Looking at the basic assault marine box that GW currently has it's fairly uninspiring. There's a distinct lack of options, and each of the 5 marines look almost identical. Compare this to the variety that an army such as the Blood Angels get. In jump infantry alone they get two boxes, the Death Company and the Sanguinary Guard. They're plastered in blood drops and other blood related iconography, but they feel like marines that have seen a fair few decades of war, and have accumulated the trappings that come along with such dedication to the Emperor! So those would be my starting point, 10 marines, with a lot of hobby knife attention to make them fit for Ultramar. That still leaves me with another 10 to go.
With the recent release of the space marine codex, the Sternguard and Vanguard marines got a re-release, with shiny plastic multi-part kits instead of the mono-pose metal/resin models of yore. I thought long and hard about grabbing a box of the vanguard for my project. Where would I go if I wanted to add a 1st company to my army, they'd end up looking the same as the non-veteran marines. I decided that it was something I would have to deal with if I ever got that far. So off I went to town, and returned another five models closer to the goal.Browsing the web store for ways to inject even more flavour into my units I came across a number of character models with jump packs. These would make ideal sergeants. Yes I would have to stick with their weapon options, unless I felt like doing a heavy amount of converting. No thanks, I have enough kit bashing and scraping on my plate! I settled on the nearly new Lord Executioner model with his impressive axe and also a classic in the form of Shrike. The former would need very little work, he's already so gothic and ornate. The latter will need a fair bit of work due to the raven guard iconography.
17 down and only 3 more to go. I'd pretty much exhausted my options for stealing from other armies, and I didn't want to have a look at 3rd party bits just yet, so a box of regular assault marines it was. With there only being three needed, and the ability to swap parts around amongst my twenty, their uniformity would be well masked.
So far I've got each of them tacked together how they come in the box. The next stage of the plan is to mess them up, swap bits, convert axes into chainswords, throw purity seals at them and see what I end up with. I also need to start working on their background. I've decided to let the look of each character dictate their personal lore, if one of them doesn't have a helmet on, why is that so? If another is the banner bearer, how come he was chosen? Hopefully I'll have the outlines of answers to these questions in my next post. Stay tuned for more Ultrafun!