Adept Primaris Rebyka Darlayn

Psyker.
A strange word, is it not? So much power, so much potential, so much hate, so much fear, all wrapped in six letters. A fitting name, though, because part of it is silent and unseen. Just one letter, one little letter 'P'. There is so much about an actual psyker that remains unseen.
I am a Primaris Battle Psyker. I look thirty-five, which is a little more than a third of my real age, sidereal. Partly a conceit to vanity, for I am considered attractive. Partly pragmatism: an individual of my skill and potency cannot be allowed to die simply by the tyranny of age. I was born psychic. The Black Ships came for me when I was seven years old, standard. Since then, I have served His Divine Majesty as an adept of the Scholastica Psykana.

I am not like those poor shackled wretches, chained in their own filth, who are herded into battle in crude Wyrdvane covens. I pity them for their fate, but see the necessity of it. I have seen what seeks to enter the world through them, and what must be done to deny such creatures. Most of those poor, shuffling creatures may live painful lives, but most will reach the Emperor's Light. Regardless, I am a different order of being.  

I can summon lightning to blast the enemies of the Imperium to ashes. I can fill the foe's mind with nightmares and shadows so that they scarcely know how to point their weapons. I can restore balance to broken men and screen my own troops from unfriendly eyes. I have stood alongside legends. Ulyssiad Sagath knows my name, and I bear a token from Aegyptor Astagath. Why do I tell you this? Because I want you to understand who I am before you attempt to lie to me. You are going to die. Let us not pretend otherwise. You, Corporal Vaylin Weisser of the 885th Volscani Cataphracts, are a traitor and a heretic. You will be remembered as such. We are here to determine two things. The first is whether a footnote will be added saying that you offered all that you knew and accepted the justice of Commissar DeSarco, the lady standing behind you. The second is whether, in doing so, in offering me everything you know, there is a small chance that you may yet be redeemed and reach the Emperor's Light. If you do not give me everything I ask for and mean it, your soul will ignite in the warp seconds after it leaves your body. This is not my judgement. This is not even the judgement of His Divine Majesty. This is the choice before you now. Confess your sins, tell me every single thing you know about the archenemy's movements in the Rubicon Sector and have a chance at redemption. Defy me and face death and damnation. Shall we begin?

The boom of DeSarco's bolt pistol was deafening. Adept Darlayn did not flinch. She looked at the corpse of the Traitor Guardsman, his head exploded like a rotten fruit. DeSarco called out into the hallway, and a pair of grim faced Ophelian Guardsmen entered. Without a word, they hauled the corpse away. Darlayn carefully added some notes to her docket. 

"Did you get anything?" DeSarco asked quietly. 

Darlayn didn't look up. 

"Some basics of troop deployment. He had no idea where Eiterfex is. He'd never even seen the Plague Lord, truthfully."

DeSarco grunted with an entire lack of surprise. She looked at Darlayn sidelong. They had been friends a long time, but neither one of them ever lost sight of the fact that part of DeSarco's job was to keep an eye on Darlayn. DeSarco was good at picking up on Darlayn's subtle tells. After twenty five interrogations, the Primaris Battle Psyker's iron will could not quite contain her tiredness. 

"You need a break, Byka?" DeSarco asked quietly. 

Darlayn looked up, pride and determination in her eyes. After a moment, she sighed and nodded.

"Just a short one," she replied. 

DeSarco pulled up a chair and sat down. They sat in companionable silence for a while. Servitors trundled in and scrubbed the blood from the floor and the wide interrogation table. Slowly, Darlayn centred herself and refocused her mind. She allowed herself a moment of sorrow for the faint sounds she had heard in the echoes of DeSarco's pistol: the shrieks of the dead traitor as he immolated in the Sea of Souls, and the Neverborn ripped his essence to shreds. Evidently, he had not sought redemption with enough conviction. 

Will they ever learn, I wonder?  she thought to herself. Then she sighed and pushed the thought away. She called for the Guardsmen standing outside.

"Send in the next one," she said. 

Commissar Myranda DeSarco

My Ophelian Guardsmen, the 'Defenders of the Faith', are a singularly gloomy looking lot. I wanted the Commissar to stand out a bit. I've always thought that the Commissar is a nice feature of Guard armies, a standout figure in the sea of fatigues. Given that my Guard are quite customised, I thought I'd need to make extra effort.

I made a few decisions early on. First, the obvious choice was to give the Commissar a different skin tone to mark them out. Second, it should be the case that this Commissar should actually look more austere than my blingy Guardsmen. Thirdly, I wanted the Commissar to be a woman. For all its appalling practices, the Imperium doesn't seem to be misogynist, with men and women entering all branches of service except the Astartes and Sororitas. This was where I hit a bit of a snag.

There are plenty of female Commissar models out there, and almost all of them are almost offensively over-sexualised. I'm talking Commissars with miniskirts, Commissars with bondage gear. It says plenty of uncomplimentary things about hobbyists that the sculptors think this approach is a winner - and that they're at lest partially right. It irritates the living heck out of me because a Commissar is a Commissar first and a man or woman second.

Thankfully, the ever-excellent Brother Vinni came to my rescue. This lady Commissar isn't entirely perfect - she's exceedingly busty, for example. But her outfit looks quite sensible, and whilst her boots are a little silly they can easily be hidden.

Hopefully in the future we'll see something like this from GW. For a long time, that company had a very real misogyny problem: when I worked there in 05-06, there was a policy for paternity leave, but not for maternity leave. I heard senior managers making comments which made me quietly leave the room, and I have a friend who has had some shocking things said and done to her in her decade working there. But the good news is that they seem to have got their act together on this. We see a lot more representation of women in the model range. Moreover, not every female model is grossly oversexualised. I hope that one day we'll see female Guard.

In the meantime, we have companies like Brother Vinni!

Let's forge a narrative part 2

Part 1 of my story was well received, so here's part 2. Will Belisarius Cawl and Master Pustolion be able to carry their diabolical plan, or will Inquisitor Horn be able to foil them? 

Are you ready to stand with the righteous?

First things first: I am actually a stalwart defender of Cadian models. I fell in love with them when they first came out in 2003, and to this day I will lecture people tediously about how they're still pretty good. But the thing is... I just can't. When 8th edition pulled me back to the 40k universe, I craved the new Death Guard, but I also wanted to return to my beloved Imperial Guard too. But I've painted two Cadians armies. I simply couldn't face more of them.

There was another reason, too: I'm an almost pathological converter, and I wanted to build a Guard army which explored the weird and wonderful imagery of 40k. A Blanchian army, as it were. I wanted them to look arcane, dangerous professional and zealous, futuristic an medieval, the very sum of the mad contradictions are the heart of the 40k universe.

After a few ideas, I hit on what I wanted. The legs come from Empire Greatswords, the torsos are from Cadians (I can stomach painting the torsos) and the arms and weapons are from Scions (Stormtroopers). Now, the Scion armour has disturbingly thorny piping which looks unsettlingly chaos-y, so I trimmed it down accordingly.

I deliberately chose heads that had a stern, patrician aspect to them, mostly from Empire kits. These are very serious soldiers who take their duty in a fallen galaxy with the upmost level of care.

Assorted other bits came from kits as various as Skaven Plague Monks, Empire Knights and Adeptus Custodes. The key was to find bits which gave off that overt religiosity, balancing it with components which emphasise military efficiency.

There's no doubt that this army will take... a while. But these days, I'm less interested in getting projects done quickly as I am doing them in a way that I'm happy with.

The heavy weapon teams are fun. I had this idea of repentant sinners hefting the guns into place, with the Guardsmen actually taking over when the important bit happens. I wanted said penitents to be hunched from years of self-flagellation and hard work, so I used Skaven Clanrat bodies with Empire Flagellant heads.

I've been tracking down the weird old Inquiitorial henchmen, and plan to add those in here and there. Before long, the Imperial Guard will march into battle accompanied by the sound of hymns and the smell of incense..

The Hammer twisted

This squadron of Leman Russ Battle Tanks is actually a project I did in 2012-13. At that time, after what felt like several centuries of loyalty to the Emperor, I was just beginning to get into this whole heresy business. Now, in recent times I've been hooked on the new Death Guard because... well, have you seen those models? They are the awesomeness. But in general terms, I find the concept of mortals falling to Chaos even more interesting. Astartes tend to fall because of hubris or despair or jealousy or a host of other suitably classical tragedies. But mortal men and women... they might fall for much more relatable reasons. They could be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They might have seen their friends sacrificed on the altar of the Imperium's ruthless pragmatism. They might simply not know what they're getting into. This is an aspect I find very scary and compelling, because it mirrors the twists in our own lives. I'm doing reasonably well for myself these days, but I've seen the other side. I've never felt angrier than the time I was laid off by my employer of six years despite being recognised as a very effective worker, just so that my job could be reassigned to some poor guy in Scarborough who was shoved into it with too much pressure and too little prep time. I raged at the hypocrisy and injustice. In 2007, for a couple of reasons I was forced to face the sobering reality that I simply wasn't as good at some things as I thought I was. At that time, I felt a really wrenching despair. Look, these aren't special. I'm not trying to claim my life has been particularly tough, we've all experienced these things. And in those moments, when the attractive falsehoods and over-simplifications we're often asked to believe in are exposed... you can well see the appeal of the Dark Gods of Chaos, of a self-destructive middle-finger to the universe. And that the thing about Chaos: it's a predator. It's your worse angels. It's the voice which says that one drink won't hurt. Chaos is the side of us that waits for us to be in a bad place, when its whispering suddenly seems to make sense.

The idea for this Traitor Regiment is that they turned on the Imperium after some harsh treatment, buoyed by the idea of a new way of life. All the promises have worn off, they're missing regular supply lines and despair is creeping upon them. They're well on their way to embracing Nurgle - and the Leman Russes, the symbol of Imperial might, have fallen furthest, possessing by morose and snarling daemons. 

I didn't want to stick garden rails on them, and I actually wanted the conversion to be minimal: I wanted the overall appearance of the Russ to be very similar, so as to make it stand out as even more striking among a horde of degenerate traitors. The conversions I made were minimal, as you can see. 

 The main thing I wanted to do was the bloody writing on the hull. At first I had this idea that as they drift into madness, the Guardsmen smear inane graffiti on the tanks. But then I thought it would be quite nice if the writing was actually blood oozing out of the hull itself - the possessing daemon's way of  communicating with both the ground troops and the enemy. I had this vision of them lumbering across the field after a battle, snuffling up corpses with those long cannon barrels, and then using the bodies to fuel themselves - and the blood as ink for their messages.

I used Blood for the Blood God to freehand on the messages. They're universally aggressive, threatening and foul mouthed - the daemon is not a pleasant conversationalist.

Now, this was during the sixth edition, when a flipped wreck was still a possibility. This gave me the idea that each of the tanks would have a final, venomous message streaked across the bottom - a threat or insult or promise from the departing daemon. It was pretty funny watching people jump in surprise when one of the tanks was wrecked!