Tall Poppies

 Tall Poppies. 

That's what they called us, almost 20 years ago. It was towards the end of my final year of primary school, which today remains one of the happiest times of my life, and I had been called in with a bunch of other classmates, a lot of whom I was friends with, and a lot of whom in hindsight were probably considered the highest performing academically, for a short little lecture thing. There we were sat all around in a quiet classroom, and my teacher at the time (an Atreides-grade tutor who happily indulged in my passions for fictional worlds, introduced us all to the wider body of Douglas Adams and who will forever hold my eternal admiration) explained to us that we were all of us a a special sort called Tall Poppies. 

Being Tall Poppies meant that we were especially intellectually gifted types, with enormous potential in life, but it also meant we were likely prone to eccentricities and, most crucially, would draw a lot of ire from others, because the world was very hostile to eccentric intellectually gifted types with sensitive souls, and would likely throw all manner of venom at us as we grew older, because people fundamentally do not like Tall Poppies. They typically try to cut down the Tall Poppies in their midst. 

Doubtless for the kids in the audience today this will all sound terribly elitist and bourgeoise, and it is true they missed a bit of a trick in not recognising that everyone can be a Tall Poppy with the right circumstances behind them, but remember this was back in the ancient halcyon days of 2005, when everything was all milkshakes and rich girls and lovely lady lumps, and when Hummers roamed the earth. It was still a very neoliberal bourgeoise time. 

More importantly though, it was very uplifting for me at the time, I got a really good feeling out of considering myself a Tall Poppy, a bright shining example along with all my other fellow Tall Poppies. I wore it as a badge of pride. 

Then primary school ended, and intermediate school began. 

The horrors of those dark times, and of the high school and university years that followed, are not stories for this blog. Some secrets are best left left undiscovered, the galaxy remains a better place for them being undisturbed. Suffice to say that much of the world began to damn well try it's hardest to cut this particular Tall Poppy down to size, or failing that to stomp it flat. And it's never really stopped. 

This is compounded by my discovery that, as that teacher long ago was probably trying to warn us all about, I happen to inhabit a country with a very, very deep distaste for ambition and high achievement. The urge to cut down the Tall Poppies is strong, most visibly illustrated by one of the most grievous insults in its cultural lexicon being 'Tryhard'. 

And in 2013, as I was drawing up plans for my Wood Elf army, it was this story, this overwhelming impression of the whole world trying to cut down this Tall Poppy, this tremendous desire to just see all the Tall Poppies grow free, that was the genesis for the Glade of Poppies, and the guardians who defended them. 

After I had enjoyed a much needed palette cleansing break working on Tau starships, I returned to the fantasy project and followed up my first full regiment with my second Warhammer regiment and my first ever metal Warhammer troops, the Eternal Guard. The reason for this choice for the next addition to the army was simple - I was working towards a very specific goal that was critically important to the army overall, but in order to make absolutely certain I would do a good job of it I needed to build up to it in a series of three distinct stages. The first of these stages had been getting some practice in on the basics of painting Wood Elves with the archers. The next stage would be to practice painting gold/bronze Elven armour, and there was no better unit to practice that on than 20 Eternal Guard models. 

Of course, quite besides such matters of practical convenience, I had also quickly grown to love the imagery and concept of the Eternal Guard as an elite anchor unit around which the nimble Glade Guard regiments pivoted and weaved. The awesome artwork of them battling skeletons in the snow that featured in the army book only sweetened the deal, as did the spectacular metal sculpts and the awe inspiring green and gold colour scheme the 'Evy Metal studio painted theirs in. 

Plus I really like the name Eternal Guard. It's very fun to say with the Rs rrrolled. "The EtEARrnal GuaRred." "The ETERNAL GUARD." 

I guess it's kind of hard to properly convey in text format, without being able to hear the full scenery chewing going on. But take my word for it. 

Painting the unit went much more smoothly than the Glade Guard. The largely prebuilt metal sculpts meant getting them to rank up was very easy, which left me free from worrying about making sure they lined up next to each other and let me work through them in batches. This resulted in getting through about one rank of them each week in what remains one of the most successful examples of assembly line painting in the modern era of my model painting. 

The colours were much the same as the rest of the Elves, with two notable exceptions being the lighter green cloth, painted with Warboss Green Goblin Green and highlighted with Nurgling Green Rotting Flesh, and of course the golden bronze armour which was done with a base of Hashut Copper Dwarf Bronze drybrushed with Ghenna's Gold Shining Gold and a final drybrush of Golden Griffon Tin Bitz to give a silvery finish to the gold. 

The bases were originally planned to be liberally covered in big tall red poppies, sculpted from greenstuff. Such an ambitious vision quickly proved to be well beyond the capabilities of my greenstuff skills and patience at the time, and at the time there was no source of pre-made red flowers available to me, so the initial concept was scaled back to just a single red poppy growing out of the base of the Guardian champion, the unit leader pointing down at it dramatically to remind the whole regiment of exactly what it is they are fighting for. 

The banner was much simpler to do, with the bigger surface area of the flag giving more breathing room for the device of a simple poppy. On the other hand, the banner is also why this unit was one of the two most painful and challenging headaches in the army. 

See, like I've mentioned before this army was started in 2013, and this unit was painted the same year. In 2013, I was still following what Warhammer rules GW currently sold, and that meant 8th edition Warhammer. 

Now, the important thing about 8th edition Warhammer is that it contains this massive collection of Common Magic Items, which are the commonplace magic items available to everyone. When you disembowel a giant spider or a troll or some other monster, it's normally one of these Common Magic Items that spills out of their carcass along with a healthy pile of gold and a healing potion or two. And in 8th edition Warhammer, the range of Common Magic Items is this enormous spread of colourful fun things like the Fencer's Blades or the Gambler's Armour or the Trickster's Helm or the Pidgeon Plucker Pendant or the Trickster's Shard or The Terrifying mask of EEEE! or The Other Trickster's Shard. And it's awesome and easily one of the best parts about 8th edition Warhammer (we don't talk about what the army books do with their magic items). 

Eternal Guard of course are able to take a magic banner, and for these ones I opted for a Razor Standard. This is mostly because I was still very new and unfamiliar with Warhammer and how a lot of the magic items fitted together, and the Razor Standard on Eternal Guard was a popular photocopy special at the time. It is hard to go wrong with some nice simple extra armour piercing on a regiment after all, especially one that throws out as many attacks as Eternal Guard in 8th edition do. 

Then from late 2014 to the end of 2015 I broke ties with what Warhammer rules GW was selling and began to pivot from 8th edition Warhammer to 6th edition Warhammer. This is important because the lineup of Common Magic Items in 6th edition Warhammer is different to 8th edition - there are fewer of them in those core rules. I was aware of this moving into 6th edition, but payed little heed to it, reasoning that the Common Magic Items I had chosen for the army would surely be in that edition too. 6th edition Warhammer might have fewer Common Magic Items sure, but it can't have that many fewer of them - after all, magic items are fun and cool, and you need lots of different Common Magic Items to fleece off to local merchant traders for gold, or to feed your blacksmiths and artisans for raw enchanted materials with which to craft more useful magic items with. 

Yes there was a sad pathetic little list of basic Common Magic Items in the Wood Elf army book, but surely that was just a bare skeleton list, a short little cheat sheet listing a few of the most basic ones for quick reference. It couldn't be the entire list of Common Magic Items for 6th edition Warhammer. No fantasy game could possibly have such a depressingly piddly number of Common Magic Items. There had to be a more comprehensive list in the 6th edition core rulebook where the rest were listed. 

Wait. 

What? 

Wait, WHAT? 

WHAT? 

What is this? 

No, seriously. 

What the HELL is this! 

Pirinen! Cavatore! Where's the fucking Enchanted Items!

Look at it. Just look at it. Only one page? And no miscellaneous Enchanted items at all? Where's the Pidgeon Plucker Pendant? Where's the Terrifying Mask of EEEE? Where's the set items? What kind of joyless Sour Prude who hates fun wrote this thing? 

The most serious problem here however was that this Common Magic Item list doesn't have any Magic Standards at all in it, except for the War Banner which is the most joyless and boring Common Magic Standard of the bunch. You would think that the Razor Standard, with its simple reasonable AP on the unit's attacks, would be safe and ubiquitous across all the editions, but no evidently even that one is too fun and interesting for whatever Sour Prude was in charge of the 6th edition Common Magic Items list. 

And so, just like that, my Eternal Guard were not usable in the 6th edition that had so captured my attention. 

This was enormously frustrating for several years. Eventually after a little experimentation I settled on replacing the Razor Standard with a Banner Of Dwindling, which is an army book item and thus guaranteed to be accessible in any Warhammer game I would be seriously interested in playing frequently. It also had the added advantage of being much more cinematic and evocative, and has generally been a much better magic standard all around, but still it's the principle of the thing that matters here. 

I was just fortunate that such a chance was even possible due to where this regiment comes from, the Glade of Poppies, which by now had crystalised into a major centre of learning and scholarship, as well as a powerhouse of artifice and magic item production in the chunk of Athel Loren I had carved out for myself, the Meadows of Heaven (because what else was it going to be called with the origin of this army). Being a centre for magic item production meant that they have plenty of Magic Standards available to take into battle. 

The Defenders of The Glade Of Poppies

Once the Glade of Poppies was the crown jewel of the Meadows of Heaven, second only to the capital of Imaginaerum in wonder. It was a centre of learning, knowledge and academia, filled with some of the wisest minds in the Meadows of Heaven, and for many leagues beyond, and many scholars could be found within it, passing their knowledge on and studying the world around them ever more. Its name came from the great blood red poppies that grew in the grass of its clearings and meadows. These were left to grow free, and so grew to be extremely tall, some even getting to be taller than the elf children that played around them. Some of the greatest and fairest Wishmasters of the Meadows of Heaven came from this place, and all studied in the Glade of Poppies at one point or another. The advancements and knowledge of those who dwelt there was put to good use in bettering the lives of all who resided in the Meadows of Heaven.

It was during Cyanathair's first attack against Athel Loren, at the very start of the Secret War, that the Glade of Poppies was ruined, as the glade became the site of one of the bloodiest battles of all those fought in the Meadows of Heaven. Hearing of the Glade of Poppies and its splendour filled The Corruptor with rage and hatred, and the creature sent a titanic horde of Beastmen and terrible monstrosities to raze and despoil the province. Massed rank upon rank of Eternal Guard stood against the onslaught, supported by hundreds of elven archers. Initially the battle went well for the Wood Elves, who struck down thousands of Beastmen and their vile allies. But still the horde pressed on, seemingly without number. The decisive turning point of the battle came when the strange shamans that accompanied the horde managed to work a great and horrific spell. With tremendous power fueled by the carnage and bloodshed unfolding around them, they managed to tear a hole between worlds, and from it poured a host of creatures born from nightmares, directly behind the elven lines. Caught between the two forces, the Wood Elves were trapped and the battle was lost. The elves fought on with the courage of true heroes, and slew scores of Beastmen and Daemons alike, but the combined forces arrayed against them were too large to fully overcome, and eventually only twenty Eternal Guard warriors remained, the tattered remnants from different regiments banded together for a final stand. They fought back to back against the overwhelming tide until all became blood and darkness. 

When dawn broke the next morning, they awoke in the centre of the Glade of Poppies, surrounded by blood, bodies, ash and destruction. The horde that had assailed the place was gone, but the Glade of Poppies was devastated. Countless trees had been cut down, burnt, or torn apart. Spites lay pinned up with nails and spikes of hell-forged black iron, their forms broken and mutilated. Sacred stones lay toppled and desecrated. The air was thick with choking cinders. And every single one of the great poppies from which the province gained its name had been cut down and stamped on.
As the survivors saw the desolation, their hearts were filled with despair and grief for their once beautiful home. And so it was that they vowed that never again while they still drew breath would the poppies be allowed to be cut down again. 

Since those dark times the Glade of Poppies has been healed, and blood red poppies once again grow free within it, though none have yet reached the height they once were. But the damage wrought in that fateful battle has left lasting scars amongst the Asrai of the Meadows of Heaven, and it is unlikely they will ever forgive themselves or the minions of Chaos for it. 

The Defenders of the Glade of Poppies were first formed from the original twenty survivors of the battle of the Glade of Poppies, formally grouped together as a single fighting unit. In the years since its ranks have been filled from a combination of their descendants and other Elves of the Glade of Poppies who have survived terrible battles. trained by the remaining original twenty not lost to attrition. 

The Defenders of The Glade Of Poppies typically carry into battle one of two banners. The Banner of Poppies is the only banner that did not fall in the battle of the Glade of Poppies, and was waved defiantly at the heart of the defence until the bitter end. The Banner of Vengeance was created to the same design in the aftermath of the battle, woven by the widowed maidens of the Glade of Poppies and given the most powerful enchantments to help their warriors in their quest to defend the Glade of Poppies forevermore. 

The Forest has not forgotten the promise that the Defenders of The Glade of Poppies made so many years ago, and wherever they step foot blood red poppies, of the same variety that grow in the Glade of Poppies, are known to spring up and grow, seemingly in reminder of their duty.

Since then the Defenders of The Glade Of Poppies have served with distinction, proving themselves to be one of my deadliest units and the star performer of the army by far. They don't always carry the game, but for every time they've been decimated by a wave of gunfire and boiling lead or scattered by Fanatics, there's two more times they've ripped the throat out of the opposing army by routing the opposing centre almost single-handedly. 

Needless to say this has made me awfully proud of them. 

On Chastity

 "And from that gaping maw of darkness there roared and seethed a great stinging wind that choked at the lung and burnt the eyes and skin, and NONE could hear themselves within the terror! And the great wind roared and reared and swelled unto a vast and fearsome whirlwind that did dower beyond the highest reaches of the sky, blocking it out with burning smoke and brimstone, and the whirlwind howled and raged and tossed them about as dust before the storm, WHIPPING them round and round within the burning tempest until they all at once SCREAMED, SCREAMED with all their might that the pain might end, yet NO SOUND did leave their broken bodies that was not lost amongst the roar of the tempest an' the lightning! 

Then did the lightning crack and split the tempest that it might send forth a great rain, not of water nor of blood but of BOILING OIL, and their skin was lashed and scared and seared 'til red and black yet still the rain of boiling oil did not cease, raking across their wretched frames again and again and as one they cried forth in begging that 'EMPEROR is LORD! EMPEROR deliver us from ruin! EMPEROR deliver us from darkness!' 

And all them that were knew in their hearts that the END OF DAYS was at hand, and all them twisted and quaked with almighty terror at the judgement of the fire! 

YET! 

Yet it was not the end. 

For at once there came from on high a vast and awesome blast of trumpets, clear as the dawn and clarion to smite all sound before its ring! And the heavens broke, and before the pit did usher forth a great host of glorious golden light that split the eye and drove back the darkness in fear, and the lightning and the tempest did part and scatter! 

Then did there come a glorious voice speaking, 'I shall salve thy wounds and raise ye all unto the highest of heavens, where the clouds do not reach and where light is everlasting, 

I shall strike down thy foes with fire and fury and plunge them to the blackest pit, there to wail in horror as their flesh rots before them forevermore, 

I shall raise you up, all ye who are my chosen people, and carry you beyond pain and death, beyond heaven and hell unto a great shining kingdom of gold there to stay at my table in the eternal glory of absolute purity, if you will but honour my name in deed and word and body and soul!' 

And their shame was washed in the fire, and they did KNOW in their very hearts that they heard the word of their MASTER, the once and forever KING!" 

And such it is that when the night is darkest and most terrible, when all that is good and noble seems lost, does the most glorious and radiant of LIGHT shine through the filth and the storm to smite away the lighting and the tempest! 

Take heed and remember all you here today, that it was only when the men were lost in the very deepest and vilest bowls of the pit, only when they were utterly broken, hanging before the very precipice of DAMNATION, that it was at last that the EMPEROR did come to their aid, and it is this that is His covenant to mankind that in our darkest hour HE SHALL RAISE US FROM PERDITION! 

I will not lie to you. I have no doubt we are all aware these are dark days before us, the direst of signs are there for any with the eyes to look. It's true, times are harsh, the struggle before us is immense and it will only get more savage and terrible before the end.

But! 

That is precisely, PRECISELY, why it is now more than ever than you should take heart, and have FAITH, and fortify yourself with the TRUTH that is the GOD EMPEROR OF ALL MANKIND! For just as He reached down His hand in salvation for those fearful men in the pit, so too shall He again deliver the ultimate victory of man for all those who hold loyal to him NO MATTER THE COST! 

I was like them once. Once I too was lost and alone, cast adrift in the empty Babylon of progress, my body numbed by the false promises of comfort while my soul screamed out in excruciation yet I WAS SAVED! I opened my eyes to the darkness and corruption around me and opened my eyes to the TRUTH of the gospel of the God Emperor our once and true Lord, and when I gave myself unto his most sublime mercy I was DELIVERED from my torment, my sin was NAILED to the wheel and my soul was washed anew white as snow by the blood of my scars! 

Now I stand before you to tell you all to take heart, for all we need do to find our way to the Emperor and His Kingdom Of Gold is but to let go of our doubt and commit ourselves utterly to His word, in mind and deed and body and soul, and give unto him our ultimate loyalty unto death my brothers it is NEVER too late to renounce the darkness and cast yourself into the shining radiant purity of THE LIGHT! 

Let all who would stand with Him then behold the very face of His Light now, in the radiant purity of His Angels who walk among us, those personally saved by the Spirit Hand of The God Emperor, His most beloved Sororitas, keepers of the faith! 

Tremendous news! After so much hard work and loyalty to The Emperor my keeper, my faith has been rewarded with the first actual unit for my Witch Hunters. 

Squad Chastity is one of three planned 'assault' units of Battle Sisters. Much like my Tau, I'm building this army with a distinction between offensive core troop units equipped for going out and attacking the other side and defensive core troop units intended for locking down important sites and guarding against the other side coming out and attacking me (the key difference here of course being the total absence of a third force of flexible tactical units that can be used for either mission as needed). 

As alluded to earlier, this army represents my first ever clean sheet colour scheme, not reverse-engineered from any GW studio examples. Instead it comes from my own real life experience, being lifted directly from the school uniform of a Catholic Girls' School that some of my friends went to. In particular some goth girls I knew from there largely hated the place with a passion, and their horror stories about it left me with plentiful inspiration for grim dark religious horror about grim dark religious horror 40k factions. 

(One particular tall glass of gothic brooding with a fondness for fire and blood curdling threats left an especially strong impression on me, and ended up inspiring the basis for one of the characters in this army and a number of other villains across the Warhammers and beyond as I processed the apocalyptic fallout of an attempt to date her, but that is not a story for this blog) 

Most notably, ever since I have always seen the Sisters of Battle as Catholic Schoolgirls In Space. Forget that nuns with guns nonsense, they are absolutely Catholic Schoolgirls with rocket guns and power armour (right down to actually being Schola Progenium brats in the codex lore), not least because that concept is SO MUCH MORE BRUTALLY GRIM-DARK, between the child soldier connotations and the implications of them being bound to and bossed around by an order of sleazy old beardos with near unlimited power and near zero oversight or accountability. The Ecclesiarchy is supposed to be all the worst parts of organised Abrahamic religion thrown into a telepod and given half a space empire to do as they please, and I am here for that as the nemesis for my grey Supermarionation Space Wellsians. 

Anyway, this all culminated in one fateful evening after school when I had the sudden divine vision to try and take the uniform colours of this Catholic Girls' School and see how they looked on the Sisters of Battle in Dawn of War: Soulstorm. The final result was a lovely blue-white-gold colour scheme that I was so delighted with that I knew then and there that if I ever got the chance to do a Witch Hunters army on the tabletop that would be the colour scheme for the Sisters of Battle in it. The rest, as you can see, is history. 

This particular incarnation of the colour scheme takes full advantage of the total freedom of colour combination in real life model painting to introduce some colour-coding for the different ranks. Thus, the regular Battle Sisters have lighter medium-blue robes (the source material's colour for junior-year students) while the veterans like the Superior leading this squad wear dark blue robes (the source material's colour for senior-years). 

For those playing at home, the robes are respectively: 

Medium Blue - Regal Blue base, layered with Caledor Sky Enchanted Blue and highlighted with a 50:50 mix of Caledor Sky Enchanted Blue and Lothern Blue Icy Blue 

Dark Blue - Abaddon Black Chaos Black base, layered with Regal Blue and highlighted with a 50:50 mix of Regal Blue and Caledor Sky Enchanted Blue 

The white armour was built up in drybrushes starting from Mechanicus Standard Grey and then working up to Dawnstone Codex Grey then a 50:50 mix of Dawnstone Codex Grey and Administratum Grey Fortress Grey, then pure Administratum Grey Fortress Grey and finally White Scar Skull White. After some sage deliberation I settled on the grey-based white palette rather than blue-white palette, both shown in the painting guide featured in White Dwarf #292(UK). 

I also decided to use red lenses on the gunsights, both to act as a nice spot colour among all those blues and whites as well as to act as a perfect visual contrast to the green gunsights on my Tau. 

The Sisters themselves received a range of hair colours, including a few skunk stripes for maximum 2003 gothic energy, and as a throwback to one of my favourite 40k art pieces - a corner vignette in Cities of Death featuring a Battle Sister blasting away with her bolter through a ruined window while incoming fire impacts all around her. 

This illustration alone is a big chunk of why I rate Cities of Death equal to Codex: Cityfight. I just wish the PDF scan I got this from hadn't literally cut it off at the knees. You can feel the Evanescence and Within Temptation radiating from it

The same artwork was also major factor in my decision to go with dark grey urban rubble for the bases. From the outset I knew I had to base these models in a Witch Hunter army's natural habitat - sweeping through a dark gloomy Imperial city, wiping heretics and deviants away like the vermin they are with holy fire and blessed bolt-shells! This was also done with an eye towards building up this army with a central focus on Cityfighting for similar reasons. 

Ironically for being inspired by a Catholic school, all these blues and whites and golds ended up being wonderfully reminiscent of Orthodox Church aesthetics (which I have always deeply and openly loved), which ended up being the genesis for the army's backstory as being rooted in the Eastern Ecclesiarchy, a de facto third Convent/Synod of the Ministorum responsible for managing and enlightening the Ultima Segmentum and Eastern Fringe; in theory a subordinate offshoot from the main branches on Terra and Ophelia, but for all practical intents and purposes an equal and autonomous branch, a status quo accepted by all because of both the logistical difficulties of directly managing the galactic east from Ophelia in the galactic south and Terra in the galactic centre-west, and because much like Ultramar it ensures the Imperium has a solid power base on the other side of the galaxy from its capital worlds. 

In turn its primary Order Militant of Adepta Sororitas, the Order of The Crux Celestas that these Battle Sisters belong to, is technically an Order Minoris (though no-one is quite sure anymore whether it's supposed to be a subsidiary of the Convent Sanctorum or Convent Prioris, such information being long since lost to the ages), but has grown large and independent enough to be a full Convent in its own right, easily a match for any of the original six Orders Militant in size, equipment and significance. 

And of course all this puts the army in the perfect spot to get into lots of fights with my Tau. 

Unfortunately despite my best efforts the camera still seems to hate this colour scheme, stubbornly refusing to get the colour balance on the blues just right and leaving them appearing much lighter than they actually are in reality. The only exception so far has been this work in progress shot of the squad collected together in a corner of my painting space. 

But such matters are of little concern in the Emperor's divine plan! Now here, take plenty of these pamphlets and be sure to share them with all your family and friends. And remember we'll be meeting to discuss and study the Emperor's Holy Creed every Tuesday night, Thursday night and Sunday morning. And be sure to stop by our first community pot-luck next Saturday! 

I Lied

 I don't have Netflix. 

Die, Heretic.

The New Cavalry

 We will ride into battle, and this shall be our steed... 

You don't have to catch it, you don't have to feed it

For as long as I can remember, I have always been an enormous, raging, Jet-head. 

It could be genetic - one of my grandfathers flew F4U fighter planes in the pacific during the Second World War, and I believe one of my uncles had a career in the air force. Or it could just be regular cishet boy interests at work. 

Whatever the reason may be, out of all the various forms of machinery that made my brain go Brrrr, the ones that made it Brrrr hardest by far were the aerospace vehicles. Planes, zeppelins, helicopters, spacecraft - if it moved under its own power without touching the ground, chances are I was into it. Like a lot of cishet boys I went through a very long phase of daydreaming about flying fighter jets, and a real fully functioning SU-34 fighter bomber was very high up in my Top 10 Crazy Things To Splurge On If I Ever Became A Billionaire until a couple of years ago when I remembered how vulnerable my eardrums were to rapid pressure changes. And even now that same list still has a fully functioning Krokodil assault gunship in the top 5 since helicopters don't fly high enough to implode my eardrums. 

And my heart always flutters a little when hearing the distinctive Whoooooorrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaash of a passing fighter jet. 

Naturally this also meant a key fixture of my childhood was the Supermarionation series Thunderbirds, which was all about thrilling aviation adventures and where the futuristic aerospace vehicles featured were almost more the central characters than the actual characters themselves. I was right in the middle of the 1990s Thunderbirds revival and oh boy did it leave an impression on me. 

So too of course did a whole lot of other science fiction shows featuring all kinds of spectacular flying machines. 

It is little wonder then, that when I ended up discovering Warhammer 40,000 I was immediately sucked into the premiere Jet-head faction of 40k bar none. Between the Hammerhead and Devilfish hover tanks, the Barracuda and Tiger Shark aircraft and the Manta Missile Destroyer, the centrepiece and crown jewel of the Tau model range has always been their awe-inspiring vehicles. 

And from the moment I first saw them showcased on the GW website, I knew I had to get me as many as possible. 

Because of this the history of vehicles in my 40k projects goes back a long way, but today we'll be focusing on the history of my Devilfishes specifically. And that starts with my first one, affectionately known today as 'Old Ginger'. 

Old Ginger was actually the second 40k vehicle I ever got - we'll get to the first one later. I no longer remember exactly how old I was when I got it, but historical evidence would place it as a present for either my 9th or 10th birthday, as I remember I had I Believe In A Thing Called Love by The Darkness stuck in my head that day so it can't have been earlier than 2003. 

In any case, by the time I got around to painting her I had largely moved past my experimental painting stage and had settled back into a primitive facsimile of the T'au sept desert camouflage used by the GW studio army as a standard paint scheme. The major difference, as you may have spotted, being to paint the cockpit vision block green instead of red. My general vision for the scheme was 'just like the GW studio army, but with green windows on the tanks instead of red' for no other reason than that green is my favourite colour, so I wanted the red parts of the vehicles to be green instead. The panels could stay maroon, but the cockpit window had to be green, which was one of the two points of improvement I had for the GW studio scheme (the other being to ditch the bald white helmets on the team leaders). This is the ultimate origin to the green optics used on the commanders of the modernised Tau army. 

Being an attempt to replicate the studio GW Tau scheme, Old Ginger was painted following the guide in Codex: Tau. Of course, being only 9 or 10 and not quite able to fully comprehend how layering and highlighting worked, the results were restricted by my own primitive painting skills, though by the standards of the time it was fairly impressive and I still have a bit of a soft spot for the old girl today. 

Being the first transport model I ever had, this was also my first ever vehicle with an actual interior. As with the gun drones and crisis suit that were contemporaries, I tried to keep glued parts to a minimum and left the engines, top cupola, chin turret and of course the gun drones all unglued and fully articulated. The interior was again extremely crude, just being given a black undercoat and left at that. This was because by this time I had some experience with the Devilfish that was part of the store Tau collection at the local Games Workshop (which was also painted in T'au desert camouflage but naturally to much better accuracy than my own attempts), and that one just had a plain black interior. Since I had no real points of reference or bolts of inspiration, I decided that following suite was the best way to go. 

Being the only Devilfish I owned for some years meant Old Ginger was quickly assigned to transport my nascent Pathfinder team, a role in which she served faithfully for 20 years - including the only two times she ever fired her burst cannon in anger - and due to the timetable and priorities set by the defence ministry is expected to continue serving in that role well into the 2030s at least, albeit strictly in second-line roles among reservist units, popular mobilisation units and border guards. 

The task of transporting Fire Warrior teams was ultimately performed by my next transport, this one. 

This Devilfish was painted when I was a teenager, it would have been around 2007. It belongs to the 2nd Generation of models from my first Tau army, in particular a family of vehicles that represented a massive step up in painting at the time. It may not look like much today, but back when I was around 13-14 just getting the colours in more or less the right places and having mostly distinct panel lines at all was a big achievement. 

Also of note is my first serious attempts at jeweling on the cockpit vision block and the chin turret sensor. Of course at the time I still didn't quite get how layers worked in model painting, so it mostly just ended up being a flat coat of colour with a dot of white in the corner, because the white dot reflection was something that even at an early age I could recognise and fundamentally understand as a key part of the process. 

The colour scheme itself also changed during this time period, because by this time I had gotten my first ever White Dwarf magazine, issue #313 (AU). This issue of course featured a major article on the legendary Tau army of Sebastian Stuart, and was a massive influence on me for many years. This Devilfish was an attempt to take some of my favourite features of Sebastian's colour scheme and mate them to the GW studio scheme so as to blend in with the rest of my models. Most notably the use of a white undercoat and Vermin Brown accent panels on the dorsal spine were both taken directly from Sebastian's colour scheme. On the other hand, the two-tone camouflage is gone here as by this stage I had given up on trying to recreate the iconic Crows' Feet pattern from the GW studio army. 

Of course, Sebastian's Devilfish also featured several conversions, most notably fully articulated side doors...

.... so naturally I HAD to incorporate that improvement into my own transports! 

The process was fairly straightforward in itself - all it really requires is drilling out the bottom hinge joint and sticking a pin through it to turn it from a purely decorative hinge into an actually functioning one. The biggest complication at the time was that I had none of the necessary tools for doing that, so the process was carried out by my father (who did have suitable tools) under my supervision. 

This Devilfish also featured a much more elaborately decorated interior than the first, the better to show off through the now movable side doors. Again this largely followed the lead of Sebastian's transports, with the white interior being a knock-off of his bone cream interiors and some Fire Warrior accessories in imitation of the kit he had stowed inside. There were twists however, with a spare grenade pack on one of the seats substituting for the spare helmet in Seb's because the process of creating a loose Fire Warrior helmet involved sharp cutting tools and filing that was well beyond my resources and skills at the time, and a pulse carbine stowed in the gun rack instead of Seb's stowed pulse rifle because at this stage spare pulse rifle bits were in short supply for me but I had an abundance of spare loose pulse carbines. 

The seats were my own original addition, painted in the same ochre as the hull to try and introduce some colour into what would otherwise be a very monochromatic interior, and topped with Vermin Brown leather upholstery for style and comfort. 

Sebastian's conversion guide called for installing magnets in the side doors to keep them secured when closed, but magnetising models was largely an unknown science to me when I was 13 - 14 or so, and there were no known magnet suppliers near me at any rate, so instead I improvised and simply used wads of blue-tack to keep the doors closed, which in hindsight did not blend into the white threshold nearly as well as I thought it did at the time. 

This machine too was around for the 2-3 games of 5th edition 40k that represent the only time thus far my original Tau were ever used in direct combat, assigned to one of my Fire Warrior teams where it displayed acceptable if not spectacular performance - I no longer remember if it ever did anything truly amazing in any of the games, but it certainly wasn't a complete waste of resources either. 

Now, here's where the plot starts to thicken. At around the time of my Tau army's tabletop debut in 2010, I was working on a sister ship for this Devilfish, which would have completely mechanised my Tau. This model got as far as to have its interior painted and its exterior undercoated.... 

... and never went anywhere after that. 

What happened was that I still wanted the side doors to be articulated, but I still lacked the tools and know-how necessary to pin them on my own, and I no longer wanted to bother my parents about it so I decided to just leave it until I could perform the conversion unassisted. That ended up taking about three years, and by the time I had my own pin vice capable of handling such precision drilling it was 2013 and my hobby focus was dominated by Battlefleet Gothic and Warhammer, leaving the 40k side of things to fall behind. 

This model is entirely unique in that it represents the first and only use of a brand new technology - airbrushing. In 2008 GW released a Citadel brand airbrush modeled in the shape of a 40k hand flamer, and while I wasn't really fully able to appreciate the shout-out I was motivated to get one because the White Dwarf showcasing it happened to use a Tau tank hull as a demonstration model and emphasised how easy it made getting a smooth colour on Tau tanks. And since smooth coverage of the skimmer hulls is the holy grail of Tau painters, I was very intrigued. 

The Citadel Airbrush I ended up getting however proved to be less reliable than advertised. I got through about two or three coats on the front of the model before its inner workings glued themselves shut forever and refused to work, and the whole experience ended up souring me on the whole concept of airbrushing to this day. Fortunately my skills at hand brushing models ended up maturing to a level that made it largely unnecessary. 

While the model's exterior was left on hold until the side doors could be pinned, I did work on the interior in the meantime. By this time I had largely given up on trying to break up the monochrome white and settled for plain white seats - though still with the same Vermin Brown leather upholstery because I value my troops enough to make sure they get whatever small comforts I can give them. There was plans to add stowage too, but they never materialised before the whole project was mothballed. 

On the other hand I did end up putting in some transfers to liven the interior up a little bit. Despite having been a Tau enthusiast for almost a decade by this point, I had very little understanding of the difference between Tau letters and numbers, so at the time I assumed the transfers I was putting on were slogans and information labels like the ones featured in the Tau ship areas in Firewarrior. It was not until much much later that I discovered I had in fact covered the interior rather nonsensically in registration ID numbers. 

The sides of the hull were left unpainted on the outside in anticipation of the hinge brackets being drilled, but I did eventually get to painting the side doors under the reasoning that they were easy enough to manipulate while separate pieces that they could probably be painted and then drilled without too much difficulty. 

And that was how the Devilfish was left for over a decade, languishing in a half-forgotten cache of models, bitz and various hobby supplies while I focused on Tau starships and Wood Elves. It was not until 2018 that I remembered it was there and, seeing a perfect opportunity to give my new rebooted Tau army a 'free' transport vehicle, I resolved to turn it into the first new vehicle for my new Tau with a deep, deep, deep modernisation program. 

The refit work began last year after I had finished the command team for my rebooted Tau. I started by carefully stripping off the outer hull with Simple Green. Normally I am deeply uneasy about paint stripping, being loathe to erase a piece of history and someone else's hard work, but plain undercoat primers are an exception and this was my own painting at any rate, and trying to work with the very thick caked up undercoat my 14 year old self had applied seemed like a bridge too far. 

That said I did determine that the interior was worth salvaging, so I avoided stripping that while carefully taking the paint off the outside by using a system of jury-rigged scaffolding to keep the Devilfish hull suspended above the pool of Simple Green, with just one surface dipping into the liquid at a time. This was largely ineffective at keeping the Simple Green out of the interior, as the troop compartment got flooded through the flight stand hole in the floor and the cupola hole in the roof multiple times, but it was successful at preserving the interior paint job, which was left relatively intact with no serious solvent damage. Though it does even now still have a sharp citric cleaning freshener smell inside...

With the white undercoat taken off, the upgrade work could begin, and this Devilfish, the missing link between my old Tau army and my new one, was REBORN. 

I can only pray I have made Xzibit proud. 

This new Devilfish was unsurprisingly painted up following the exact process outlined in Codex: Tau, with a level of fidelity that my 10 year old self could only dream of. In particular this is the first success I've had in implementing the iconic Crows' Feet camouflage pattern featured on the GW studio tau army's vehicles. 

It wasn't easy of course. The size of the model meant that it was a massive slog to get painted, but crucially it was noticeably much less of a slog than those damned battlesuits. Much of this was due to this model being big and vehicular enough to attack with a tank brush for basecoating, and big and smooth enough to be attacked with a makeup blush brush for highlighting (another tip gleaned from Sebastian Stuart). This meant a lot of rapid progress for a lot of the larger open areas of the model that mostly bogged down around the clusters of greebles scattered over the model - the landing gear in particular were especially troublesome. 

The chin turret was also a major headache due to the friction caused by having such a snug fit. Ideally this piece should really have been painted separately and rigged up to be detachable for both upkeep and to model Weapon Destroyed damage results, but 14 year old me was not that smart. 

The largest problem by far however was clearcoating the beast. Some application of an improperly mixed varnish ended up causing huge swathes of the model's recesses to fog over with this disgusting crusty white residue, which then plagued me for many days as it just would not stay gone, returning paint touchup after paint touchup no matter what I tried. I thought I had solved the problem at last with many many touchups followed by a coat of pure varnish, but even now it seems to be starting to creep back in. It seems that this particular TX-6 is cursed to live an ignominious career as a tyrannical hangar queen. 

But then that's just how the march of technology goes sometimes. 

The rear of the machine shows off one of the many firsts for a 40k vehicle I've painted - a full set of engine glows. These were done using the same rough colour scheme as the engine glows on my Tau ships for Battlefleet Gothic, building up from red to yellow to orange to white in the centre of the thruster. The main difference was in a more detailed range of colour shades to fit the larger scale of Warhammer 40,000 models, as well as a white undercoat to compensate for the colours being drybrushed rather than simply layered. 

The orange engine glows also mark the first decisive action in my WAR AGAINST BLUE GLOWS. They were fine in Firewarrior, and they were OK in District 9, but then after that every single fucking sci fi movie has just put made every glow and explosion electric blue and after 15 years of it I just can't take it anymore. ESPECIALLY with Tau since every last Tau player and artist seems to only ever give Tau stuff blue glows everywhere because of Dawn Of War, and it just feels so lazy and it looks so monotonous and I'm so so tired of seeing them everywhere. 

So in my new Tau army there's not going to be a single blue glow. Anywhere. At all. 

Starting with the engines on this Devilfish. 

The other notable feature on the rear of the Devilfish are the rear-facing sensor clusters at the bottom, which have been painted up in multiple colours as a throwback to the rainbow lights on my older vehicles, with a little uniformity added in - the main lenses are red and green, which is a recurring colour motif throughout the army and taken directly from Codex: Tau and Firewarrior, while the smaller lenses are asymmetrically coloured to add a splash of visual spice. 

The underside showcases what is perhaps the most dramatic new addition over the previous models, a massive increase in firepower from a set of magnetic hardpoints for a full payload of seeker missiles. It was always my plan to eventually equip all the Devilfish of my Tau army with the maximum number of seeker missiles they can carry. This is rooted in my longstanding doctrine of ensuring that every single unit in my armies is equipped with anti-tank capability as well as anti-personnel weaponry, to ensure they can defeat any threat they encounter. And also because as I've mentioned before I had a strict policy of no battlesuits so I needed something to cover the middle ground between pulse guns and railguns. More recently discovering the Soviet army practice of ensuring every single unit had some way of hurting tanks only vindicated this approach. Besides, it's just not a proper infantry combat vehicle without a good anti-tank missile launcher bolted on. 

Much consideration was made to the placement of the seeker missiles, a question that my engineers have wrestled with for decades. At one point over-wing mounts on the top of the prow were considered. So too were a cupola mount, and sticking them on the engine mounts or on the top or underside of the engines themselves. In the end, I settled on a conventional under-wing configuration on the prow, which was simple and made plenty of sense from a design point of view. But this then raised the question of how to fit four seeker missiles under the prow of the Devilfish, which was not a lot of space to fit four big honking cruise missiles. My first plan was to take some inspiration from real life Raketnosets and opt for an interleaved stack of missiles clustered around the central keel in a similar manner to the TU-95K-22 missile carriage. 

But then I discovered that the weapon stations on the tips of the prow wings were actually smaller than I first thought and it was possible to stick a big cruise missile right next to them without getting in the way of any gun drone docked there. This made the overlapping layout unnecessary, provided two missiles were kept right next to the central keel. 

The missiles themselves are taken from the Skyray, because the Hammerhead kits these days come with a Skyray sprue, and since I plan to build more Hammerheads than Skyrays I have a surplus of Skyray seeker missiles, which is great because I need a lot of seeker missiles, and each Skyray sprue gives me six of them which is five more than the lone seeker missile on the Tau vehicle accessory sprue, and Forgeworld no longer sells booster packs of seeker missiles. 

They have been slightly modified with the addition of missile pylons modeled on directly, which in the case of the central two is necessary to give them enough clearance over the central keel, and provides enough area for sticking down a pair of magnetic metal pins so they'll stick to the magnets embedded in the prow. There are also a number of magnetic hardpoints installed around the top of the hull so that the Devilfish can be fitted with specialised mission equipment in the future. 

The other notable feature on the underside is the prominent anti-gravity arrays on the prow, picked out in gold as both a shoutout to my first vehicle model and to tie in with the gold anti-gravity gyros on the infantry and battlesuits. 

Like her predecessor, this new Devilfish also features fully articulated side doors, this time secured with paired sets of magnets. The hinge installation did not go smoothly, as my wonky depth perception and spatial awareness meant the shafts drilled through the hinge pieces were not completely level, making the resulting axis of movement for the door awkward. In the end I had to destroy the hinge brackets in order to save them, with the remains being assimilated into the greenstuff fairings added to accommodate the pins. 

The doors in turn open to a completely refurbished interior. 

The interior itself is mostly the same configuration it was first painted in, just updated to my latest painting standards. The white areas were enhanced by using the same method I once used to improve my first ever Battlefleet Gothic spaceship, and involved something I have only ever used twice including here - ink washes. Like my first Explorer class starship, I applied a liberal wash of very watered down black paint to the whole of the passenger compartment, then went back over it with a drybrush of white. This also conveniently repaired the warping on the areas contaminated with Simple Green. 

From there it was mostly a matter of touching up the buttons with jeweled versions of their original colours - which was not the easiest thing to do as I had to work around several sections of hull that had already been glued in place - as well as the vision blocks, which were painted to reflect the environment beyond them, in other words the inner sides of the vision blocks were painted blue to reflect the sky outside and the outer sides were painted red, marking a return to the red vision blocks used in the GW Studio army which I am happy to settle for, and is a reflection of the red combat lighting inside the Devilfish itself. Speaking of, several casting pits and divots in the ceiling of the passenger compartment were painted up as dome lights, coloured red because they've been switched over to combat lighting. 

The upholstery on the seats was also enhanced with a drybrush of Skraag Brown over Doombull Brown for some extra hard-wearing, stylish and comfortable leather padding - though naturally synthetic this time to avoid needless animal cruelty. 

The interior has also at last been equipped with some stowage, this time not one, not two, but three pulse guns for a complete full gun rack. Moving forward all future transports in the army will be required by regulation to have at least one fully stocked gun rack on board at all times, because I am smart enough not to make any of The Classic Three Mistakes. This also means I will be deploying units as large as possible and avoiding any suspiciously well-paying bounty contracts for a maverick lone-wolf space outlaw with surgically-enhanced night vision. Even if issued by a planet facing imminent invasion from Newcrons. 

Not that the Tau Fire Caste is generally given to the business of bounty hunting in the first place anyway. 

The combination of two pulse rifles and a pulse carbine also indicates this Devilfish as being assigned to transport one of my tactical Fire Warrior teams. 

The new Devilfish also features for the first time a complete set of markings, faithfully applied precisely according to the guide in Codex: Tau and painstakingly copied from the GW studio models using photos from Codex: Tau and White Dwarf #262(US) as reference. Since many of the marking icons used did not exist on the GW Tau decal sheet I had to create my own decals using an inkjet printer. These ultimately proved ineffective on their own, as Microsoft Word's crude graphics editor could not scale down the Tau letters and graphics to a small enough size, and the final printed decals lacked pigment. Instead I ended up printing off a set of circular markings in the right size and using them as templates to freehand over with the desired graphics. The results are a little wonky, but honestly so are the freehand letters on the GW studio examples. 

The crew's personal roundel was chosen to be the same design used on the main GW studio Devilfish, visible in the painting example on the back of the box and Codex: Tau as well as the battle photo on the back cover of the codex. The slogan next to the cockpit was taken from the GW Tau decal sheet and reads "Y'eldi Shi" meaning "Winged Victory" which seemed fitting enough. There were also plans for a second slogan around the edge of one of the side doors, but the curved slogans on the decal sheet proved unable to fit there. 

Similarly after the number Lobba barrages my Fire Warriors have been subjected to I had also planned to freehand "PIN US NOW ASSHOLES!" in actual Tau'sia onto one of the side doors, but even after all my time spent painting tiny Elven runes onto banners my freehanding skills were not able to produce acceptably good looking painted letters to the right size. 

The new Devilfish, Arrow 1, has already seen action and performed well in her tabletop debut. It is expected that she will see much more use this year. 

In the meantime, I now have a modest army featuring a solid core of infantry, jump infantry, assault weapons, and now heavy weapons and vehicle support. It is time, at long last, to close out the beginning of my rebooted Tau army with the most awe-inspiring beautiful centrepiece model GW ever made in plastic...