Pimpcron: 40K/AoS Homebrew – How To Make Your Own Faction
Pimpcron lays it all out for you if you Grimdark and Mortal Realms fans ever dreamed of creating your own tabletop wargaming faction.
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Have you ever had the inspiration to make your own faction in 40k or AoS? There are countless minor races or factions that could grace the tabletop, and certainly GW could never get them all. Here is how you could make your own army that is entirely unique and super fluffy, a real exercise in creativity. In the end, that’s what this hobby is all about right? It could be anything from a lesser known race of aliens, to a minor faction of renegades (non-chaos I mean), planetary rebels, or even a federation of different species working together.
Maybe not this Federation, or maybe?
Here’s How Not To Do It
Maybe the first thing that comes to your mind is to literally write your own stats and rules for units and try to cost out their points correctly. While that is possible, it is definitely the hard way of doing it. If you want examples of how it can be done really well with a lot of flavor, my friend Robert over at Fandexes has been doing this for years. This is obviously possible to do, but requires a ton of play testing and study of how they cost out points for rules and model stats. I have done that in the past and after quite a bit of work, it worked out pretty well. But be prepared to scour codices for hours trying to compare two similar but different units and figure out why they might have point changes and what rules are involved that made those point differences needed.
Here’s The Easy Way
Let’s start with an example that I have actually pulled off before. I didn’t have much interest in a Tau army fluff-wise, but thought that some of their background could help me pull off a custom army. I thought of a renegade federation of multiple minor races that were sick of the major factions’ crap. They were sick of being caught in the middle of these larger faction’s wars and decided to do something about it. They pooled their resources and stole technology from several sources. Much of it was Tau technology on the Black Market.
I decided that I wanted to include units that could represent many different races, so naturally I had to take units from different codices. Honestly it’s as easy as just taking their stats and unit profile wholesale. You don’t have to change a thing to make this work, and you could even keep each unit’s racial abilities if you wanted. The most important thing to make this legit is to make sure that you aren’t just taking units that are the best from each army, and that their rules make sense for the made up unit.
Here’s How I Made The Models Work
In order to pull all of this off, I ordered Tau bits online and made Human Fire Warriors, tentacled Broadsides, and Gargoyle-Vespids. Then I decided that the Tau codex didn’t have as much variety as I’d like, so I started introducing other units from other armies in my Renegade army. I bought a bunch of Thing Heroclix (Fantastic Four) to make count-as Terminators and gave them storm bolters. Next, I bought Skaven parts and Guard bits to make Hrud models because even though accounts change, some say they are large rodent people. Then I painted them to look gross because the fluff says they wear rotting clothes. I bought a ton of Antman Heroclix to make swarms of counts-as Nurglings and painted their little suits to match the greater army colors.
Not that Ant Man.
The key to making this look like a real army was painting them all in the same army colors, as all of these races have come together under one banner. They should all be painted the same colors. But voila, you have a custom army with a real purpose and backstory while having a huge diversity of units to use. You could easily make a new army using models from different armies.
Here Are Some Interesting Ideas
How about a new strain of Tyranids that have the stats of other units? Buy third party models of an appropriate size, or convert something giant from Nid kits and come up with new rules for them. Especially now that Vehicles and Monsters are treated the same with wounds and saves, etc. It has never been easier to proxy things. What about a new Bio-Beast that is a huge and has the stats of a Baneblade? Or a new Hive Tyrant that has the stats of one of the many Chaos Daemons Princes?
What about an awesome artillery bug out of a Basilisk?
How about a parasitic race that literally uses units from other armies to enslave – like say Enslavers? You could even take this as a great opportunity to green stuff some infection on each model. Paint each model the way it classically should be painted but mess up the paint jobs on the armor to make it look worn. This could look really neat as the host bodies keep their paint schemes but the infection is obvious.
Either of these ideas could be a modeler’s dream to complete.
~Would you play against a full counts-as army?
Like this total conversion Hrud army
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