Dreams of Baal

As a born procrastinator, making lists and plans is without a doubt my favourite part of any project! There’s still a process in place, mind you and the time it takes me to get from napkin sketch to completed work is definitely getting shorter!

With the release of Warhammer 40,000’s new 10th Edition, I wanted to do something special with the Leviathan launch box. New edition launch boxes from Games Workshop are always highly anticipated, due in no small part to the marketing team doing a great job seeding the community with lots of FOMO flowers, ? and this one was no exception.

As it’s packed with Space Marines and Tyranids, it seemed like a great fit for another diorama paying homage to Guy Haley’s incredible novel, The Devastation of Baal. I’ve already done one diorama inspired by this book, named Survivor of Baal, but I want this one to be even more dramatic.

The revered Chapter Master of the Blood Angels, Dante, is due to take a journey through the Rubicon procedure to embigulate him into a Primaris Marine. We already have the miniature for this and are just waiting for the lore to catch up.

But what would a Marine like Dante dream about while undergoing that process? Well, that’s what I’m going to show in this diorama. Dante is ringed by a squad of 10 Space Marines from various Blood Angels Successor chapters, and together, they stand as the last line of defence against the overwhelming forces of the Tyranids. This is Dante’s Rubicon Dream of Baal.

Painting a bunch of different Chapters meant that I never got bored painting the Marines! It still feels weird to use yellow, teal, and chrome when painting anything related to the Blood Angels, but I intentionally chose Successor Chapters in a variety of colours, rather than just them all being shades of red!

I did a fair bit of research in Blood Angels and Space Marines codexes, along with digging into various 40K Wikis, to make sure that I was painting them accurately.

Finding decals for Successor Chapters isn’t always the easiest thing in the world. Thankfully, I have a deep reserve of decal sheets that I’ve accumulated from the many dozens of kits I’ve built over the years.

Some Chapters are easy, as the Blood Angels are fond of blood drops and chalices, but other Chapter logos are a little more challenging and have to be made up using multiple layers of small decals, or parts of decals.

It’s fiddly work and at times frustrating, but the payoff is great when it looks right!

The diorama base started life as a 12″ wide by 1″ deep polystyrene disc, which I picked up from a specialist art store in Dublin. It was a much more fragile (and compressible) material to work with compared to the dense XPS foam I’m used to.

I carved out the moat and built up the central mound using the offcuts as well as some DAS clay, then sprayed it all with Tamiya’s fine grey primer.

I painted the base with AK Asphalt terrain paste and used AK Snow paste to create textured moat filling, then topped it all off with a third of a bottle of Citadel’s wonderful Blood For The Blood God technical paint.