A Year in Miniatures 10: Dread Persephone
Adeptus Titanicus is awesome. I’m just about old enough to have played games with Games Workshop’s lesser-used game systems, and to have mourned the death of Battlefleet Gothic, Inquisitor, and, notably, Epic. To be honest, Inquisitor was never that good, everything I liked about it is done to far better effect in Dark Heresy, but Epic was genuinely amazing. The smaller scale (6mm compared to the 28/32mm heroic scale of the main game) meant that you could field frankly ridiculous armies, and it let you play around with things like Warlord titans which would be completely impractical at the larger tabletop size.
And then GW killed it off.
We’ll skip over the dark days of Apocalypse and £3,000 Forgeworld titans that tried to replicate Epic at the larger (and much less affordable) scale, and fast-forward to 2018 and the appearance of Adeptus Titanicus*. Epic was back, albeit at a slightly larger scale and with newer titan designs! And this time around I’m an adult with actual disposable income.
All of which is a lot of pointless preamble building up to the big reveal of my first Warlord Titan: Dread Persephone.
This is one of those rare occasions where I actually had a very strong concept for a model before starting. I occasionally have a go at creative writing, often to no great success, although the naratives and ideas tend to get recycled into TTRPG adventures so it’s not a complete write off (pun absolutely intended). Recently I hacked together a short story about Imperial Guard exploring an ancient city and stumbling across a motionless sentinal - ancient, colossal, and weather beaten, the giant figure towers over the remains of buildings. Plants and birds nestle in its tarnished superstructure, and the wind and rain whip around it as it stands, motionless, just as it has stood for centuries. It’s only when they investigate closer that they find the heretical symbols, and begin to suspect that a dark power still lingers within the ancient god-machine.
“Ancient, colossal, and weather beaten, the giant figure towers over the remains of buildings. Plants and birds nestle in its tarnished superstructure, and the wind and rain whip around it as it stands, motionless, just as it has stood for centuries.”
Diabolus ex Machina, as it was titled, will probably never see the light of day, but the idea of trying to convey aeons of wear and immobility on a model was too good to waste. Cue a long series of stippling, washing, chipping, and streaking until I finally had something that captured the right level of grimy and magnificent! I also swapped out the head for a recreation of the older Lucius Pattern variant, partly to imply greater age, partly because it has a more inhuman look than the standard heads, and partly because I happen to really like it.
Next time I’m messing around with resin I’m planning to add a few feet of water around Persephone’s back foot, but for the moment I’m calling this one done! Also those of you checking the release date on this one will have noticed that it’s decidedly late. This, surprisingly, is not due to me not finishing painting project, rather it’s the result of me spending too much time painting and not enough editing photos! I’ll be filling in the missing posts over the next few days and trying (and probably failing) to be more organised going forward.
Next week we get involved in another of GW’s recent rash of additional games - Kill Team!
* Okay if you want to get really pedantic, this is actually either the second, or fourth iteration of Adeptus Titanicus depending on how you count Epic and the older Titan Legions, but since that discussion is completely irrelevent to the story I’ve elected to ignore it.
16/ 05/22
Weeks Elapsed: 19
Miniatures Finished: 14
