In case you were wondering, some of the parts to make my groovy Rough Riders were sculpted by Rob at Curious Constructs.

Thursday 9 August 2012

Reforming my Imperial Guard (part 1)


Still, I have been away from my modelling desk yet to get back to all my awaiting projects. As devastating as that is, on the plus side the space away from my models has allowed me to rethink what I want to do with them and how I would like their fluff to work.

Also the space has made me realise that, essentially I can do whatever I want with my miniatures. It is nice to have fluff that doesn't contradict the established universe, but even if mine did, nothing would happen. At the worst, someone would say, "hay, that doesn’t work!" to which I would reply with a shrug "so?". This freedom was what I really enjoyed about modelling in the 40k universe (opposed to historical modelling) when I started out. You can do whatever you want with your colour schemes or be utterly ridiculous about the planet you say they are from. As it turns out it wasn't too hard to make my fluff fit (and I don't think my colour schemes are all that ridiculous), but knowing that I could do anything was very freeing.


So, in a grand reorganising of my miniature forces I have broken my Guard up into distinct elements which I will post about separately. First off, I have my Macharian Thunder Guard, my blogs name sake, and a group of minis that I suspect will take up a lot of my future modelling time. I decided this would work best as a division rather than a regiment. What I wanted was a division of several different regiments, which would allow me free rein to come up with whatever cavalry units I wanted. Like I said, it’s all about feeling free to do whatever I want. :)

4 comments:

  1. Maybe I should clarify, obviously you can't ignore the 40k universe and how it works, but I find it feeing to focus more on what you want to do rather then what is and isn't allowed wit the fluff. Anyway, just a bit of an evening rant ;)

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  2. It is nice to have fluff that doesn't contradict the established universe, but even if mine did, nothing would happen. At the worst, someone would say, "hay, that doesn’t work!" to which I would reply with a shrug "so?"

    Exactly. And your comment above is spot on. I find I get the best fluff by trying to be different within the established fluff because it gives you something to work against and develop more and deeper fluff - so if you want to do X when Y has been established as standard you can get into why it is different, how it became different and the future consequences of it being different. Well I find that works anyway, when you're trying to be creative against existing parameters, it hones it, whereas too much "freedom" can lead to "meh" ideas I find.

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  3. Missed the quote marks where I quoted you there, I suppose in a nutshell I suppose my comment was that really almost anything *is* allowed in the 40k universe but you get really good fluff from trying to work out how it fits rather than ignoring it. There may be certain things that are no gos - the Ultramarines having 11 Companies for instance, but pretty much most things you can do in some form or another :D I should stop doing most of my writing late at night or when I've just finished a long shift...

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  4. LOL. yeah, I think that is pretty much it. Although the forgotten 11th company that was expunged from all documents and memory... that could be interesting...
    sure, at some point you cannot connect the dots.

    writing at night hey? I just updated my profile from 'Scientist' to 'Sleep Scientist'. Yeah, it's 5am in Aust and I've been up all night... I feel your pain!

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