Over Christmas and in the holidays afterwards I have put some thoughts on how I wanted the two titan legions to look like and what type of conversions or scratch builds could be possible to include.
For a start, I am still a big fan of the old titan designs that date back to the 1st iteration of Adeptus Titanicus. In the meantime (30 years later...) most of the titan and knight designs were altered and modernized several times along developing their own look and styles. However I still have a sweet spot in my heart for the look of the old "beetleback" Warlord titans and the old spiky, doglike Warhounds titans.
Hence I was rather happy, when the 2nd variant of the Warlord titan that was released by GW came with a new head that had a very strong resemblance to the 1st edition warlord titan´heads and also included some modified shoulder plates that are closer to the beetleback titan look.
Going forward my plan is as I said earlier to build two titan legions, Traitor Legio Mortis and Loyalist Legio Astorum, each with a distinct look.
Legio Mortis is rumored to be one of the three first titan legions ever to be raised on Mars, and based on this fluff, to me their titans should look the most archaic or primitive. For them I will use the old style Warlord titan heads and the closed shoulder plates for the beetleback look.
To add to the archaic look, I will build some archetypal titan weapon too i.e. the Multi Launcher, which is basically a giant rocket launcher. The old version of this weapon looked like a round cylinder while the modern one is more like a stack of rockets and overall box shaped.
For the old style one I believe that I have already found the right donator part too, the rocket pod from the 40k scale Imperial Guard Valkyrie flyer, here´s a pic of it with a EPIC 6mm Rhino tank of mine for scale. With some minor re-work this should look quite nicely on any of the Warlord´s of the Legio Mortis.
The titans of Legio Astorum will get the newer and more modern looking versions of the heads, weapons and shoulder plates to reflect the legion being significantly younger by its founding than the Legio Mortis and thus having likely been equipped with newer type equipment.
For the Warhound titans, first I intend to build one according to the given instructions for Legio Astorum. This should give me some ideas and insight on what could be possible to change or scratchbuild for the torso and possibly the head to reestablish the dog look of the 1st edition Warhounds for Legio Mortis. This might require some clever use and cutting of styrine plastic easter eggs for the torso, as the torso of the old style Warhounds was rather egg shaped.
Paint-job wise, in the old days of Adeptus Titanicus 1st edition many Warlord and Reaver titans had their carapaces or the shoulder armor plates painted not in the colors of their legion, but with various camouflage patterns. You can see this on the cover of the old game box too and also in some White Dwarf pictures.
This is something that I intend to establish on both of my titans legions too. One reason for me to do this is to break up the uniform and very rather boring look of the Legio Mortis currently established paint pattern, i.e. black shoulder plates and rest of body armor is painted black too...yikes!
From my point of view, all titans are high priority targets and thus trying to hide them a bit from (crude) enemy orbital sensors and satellites by applying a camouflage scheme, at least to the upper torso and carapace, sounds very grim dark style to me. So I will play around with a few camouflage patterns to get two distinctive looks for each of the two legions.
Each legion will also get a number of Knight banners (squads) as their support. Legio Mortis will get a banner of Cerastus Acheron Knights instead of the Cerastus Lancer Knights. The head of the Acheron Knight is included in the Cerastus knight kit already, it´s now a question to simply scratch build a chainsword and the flame cannon. None of which should prove to difficult to do, as a number of Chaos Chainswords and Imperial Guard or Space marine flamers could be easily modified to look accordingly. Adding some fuel barrels to the back of the knight, and voila that should do nicely for an Acheron Knight, and the Acheron rules are already included on the Cerastus Knight terminals anyhow. :)
That´s it for now. Happy gaming to you!
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