VI. Oleg Miletus

"Below the embarkation deck lies a small chamber, unadorned and lit only by worklamps. This is where Oleg Miletus spends his waking hours, surrounded by his tools, stripped down weapons and chattering servo skulls. Most call him the Quartermaster and it is Miletus' role to maintain the arms and equipment of the Euridipes' crewmen.

"Oleg Miletus is old. His shaven head, with its hardwired data cable and the servo arm, of his own design, sprouting from his back gives him an odd appearance. Kal opined that Miletus wishes he was one of the Mechanicum. I cannot speak for the truth of that, but he does spend time deep in conversation with the Magos, when he can. At his hip he carries an armour plate from one of Mars' metal men, as though it were a sacred relic.

"It reminds me of what we stand to lose, should we fail", he once told me. 

"Miletus joined the Great Crusade as a young man and has given all his adult life to serving the Euripides, but though his body may be frail, his mind is still as sharp as a knife. He does not rest in his work and the ship's Armsmen often find that Miletus has 'improved' their weapons with his own modifications while they slept."

~J

V. The Iron Hand

My first Astartes and a test of the paint scheme. I'm trying to avoid just painting the Iron Hands black. Instead I want to suggest black using a dark, slightly slate blue, grey. It just looks better I think and also gives the painting more depth.

IV. The Astartes Arrive

Work on the Quartermaster is continuing. His face is done and I'm starting on the fiddly details. Photographing him close up has made me realise there's a massive mold line running along his left hand though. Having seen it, I must fix it.

However, work on him was slowed down when these chaps turned up to distract me;

These are the first of the Euripides' Astartes, Iron Hands in MkIII armour. Once the Quartermaster is completed, I'll be starting work on them, probably painting their armour in a similar manner to Q's black breastplate.


And to distract me even more, my lovely over half bought me a present off ebay;

This is the Imperial Enforcer, the Forge World event only miniature from a few years back. Now, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with him, but he's such a beautiful miniature, I'm too scared to hack him up. I can't just go out a get a new one if I balls it up. I've recently finished reading "Battle for the Abyss". This book is really what inspired me, more than anything else to collect the crew of a single ship. "Battle for the Abyss" features the Armsmen, the chaps responsible for maintaining discipline and security among the crew. I'm thinking perhaps the Imperial Enforcer could be the basis for the Captain of the Euripides' Armsmen. I've got a rough idea for a simple head swap, but the difficult part will be working out how to make some Armsmen for him to lead.

Thanks for reading.

III. The Quartermaster

Sometimes, when I'm kitbashing, I have a definite idea what I'm trying to make but often I just playing around with no idea. There are those wonderful, organic kitbashes where everything just seems to work and then you sit back and try to work out what it is you've actually made. This was one of those cases. A while ago I made this chap;

Then he sat in a drawer ...

Now he's finally starting to get some paint and an idea is forming about who he is. He's still a long way from finished. I'm calling him the Quartermaster, though I don't have an actual name for him yet. He is the one who keeps the weapons and equipment of the ship's crew and he cannot resist tinkering with them, like a far future version of Q from the Bond movies.

Neither FW or GW make rules for spaceship crews and I doubt they ever will, so I'm going to use the Inquisition rules for my crew. The Inquisition is perfect in that it allows me to have a collection of the weird and wonderful that still feels human, far more so than any other published codex. With the Quartermaster I realised I could get a (counts as) Jokaero into the crew. Jokaero's are physically weak but can shoot powerful weapons so the Quartermaster is an old man and his weaponised servo skull provides a rational for his ability to shoot.

II. Work is in Progress

There is more to life than space marines. One of the things I love about the Heresy era is the way that each fleet is a real community. Astartes, Imperial Army, emmisaries of the Mechanicum and the ship's crew all live and work together. So, having blown all my money on massive, leather bound books, I decided to begin on some crew ... while I wait for the Iron Hands to muster.

Lycia Jesh is the youngest, but perhaps most talented astropath aboard the Euripides.

Sooner or later, anyone who likes to convert GW miniatures must make something out of a cairn wraith. It almost feels like a rite of passage. How to make something both interesting and original out of a miniature which has been done so many time before? Well, this is my attempt. I'll write up some background on young Lycia when she's finished.

I. The Death of Hope

"Regardless of where the blame truly resided, many within the Iron Hands Legion, now fatherless, dealt with this traumatic crisis on a personal level in a simpler and more direct fashion; they went violently insane."

- Horus Heresy Book 2 : Massacre

For me, if the Horus Heresy is about one thing, then it is about the death of hope. Mankind stood on the edge of a golden age, a pax imperialis, free from fear, free from superstition; but that fragile dream has come crashing down, and in the best traditions of tragedy, the Imperium contained within itself the seed of its own destruction.

It is a setting that I find perhaps far more compelling than the 41st millennium. Its characters seem more recognisably human and that makes the darkness all the darker, the tragedy all the more tragic.

For a while I had been in a hobby slump that I couldn't shake, this is until I realised that it was indecision which had made me grind to a creative halt. On the one hand, what had enticed me back to this hobby after a gap of over 20 years was the amazing miniatures I had seen coming out of the Inq28 community. So, my first tentative steps to rediscover the joys of painting and modelling revolved around acolytes and death cult assassins and their ilk. On the other hand, I had begun reading the Horus Heresy novels and had fallen in love with the stories and setting.

Yet the Horus Heresy hobby seemed the complete antithesis of Inq28. One was about creating small bands of lovingly crafted conversions, the other about 20 man tactical squads and giant tanks.

The solution was so obvious that I could not at first see it. The novels I loved to read were not just about huge battles; they were also about individuals. They were as much about small bands of Astartes, as much about the ships' crews, the astropaths, the remembrancers as they were about Drop Pod Massacres and Titan Legions.

An idea began to germinate and it has taken a long time to take shape.

The Doomed Ship

"... in the aftermath some Iron Hands units and, in some cases, entire Clans shunned the Medusan Council's assumed authority and went their own way, consumed by their own hatred and need for revenge."

- Horus Heresy Book 2: Massacre

Ferrus Manus was dead. This terrible news filtered through the galaxy, astropath to astropath, until it reached the escort ship Euripides. Now, lost and leaderless, the Iron Hands astartes will have their revenge ...

One ship, its crew; the space marines and mortal men who call it home.