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How do!

More a chit-chat thread than one with a specific purpose. And I’m interested to know how common it is to see an opponent with a Custom Chapter, Craftworld, Hivefleet, Regiment etc.

For understandable reasons GW of course focuses on the Officially Official ones for the most part. Not entirely universally, but definitely predominantly. And so it seems to be the same old Big Names time and time again.

How does that translate in the wild?

Is this in terms of the paint scheme used or their army's fluff?

I guess in both cases, I'd say Marines and CSM tend towards recognised chapters/legions over being custom. CWE are maybe 50/50 and every other faction moves heavily towards custom.

I prefer to take an obscure faction or group and build on them.

Right now I am working on building an Inquisitor for the Ordos Maledictum. They are Inquisitors given the near impossible task of closing the Great Rift by Any Means Necessary.

The inclusion of a single model into any Imperial force I play allows me to have a narrative reason to fight any army in the 40k universe.

(I have a d10 reason generator)

Usually it's because there is something on the battlefield (hexagramic leylines are always a good reason) that our side needs.

What do you mean by "Custom"?

Unique paint schemes?
Personal fluff/lore that doesn't have any rules impact?
Home brewed rules?

If it's the last one? Then it's pretty rare in my experience because:.
1) definitely not allowed tourney wise,
2) virtually no one is interested in playing against (to put it politely) DIY rules in pickup games - sometimes GWs own rules are bad enough thank you....
3) only amongst close friends where we've all agreed on stuff.

If it's just paint schemes & "blah blah blah" personal backstory?
Then I've played against this type of stuff 1000s of times over the decades. It's not unique or rare.

Schemes and Lore I what I meant.

Should’ve specified that in the OP

It's an integral part of the Your Dudes design, and that's one of the most important features a game can have, as far as I'm concerned. I don't think I've played with someone who didn't do this to one extent or another.

Maybe if I were gearing up for a specific campaign? Playing out the Badab War or Kastorel-Novem or something with a group? Other than that, though...

For myself, I've done a homebrew Guard Regiment (Lavrentian Guard) and Chaos Warband (Harbingers of Fate).
My Renegades & Heretics are just generic mookazoids meant to represent any armed Chaos mortal force.

For folks in my gaming group over our tenure, we've also had two Chapters, a Sept, a Craftworld, two Hive Fleets, a Knight House, a Kabal+Cult duo, a Blackshield Warband (HH), and a Mechanicum Forge World (HH).
There are also a Necrons and Orks over the years, but for 'Crons it was just the generic gunmetal, and Orks is Orks, they got painted with whatever paints people had to hand.

We primarily play Heresy, so homebrew is more the specific iconography and characters we use for our Legion forces. For example, my friends Thousand Sons use the Tomb Keepers (book with a star in the middle) badge as their company emblem.

Fairly common, I'd say. I feel like about half of my regular opponents have either explicitly custom factions for their lore or else just keep their lore vague enough and their paint scheme generic enough that they *could* be part of one of the canon factions, but they don't go into it. I do kind of feel like wanting to use named characters factors into this. Want to use Farsight's rules but don't want to paint your army red? Here's an ambiguously maybe Farsight leading your forces.

In the discord servers I'm a member of, I see people sharing custom subfaction lore all the time.

For myself personally:
* My eldar are Iybraesil or Ynnari or sometimes Ulthwe with the handful of black-and-bone models I have that could ambiguously just be guardians with non-craftworld/ynnari paint schemes because reasons.

* My drukhari are mainly poisoned tongue, but I have a lot of red guys kabalites that get used as either Flayed Skull or Ynnari. My wyches are painted up as ynnari but also have their own subfaction lore. My haemonculi aren't part of wider subfactions but are instead independents scooped up by my archon because fewer political connections hopefully means fewer politics to juggle.

* My harlequins are the canon masque The Dance Without End.

* My primaris marines are Alpha Legion in disguise.

* My firstborn marines are an Indomitus Crusade fleet that has been specifically tasked with scooping up stragglers from the other fleets and consolidating the other fleets' gains.

* My chaos marines are one part Night Lords, one part fully homebrewed Slaaneshi marines, and then some Thousand Sons who are painted such that they can either be working with Ahriman, or they can be their own subfaction focused on cultivating psychic and mutant potential within the human population.

* My tau are canon sept Tol'Ku.

* My necrons are my own custom minor dynasty, but part of their lore is they have a long history of being conquered/absorbed by other dynasties. (Their survival strategy has long been to put up little enough of a fight that they remain largely intact after the big fish declare victory and move on.)

* My "GSC" are a generic chaos cult that is meant to be able to represent various cultists that pop up across the galaxy. That said, their color palette is meant to feel vaguely Tzeentchy or Alpha Legion-y so I can play them as literally the mortal part of an Alpha Legion force.

* My sisters are a custom subfaction.

Custom warbands are the usual approach I'd say, custom factions less so.
What I mean is people make up their own commander and their squads, their own Story and so on. But they still are Nightlords, Death Guard, a certain Dynasty and so on. More often than not because people may start collecting because of certain paint schemes or faction background.
Personally I have my own DG vectorium with its Warlord Anthraxas. I started the army in 5th and later on incorporated 8th edition fluff when I liked it or it was compatible. My older paint scheme is different from the official depiction, so you certainly could see them as custom nurgle Chaos renegades back in the day.

My Orks are Snakebites and their fluff is not really worked out so far, they tend to jump from campaign to campaign as new orky tribe NPC's.