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Do you prefer GW written chapters/Legions/Dynasties or what ever your army faction calls them or to make your own custom one?

Once upon a time I collected Ultramarines.I have since sold them even though I really enjoyed the army I kind of kicked myself for painting myself into a corner (pun intended) and said if I ever started another it would be my own chapter.

Well I got Into word bearers lore recently and fell in love with them to the point I bought myself a decent starter army. Now that I’m almost to the painting stage I’m asking myself do I really want to lock myself into one flavor/rules set again. Hate not to because word bearers speak to me but I been down this road before. Also I’m not the best at coming up with my own back story paint scheme.

Custom paintjob, usually existing <subfaction> rules, as they're generally better.

I dislike the vulnerability of GW being able to take things away by highlighting a paragraph and hitting backspace- today's overpowered nonsense is tomorrow's deletion. A custom paintjob is more flexible in avoiding the hammer. Plus it makes them more 'mine,' and I can discard a lot of the random nonsense that GW attaches to subfactions - like the Nephrek insanity of wanting to turn into light, the Imperial Fists penchant for masochism, World Eater's obsession with mindless axe chopping, etc.

And I fully expect a lot of subfactions will lose their special rules the next time the paradigm shifts in the writer's room (so about midway through this edition or the next one).

Custom all the way. Your dudes, your lore.

It makes the setting feel bigger and I can't stand hearing people say your blue marines need to be yellow if they're going to be good at doing the gun thing.

I'm all for custom armies, get a cool scheme going and backing it up with your own lore is sweet.

I do also enjoy the GW made armies, especially the ones with very little lore, as you can pick them and then expand them with your own lore and background stories.

My Excoriators are based on the 5th company which got destroyed to a man in the BL novel Legion of the Damned and I couldn't help but use it as a jumping off point to make my own Primaris force.

My Eldar are my own craftworld with their own scheme and lore. It was accidentally developed as a teenager when I could not paint Biel-Tan guardians and their white armour.

Voted custom for pretty much all the reasons stated above: My guys, my paint scheme. I also get tired of people who need a rigid set of rules for every decision (as above, blue guys need to be yellow to shoot good). GW fluff also goes too far for me. Everyone has a different level of believability. Mine usually stops at "and billions died!!!!!!!!" I remember the Cadian fluff in some edition of IG. If you put together two different boxes...like 90% of cadian soldiers died in training or their first battle...yeah, that's survivable.

For my Xenos factions, all of them are my own paint scheme and so on.
Same for Imperial Guard and if I ever got Sisters.

I like the Chapter paint schemes for Space Marines, so I have Crimson Fists because I think they look cool. I'm less bothered if I adhere to the background for that force, to me they are just space marines doing space marine things.

I like the background for the Word Bearers a lot, so my Chaos army is explicitly Word Bearers. I just think they make great villains. I have tried to follow the background with them with lots of cultists and possessed marines.

Itz the difference between a 'personality narrative and a 'shared narrative. No one but you can visualise or know your something verbnouns. Everyone can visualise ultramarine or space wolf.

Personally I quite like a middle ground and like the 'B-listers' you typically see in the forgeworld productions rather than gw's a-listers. Enough there to be shared but still.huge scope to make them my own.

The likes of the charcharodons, Raptors and Minotaurs are very interesting.

Bit of both really.

Harlequins are Frozen Stars while Craftworlds are eccentric rivals to Ulthwe. I have small desert and jungle themed marine kill teams while I'm currently working on a Tome Keeper team/army( sigh. not enough library books in the kitbash box ).

Why did you not include an option for "both"?

For example;
I own SW, DA, UM, Mentor Legion, Doom Eagles, and an as-yet unbuilt/unpainted pile-o-Primaris.
*I have no problem fielding my SW, DA, & UM as those chapters - that's WHY I built/painted them as such.
*The Doom Eagles? Well, technically they'd be an UM successor - but I've never gamed with anyone who actually knows that. And I've most often run them as generic SM anyways. Truth is I painted them like that just because I liked the color scheme.
*The Mentors? These guys I'll change their chapter rules/traits etc as I please as that actually fits their lore. They are my "official" custom chapter. They're also the home for all my one off SM stuff. Things I just like that don't really fit my other forces. Again, very fitting with their lore - they're testing new stuff. And I've liked the Green/White scheme ever since seeing it in the RT book all those years ago.

*Those Primaris....
I'll almost certainly paint some of them up as Mentors. Maybe some will go into my DA force. The rest? I need to settle on a custom scheme I like. So most will become a custom chapter.

Other armies are similar.
Some I run/paint as GW - Catachans, Iyandyn Eldar, etc because I like those.
Others I've painted as pleased me & I pick whichever rules suit me atm - Ex: my Necrons. I built these guys long before there was lore & color schemes for various Dynasties & I've painted additional stuff to (generally) match them. Right now they're claiming to be Mephrits. Next crusade they might be used as something else....

Deadnight wrote:
Itz the difference between a 'personality narrative and a 'shared narrative. No one but you can visualise or know your something verbnouns. Everyone can visualise ultramarine or space wolf.

To some degree. Maybe. But... really, 6th-8th edition Space Woofs have no relationship at all to 2nd-3rd edition space wolves. RT SW are completely different, considering they were used as the example 'standard' chapter in Rogue Trader and Russ was a general and a spacecraft pilot with a big ol' rebreather.

Ward Grey Knights aren't even recognizable as the Inquisitorial servants they started out as.

So what the 'GW official verbnouns' are to people varies a lot.

Deadnight wrote:
Itz the difference between a 'personality narrative and a 'shared narrative. No one but you can visualise or know your something verbnouns. Everyone can visualise ultramarine or space wolf.

Personally I quite like a middle ground and like the 'B-listers' you typically see in the forgeworld productions rather than gw's a-listers. Enough there to be shared but still.huge scope to make them my own.

The likes of the charcharodons, Raptors and Minotaurs are very interesting.

I'm with Deadnight here; I did a Preatorian army in like, 2010ish, and I'm doing a Konig one now. Planets that have some mentions in the fluff, but not much.

I like a "shared narrative" bit, but I want it to feel suitably serendipitous should I run into someone else playing the same army; and I definitely don't want the total number of models to exceed the total number of guys in the fluff.

E.I. There are probably a lot more than 1000 minatures painted as Ultramarines; all you Ultramarine players are committing Heresy by participating in building up a legion sized force. As soon as you all show up at one event, the gig will be up and the Inquisiton is coming for you!

(Same reason I never use named characters.)

If you mean in terms of paint scheme and fluff, always custom for me.

If you mean in terms of army rules? I go with one of the standard Cults/Kabals/Covens, because I don't have the privilege of playing Marines and so playing a custom chapter means giving up all but the basic artefacts, stratagems and warlord traits.

Voss wrote:

Deadnight wrote:
Itz the difference between a 'personality narrative and a 'shared narrative. No one but you can visualise or know your something verbnouns. Everyone can visualise ultramarine or space wolf.

To some degree. Maybe. But... really, 6th-8th edition Space Woofs have no relationship at all to 2nd-3rd edition space wolves. RT SW are completely different, considering they were used as the example 'standard' chapter in Rogue Trader and Russ was a general and a spacecraft pilot with a big ol' rebreather.

So not the figure they made of him.... Even came with his 2 wolves.
This guy (see below) has been leading my SW force since I built it in the closing days of RT.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

VonGerrow wrote:


E.I. There are probably a lot more than 1000 minatures painted as Ultramarines; all you Ultramarine players are committing Heresy by participating in building up a legion sized force. As soon as you all show up at one event, the gig will be up and the Inquisiton is coming for you!

(Same reason I never use named characters.)

{shrugs} My UM are a snapshot of one particular company during a specific period of their history. All battles involving them are of one of several varieties:
1) Something happening in their time period.
2) Training exercises, either then or now, against Holo-deck esque opponents. One side is rendered either archaic or futuristic - depends upon who's "real".
3) Fiction. "More exciting tales of the Fighting 9th!"
You know how we have precious few historically accurate WWII shows/movies today? Well guess what? 39K years in the future the trend continues! Thus this week you get to watch as the heroic 9th Co., in all their RT era style, does battle against the eeevil xeno Commander Farsight & his Tau*. And tune in next week as our heroes fight against their far future Primaris dopelegangers!
*Never mind that the 9th Co. never actually fights as a Co., and the Tau hadn't even evolved out of the muck at that point in UM history....

Voss wrote:

Deadnight wrote:
Itz the difference between a 'personality narrative and a 'shared narrative. No one but you can visualise or know your something verbnouns. Everyone can visualise ultramarine or space wolf.

To some degree. Maybe. But... really, 6th-8th edition Space Woofs have no relationship at all to 2nd-3rd edition space wolves. RT SW are completely different, considering they were used as the example 'standard' chapter in Rogue Trader and Russ was a general and a spacecraft pilot with a big ol' rebreather.

Ward Grey Knights aren't even recognizable as the Inquisitorial servants they started out as.

So what the 'GW official verbnouns' are to people varies a lot.

True, but side stepping the point slightly.

Interpretations may have shifted over the years and decades, (rules have changed dramatically haha!), especially since the very early days but a lot of the core details are solid at this point. Space wolves are from fenris I very much doubt for example that logan grimnar will become leader of the blood angels, for example.

But that's not what I meant by 'shared' narrative. A shared narrative refers to these chapters being in a common ground, and shared experience. And while, as you say, things have shifted over the years, we all still have access to those books and lore that shows this shift. They're not hidden, nor secret.

And while anyone can read the official second ed space wolf lore, and chuckle ay the shifts between then and ninth, it's a lot more difficult to have my something verbnouns share the same kind of common understanding and experience that the notable chapters have. You can make your space wolves 'yours' too, but it's a lot harder to walk them.away from the shared understanding.

Well there is no custom GK like chapter, so to play them the GW official is the only way to go.

But even for those that do have the option to play something else, it is still probably better to stick to an official army. More updates, and if something custom is better, you just can just switch from hydra to kraken.

For me, loyal Marines have to be a custom chapter. Chaos is the opposite since I live the story of the traitor legions and the heresy so I use only established ones.

Karol wrote:
Well there is no custom GK like chapter, so to play them the GW official is the only way to go.

But even for those that do have the option to play something else, it is still probably better to stick to an official army. More updates, and if something custom is better, you just can just switch from hydra to kraken.

Not necessarily.

There's a difference between 'stick to an official army' and 'use a factions rules'. Blood Angels aren't the only chapter that gets to use the blood angels rules, successor chapters are a thing.

Agusbly, There is some merit to using a particular rules set if it better reflects the identity of your named chapter/force rather than the rules it 'should' use - I once saw a converted ad mech army using the tyranid rules. Conversions were frankly, incredible.

Things get... morally greyer when your unpainted, or 'not a named chapter' something verbnouns are just codex surfing the various marine rules sets based on the power rankings at any particular time, ba's one week and raven guard the next, etc but thats a discussion for another day.

When I was younger I used to do everything from scratch (custom warband). Nowadays I play more within the rules, selecting existing factions, although I like to carve out my own space within that with background/characters, etc.

Deadnight wrote:

Voss wrote:

Deadnight wrote:
Itz the difference between a 'personality narrative and a 'shared narrative. No one but you can visualise or know your something verbnouns. Everyone can visualise ultramarine or space wolf.

To some degree. Maybe. But... really, 6th-8th edition Space Woofs have no relationship at all to 2nd-3rd edition space wolves. RT SW are completely different, considering they were used as the example 'standard' chapter in Rogue Trader and Russ was a general and a spacecraft pilot with a big ol' rebreather.

Ward Grey Knights aren't even recognizable as the Inquisitorial servants they started out as.

So what the 'GW official verbnouns' are to people varies a lot.

True, but side stepping the point slightly.

Interpretations may have shifted over the years and decades, (rules have changed dramatically haha!), especially since the very early days but a lot of the core details are solid at this point. Space wolves are from fenris I very much doubt for example that logan grimnar will become leader of the blood angels, for example.

But that's not what I meant by 'shared' narrative. A shared narrative refers to these chapters being in a common ground, and shared experience. And while, as you say, things have shifted over the years, we all still have access to those books and lore that shows this shift. They're not hidden, nor secret.

And while anyone can read the official second ed space wolf lore, and chuckle ay the shifts between then and ninth, it's a lot more difficult to have my something verbnouns share the same kind of common understanding and experience that the notable chapters have. You can make your space wolves 'yours' too, but it's a lot harder to walk them.away from the shared understanding.

They might as well be hidden or secret. Anyone 'can read,' sure. But most don't. People play, for example, Retcon Angels for the terminator and bike power-ups. They'll have no idea why the chapter would properly be wearing Black armor and have native american touches rather than a generic knight look.

No, Logan won't be a Blood Angel... but that's not even vaguely in the scope of what anyone is talking about. But if you're trying to make a named chapter 'yours' you won't be using Santa Logan on his christmas sled anyway.

Deadnight 796849 11077816 wrote:

Not necessarily.

There's a difference between 'stick to an official army' and 'use a factions rules'. Blood Angels aren't the only chapter that gets to use the blood angels rules, successor chapters are a thing.

Agusbly, There is some merit to using a particular rules set if it better reflects the identity of your named chapter/force rather than the rules it 'should' use - I once saw a converted ad mech army using the tyranid rules. Conversions were frankly, incredible.

Things get... morally greyer when your unpainted, or 'not a named chapter' something verbnouns are just codex surfing the various marine rules sets based on the power rankings at any particular time, ba's one week and raven guard the next, etc but thats a discussion for another day.

But succesor chapters get worse relics or special characters. I know it is not always the case, but for GK for example, if they were ever to get succesor, a GM or Librarian is often just a worse version of a special character, the way they are costed.
I don't think that playing unpainted makes much sense in 9th ed. 10VP difference is practicaly an automaticaly lost game, specially if you play a weaker army.