market, he was actually masking his true purpose, unsure of how far the influence of the conspiracy reached. What Inquisitor Ryloth had actually been seeking was sprayed all over the nearest bulkheads when he cut through Karde’s gang, blood that even in the dim light of the hallway we could see had too much purple in it to be the right color for a man.
His superiors at the Ordo Xenos needed visible confirmation of what his investigation of the last few months had led him to: Refinery Stack Nineteen and its surrounding hab blocks had been the sight of a growing xenos infestation for some time. Before the sanitation techs had arrived to scrub the hallway, our squad had already been given orders to accompany Jorus and a regiment from the PDF to lock down all the access in and out of the western rim of the station. The surprises kept on coming that day, it turned out Ryloth had more than a score of Astartes hidden away on the naval cruiser that had brought him to the station. Once the combined forces of the Arbites and PDF had sealed off Stacks Fifteen to Twenty-One, he strode in with those armoured giants in a suit of his own jet black power armor to cleanse all those infected by the genestealer cult. Don’t even get me started on that ridiculously huge banner he wore while leading the sons of the emperor into battle…”
This week's entry is a vintage Dark Angels gem from their first official supplement codex that I scanned recently for a fellow participant in the 2nd Ed Army Challenge. If you haven't checked out the first month's post, follow the link and check out some amazing looking classic GW miniatures. Based on my success with printing the banner for my Inquisitor, in the near future I may try and use those the character banners above for my Deathwing Chaplain and Librarian. There seems to be no end to Dark Angels players out there so hopefully this is useful for someone who may want to have a go at old school back banners.
I've got to find a way to include that crazy ass early Ravenwing banner in my Dark Angels army somewhere... |
My recent foray into the Inquisitional Conclave led to me discovering I had an untapped resource on my bookshelf that may be helpful for the hobby community at large. For many years I have owned an incomplete copy of the Rogue Trader Chapter Approved which was fun for the lore contained in the pages that were complete, but I had always seen it as a disappointment overall because all of the nascent Imperial army lists that should have been in there were missing due to GW's infamous problems with bindings falling apart on their early sourcebooks. While scanning in some pages as part of my ongoing Codex Titanicus entries I decided to take another flip through that book to see if there was anything worth scanning since thanks to the aforementioned binding issues there were many loose pages ripe for scanning within. Much to my delight I found that not only was the full color catalogue at the back complete, the bottom of every page contained at least five or six banners for the factions that existed in the early Rogue Trader era. I was especially excited to find an Inquisitors banner that was perfect for my conclave entry but the wealth of banners went on for pages and I know from my own internet searches that sometimes finding reliable quality scans of these old resources can be difficult.