When I started a Heresy Era Ultramarines army, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. What started as a way to help justify buying the Forge World tanks for my 40k Ultramarines became an even greater project, an army that I have been working on for years.
Welcome to Project Ultramar, a multi-phase plan to create an army with many ways to play.
…Because My Wife Plays Word Bearers
What in the hell is a Nullificator anyway? It wasn’t so long ago that I had no idea. One of those fateful nights, when Connor was over, filling my head with bad ideas, we got to making a nasty Word Bearers army for my wife to use (mostly) from my existing painted collection. Sure, I needed a few drop pods of various sizes and spikiness, but otherwise it was all terminator and Gal Vorbak, you know: nastiness.
After Connor proclaimed that he didn’t want to have to go up against the list, I asked the obvious question: How in the shit am I going to fight that list? Turns out I need Nullificators. And a Prime.
The Horus Heresy affords many opportunities to create some custom built units. You can dig through the Legacies .pdf document and pick something that sounds juicy, and you can build a unit or character to represent the legacy unit of choice.
Turns out, I needed some help dealing with Daemons, be it possessed marines of the Gal Vorbak or summoned Daemons of the Ruinstorm.
After Horus betrayed the Emperor and started communing with the corrupting powers of Chaos, it became clear that a way to combat the daemonic entities of the empyrean. A bit of fight-fire-with-fire.
Enter, you guessed it, the Nullificators.
From Bits to Battling Daemons
I found myself digging through my prolific pile of plastic, and as you can imagine, I was able to locate a Cataphractii Terminator sprue. I supplied it, and the maces from the newly re-released Deathwing Terminator kit to Connor. He had the left-handed flamers already. The rest I will leave up to him:
“Nullificator’s are one of those units which I personally think get overlooked in 30k. In many ways they’re legion flavored Grey Knights which can add both thematic interest and tabletop punch to almost any list. Especially when that army is already themed around a battle full of warpcraft and demonic incursions like Calth and the 13th legion’s push back against the Dark.
I started with the basic plastic terminator kit, carving and sanding spots into the torsos for MK4 Ultramarine heads to fit in to still make the legion a little more obvious. I carefully clipped hands away from 40k CSM terminators and slapped the old plastic flamers from the Calth box onto the hands. I thought the new Dark Angels mauls would work for a volkite mace (and look less legion specific than their old terminator counterpart) and attached to plastic cataphractii arms.
It’s not the most “legion specific” kit bash sure, but Nullificators in general were an emergency stop gap to deal with daemons and warp spawn, a choice of ignoring the Edict’s of Nikea for the Greater Good (no, none of that and wrong shade of blue) and preserving what they could. Standard armor quickly refitted for more esoteric reasons would make sense to any legion going up against horrors from beyond, and the Ultramarines especially.”
– Connor
All I needed was to 3D print an extra set of legs, a wrist-mounted Disintegrator rifle for the Prime and shoulder pads all around. What I was looking for presented itself to me on Cults3d.com and a few bucks later I had the STL file sliced and wracked up on the printer. Next thing I knew, I had a Nullificator Prime and a squad of specialized Daemon hunting terminators in support.
You got some black on my Ultramarine
Like the many other Ultramarines in my collection, the Nullificators started off with a Macragge Blue primer spray. Then I airbrushed them with a couple thin coats of Macragge Blue air along with the lightning claw Cataphractii squad. I got to thinking, just how much of these Nullificators I was going to paint white and gold to make them stand out from the Command Squad and the Fullmentarus Terminators already in my collection. Literally stalled out in the process, I couldn’t come up with a way to make them look different when it dawned on me: They have some nasty-ass weapons. With a mace that lights their targets, and their targets’ friends on fire and a flamer that has a horrific concoction that makes burning to death look favorable, these guys were looking a little bit like a war-crime unit. The other purveyors of war-time atrocities, the Destroyer squads, are painted black. Why not do the same here.
And like that I was painting a terminator squad in the colors of the Nemesis Chapter of the Ultramarines. Project Ultramar will eventually move onto a couple of Destroyer squads, transports and a dread or two to represent units of the Nemesis Chapter, maybe even as much as a full 2k list of black-clad Ultramarines. We’ll see.
Either way, I found an efficient and acceptable means to paint the Destroyers. I used Coal Black from Monument, with Blue Black along the edges in dots and dashes to simulate damage. To this I added a little Leadbelcher for some real damage. I feel that the blue-tone to the scratchy edge-highlighting works well with the blue of the rest of the army, and the white and gold stand out wonderfully in contrast to the black.
The end result is rather pleasing, especially since it’s not just blue with a little white and gold in one place or another.
Same as the Morlocks, this is also all Connor’s fault. With the Nullificators and the Prime complete, I am nearly finished with the Terminator only Pride of the Legion list, which is the next stage of Project Ultramar. Well, Terminators, Land raiders and dreads anyway, with no power armor in sight.
You’ll see me here again when that is ready to unveil! Until then…
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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
