I’ve always wanted to create my own Space Marine homebrew chapter,
but never really felt any of the ideas I had were substantial enough for a conversion. Until
today. Today I present to you my first homebrew chapter: the Russian accented Iron Patriarchs.
For the base of this homebrew marine I’m combining primaris armor with the front
of a tartaros terminator. The width matches fairly well, and the industrial plate steel
look of the tartaros will help take away from the futuristic look of the primaris armor.
In my headcanon my Russian Iron Patriarchs hail from an ice planet of subzero temperatures,
and the cold has turned them into a brutally practical chapter that
values strength and stoicism. And the tartaros armor helps reflect that.
To attach it I snipped off the bottom curve of the tartaros chestplate and scraped it clean.
I proceed to snap off the front off the Primaris armor and shave off the top portion just below
the collar. The reason I did it this high is that I wanted my Iron Patriarchs to have more
truescale proportions than the regular primaris who have overly short torsos.
One consequence of attaching the tartaros armor this high is that there's now a gap in the back,
but I knew that would be covered by his reactor and what I had in store for the rest of him.
The tartaros armor juts out a little farther than the original primaris chestplate,
so I simply mixed up some milliput and added it to the squarish portion of the primaris armor
so it matched the tartaros collar seamlessly. With the torso in place I moved on to adding
some armor plates to my marine’s midsection. I scraped the insignia
off them to match the utilitarian aesthetic I was aiming for and glued them in place.
I also glued in place this cybernetic head from a dark angels kit. I love how half his
face is stripped of skin. In my headcanon the Iron Patriarchs are a successor chapter of the
Iron Hands. But where the Iron Hands replace their limbs in devotion to their primarch
and a wish to strip away weakness, for the Iron Patriarch it’s more a question of practicality.
In my headcanon part of the novitiate training for my marines is to survive in the subzero
temperatures of the wilds bare skinned. Frostbite is common, and the only noviates who survive are
those who are willing to hack or slice off the affected body part before the frostbite
can spread. Such an act isn’t considered a mark of failure against the novitiate though,
and it’s actually abnormal for a novitiate not to lose at least a finger or two, if not a nose or
ear or whole limb. After successful implantation of the gene seed the lost body parts are replaced
with bionics, which is why so many Iron Patriarchs feature cybernetic faces and limbs.
For my marine’s right arm I picked out this one. My mental image of my marine
was of him trudging through some barren landscape, trophy gripped in his fist.
Though I’d later take it off, this is the pauldron to a chaos marine I stripped of its iconography.
While the Iron Patriarchs aren’t a chaos chapter, I liked the slightly gothic,
ancient, brutal look of it to add a little flair to the otherwise utilitarian armor of the marine.
One option I thought about for my marine’s left arm was this knife drawn one.
Not only does the pose help enhance the trudging forward stance of the marine,
but it also looks like he just finished cutting off the heads held in the other hand.
This is a neat element and tells a little bit of a story, but it isn’t a specifically
Iron Patriarch story, and with a homebrew chapter you have to be really strategic and
disciplined with which bits you use because it’s the only way of telling their lore.
Towards that end I decided to use this servo arm. The easiest bionic limbs to source are mechanicus
ones, but I didn’t feel like their insectile and golden age scifi aesthetic matched the Iron
Patriarch’s brutal strength. I wanted something tougher, grittier, more substantial and this
servo arm from the house Orlock necromunda kit matches that aesthetic perfectly. Over it I put
another chaos pauldron, this one a little larger than the other because it’s from a terminator.
I liked the asymmetrical look it gave him, and again helped with the trudging forward silhouette.
With one bionic limb done I decided to try for a second, in this case a leg.
I snipped off the marine’s leg to see how well this bionic claw would fit.
It’s from a thunderwolf, and the scale is pretty close to the marine. I got ambitious and decided
to replace the entire leg… which after I’d mangled his leg I realized looked pretty terrible.
You can’t really see it here, but the limb simply looked too skeletal and also I couldn’t get the
stance right, it looked less like he was trudging forward and more like he was dragging his leg,
which wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. Luckily I had another marine with the same stance,
so I simply cut and pasted his leg over. I wasn’t entirely happy with the pose of
the bionic arm, so I switched the upper half to a terminator one. Not only is it chunkier,
but the piston on the side helps with the mechanical strength of the marine.
The next step in my marine’s conversion was the trickiest. I don’t have any real sculpting skill,
but I wanted my marine to have a wolf pelt over his shoulders.
I started by lumping greenstuff over his shoulders to get the rough shape in place. I wanted the
pelt to look less wild and viking berserker than those of a Space Wolf a little more restrained and
lordly, a bit like the pelt from this picture. Once the rough shape was in place I started
scoring the greenstuff with diagonal lines. Once that was done I began to tease the triangles
left from the scoring into distinct clumps to look like fur. This took a really long time,
but was a lot easier than I thought. It looks a little more like moss or algae than fur,
but some of that is owed to the green color. It’s by no means perfect, but it’ll do.
I liked so much the longer torso to my Iron Patriarch that I decided to add another
truescale element was thicker thighs. Almost all of my favorite Space Marine art has the thigh
armor just a touch thinner than the shin armor. These proportions aren’t reflected in the actual
miniatures though, where the thighs are thin. To make my marine’s thighs chunkier I layered
on milliput and smoothed it so it was the same height as the side armor. This would’ve been
significantly easier and would’ve looked better if I did it before I added the marine’s arms
and the legs were separated, but doing things in the right order just isn’t how cool people roll.
And with that my Iron Patriarch was ready to take the field. While my marine has no real weapons,
I’m mostly ok with that. Because my models aren’t ever going to see use on the tabletop
it’s not important to keep them tournament legal, and an interesting pose and aesthetic
I think is more important than looking like he’s charging forward or attacking.
While I’m always cognizant and think ing about how to best tell a story through a model and
its aesthetic, it was especially important with this build, and I think it was successful here:
the head and servo arm illustrate the frostbite element, the tartaros and armor plates the
austerity of the chapter, and the wolf pelt and and chaos pauldron the cold of their homeworld
while also adding a little flair. I don’t paint my models,
but if I was I’m not sure what color I’d go with. While it would be meme-worthy to go
with a soviet scheme of red and gold with a sickle and hammer insignia on the pauldron,
I’d probably just go with unburnished metal to continue his stoic aesthetic.
In the future I may convert a few more Iron Patriarchs to expand and explore the chapter
a little more, so if you’re interested in that subscribe. I also have a patreon where I post
exclusive content, so go check that out if you’re interested. Do you have any homebrew chapters
of your own, or ones you really like? Tell me about them in the comments. Thanks for watching.