Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Defenders of the Adeptus Mechanicus: Part 1



 An Article by C.J. Young


For my first post I have decided to talk about my favorite subject: theme armies! That is the driving factor in 40k for me: building theme armies, but the problem is that most of the armies that catch my attention do not have a codex. So I must admit that I am guilty of the great evil of “counts as” armies.

Now, before you say 'oh, he's just another one of “those gamers”,' I feel this can be justified. If the army has a strong theme and is modeled appropriately, “counts as” armies are really cool. These types of armies are fun to build and offer the great challenge of bringing to life what you read about in the 40k lore. I love to see any well done 40k army, but my favorite is to see the obscure ideas in 40k brought to life in miniature form. This in my opinion adds variety to 40k and really brings to life the absolutely tremendous backround in this hobby.

I have done many “counts as” armies and I draw most of my inspiration from the Black Library novels. One novel that really grabbed my attention was Mechanicum by Graham McNeill.  In particular, the Iron Knights of the Adeptus Mechanicus in this book fascinated me.

First of all, I LOVE titans and own one Forgeworld reaver and three Forgeworld warhounds, so it may not be surprising that I would fall in love with the Iron Knights from Mechanicum. I did tons of research in the most obscure realms of the web to find any tidbit I could about these Knight Titan Orders. Once I had learned as much as I could find about these mini-titans I set out to build the army.

However, this at first was met with disaster, because I could not find a way to build them that did not look dumb! I tried everything from IG sentinels to Ork Dreadnoughts but nothing seemed to work. I gave up on the project for about a year, but one day I was going through some old boxes and I found an old unassembled Witchhunter Penitent Engine. BAM! A spark hit me and the rest was history.

I built my own Knight Titan Order and I will show that off in another post. Before I do, I want to give some background on who these guys are, because not many people know too much about them. The next post will be a summary of what I found from looking in countless places online and will shed some light on one of the coolest themes in 40k.

Editors note:  Cool, finally a post from my pal CJ.  I've seen his army, and it looks great.  Looking forward to the rest of the series!

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