This project is foremost amongst my others, because it's actually met success rather than the shelf and continues to hold my interest. The army was inspired by my experiences at the first two Age of the Emperor weekends and somewhat kick-started by a brief daemon 'Tale of' project at my club. Back then, I had toyed with the idea of a Soul Forge themed army, as hinted in the Codex Daemons book. I wanted to explore the concept or robotic daemons and possessed constructs and later introducing some aspects of the Dark Mechanicus.
The idea of semi-robotic daemons lead to the first (now completed) squad, my Bloodletters. They sought to be gifted robotic bodies to inhabit in the mortal plain in order to remain tangible longer, or indefinitely. I used Necron parts to replace various Bloodletter parts, but never entirely. The first Bloodletter received a wholly reconstructed leg to suit the Bloodletter's bone structure, but the time involved to repeat this threw me a little. I also felt that the idea of stealing and scavenging robotic parts wasn't best portayed by them being a perfect match for the daemon's form. Having a mix-mash or mis-shapen parts seemed to work better.
The second venture into the robo-daemon world was inspired by reading Mechanicum. There's a mention of 'Feral Servitors' attacking a refinery and it really grabbed my attention. I liked the concept of lobotomised servitors reverting to their primal nature, perhaps influenced by daemon or machine to malevolent ends. I sought to get hold of every servitor model available, several times!
Daemons aside, the first true Mechanicum model I built was the Magos. A very fun conversio to undertake, incorporating a lot of components and some sculpting. I based this piece, like many others, on artwork from Colected Visions. I quite often take the book to bed to generate ideas for other models.
A lot of time went by without giving much attention to the army. I toyed with various forms for the Skitarii and played around with custom Chimera builds. It wasn't until the urgency of the next campaign approached until I got back up to speed and dived into production. As part of my drive, I started up a project to fully build and paint one model a day. This worked very well until I got to repeats or large models.
The model a day project helped me get into a pace for painting the army and also really helped with my choice of colours. I wanted to tie the models together somehow, despite being extremely varied in form.
The Hypaspists are perhaps my favourite. They're fairly simple conversions, initially replacing Death Korps heads with sculpted hoods. As the quantity of models grew, I started adding renegade and servitor parts, sometimes wholly sculpted bits to add more variety. I am working on a 3rd squad of Hypaspists, bringing the total to 36 models!
I also love the simplicity but effective look of my menials. Having a huge Goblin built from Skullpass sets, my bits box was full of spare musicians and standard bearers - they formed the bulk of the conversions, adding Graveguard skulls as face plates. The new Skaven range has also begun to provide some much needed variation in the group - hopefully the Isle of Blood boxed set will provide a few more slaves to the grind!
Quite often I found myself buying absolutely any model that was remotely related to Mechanicus, usually with no intended plan for using the model. Right now I have a huge pile of such models that will hopefully find a use in the army as it is expanded. One model I am quite proud of is a Ramshackle-based conversion. He stood in as a Protector for the campaign and is likely to remain in that role for now. Ramshackle have provided a lot of my models, wholly or converted.
A few models were added purely for having a legal and whole force for the Age of the Emperor events. My assassin, Athena, was a suitable, cheap choice for the required named character slot. She's an unconverted Callidus assassin, painted half black, half white, with a death mask.
My Myrmidons are also inspired by the rules from Tempus Fugitives. Combining the Defiler kit with a Penitent Engine pilot gave these walkers a very dark, enslaved feel to the machine. They're also very powerful on the battlefield, hogging a lot of attention from anti-tank weaponry across all my games!
The creation of this army very much coincided with me starting my gaming blog website and so almost every model seen here has been explained and in some cases a tutorial written. However, I am always happy to answer questions about anything in my army or offer tips as I continue to expand and develop it.
As the day (Siege of Terra) arrived, despite not being too happy with my army incomplete, my Dark Mechanicum forece was nominated for best army! This made me proud, but also determined to work even harder for next time.
I am working to adapt and expand this army for the next Age of the Emperor campaign and in the future I hope to make it usable within normal Codices for 40k, such as Imperial Guard. I've plenty of unfinished models to address and am always investing in more. You will definitely be seeing more crazy conversions over time.
Kelbor Hal will soon be making an appearance:
