Make a Difference

The path less traveled. I'm sure you all know the Robert Frost poem (if not, go read it, I’ll wait…) Dare to be different. Sure, if everyone does something, it’ll usually be easier to do than if you do something very few people do. As an example, if you play Space Marines in 40k, it’s easy to find many examples of what to do and how to use them. On the other hand, if you play Tyranids or Sisters of Battle, it is a lot harder to find other people that play them and get advice on how to use them. This also means that it may be harder to find models in stock at stores and it may be harder to sell or trade models. If it’s harder to do, why do it? Style. I play Tyranids and Dark Eldar. Nobody else in the group I play with actually plays Dark Eldar. Only one other person actually plays Tyranids. There are tons of Space Marine players. There are several that are also Tau players. There are several people that are starting Chaos armies. I sometimes get people lining up to play me, since I have something different. Viva la difference!

So, you’ve decided to blaze your own trail, but you don’t know where to start. Ultimately, it’s up to you just how far off the beaten path you want to be. You can range from having an unusual army, to having a different style of play to doing wild conversions to having a different paint scheme. It all depends on just how funky you want to get.

An unusual army. This would be something other than some variety of Space Marines, Eldar or The Flavor of the Month. Space Marines and Eldar are the most common armies out there. The Flavor of the Month is whatever everyone is starting armies of. Right now, it’s Chaos, because they just released the new codex and everyone is going gaga over all the bells and whistles and things. I’ve been thinking of starting a Chaos army for a while (almost a year now) but I won’t be doing it anytime soon with all these sheep running around chanting, “Blood for the Blood God!” Before Chaos it was Necrons, before Necrons it was Tau. These are all armies that GW put out a codex for and put together a marketing campaign and everyone just jumped on the bandwagon. I'm not saying that there are no “serious” players of these armies, but they are somewhat buried under the feeding frenzy of people that are trying out the new flavor, but will just discard it a few months down the road when there is some other new, shiny codex out. Check out all your options and see what you’d really like to do. If you really want to do something that is done by a commonly used army, like Marines, see if you can do something similar with another army. For example, if you like the idea of having elite troopers that can stand up to several times their number in opponents and be able to fight at a distance or in close combat, you might consider Space Marines. Or you might take a look at Necrons. You might even decide to try to use an army that normally does one thing well to do something different.

A different style of play. Just because an army is good at something doesn’t mean it can’t do anything else. When I started playing Dark Eldar, everyone was playing them as being close combat-oriented and mostly were using their armies as Archon delivery systems. I did just fine with a shooty Dark Eldar force, thank you very much. For about the first 6 months or year that I played them, I used a Haemonculus as my leader to cut down on points. That way I could spend more points on shooting units. I now play more of a balance between shooting and assault, but the army list can be used either way. As a more extreme example, I know of at least one person that plays an assault Imperial Guard list. He wins with it on a regular basis, too. You don’t necessarily have to go that far, but if you are going to spend a lot of money and time putting together an army to play with, you might as well spend the time looking into what it can do and what you want it to do. On the other hand, maybe you want the army to do the same thing that everyone else uses it for, but you still want it to stand out. That’s fine, you can always make it look really different.

Wild Conversions. You can take a standard army and make it stand out by converting it. Most players will do some sort of conversion for their major characters, the leaders of their army. This makes the character stand out from the rank and file, but it doesn’t usually change the look of the army. On the other hand, you can convert most of the army in some way, which will really get people’s attention. I went to a Rogue Trader Tournament a while back and one Space Marine player had the usual Marine-style force, but all his rhinos where converted and stretched so that they looked like WWII-style amphibious landing craft. (He took the bottom of the Rhino and added it to the top, doubling the troop compartment length, extending the nose well out in front of the treads, then replaced the bottom with some plasticard, it looked really cool.) He didn’t do anything different with his Marines, he played them in the usual way, but it looked cooler than most Marine armies. On a larger scale, I’ve replaced all the legs in my tyranid army (except Genestealers) with scything talons of some sort, much like the Tyrant picture you see on my main page. That’s right, the entire army now looks like a bunch of creepy-crawlies. I get compliments about it all the time. (yes, I do count, “That really gives me the creeps, “ as a compliment : ) ) It’s something radically different from what people have seen before. It took me a lot of work, but it pays off because people think it’s cool. Another army that is really something to see is Calgar’s Homecoming.http://www.pbase.com/devo/calgars_homecoming

This is an amazing looking Imperial Guard army, converted to look like a High school football team! They play pretty much like a standard Guard army, but there are cheerleaders (sergeants) in the squads and schoolbuses (the Chimera troop-transports) and two Homecoming Floats (the tank and the artillery piece) that tell you you’re looking at something really different. If you go to the Warmonger Library, you can see and read about the Thousand Squats army that Matt Birdoff won with at a Grand Tournament. He took a fairly standard Thousand Sons Chaos army list, but he used figures representing an army of Squats (Space Dwarves, no longer a supported army for 40k) He used the army in a standard Thousand Sons fashion, but he converted every model to look like a dwarf or like the product of Dwarven machinists. Maybe you want your army to look different, but those conversions sound like too much work, or you think you’d cut your arm off with that hobby knife.

A different paint scheme. You can make fairly minor changes in the appearance of a model that will, over the whole army, make it look different or exotic in some way, giving it more flavor than vanilla. I wanted to do something different with my Tyranids, especially once I’d decided on the talons. Having cool creatures with just a standard paint scheme didn’t really seem right for me. I’d seen plenty of the standard types and some jungle schemes, but they really didn’t do it for me. I started playing around with some ideas based on insects. For a while, I almost went with Black and Gold, like a Hornet or Yellowjacket. That’s when I thought of StormTroopers, from StarWars. The scenes from StarWars featuring masses of StormTroopers always really impressed me. I tried it on a couple of Genestealers and I liked the menacing feel it gave, despite the ease of painting. Later, when I realized it didn’t look as good on the other creatures as it did on the Genestealers, a friend suggested I try drybrushing. Now, my Tyranid spawn are base coated in Grey, then drybrushed with a somewhat dried out white in two coats. This leaves them looking rough, like they have been through a blizzard, which fits my fluff of infiltrating planets through their arctic wastes. You can also change the look of a figure by changing the flocking on the base. Most people use green flocking. Because most people use it, it seems kind of boring to me. I want something more exciting than green fields for my Warriors to fight on. This is a science-fiction game, let’s do something interesting. I decided to base my Dark Eldar on a volcanic plain, as that’s how I envision Commoragh. I used black sand and some shiny black aquarium gravel, both purchased from a pet store, to make them stand out just that little bit more.

Any way you want to go, it’s always more interesting to do it your own way. (Cue Sinatra) So, what am I going to do for my next army? Well, if I do decide to do another army (no promises either way), I think I’ll go with plain Marines….

I'm joking, of course. Well, I won’t give away any secrets here, but I’ll leave you with a final thought. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Warband. Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid.