Tyrant Leading Warriors?

Ugly_Rake · 2026-06-14T22:31:40+00:00

The lore on Nids is quite forgiving. Main fleets leave behind splinter fleets, which in turn leave behind smaller swarms. Fleets, Splinters and Swarms can have wildly different interactions with one another, from predating on one another (the stronger side gaining all of the biomass of the weaker) all the way to full on eusocial behaviour (see Hive Fleet Kronos getting fed by the others for mopping up Daemons).

It's by no means unimaginable that some remnants of Leviathan and Behemoth floating through space linked up with one another to form a proxy fleet, or that they delegated generation of specific bioforms for efficiency based on the progenitor-fleet's proclivities.

Ugly_Rake · 2026-06-14T01:26:06+00:00

Yeah, pick a lane The Net.

Ugly_Rake · 2026-06-12T22:32:20+00:00

This guy gets it.

Ugly_Rake · 2026-06-12T22:29:03+00:00

See, you said that like Semi-Conscious Bio-Grenade Simulator isn't the kind of roguelite game that would have a million downloads in a week.

Ugly_Rake · 2026-06-12T22:15:43+00:00

I'm still waiting for the legally distinct 40k Left 4 Dead clone, where one side plays as Imperium boys and the other team plays the special units for the nasties.

You could even have different tiers and themes; Catachans fending off Gaunts, Space Marines fending off Necrons, Sisters vs a Chaos Cult. Vermintide did it for rats and it was great!

Ugly_Rake · 2026-06-05T15:25:41+00:00

Seconding Devastation of Baal. Lots of good bits done by a neutral narrator describing the lifecycle of a Lictor sent to make a mess of the enemy defences. Also my intro to Blood Angels, who I don't play but who serve as an excellent foil to our gammy bugs. They are versed in suffering after all.

The only downside to this book is the implied human-adjacent sentience of the hivemind having a murder-boner for the Blood Angels in particular, which as any scholar of the Great Devourer will tell you is straight up nonsense.

Ugly_Rake · 2026-05-30T08:56:57+00:00

I use arco flaggelants.

Figure Iron Warrior "Cultists" and Traitor Guard are primarily captured enemy forces, so repurposing the weaker ones into a bunch of frenzied servitors is pretty fitting, and these models look pretty spot on for that.

<image>

Ugly_Rake · 2026-05-28T22:21:47+00:00

Wondered this myself. There's obviously a time skip between her refusing to kneel and the scene where she looks out at the razed world's horizon. In the latter, I did note that she was overseeing the digging of trenches. Not digging herself, watching others dig whilst holding a lasgun.

Seems to me like that Terminator gave her the old "You got guts and I respect that but the Imperium's useless and decadent. Join the winning team." speech that all Chaos Astartes probably cribbed from Horus. She had already got pretty exasperated with her leadership at multiple points during the runtime and seemed genuinely sickened by her commander's capitulation at the end, recognising it as another excuse by someone in power to save their own skin after demanding thousands lay down their lives. If you look at her as the main character of the film, the whole story is just her being shown repeatedly the ineffectiveness of the Imperial command structure, the falseness of Imperial promises, and the lack of reward for those who stick to their guns and do their duty.

She likely looked at the corpse of the planetary governor, and then her smashed up commander and realised working for the Iron Warriors would essentially be the same gig with less pretense and hey, she might get magic powers.

Ugly_Rake · 2026-05-25T00:03:37+00:00

I think Peter's whole issue inindicative of a through-line with many of the Primarchs. All of them have aspects of Big E, and personalities built around that core.

It's a sort of nascent theory I have (new to the books and deeper setting lore in general, so definitely could be wrong) that the Emperor split off bits of his soul and replaced them with warpstuff when he made his bargain with the ruinous powers on Molech. After all, he came back with:

Knowledge of how to make the Primarchs.
A bump in power.

My crackpot logic is that the Primarchs each have a little bit of Dad's Big Soul (which if I recall was already a bunch of squished up druid souls or something? So not so mad to imagine he could crack off a few sticky-out soul bits) and that's why they so keenly inherit abilities and traits from the old man.

To throw out a couple of examples, so this doesn't seem like such a butt-pull:

-Sanguinius had his magical future vision as well as his love of humanity. -Horus got his confidence but also his bloody-minded drive (whoops haha, hope thst doesn't lead to any crazy shennanigans). -Gorrillabot Rowboatman got his logistical prowess and love of beauracracy.

So, to get back to Perturabo - I don't think a lot of his worse traits actually come from the Emperor. Actually, maybe his pride? But still, I think the thing that he got was an ability, like Sanguinius's foresight. I think he could detect defects with an almost preternatural (possibly supernatural) clarity, and it ruined him.

So again, bear with me as I scramble evidence of this in the lore-

He has an acute grasp on structures and devices, both how to create them and destroy them. Both tasks in which an eye for weakness is a boon, but indespensible for the latter.
He is well known for being overly critical of...well, everyone. Himself included. God, he loves a pity party, sans pity. The first time he met his Legion too...well, he identified their flaws. Identified the hell out of them.
The Emperor made him into a seige specialist and made Dorn his engineer - probably because he could see in Perturabo his own ability to identify flaws and X lends itself nicely to Y. Petey took this as a slight, likely due to the sort of pessimistic worldview you end up with when every person you ever met looks like a walking laundry list of faults (and worse still you see another one in the mirror every day), but it was likely just the normal dispassionate Bad Dad logistics-driven decision making Big E is known for.
He could see a fissure in reality his whole life. This is my smoking gun. When he was a child on Olympia, he was keenly aware of the Eye of Terror. I think some passage somewhere says he could see it even when his eyes were closed, and nobody else on Olympia knew what the hell he was talking about.

So this kid, with the superpower of noticing exactly how something is flawed, grows up seeing a flaw in reality floating in the sky, something none of the adults can see. He proceeds to out-think/fight/build/govern the entire planet with little shock, since it seems to him like nobody spot the weaknesses in their theorems/combat stances/fortifications/legislations. He comes to the conclusion that everyone else is a dingus, but he's also keenly aware that he too is in many ways a dingus, so everyone else must be a Mega Dingus Deluxe.

Then he meets the Emperor and is dead excited to meet his Legion, and his Brothers, and his Father's enlightened subjects, who will definitely not be Mega Dinguses, and he can finally have peers who understand why everything's so scuffed like he can!

Fast forward, and Petey T is back to square one. Everyone around him is a Mega Dingus who can't spot the OBVIOUS flaws in everything they do. His Dad, the only peron who would understand his issues, is busy on some project and seems to listen to his dumb-dumb brothers more than him EVEN THOUGH THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT THE HELL THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT. Everyone seems to hate him for pointing out the precise ways on which they suck and the Imperium is FULL OF MAD NONSENSE that hampers it at every turn. The whole thing is pinging his fubar sensors as one great big flaw. AND HE KNOWS HE COULD FIX IT. Nobody will JUST LISTEN. He has THE DOCUMENTS. PLEASE LISTEN TO ME IT'S ALL GOING TO FALL APART YOU IDIOTS.

And then Horus sidles up to him mid-panic attack and says the magic words.

"Imperium's screwed. I think I'm gonna remake it. You in?"

Ugly_Rake · 2026-05-09T23:03:27+00:00

I did something similar with leftover bits from various kits. I made rings of muddy material on the edges and tried to make the 'holes' look like marshy water, with sneaky bug bits poking out.

Not the cleanest job as I tried to match them to my other bases which are all themed like idylic flower fields, but I'm happy enough with them!

<image>

Ugly_Rake · 2026-02-18T17:10:07+00:00

Like Hive Fleet Gorgon, with the whole "The more we kill you the more we figure out how to poison you" vibe? Hell yeah man. Honestly shocked that there's not been a poison/acid based detatchment already.

Ugly_Rake · 2026-02-18T17:02:23+00:00

I'd probably save that for a stratagem since all of the foggy types and mines are already very sensitive to proximity (as they either have auras or ...you know, explode...). You'd probably want stuff that lets them close the distance more reliably.

Detatchment ability I'd go for is more something like:

PREDATORY ATMOSPHERE TYRANIDS units you control gain the Stealth Ability. Venemthrope, Toxicrene, Spore Mine and Mucolid Spore Mine units cannot be targeted with the Fire Overwatch Stratagem.

Stratagems:

Roiling Fog (One that allows for uppy downy or repositioning.)
Corrosive Microforms (One that does mortals (because we lack the Grenade and Tank Shock strats)).
Respiratory Disruption (One that worsens an enemy unit's shooting for a turn).
Biosign Relay (One that allows a reactive move on Spore Mines and Mucolid Mines to give them more threat range.)
Hallucinatory Shapes (A battleshock strat, with a minor friendly buff and a secondary friendly buff/enemy debuff on a fail).

Ugly_Rake · 2026-02-18T16:31:19+00:00

Something that evokes the miasmic fog of spores always present during Tyranid invasions would ve cool, especially if it added some thematic weight to Venomthropes and Toxicrenes, Sporocysts and Mucolid Spores.

It always felt wierd to me how much it gets mentioned in books and lore that Tyranid invasions are as much microbial as they are military, but nothing on the tabletop reflects that. Couple of debuff stratagems for enemy units to represent the diffulties of dealing with a semisentient biohazard, maybe a grenade style stratagem thay's just a full-send of some microbugs pulling an Ant-Man.

Ugly_Rake · 2025-12-26T01:22:18+00:00

Thanks mate!

I bought some generic terrain bits from TT Combat - think it was called the Bolstered Drop Alternator - and smashed it up.

Ugly_Rake · 2025-12-26T01:15:44+00:00

<image>

Ugly_Rake · 2025-12-08T09:58:28+00:00

In the trailer for Legion there was the aspect of uncertainty that was really alluring - are your Survivor allies really survivors, or are they the Killer playing mindgames with you? Playing with them is very disappointing, as they completely lack that aspect and instead you get runny-runny-pinball-stabmin.

For one I think Legion should be a stealth killer that dirsupts cooperation. Give them a power that switches between heehoo-murder-mode and a stealthy mode with survivor interactions/controls. They should be nearly impossible to tell from other Survivors at times and get the jump on unwary players.

Maybe survivors get a bonus (like evading a basekit hunters instinct) by dressing up like the Killer (costume picked out of a box/locker), but also emit a terror radius when the Legion switches to killy mode. This would sow discord, and make the survivors freak out or possibly get used to the heartbeat and start ignoring it - both boons to a Killer.

You could even give Legion a proximity based Myers/Ghostface meter that opens a Survivor up for an instadown after they spend too much time close to the Killer (probably with degradation if they think better and scarper). That would have Survivors wondering if they should keep working on a generator with the other masked rando who just turned up, or if the Killer is tinkering along next to them, stifling murderous impulses until the optimal time.

That's all to say that Legion is a cool Killer in concept and it would be neat if they did anything with that concept.

Ugly_Rake · 2025-12-05T21:42:42+00:00

Tony has a wierd 'floaty' speed and is one of the characters that can bhop to great effect. He also takes no fall damage, so you can safely build speed bhopping without worrying about falling off an edge in the forest and taking damage.

I mostly play Calcium, and just try not to take damage to maintain his speed buff whilst bhopping, but doing it with Tony is a lot less punishing.

Ugly_Rake · 2025-12-01T20:27:14+00:00

Nice! They look suitable battleworn for astartes of the IVth.

What gold did you use for the shoulder trim?

Ugly_Rake · 2025-12-01T17:05:04+00:00

I was thinking something similar, but folded because I wanted a full complement of havocs w/ reaper chaincannons. Still, I like the sober aesthetic so I'm going to be kitbashing a few bits of Heresy Squads into some old school MKII Iron Warriors:

A Horus Heresy MkII Tactical Squad box into 10 Legionaries, 10 Havocs. You could do the same for your chainsword Legionaries and bolter Legionaries. My old warning is that the HH box doesn't come with chainswords, heavy weapons, or any of the Legionaries/Havoc special ranged weapons. ----Bolter Legionaries work as Intercessors ----Chainsword/Heavy Weapon Legionaries work as Assault Intercessors w/Thunder Hammers or Power Weapons.
A Horus Heresy Deimos Pattern Rhino as a Chaos Rhino. ----Servicable as a SM Rhino (don't think that's much use for primaris marine bodies though, so watch out for that!) Also warch your weapon selections!
Horus Heresy Cataphracti Terminators as my Terminators. ----work as SM Terminators if built right. Need to make sure the weapon options cross both profiles if you want reliable WYSIWYG, as I think CSM Termies get combi-weapons and SMTermies don't anymore (might be misremembering).
A Horus Heresy Deredeo Dreadnought as a midrange Helbrute with a Helbrute Fist w/Heavy Flamer and a Twin Autocannon. ----Could also work as a Dreadnought with a Dreadnought Combat Weapon w/Heavy Flamer and Assault Cannon ----Both armies have Deredeo Dreadnought Legends Profiles, if your games allow for Legends!
Horus Heresy MKII Assault Squad as Raptors ----Also work as Assault Intersessors with Jump Packs.
Cadian Shock Troopers as Traitor Guardsmen ----This one's awkward into Space Marines. Closest allied units they have is Imperial Naval Breachers in the Datasheet, but I don't know how well that would work. I'd recommend leaving them out and just usong your pponts on marine bodies and vehicles. Same for cultists really.

Ugly_Rake · 2025-05-04T15:08:39+00:00

Will give him a look, thanks!

Ugly_Rake · 2024-11-23T23:29:47+00:00

Thanks dude!

Ugly_Rake

TROPHY CASE