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So I interpret the new 30k box to be set in the late Heresy/Siege of Terra period (evident by Mk. VI at this point having become the most common armour type), yet GW seems to be promoting the clean and classic pre-heresy schemes in their new 30k painting guides.

My question is: Wouldn’t a fair few of the traitor legions be looking rather different by the time we get to the late Heresy? Emperor’s Children full of garish colours, World Eaters covering most of their blues with reds, Sons of Horus having spiralled into that spiky Cthonian ganger aesthetic, Death Guard covered with pus and boils etc?

How common would pristine suits in pre-heresy colours actually be among the likes of the Emperor’s Children, World Eaters and Death Guard etc during the latter stages of the heresy?

xenofexx wrote:
How common would pristine suits in pre-heresy colours actually be among the likes of the Emperor’s Children, World Eaters and Death Guard etc during the latter stages of the heresy?

They'd still be fairly common - the Legions were still recruiting during the HH, and not every marine immediately fell to Chaos corruption.

Common enough. Not everyone was into Chaos worship and it was mostly the Companies, Millenials, and Hosts that fought with their Primarchs that tended to be the most corrupted. Those that landed at the Siege, however, would be the ones with the most Chaotic aesthetic.

They wouldn’t have had time to collect all those bits of fence until after the heat had died down following the retreat to the eye of terror

I don't think there is a "setting" to the new edition of Horus Heresy, it takes place whenever you want it to within the context of the 30k timeline. Officially, operational deployment of MkVI armor predates the Heresy by a scant few months, though the Raven Guard were field testing it several years prior. Technically speaking, there is fluff to justify marines of any legion wearing MkVI at any point in the Heresy.

Cheers for the informative replies, guys :-) That's provided some direction for my EC plans.

xenofexx wrote:
So I interpret the new 30k box to be set in the late Heresy/Siege of Terra period (evident by Mk. VI at this point having become the most common armour type), yet GW seems to be promoting the clean and classic pre-heresy schemes in their new 30k painting guides.

My question is: Wouldn’t a fair few of the traitor legions be looking rather different by the time we get to the late Heresy? Emperor’s Children full of garish colours, World Eaters covering most of their blues with reds, Sons of Horus having spiralled into that spiky Cthonian ganger aesthetic, Death Guard covered with pus and boils etc?

How common would pristine suits in pre-heresy colours actually be among the likes of the Emperor’s Children, World Eaters and Death Guard etc during the latter stages of the heresy?

That's actually one of the topics of Path to Heaven
And the palatine blades in particular seem to be amongst the last to succumb to corruption
I'll try to get a few parts for you tomorrow or the following days if you are interested

 godardc wrote:

xenofexx wrote:
So I interpret the new 30k box to be set in the late Heresy/Siege of Terra period (evident by Mk. VI at this point having become the most common armour type), yet GW seems to be promoting the clean and classic pre-heresy schemes in their new 30k painting guides.

My question is: Wouldn’t a fair few of the traitor legions be looking rather different by the time we get to the late Heresy? Emperor’s Children full of garish colours, World Eaters covering most of their blues with reds, Sons of Horus having spiralled into that spiky Cthonian ganger aesthetic, Death Guard covered with pus and boils etc?

How common would pristine suits in pre-heresy colours actually be among the likes of the Emperor’s Children, World Eaters and Death Guard etc during the latter stages of the heresy?

That's actually one of the topics of Path to Heaven
And the palatine blades in particular seem to be amongst the last to succumb to corruption
I'll try to get a few parts for you tomorrow or the following days if you are interested

Ooh, yes please — That’d be great!

GW like to give you options, so how corrupted you want to make your army look is entirely up to you. Emperor's Children in particular went completely off the chain, fell a long way in a short time and experimented with modification so there is plenty of scope for modelling them with extensive chaos corruption. On the other hand legions weren't all in one place and they all had elements spread throughout the galaxy, some operating in near total isolation from the main body, who might exhibit corruption to completely different degrees based on their own individual circumstances. I'm sure there would have been entire formations of Emperor's Children still in pristine purple and gold at the end of the heresy. For some that might be because they were totally obsessed maintaining their perfect and unblemished appearance (despite the corruption within) and other units would be totally oblivious as to what was happening with the main body of the legion and that their primarch was now a giant perverted snake daemon.

As far as I understand it the point at which the DG gets corrupted by Nurgle can be made out exactly: It's on their way to Terra. So any DG force before the siege would be in their classical heresy scheme, everything since the siege would mean plague marines. Not necessarily the kind of totally bloated and ridden with tentacles Marines GW introduced with 8th, but the DG was infected by the Destroyer Plague on that journey and every Marine should have signs of that. (Of course, there's always room to have companies that were left behind to not attack Terra and guard some outpost and therefore weren't infected, yet).

I’ve struggled with this question too and definitely think it depends on what legion you are playing and what time period. We know from the HH novel about the EC (I forget which - one of the first few) there was the moment where the one character looks about them at what his legion as become; all peeled skin, bulging eyes, sonic weapons, and realizes they have damned themselves (in a bit of a “are we the bad guys?” Moment). But I assume they were still recruiting other EC that wouldn’t look like that.

I plan on painting up some of the new Mk6 minis as Night Lords - adding some trophies and embellishments (face crotches ftw!) really as they were during the crusade anyway, but not OTT.