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Hi,

after a long absence (and a bit of Turnip28), I've started getting more involved with 40k again. My question now is: How do I build an army that stays as close as possible to the lore when it comes to playstyle?

I'm very interested in Lamenters and Blood Angels and planning to build a thematically appropriate army for the Lamenters. What's the best way to approach this? Where do I find the good information about this chapter, and what should my army look like if I want to play the way a Blood Angels successor chapter would fight?

Lexicanum is a good starting point - Blood Angels & Lamenters. There's a list of sources at the bottom showing what books you should be looking at.

IMO, though, there are a few tiers of sourcing for lore in re fluffy army compositions:

Top - GW codices are best for general feel of an army and relevant FW books are best for nitty-gritty "how many lasguns per company" details (older is generally better, but that's partly codices shifting away from a lore-heavy layout to more of a product catalog format, partly an artifact of the old writers leaving over time, and partly me being a grog). I'd say Lexicanum lives here due to its encyclopedic (duh) knowledge and use of GW sources. That said, as beast_gts said (and as with any wiki), you should try to find and read the materials Lexicanum uses as sources rather than using Lexicanum by itself.

Penultimate - White Dwarf (and Index Astartes for Space Marines) can also be invaluable, if harder to source and sift through. Also, the BRB blurbs, campaign books, and other non-codex gaming material.

High-mid - Researching the real-life inspirations of the army, should one exist. Some educated guessing can help fill gaps here - eg, a steppe-nomad-raider force in 40k might take Land Speeders or Vypers or Valkyries rather than horses (the intent is "rush in, hit hard, get away", so anything in the roster that helps do that would be fair game). Even in cases where there may not be an actual inspiration, some thought to the themes present can be helpful as well ("Viking" is a seasonal job, not a force composition, but you can still use it to inform your unit selection - Nords were big on death in combat and taking your wounds to your front, so they'd be less likely to take sneaky snipers and more likely to rely on melee units charging straight down the center).

Low - Things like video games and Black Library. They can be OK, but they're much more scattershot in quality, even more subject to the whims of narrative convenience and biases (or ignorance *cough* C.S. MULTILASER *cough*) of the author, and there's no guarantee a given bit of fluff from a novel will ever be referenced again (outside Lexicanum).

Questionable - YouTube, Reddit, fan forums. There're some great resources out there, but there's also a lot (a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT) of misreading, misremembering, fanon, headcanon, laziness, lies, stupidity, and other assorted bullgak, too.

Unimpeachable - DakkaDakka. Everyfing posted 'ere 'as been vermifi... um, vreif... SOME BRAINY GIT CHECKED IT.

Also, don't forget that "Blood Angels are more melee-focused than your typical Marine chapter," is not the same as "Blood Angels don't use guns," or "Blood Angels refuse any tactics other than running at the enemy screaming bloody murder."

With few exceptions, factions with a preference won't let that get in the way of being effective.
Even Tau developed things like the Onager Gauntlet to punch tanks!

I don’t think there’s a single answer to this.

Going back to the 3.5 Edition Chaos Codex, you could choose a Legion and from that gain restrictions, benefits and extra options. And so if you did that, the background adherence was kinda enforced.

Which isn’t in itself a bad thing. It was unevenly applied, and lead to some No Brainer choices, where your drawback just didn’t really matter in the face of the benefits.

But I would point to a Background Preference not equating an Obsession.

For instance. The White Scars heavily favour mounted troops and rapid strikes. But not to the exclusion of all other options. For Dark Angels? It’s largely cosmetic. Terminator are all Deathwing. Bikes and Speeders are Ravenwing. But no one DA army need feature any of those. Outside of their special chapter only troops? DA are noted for having a greater amount of exotic weapons, so you may want to spec into Hellblasters. But they still make good use of Everything Else.

Blood Angels, as covered above, do like their Fisticuffs. And whilst I couldn’t say what exactly they are in the modern day? Typically have rules that reward to one agree or another leaning into that.

Once again I’m not sure what it’s like in the modern game, but generally the past exception has been Forgeworld units, which in certain builds could cover entirely intentional blind spots in a list.

For Lamenters? You can take one Tactical Squad which represents your entire Chapter because at this point the Lamenters are down to about maybe six guys after Badab and then getting munched by the Tyranids about three weeks later.

I mean, Lamenters are pretty much just another SM chapter, so basically you can do what you want.
Personally I'm a fan of flanderizing things, so I'd put more emphasis on assault, throw in the occasional Blood Angels unit and so on.
I'd say overall it would be more of a modelling project to show lamenters, no? Take the skull set and throw all tyranid skulls as trophies you can find on them as well as the occasional chaos head.