Long in the Fang (Part 4)

Hello. As I write this Warhammer 40,000 is about to enter a new era with it's 8th edition soon to be launched upon the gaming world. It will be the most radical change in the ruleset since the transition from the 2nd to 3rd editions. From everything* I have seen so far, I think I am really going to like these rules and I am excited for their release.

Meanwhile, I have a game lined up soon in which I will play the Space Wolves for the first time in 7th edition. Despite the fact that I consider them one of my Primary armies, I just wasn't excited by their codex and once again realized the way I liked to play them wasn't really supported in the codex, but instead the obvious "new" units were clearly given "win button" favoritism. Which is fair enough I suppose, but at that time I was at a very strained place financially and couldn't invest in adding new units. So the Wolves waited. Oh yes, I almost brought them out when the Warzone: Fenris Campaign kicked off but I just couldn't break away from the Chaos stuff I was having fun with.

Coming soon will be their first, and likely their only, 7th ed game. This awakening can be attributed to multiple influences: Shadow War Armageddon encouraged me to dig out my Space Wolf Scouts, Kushiel has been goading me for many months for a showdown against his Lions, and (as I previously stated) the approaching new edition. Digging them out and looking over my army I find a lot of projects that were half started or mostly complete that I never finished for some reason or other, and I am invigorated to get back to them. Click on the Space Wolves label and you'll see some of them (Rhinos, Whirlwinds, Wolf Guard, Drop Pods, Fenrisian Wolves, etc.)

One of these projects is my Long Fangs project. In Long in the Fang-part-one. I reviewed some of my older Long Fang models and their color schemes. I considered this a completed project at the time but in hindsight I believe I was kidding myself (Also there was no way to foresee the increase in base size up to 32mm). Earlier today I found myself reviewing them for the first time in a long time

Long Fangs assembled.

I am still very pleased with the models I added to this unit a few years ago, but I have been pondering expanding their unit with options that could let me split them off into additional units if I chose to. They are quite versatile and tend to kill more things than a more expensive tank would in their place.

Some of these models, and their paint jobs, are showing their (err, my?) age just a bit. Take this guy:

So old his base dropped off.

This guy was my original Long Fang Squad Leader. He needed to be "wolfed up" at the time so I added a power axe and sculpted on a beard. This was my first ever attempt at using epoxy putty as a sculpting medium. At that time GW wasn't selling it but they were talking about it in White Dwarf, so I sought it out. I found the epoxy putty in the plumbing section of a local hardware store. It did the job, but it wasn't nearly as user friendly as Greenstuff but the real down side is that it seriously stank! Anyway, he turned out OK even if he did end up looking more like a Mennonite leprechaun than a space viking.

If I do restore this model I am unsure if I will keep this head or not. I will still need to fix that axe regardless of whatever I decide to do with him.

Heavy Bolter.

Ah, the classic plastic heavy bolter! This was available in the original Space Dwarves plastic boxed set but I ordered a few from GW mail order back in the day just to get a few additional weapon options. This particular model had a bolt pistol in his left hand but it busted off at some point over the years. He was posed to appear to be firing the pistol while holding the heavy bolter in a rest postion. As the '90s thundered forward GW upped the size of their heavy weapons leaving this weapon to appear strangly small.

Also, the heavy bolter had to be the most reworked weapon design in 40k history.  It last appeared similar to this in the Space Crusade boxed game before settling into today's familar design silhouette during 2nd edition.

Las Cannon.

Although this las cannon also suffers from the original smaller size, the silhouette and design of the weapon still conforms to later designs. I like this particular model as it was one of the first Space Wolf models that I painted that I felt confident about how to paint it. He was definitely a stepping stone on the path my Space Wolf paint style would eventually evole into.

The missile launcher marine above is among the first 10, possibly 5, models that I ever painted. The yellow stripe on the helmet is a bit of a give away in that regard, as that was a common thing to see on early Rogue Trader era marines.

This next guy is among the last I painted in this style. Comparing the two you can see that my technique was cleaner and more confident at this point and I was experimenting more with tones as layers. Despite the fact the the 2nd edition Codex: Space Wolves was the current book at the time I still wasn't quite ready to shift my Wolves over to the heavier "baby blue" look that the models in that book had.

A note on the missiles: even today the typical option for missiles in a game of 40k are Frag and Krak (somes called Super Krak) missiles. I wanted to make this distinction apparent on the models so I made the Krak missiles red with yellow bands and the Frags yellow with red bands. In those days there was whole list of additional missile options, and one of these guys has a green set of missiles to represent that. I think they may have been intended to be Anti-Plant missiles but I don't really recall. We'll just say they're Flakk missiles from now on.

And yes, these are detachable. If you built your Imperial Space Marines correctly, and carefully, it was possible to make the missile launchers removable.  Although one of these loosened up in time and requires a bit of blu-tac to hold it in place.

The point of this is that my oldest models no longer look right with my newer ones. The original Space Wolf scheme is no longer favored at GW and was further retconned out by those heretics who write the FW 30k books (Dark grey -bah, that might as well be Luna Wolves!). I will likely experiment with repainting a few models just to see if I like my current style on them better or whether I should just leave them be. After all, I do have a lot of unassembled and unpainted plastic marines I could just move onto anyway, but these classic RTB01 marines have always appealed to me. Believe it ot not, my original paint jobs were beginners attempts at following the steps in the Space Marine Painting Guide from 1989. Figuring out how to thin my paints was something I did on my own as these paint guides were somewhat lame at explaining how to it.

Step by step painting Space Wolves in '89.

What follows was the original iconography guide, which would be totally ditched 2 years later in the Space Wolf White Dwarf lists of '92. These icons were challenging for the average painter to paint and next to impossible for a beginner to do. Which is why my old Space Wolves almost all have blank shoulder pads.

That is all for this ramble, more wolf stuff will be appearing here in the future.



*Admittedly I am having a tough time accepting the Primaris Marines into my paradigm.