Birthday Post & My Marine Chapter

Happy Birthday to ME!

So, today marks my leaving behind my “prime” years: my thirties. I’m now unarguably in the age bracket where everything starts to all go down hill. For instance, reading a Bell of Lost Souls article a few weeks ago made me realise that, at best, I only have a few more years left in me where I’ll be able to paint (at the very least) without the aid of glasses—I had better get painting! In that vein, what is nice is that I managed to sit down and do some painting earlier this week; I didn’t work on any of my 40kor War of the Ring or Flames of War projects, but I did get some Strange Aeons stuff closer to completion.

But anyways, this post isn’t supposed to be about me getting depressed over the inexorable march of time. I mentioned in a post earlier this summer that I’m s-l-o-w-l-y working on my Marine army and had always meant to make my yellow marines be the Doom Warriors chapter.

DOOM WARRIORS….?

I was taken by the simplicity of their army colour: yellow—but not a cartoony yellow, more of a “hard-fought, on-campaign” yellow. I also really liked their name and iconography; I’m a sucker for words and word play; there’s something cool about the word “doom.” Despite how it seems to be regularly used as being synonymous with ruin, death and other negative connotations, its first listing in the dictionary defines it as “fate or destiny.” 

I also liked their iconography and came up with a method of combining two transfers from the Marine transfer sheet to make an ad-hoc Doom Warriors chapter symbol (it’s not quite the same but oh so very close).

The last attraction for me was their company markings: Doom Warrior squads use a colour to denote which company they belong to; they instead of using that colour on the rims of their pauldrons, they are truer to the old-school Rogue Trader 40k days: they mark their company with a vertical stripe on their helmets.

However, when I decided to make a serious Doom Warriors army (rather than the collection of tactical squads, which is where I’m currently at), I realised just how much the yellow process I use to paint my marines deviates from the Doom Warriors’ “proper” colours; it really isn’t appropriate for me to continue calling them my Doom Warriors. (Really, all the material showing the Doom Warriors’ colours portray their yellow armour as either a mustard yellow, or a very dark, dun shade of yellow—hardly the deep vibrant yellow my guys have become!)

My yellow is much closer to that of the Imperial Fists, but—and no disrespect to those players—I have no desire to field an Imperial Fists army. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen enough Imperial Fists armies and I’m a hipster at heart, wanting to play a chapter no one has ever heard of. No, I’m so much more a sucker for the esoteric elements in the 40k universe.

"I was in yellow armour before it was so mainstream."

I’m also a big fan of GW’s decision, made long ago, to accommodate and legitimise players’ creativity by saying that all player-created colour schemes were simply already-existing armies that had not been covered in any GW publications. It just wouldn’t be right for me to be calling my army the Doom Warriors or the Imperial Fists when I could just say they were a different chapter; plus, I’ve always enjoyed—championed even—creating my own armies and paint schemes instead of merely painting ones laid out by GW (which is likely a big reason why I hold such disdain for special characters…even now in Fifth Edition).

I have no choice in the matter: I need to invent my own Chapter.

STARTING POINTS

So now that I’ve established just how cool I think the Doom Warriors’ name, colour scheme, iconography and markings are, I’ve decided to make my chapter have direct ties to them. Even though the Doom Warriors are not one of the founding legions from which all other successive chapters owe their lineage to, it’s still totally possible: according to the Warhammer 40,000 Wiki, little is known about the Doom Warriors’ history: not only are they of an unknown founding, it’s also not known which Space Marine legion they are a successor of.
Sure, there are no known successor chapters based from the Doom Warriors chapter, it’s not much of a stretch to say that my chapter is a recently-discovered/acknowledged successor of the Doom Warriors.

The icing on the cake for me regarding the Doom Warriors lies in their back story; it’s just a coincidental tidbit that helps make them more…fitting for me: they have a defect in their Catalepson Node as a result of a mutation in their gene-seed that makes them incapable of true sleep. Anyone who knows me well will know the waking hours I tend to keep; so this detail in their back story really resonates with me.

Ah, Crimpshrine. Good times..... (Not that I ever saw them live, mind you.)

For my marines, right now I’m really leaning towards the Doom Brethren and the Doom Keepers as possible chapter names. Plus, if I keep the word “Doom” in my chapter name, I can name my Chapter’s leader Chapter Master Thulsa!

But don't expect any helmet conversions in the army.

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