Hello kids and welcome to an installment of Works in Progress Theater. I'm Josh, I'll be your host as we examine what's up and coming in the wonderful world of Rosenritter. Let's see if I can acually complete this amidst all the frakking interruptions that have plagued me all afternoon.
Amazingly, I've actually gotten quite a lot of work done in the last week or so. Getting snowed in here for the weekend was a boon to the 40K production line, especially since my Dark Angels bits had the good idea to show up. The DA sprues rock. There's all sorts of cool junk on them just begging to be used. And I used quite a great deal. Since GW
still hasn't gotten my Templars stuff in, I decided to put the 4th Company command squad on hold and get down to the nitty-gritty of special characters. Namely my librarian and chaplain, and a whole freaking entourage for said chaplain, which I might just continue to expand.
First up is
Scriptor Ulrich Boecker. I based him slightly on the original Boecker, one of the really old GW librarian minis that my friend Aaron painted for me (Aaron, by the way, is probably the best painter of the lot of us though due to residency in Hungary has not been able to produce anything new for a while. I'm hoping that changes in the near future). I used Boecker a few years later to stomp the hell out of a bunch of his Slaaneshi terminators even after a botched Smite attempt that hurt me more than him.
So there's definitely a history behind the character and I wanted to make a figure worthy of that. The chest plate's a BT Mark IV chest with the Maltese cross filed off. The sword is the Emperor's Champion's black sword with the writing filed off. I left the uneven file pattern on there to see what it would look like when painted. Most of the bits are from the DA frames, including the head. He's also go a book for his left hand which I forgot to put there before I did the pictures. It looks keen in the final product.
Believe it or not, between the time I took this photo I managed to get him entirely painted and even based! I think he looks entirely badass but I'll get some images up soon. I'm not entirely happy with the way the force sword came out, though. I was trying a few techniques I haven't really used before and I'm still not sure what to make of the end result. We'll see.
Ordenspriester Franz von Hohenzollern didn't turn out exactly as I planned, simply because I'm lousy with greenstuff. Gap filling is about all I can do and even that tries my patience. So the robes that were going to go on each side of his mark IV didn't materialize, but I figure the rest of the robes are just tucked in under the breastplate or something. I was also unable to create the scroll I had planned, so I just chopped up and filed down a backbanner and festooned it with stuff. The hammer I chopped off the Salamanders' Chaplain Xavier who I'd tried to make a Rosenritter chaplain some years before and failed. The helmet comes from the chaos marines sprue. It just screamed "skull" to me and I think it looks cooler than the actual chaplain helmets out there.
Much like Boecker's not painted "Codex Librarian Blue," I don't think he's going to end up black. These are Rosenritter, for Dorn's sake! They've got "take pride in your colors." Of course everything is going to be Rosenritter blue! I'm not doing the usual bone colors on the robes; I'm likely going to build up from grey to white. I've got Catholic priest vestments in mind for him and his retinue, maybe some red and gold trim on the edges and hems.
The Sergeant and the plasma gunner here are all primed and ready to be painted now. If you'll note, all of the retinue have Crux Terminatus on their right shoulders; all are veterans and members of the
Ordens der Rosenkreuz First Company. The Sergeant's also the only one who doesn't have a hooded head, but I did that so I could show his veteran sergeant helmet marking when he's painted. Like the others, these guys are primarily a mix of the DA and command squad frames. I wasn't able to use as much of the DA stuff as I wanted, simply because while I can generally get away with using the DA insignia as just a winged sword, they're not really a sword-based unit with the exception of the Sergeant.
As you can see by the guy with the power mace. In game terms I've adjusted my Chapter's traits even more to make them really non-codex. I jumped from my initial idea of a minor divergence to significant. I've still kept Blessed be the Warriors and Have Pride in Your Colors, but I've added Take the Fight to Them (representative of their heritage and allowing me to mix bolters with close-combat guys) as my second advantage and Eye to Eye as my major drawback since I don't think I'd ever really field more than one landspeeder squad at a time. The Rosenritter like blitzkrieg tactics, not hit-and-fade.
And finally, the one bolter guy I'd finished last week. I've since built a second as well as a standard bearer with a nifty, non-banner standard. I took one of my old, old plastic skeletons and wired him to a standard pole with some bits stuck on him. He's an example of what the Rosenritter do to heretics who reject the word of the Emperor. I may also do one or two more marines, just to use the last of the robed legs I've got. Granted, I probably won't have them all painted until sometime this summer, but hey.
