Warhammer 40K - Coming Back to 8th Edition

Those of you who have been followers of this blog for quite some time may recall that in the dim and distant past my primary game system was Warhammer 40K and remained so right up till the terrible imbalance that was 6th Edition and I also managed to remain indifferent during the massively bloated 7th. I am however giving 8th a go with a small group of friends who nicely hover in the 'competitive enough but not so much that you want to stab them' category.

I have started this by purchasing the Dark Imperium Warhammer 40K starter set and then swapping out the Death Guard half with another local player. This left me with a considerable quantity of Primaris Marines and a shiny new rulebook...a few other purchases were also made...

I'm of the opinion that currently Primaris Marines work best as a mixed force with the original style of Marines for a number of reasons but in the main they (imo at least) lack long range firepower and are a tad tactically inflexible. The issue is of course that my own custom 'Night Reaper' Chapter had a quite distinctive style caused by my use of normal marine configurations with Chaos parts liberally added to give them a renegade look.

Night Reapers - Tactical Squads

Night Reapers - Veteran Scouts

Night Reapers - Assault Squads

Fortunately it seems that Games Workshop have either thought ahead or somewhat by accident they've made the heads, many shoulder pads and quite a few of the weapons close enough in scale to swap between the Primaris and standard Marines. This means that I've been able to match my new Primaris recruits to my original concept with a few head-swaps and some basic reposing. The reposing was necessary as due to having two of the same Dark Imperium halves I obviously have some identical models as the starter box models are of the simple assembly variety.

These are the Primaris Librarian with a Chaos Space Marine Sorcerer head on instead and the Primaris Captain with a Dark Angels Veteran head instead of the provided Primaris one. I haven't decided whether to use their correct shoulder pads or Chaos ones so their right shoulders are currently bare.

Here's some comparison pictures between my converted versions of the starter set Lieutenants and the originals with head swaps. Two of the Primaris Marines had their helms attached to their belts so I swapped those instead of the actual heads. The sword armed version had a simple arm re-position while one of the Bolt Rifle armed versions had a slightly more complicated swap of weapons which required some green-stuff work to get the arm at the required angle.

Once I was fairly certain I could match the older marines from my chapter in appearance I moved onto attempting to match the colour scheme. Unfortunately the two paints I used to mix are no longer produced by Games Workshop and the alternatives aren't quite the same. I therefore went with a metallic blue that despite not being exactly the same as my original scheme is still similar enough in style so they're obviously the same chapter. I did a test model just to be sure...

With that worked out I started some minor conversion work on the Inceptors involving the addition of some trophy racks. The heads are unfortunately too enclosed for me to replace with horned versions...

...and then of course there's Daemon Prince Guilliman Shibboleth....

I've had a few messages from people concerned that I the haven't been posting much lately and this is due to my abandoning all other games in place of Warhammer 40K 8th edition...the truth is that I have been working seventy hour, seven day weeks and simply haven't had the time to do any detailed unboxing and review features. Whereas the above conversions and projects are things I can get done in the couple of hours a day I've actually had to myself. Hopefully things will get back to normal within a week or so...

Thoughts and comments are (as usual) most welcome.