Anyway, todays thing is spurred on by Warpstone's question: What should be in a Sons of Malice army?
Rather than an extended comment on Wot I Did, I thought I'd do a bit here, show the space wolves version I sent to Crusade, and so on. My quick answer is whatever the hell you want! I'm turning the Sons of Malice into the Ultimate Marine Army: any configuration, any unit, any codex.
While this may rub some people on t'internet at the moment, I'm of the opinion (and agreed with by everyone I've talked to or played at The Club) that as long as it's WYSIWYG, with a bit of modelling imagination on my part, I can justify almost any army configuration with minimum application of the Fluff Crowbar. For example; my Kathal's Hunt that I took to Cut'n'Thrust's Crusade tournament at the end of January:
It's a Space Wolves codex army, led by Logan Grimnar's soul twin Kathal, the current Chapter Master of the Sons of Malice. Their recruiting grounds were a barbaric backwater planet where life is hard, and the men are a little... Canabalistic.
I say 'were' because some self important numpty decided people shouldn't eat each other, exiled the Sons of Malice and genocided the planet. As hopefully you can see, the army is adopting the buddy system, each unit having a CML terminator armoured buddy. Tactically sound for any chapter!
The guys with the trophy racks are Nori and Dori, the Doomed (it's in The Labyrinth - look it up) and are honoured guys who made it through the trial - hard enough to take anything on their Lonesome.
Also in the book, you'll find giant gribblies that are mutated (space radiation, warp, whatever) failures in the Trial, and with a little electroprod application, I'm sure you could get them to carry other Doomed into battle. With this in mind Balin and Dwalin are mounted on things that aren't Thunderwolves, but beasts that are of similar size and suitably nasty. In my opinion, thats about as ridiculous as Space Marines riding giant wolves. I mean - come on!
I've also painted 5 objectives that you probably can't see too well. Sons of Malice go around Hunting (see what I did there?) slaves for a later grizzly feast. So we've got a Kroot, Ultramarine (first and last time I'll ever paint one), Firewarrior, Ork, and random chaossy dude I had nocking around, all in chains awaiting their fate.
Unfortunatly I haven't got pictures of the Blood Angles version, but as you may have noticed, most of the marines are of the assault variety and have magnetised backpacks. Yes, thats alot of magnets! So all the marines go back to the thunderhawk (no, I'm not going to buy one) and change into their jump packs. The terminators can dump their various chainfists and cyclones, and pick up a thunderhammer and stormshield (again, magnets). Then all we need is some veterans/honourguard, so I've used raptors to represent the best of the best flying dudes.
For the Chaos version (in planning), I can use all the marines (as they're all armed with boltgun, bolt pistol and chainsword, right?), terminators and raptors. For the HQ I can go terminator lord, jump pack sorcerer (they're just the same as Librarians and Rune priests in the end), or with Princes... Now on one hand this is an idea I'm particularly proud of.
In my opinion, Sons of Malice are all about Black Vs White, Good Vs Bad, and they're sitting right in the middle, no grey, just survival. So their Princes or 'avatars' of this can be seen (by me anyway) as:
Now, the only downside as miniatures is that they're not GW! Damn you GW! But I think they're awesome mini's, and will be able to use them in friendly games at least. Oh, and I was weak.
Aaaanyway, what I'm getting at here is that I'm building a Space Marine army that with the addition of unique units (thunderwolves, veterans JPs, Deamon princes) and the liberal application of magnets, can be legally and reasonably fluffily played with.
A marine, after all, is a marine. A rhino is a rhino, and a terminator is a terminator. Until they do a Codex: Sons of Malice, I can play them as I see fit. Now I've just got to win some games!
