'Empire' From Mike F - Tyrant’s Legion Command Squad - Empire Theme - 80 Points

 Hello fellow challengers! It’s usually late January before I get my first entry in, but this year I seem to have my act together. Hopefully I can keep the momentum rolling. I’ll apologize now to the bulk of you who paint historical and fantasy miniatures, as I’ll be blathering on about 40k and space marines for most of the challenge. I’ve tried to pivot to history at different times, as I do have a passion for it, but I just can't seem to get any momentum going with a historical or even historical adjacent project. 

For the past year or two, I’ve been in full blown 40k nostalgia! 5th edition and Badab War specifically. I’ve completed a Minotaurs Chapter and have (mostly) completed an Executioners Chapter. Both of these were involved in the Badab War on opposite sides. I enjoy these large projects, so decided to move on to the primary bad guy of the Badab War - The Astral Claws! 

For those not familiar with the lore of the Badab War, It's a small civil war in the 40k Imperium which involved several Space Marine Chapters and lasted for about 10 years. The Astral Claws were originally put in charge of a sector of space and tasked with liberating the Maelstrom Zone which is littered with pirates, raiders and chaos empires. As usually happens, the Imperium eventually lost interest and focused on other matters. The Astral Claws chapter master, Lufgt Huron became incensed and turned his homeworld and surrounding systems into a small empire with which to pacify the Maelstrom. This led to him withholding his Imperial tithes, expanding his chapter beyond the size which was allowed and when challenged, to secede from the Imperium. At its height, the Astral Claws empire was quite powerful and held off over a dozen space marine chapters before it was destroyed. As such, I'm submitting this post for the Empire Theme to commemorate both the rise and fall of the Astral Claws Badab "Empire".

The first unit for this project is a Command Squad for the Tyrant's Legion. This was an Auxiliary force of normal humans to help secure the Badab Sector for the Astral Claws. In the 2010’s Forgeworld actually made an army list for the Tyrant’s Legion. They were poorly equipped and utterly expendable, but could include space marines in the list. I’ve put together a varied collection of models from different manufacturers to represent the various units and most of the GW models were purchased second hand. I hope to complete a good chunk of the army during this challenge.

The full command squad.

I used the original Commissar Yarrick model as the Commander who is known as a Tribune.

The actual leader of the army is the Astral Claws Centurion in the centre represented in MK IV armour. The human members are from the Wargames Atlantic Raumjager box with heads from Mad Robot Miniatures.

The standard is also from Mad Robot. The tyrant's claw and Astral Claw decal is from Fallout Hobbies. Unfortunately they are going to stop trading their line of space marine decals.

The color scheme for the Tyrant's Legion is pretty vague. Grey uniform with dark grey armour. I tried to include a few different greys and blue greys to add a bit of variety and break up the models a bit.

6 28mm figures for 30 points plus 50 points for the Empire Theme = 80 points.

Thanks for visiting!