Tzeentch Thousand Sons Chaos Marine Legion
- May 26th, 2010
- By Bucho
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All this talk of new plastic daemon goodness has got me digging through my thousands sons stuff and adding in some new plastics to the summoned units is going to give me a larger choice of units. Yes, the thousand sons legion is quite a limited army in that you get very few options and the troops are not that quick to adapt to the changing battlefield (and are seriously undergunned compared to other chaos forces). When your only heavy/special weapon option is a psychic attack by your aspiring champion/sorceror you have to be that little bit more careful when and how you want to attack. Psychic hoods are NOT your friend.
But with a greater daemon and lesser daemon units I can see the flamers of tzeentch really making their points back versus horde armies, but against the now common Imperial Guard “leafblower” and “alpha strike” lists they are going to struggle. The best bet is dropping sorcerors into the IG rear and hopefully get some psychic strikes against the tanks along with any powerfists I can bring along. The IG sanctioned psyker squad is going to upset the applecart but knocking them off early will hopefully open up the psychic phase to a building torrent of psychic attacks. Fortunatly foot IG are soft against large flamer units, the daemons just have to get close enough without getting shot to pieces.
Honestly running a few rubric units should give me an unbreakable core of infantry and elites easily able to defend positions. Attacking would be best left to other units and any “cunning plan” I can come up with would be a bonus. From memory, a unit standard dedicated to tzeentch gives the unit an invulnerable save or increases the one they already have. Which could make for some tough rubric terminators! Having a fifty – fifty chance of saving hits is just awesome when facing Tau or IG heavy weapons.
It would be tough in a tournament due to the repeat spam of the troops choice (to get good army selection points). Full rubric tactical squad with sorceror aspiring champion in a rhino. There are no weapon options to choose from so anyone not used to them is going to be surprised how limited they are. Yes I know I can run normal chaos units dedicated to tzeentch, but they are not part of the legion as such.
Two daemon engines would probably give me the range and strike power I need in big games, but the thrill of building some silver towers may keep me busy long enough that an alternative unit comes out!
A vindicator would be low profile enough to advance with the troops and give them enough support to allow them to have some success in close range firefights and soften up targets prior to assaulting them. The vehicle upgrades could make for some interesting conversions. (the old flames of tzeentch one I have seen done amazingly well).
The special character for the thousands sons is not only a nice miniature it is pretty good on the table too. I might try and find the rules for Ahriman’s Council the unit of thousand sons sorcerors that was in a chapter approved article a while back. Have to pick a good selection of psychic powers to hopefully cover anti-vehicle and anti-infantry needs throughout games.
I primarily planned only a small force to use as an opponent in kill team themed games, but with the inclusion of some heavier daemon and vehicle units they may be a nice change to my Imperial Marines, Genestealer Coven and Orks.
There is also the option to build my daemons and try running a mono deity daemon list. I certainly have enough greater daemons for that!
Lesser daemon cavalry would be a sight to behold for tzeentch, although the horrors are meant to be riding discs, I can see various modes of transport being used from crazy cavalry mounts to a spawn with hundreds of legs.
Spare spawn and horror models are required for the psychic attack conversions. Possibly have imperial helmets or clothing modelled onto them. Even a couple of converted tyranid models would work well as they have great fanged maws and chitin body armour that could be replicated to make the spawn have a strong style along with some visual cue to where the original spawn was created from.
A recent devolpment is the leaked images of the new horrors. They have moved away from the more recent ones back to the bigger slightly comical versions. I have plenty of ideas for conversions so it might be worth getting a couple of boxes to convert up for fun. Of course all the crazy conversions will need to be matched in the other units or at least have the units with conversions as crazy. It would then be down to doing something different for the greater daemon to fit it within that style of army.
One of my tzeentch greater daemons is painted to look like a vulture but a second one I have could be converted to be more like a shaolin monk or similar.
Since there is a theme of flames with tzeentch I am tempted to work on a flame covered daemon prince. A burning skeleton in a robe would suit the style of the army especially if I spread flaming unit champions through the army. Adding extra flames onto the tzeentch flamer units could give them a better look alongside the burning prince.
Back in Realms Of Chaos days I had a chaos warband which was hilarious fun, especially when your champion was just as likely to be given gifts as mutations. Lots of gifts allowed you to ascend to daemonhood whilst mutations lead to becoming a chaos spawn. You had to laugh at the luck of some of my champions getting so close to their goal only to them be given half a dozen mutations leaving them nothing more than a spawn. Then there was the blasted standard which caused a toughness check which killed you if you failed or gifted you with d6 mutations. My genestealer cult faced one at one point a whole stealer squad was cut down apart from two, so I rolled up their mutations and ended up with two truly brilliant models to convert up. (this is just something I remembered whilst writing about flaming characters) one had a flaming skull, gave off a smoke cloud and had extra limbs, the second had an additional head, brightly coloured feathers, had extra long legs and both caused terror. Not a bad set of upgrades for them in our campaign, and makes me want to find the old conversions I did and do new better looking ones.
