An indomitable wall of blue stands ready to break through any defense and hold the position for Ultramar and for Guilliman. When crafting my Ultramarines force for Heresy, the narrative I settled on was that of a specialized beachhead strike force: all shields, all the time. Well, lot’s of them anyway.
(Power) Swords and Shields for Ultramar
Zone Mortalis is a great way to play Horus Heresy; Small scale, tactically challenging and brutal. It’s also brutally addicting. One of the things my Heresy era Ultramarine force does well is carrying a literal wall of Shields into battle. In the claustrophobic corridors of a Zone Mortalis game, using a shield to stave off death be it by plasma blast or powered blade attack (or even the tainted talons of my Gal Vorbaks- Kera) is indispensable.

Within my last Table Ready article, we took a look at the humble Ultramarine Breacher Squad. As a troop choice, the Breacher Squad is a great way to form a shield wall around an objective and dig in for the fight to come. Breachers are great, but, what if you need to go forcefully remove some adversaries from an objective and defend it after? The Ultramarines have two unique units at their disposal that fill that bill. As the second shield-bearing unit in this series, we will discuss the first of those unique XIII Legion options: the Praetorian Breachers.
Ultramarine Praetorian Breachers
The XIII Legion has a few specialized units available to them. One of those is the Praetorian Breachers, an elite version of the standard Legion Breacher squad. I built and painted these guys first, before my Breacher squad, and came to realize afterwards that the Ultramarines would make a great Roman Shield Wall style army. It was from this point that the true intent and purpose of my Ultramarine project found it’s focus.
During a ground war, Praetorian Breachers form the spear-tip of a battle, leading the standard Breacher squads to battle. Aboard a ship of the Ultramarines fleet, Praetorians are used in counter-boarding actions, sent to eliminate those that are bold enough to fight towards a point of strategic importance. They function similarly in a Zone Mortalis game. Like standard Breachers, they are defended by their shield and are better protected from blast weapons by being a Heavy unit. Unlike their basic troop brethren, Praetorians are elite, and come armed with energized swords, which cut through standard power armor with ease, and can wound anything on a good enough wound roll. This makes them far better at taking an objective, instead of just sitting on one. Most importantly they have the benefit of being Line, which means they can score victory points to win an actual game.
My Praetorian squad was assembled by combining several Heresy Kits. The build started with the classic MK4 plastic Space Marine kit: I used the legs, backpacks and bases. Yup. That’s it. I used a spare resin Mk4 Ultramarine torso upgrade for the Veteran Sergeant; I had extra from when I eBay’ed a bunch of them to make the Locutarus Storm Squad (we will see them some other time – I can literally here Hammond declaring “Spared no expense” and I weep a little). The Storm Squad all got Legion upgrade torsos, so I was able to use the Assault Marine chests for my Praetorians.

Two different but aptly named Kits were acquired from Forgeworld: The first was two sets of Praetorian Breacher Shield kits, because Forgeworld makes us buy 5 shields at a time, but, at least they come with ultramarine power swords and a Legatine axe. The second was the Mk4 Praetorian head kit. These look great on any Mk4 kit, and I used them as often as I possibly could when building my army up. Lastly, because I am a sucker, I used Mk4 shoulders with the Ultramarines logo on it; again I used these everywhere. One thing I like about collecting Legions in Heresy is the amount of characterful Legion specific upgrades available, allowing me to arbitrarily spend more money on every single model (although I use sculpted shoulder pads very often, I still buy expensive transfer sheets, too. Cause, yeah, sucker).
These were painted prior to the discovery of my new way of painting Ultramarines. They are a bit duller blue because of it. But, I have chosen not to repaint them. One feature of their paint job I enjoy is that I went with Black as the background color of the shields. While that is how they were shown in the Black Books and then again in the Liber Astartes book for 2nd edition, I had originally planned on white. I use white with gold accents to show elite status in my army. The black makes them heavier in appearance and I think it works great.

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Tyson
Obsessive and neurotic collector of little plastic men, novels about the same little plastic men and paints to make the little plastic men pretty. Married to Kera, who puts up with him and pretends that she doesn’t hear him speaking to the little plastic men in between making pew pew noises in the hobby room. Requires adult supervision. A menace to himself but rarely to others. More beard than man