Missionary Man

++ Battlespace Galactihulk, Part 2 ++

One of the more obvious yet challenging parts of the mashup was the player characters. In BSG each player has the role of one of the major players in the series and of course one or more of them is a cylon. The traitor concept maps pretty easily to 40k obviously (too easy really - Chaos? Mutant? Heretic? Necron?) but the idea of one of a unit of space marines betraying his battle-brothers is pretty much anathema to the contemporary galaxy. Betray humanity, oh yes, but one marine isn't going against his chapter any time soon.

So the obvious thing to do was to take a leaf out of a not entirely dissimilar game with a hefty dose of treachery - Inquisitor! So then the problem became identifying ten distinct characters, or really (since I wanted the human players to put their own persona onto their characters) ten character classes, limited obviously by my collection of models.

Brother Ephrys - Missionary

In reverse order then, the last of the ten I settled on was the Ecclesiarchy representative, the missionary. From the fluff, missionaries seemed the most likely to be boarding a Space Hulk or acting within a non-Ecclesiarchy unit. I deeply, deeply love the model from Red Box Games (I think I have a thing for lanterns) but I had to obviously sci-fi it up and 40k it up. Boltgun and an Inquisitorial icon were easy enough but perhaps a little tacked on, so adding some kind of power cable seemed to be a nicely understated way of emphasising the futureness, and yet it's a lantern, so it's got that gothic, broken down kind of future which is what 40k is all about to me. So yeah, I like the model :)

The lantern also opened up the chance to do a bit of OSL which is just the most fun thing to paint for me. I kept to a simple colour scheme of red and blue against a neutral background. The black was highlighted up with hawk turquoise (a technique I learned from somebody or other on BOLS) which lets it maintain a rich blackness without ever looking washed out as it might with pure white highlighting - basically kids, always mix a colour into your greys. The rest of the lighting was simply achieved with varying levels of highlights in appropriate places, and lots and lots of thin washes of red, purple, and black. The only thing I'm unhappy with is the head really, but the model has such a delicate head with very small eyes and a lot of beard obscuring other detail. C'est la vie.

Great fun to paint, and one of my favourite pieces I've done, if I say so myself.