Legio Fureans

A single maniple Legio in 12 days…

Why I do this to myself, often, is not so much a mystery as a time-honoured tradition of self-flagelation and honest-to-badness testing of my own ability to remain (broadly) sane.

As was the case with my Legio Infernus project, an event was looming – this time the much-anticipated Defence of Abbona, which will be hosted by the Bristol Gaming Collective at the end of the week.

The force sizes required are 1500 and 1750 – neither of which ‘work’ for my still-new Legio Infernus force. I had playtested them at this level – often – and found they truly come into their own (when handled by me) in 2000 games.

So, once again having to decide on using any of the Mortis force or the meme-y Infernus Ignis force, but at a size I already know to not really ‘work’, I consulted my WIP boxes*.

Of all the projects, I shortlisted those for which I already had in place all of the relevant models and weapons etc and further shortlisted based on those for which I had at least built a minimum of half of the requisite force. This provided me with two options:

Legio Solaria – Warhounds Galore and some Warlords – built and some sprayed, half of which even have some base colours paint on

Legio Fureans – Full Corsair maniple, skeletons built and sprayed Leadbelcher

As it later transpired, the Goonhammer Open had had a Loyalist ticket become available and so I could have attended that most holy-of-holies, had I opted for Solaria. Whilst I am desperate to attend a Goonhamer event, the additional narrative elements and campaign rules carrying over between matches were a little too intimidating for me.

And so, I plumped for the savagely-beautiful beautiful savages of the Hamardu, the Tiger’s Eyes: Legio Fureans.

I wanted to theme this force, similar to how my Infernus are themed to show the beginning of the descent into daemonic corruption and the Mortis are pointedly not tarnished – they stand as they did before the words ‘Loyalist’ or ‘Traitor’ were recognisable terms of allegiance.

Naming the titans, I wanted a language that was alien and complex, that sounded beautiful and mellifluous when spoken by a native but grating and dissonant when mispronounced by the ignorant. I wanted my Wife’s native tongue, Irish.

I set about finding terms online and having her provide pronunciation/correction for them until I had 5 that ‘fit’ – naming is half of the game as no-one says, ever. Once the names were settled upon, it was all a simple downhill matter of ‘just’ painting up 5 Reavers in less than 2 weeks in a scheme I had never done whilst remaining stubbornly adherent in my refusal to unpack and learn how to use an airbrush. Simples *meep*.

I used various aftermarket (3rd Party) parts on the Corsair maniple. BattleBling Rubble Claw feet (expensive at £6 a titan but I really, really hate regular titan tootsies), BattleBling rotary guns (gatling cannon), BattleBling Skeletal Helm for the Princeps, BattleBling missiles for the carapace Warp Missiles and VMB, GrimDarkTerrain’s Volcano cannon and 3 some of the base toppers and a hybrid helm made of several Reaver head parts spliced together – the one with the tusks. This made this a pretty expensive project as things go – c£200 for the Reavers, £30 for the feet, c£40 for the guns, c£15 or thereabouts for the top guns and however much the files and resin cost me – which is something I refuse to ever factor in for fear of facing the reality that printing my own might not be as cheap as I like to believe it is.

I don’t often list things out and tally the pricings as above, if for no other reason than the amount of hours of enjoyment I get from each project far outstrips any other hobby/interest/habit I have had over the years for £/hours ratios – but I was curious for this maniple as it was the only one I was building with a vague attempt at being competitive. On this point, this Corsair maniple was originally built with the intent of being a Legio Krytos meme-y maniple with 5x Quake missiles, ah well, another time. I had the decals for both.

Painting

For the first time with Titanicus, I had actually approached this project with something resembling planning: I left the armour plates on sprues.

The skeletons were sprayed silver and washed with a nuln oil/agrax earthshade/medium mix and, when dry, selectively washed in areas with either nuln or agrax as whim decided. A soft drybrush of silver over the top was all they were getting for now – I’m on a tight schedule!

The armour plates were sprayed (badly, as it turned out) with Wraithbone. 2 coats of Imperial Fist contrast on the plates followed by 4-5 coats of Casandora Yellow shade – midway through these shades, the trim is picked out with Black Legion contrast.

An attempt was made to use the Anarchy Models flame stencil – but I can personally attest that without using an airbrush, this can (did) go badly. Badly enough that the plate had to be pulled and my spare carapace plate, which had been receiving the same colours and washes for just such an eventuality, was used to replace it. I used the stencil and a pencil to dial in the flames as much as I could and then VERY carefully lined this with Black Legion contrast. I counter-lined the black with Corax White, which looked pretty cool, and then brought that back to the yellow with Imperial Fist then Casadora Yellow. It doesn’t match… but I’m not hating it… yet.

As I had run out of silver spray (typical) and the local GWs was suffering another shortage, I had to manually prime several weapons. This felt barbaric and I needed a Lion bar as a reward. I chose a warm and dark pink for the laser glows (similar to chaos plasma/laser weapons as depicted in the Dawn of War series) as it was very far from the yellow/orange and black the titans provided. Eye glows were going to be a blue-green (as I used on my Infernus plasma weapons) and I think I’m going to try a white-hot blue for the volcano cannon.

I’ve managed to secure myself a test game – having never played as/against Fureans before and not having played as/against a Corsair before either, what could go wrong?

The Maniple currently looks as below – updates to follow.

UPDATE

So, progress has been pretty dire – I managed to get sick this week and have basically lost 3 days, it is going to be VERY tight to get this maniple to any sort of decent position for the event on Sunday.

What I did manage to do, was to get in a practice game against Alex’s Legio Astorum. I’ll have to start taking pictures of games I play, in the event I manage to actually document any battle reports in the future. It was an interesting game, not least because Alex had randomly decided to run a Dominus maniple – something usually considered pretty low-tier for competitiveness BUT they are singularly amazing at swallowing dozens of low-strength shots… like one finds in a budget Corsair maniple! It was a tight early game and the final turns saw a fantastic series of events sparked off by an Astorum shot missing, scattering onto a ‘Laid Low’ Astorum Reaver which proceeded to fall onto 2 of my Reavers, one of which died and fell on his (now damaged) compadre. Mayhem. Narrow victory to Fureans.

I had managed to get one Reaver’s trim silvered and I got the first pass at all of the Reavers’ flames and so *drum roll*:

So, there should be one final painting update which I will aim to deliver Saturday night – following which, the next blog should ideally be covering the Defence of Abbona event in Bristol.

Final Update

It is 23:11 on Saturday. About 6 hours before my alarm goes off to wake me so I can get set to drive to Bristol. I’ve done as well as I could, given the circumstances, but as always there are so many skipped steps and areas left for me to do. Still, table ready was the aim and table ready they are: