Greetings one and all
The start of a new year is normally the time we make resolutions to improve ourselves, be it losing weight, learning a new skill, or giving up a vice.
For most of us in the Warhammer Community, it's normally a time to set ourselves new challenges; and for myself, I've chosen to start a new army.
Thus, I have set myself a small achievable task of building and painting a 100 power Astra Militarum army. I’ll also be doing this in tandem with the bingo cards in the back of White Dwarf issue 459.
My plan is to create a force with plenty of character and feeling, which I will provide updates on at the start of each month on my blog.
Now, personally, I find that a good backstory can really inspire and feed into the models… I’m also a huge sucker for a detailed back story, hence why I love 40K so much. So I decided that in order to create something unique, I would sit down and have a bit of a brainstorming session; the mess that came out of that is below.
Now, for those of you that can’t read my shockingly bad handwriting, I’ll quickly take you through the process I used.
I firstly considered the planet the regiment would be raised from. In this case, I decided on a cold industrial world which had just raised its first hive, and had other proto hives scattered across its surface.
I next considered its society. I went for a blend of Victorian England, Divine Monarchy, and near-total bureaucratic control. The Royal Family are the Emperor's representatives. To work is to praise the Emperor, and so everyone must work. In order to make sure everyone works, everyone is registered at birth and tracked throughout their lives. There is even public schooling which takes the form of ecclesiastical schools; therefore everyone is very religious, even more so than normal. Those that do not or will not work are heretics, and will either be gathered into penal legions or converted into servitors.
Lastly, I considered its military. I decided that a bureaucracy that placed so much importance on monitoring its citizens would want other ways of doing that after schooling, which is why I decided on conscription. Of the billions of conscripts, the top 1% would enter the Astra militarum each year. Out of a population of 70billion, that's 700million guardsmen each year; broken up into mostly infantry regiments at roughly 20,000 strong, that would result in 35,000 regiments a year (the law of large numbers). The first 10 regiments of each year's batch would be royal regiments, and would therefore be made of the best recruits utilising the best equipment. These I decided would be mostly specialist regiment; armoured, mechanised engineering and such.
After all of this, I decided on the name of an armoured regiment: .10.M41 4th Royal Cannoneers. With the planet churning out so many regiments for the Astra Militarium each year, the date it was founded is at the front so as to ease bookkeeping.
Anywho, that is how I decided on the background for my Astra Militarium. I think these guys should be loads of fun to build, convert, and paint, as I tend not to consider the more religious side of the imperium. I'm looking forward to the challenges this might give me.
I hope you all saw 2021 in in the best way that you could, given the current circumstances. See you next week, where I’ll be going over a couple of ways to paint black armour.
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