"I felt his anger crash into the room like a bow wave before I ever saw the man himself. Lords Militant, Inquisitors and the Exectuor Fetial of Legio Agricola himself blanched. I felt a stab of fear, and then a kind of directionless horror. I had grown up on legends of the Astartes. On the one occasion I had met one, Brother Sergeant Sulbord of the White Consuls, I had seen the angelic being of purity and honour I had expected. But this... Sagath was a savage warlord in snarling power plate, a barbarian king with grisly trophies clanking from his belt. As if he relished alienation, he told us he cared not for honour or protocol. He was there to win. He was there to butcher the enemy and burn their cities down. And Emperor save me, I believed him."
- Lord Commissar Fadel Ibn Bashar
"Blood for the Emperor! Skulls for the Golden Throne!"
- Battlecry of the Brass Reapers
The Brass Reapers were born into darkness. Founded barely 900 years ago, the desperate struggles of the dark millennium are all that this grim Chapter has ever known. They measure their worth not in honour nor great heroism but by the number of enemies destroyed, the number of threats extinguished. They barely co-operate with other Imperial forces, preferring to smash into the enemy far away from support and pull the heart from the foe. The vast majority of Imperial commanders who have encountered the Brass Reapers maintain a policy of monitoring these volatile Astartes almost as much as the enemy's movements.
Ulyssiad Sagath is the eighth Chapter Master of the Brass Reapers, and he epitomises their brutal, cynical approach to warfare. His scarred power armour and battle-torn flesh tell of three hundred years relentlessly making war. Sagath is more canny than he appears, a revelation which his allies find almost as terrible as his enemies: the Holy Sea of the Quintus Sector actually declared Sagath a heretic after he destroyed a holy templum complex in order to rob a Death Guard warband of their entrenched positions. Sagath shrugged when the complaint was raised.
"Build a new one," he was heard to say, "our enemies are dead."
Ultimately, neither the Inquisitition nor the Ministorum's Segmentum Diocese Command would ratify the pleas of the local Ecclesiarchs. Nobody particularly wanted to see what would happen if the Brass Reapers were driven over the edge. And so Sagath continues to wage a ruthless, almost unhinged war among the stars, at arm's length from his allies and almost as feral as the creatures he hunts...
You know when you get one of those ideas that won't go away? The Brass Reapers are like that. One of the main problems I have with loyalist Marine models is that there's no sense of threat about them. For massive transhuman warriors designed specifically to be the thing which nothing could answer, they often suffer from being static fellows wearing big slippers. I wanted to do something... scarier.
Firstly, Sagath's base is a bit built up to give him a little extra height. now, I wanted a sense of motion as well as size. The body is actually the power fist wielding Chosen Chaos Space Marine champion from Dark Vengeance. He's got a good sense of foreward motion and he's pretty solid in the trunk. First things first, I removed all of the chaos markings and overly pointy bits on the banding. Now, there was originally a chaos starburst on the loin cloth/tabard at the front. I was about to remove the chains it hung on when I had the idea of replacing it with an Imperial symbol. So I got a small plastic aquila (can't remember where from) and added that. I added purity seals here and there to ensure that the right idea came across. I replaced the power fist with a sword from the Raptors kit, with all the spikes filed off Probably the hardest part was sawing out the front of his chest and replacing it with a Space Marine chestplate. I wanted to give him both more mass and a sense of brutish danger, so I attached skulls hanging from chains to his belt. The chains binding his weapons to himself are budget jeweller's chain which you can get from Ebay from no more than £1-2. Finally - and with a bit of sawing - I added a spare Dark Elves Beastmaster cloak to a standard power pack and put that on his back. I finished the piece with the scowling, scarred bald head from the Empire Greatswords kit - one of my favourite components.
So there he is. A bit of work, but pretty scary I think!
