The third member of my small collection of Rogue Trader Marines in the heavily-scuffed livery of the Original Dark Angels – to be used as Fallen Angels in modern gaming. This chainsaw-wielding lunatic with the wild hair was first sighted by myself in Chapter Approved: The Book of the Astronomican, back in the day. As The Fallen are old. Really, really old, despite the machinations of time within the Warp, I mixed grey in with the brown of his hair, and moreso on the highlights. I also had those old “Motörhead” facial hair pictures of Andy Chambers in mind while painting his hair.

His helmet got the appropriate old-school treatment of a red stripe, though I left the eye lenses dark, as the helm is obviously not going to be active while it’s mag-locked to his hip. Despite only having painted three of these guys, I’ve really enjoyed doing each one of them (once I forced myself to finally get going on the long-started-and-stalled Brother Holt, anyway).

The old-school-inspired palette combined with a bit of the Forge World-style penchant for weathering makes these guys really quick and simple to paint, while still looking great. Of course, there are more modern touches such as weapon casings not exclusively being drybrushed silver and the basing (I might add some powders to them once the entire force is complete for consistency). I’ll keep this style unique to this force which will keep them visually distinct from my other forces, and I have concerns that if I were to use the “dark & scuffed” look on too many other forces, they could easily start to look samey. There is another force I’ll be working on in future who might get weathered and scuffed armour, though the armour certainly won’t be black or near-black as these guys are.

Here’s the trio so far. One of the hardest parts of this force is finding figures that will fit in. I’ve only got a limited number of the old metal RT marines around, I’ve got very specific places that some of them are destines for, and on top of that – sometimes they go missing, such as another trio I’d planned to add to The Fallen. I could easily add some plastic RTB01 marines, I suppose – though I don’t want to overdo the use of those here, either. Maybe a couple of them can fit in, I guess – though I’m (apparently) going for more of a close combat oriented squad here. I do plan to drop in some modern DA parts mixed with older armour marks, Calth marines and some Forge World DA parts down the line, but I’d much prefer to finish off some more of the old metals first.