Dark Legion Resurgence- REALLY Getting Started- Part 5

Siege of the Citadel plastics stripped, rebased, and reprimed.

The Dark Legion miniatures from Warzone in the mid/late 1990s were some of my favorites- space undead and demons, hell yeah. I painted up gobs of metal Undead Legionnaires and then based all of them with some giant boulders that I thought looked good at the time- they really didn't look good. 

I bulked up the metal miniatures with plastic Siege of the Citadel boardgame miniatures, it's set in the Mutant Chronicles/Warzone universe. it was a pretty fun boardgame. I blame the overabundance of Siege of the Citadel boxes with their not-too-bad handfuls of plastic miniatures. Okay, the Undead Legionnaires were not bad, the Corporation/Doomtrooper minis were pretty poor. When toy stores were getting rid of them for less than $10 I grabbed up over a dozen boxes just for the loads of minis. Many of those minis have been given away or sold (or lost!) over the decades since, but I have a good number of them that have been crying out to be modernized or disposed of.

When there was the Micro-Art Studios and Cool Mini Or Not Kickstarter for nice reasonably priced scenic bases, I got a few sets for all kinds of reasons. One set was a Chaos Wastes spiky set of bases that I decided would be a good choice to make my Dark Legion bases look better. 

This brings us to the situation of dozens (I have not done a full count, yet) of miniatures that need to be rebased and touched up or repainted. Will they be used for Warzone? Probably not, though a Siege of the Citadel style game using Dwarven Forge dungeon tiles would be pretty awesome.

Since there were so many Dark Legion figures I was looking at to take part in the Dark Legion Resurgence project, I subconsciously split them up not 4 or 5 different segments- or perhaps "spikes" would be a more appropriate term.

Pretorian Stalkers, Nepharite of Algeroth, Cultist Leader Guy, Technomancer, and a honkin' huge full metal Razide!

Spike 1 contains some of the bigger metal figures and has seen a little action on some previously unpainted figures like the Metropolitan Prophet, my second Immaculate Fury, and the Carnal Harvester. The main figures for this spike include a Nepharite, a Razide (the more properly sized sculpt), the stripped and reprimed Pretorian Stalkers, and some of the Heretic Cult figures. I also based up a couple of random metal Legionnaires at the same time as these more impressive minis. I haven't found all of those Legionnaires, but they'll turn up eventually.

Spike 2 has seen the most progress so far. The Ilian faction Templars were rebased in 2020. I feel like the Templars need some additional paintwork eventually, if only a wash and/or more highlights. There are also some plastic Siege of the Citadel Legionnaires that were painted up in a more Ilian-like color scheme who will probably be stripped before their rebasing.

Lots of metal Leginnaires with a Nepharite on the far left and a Necromutant on the far right.

Spike 3 is the metal Legionnaires and a few specialists/characters. Progress on this spike led to the building of a lot more bases for the next spike.

The test figures with materials to echo the Chaos Waste style bases, because there's not enough of the fancy bases for all of the minis that need them.

Showing how my spiky chaos bases compare with the original source material.

Pre-stripped mass of Siege of the Citadel plastics.

Spike 4 is the plastic figures from Siege of the Citadel. Originally this seemed like it would be the hardest spike to tackle, but so far it's going along rather well. This is the main focus of THIS update to the overall project.

Jar full of Legionnaires in stripping juice (just LA's Totally Awesome- orange flavor).

Stripped plastics with a couple of metal fancy boys that got tossed in with them.

When they were originally "painted" in the 1990s, I left the green plastic skin for the Legionnaires, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Also, they were painted up into squads with uniform colors. This is something that would eventually become antithetical to my painting of undead (check out the mummy warband retrospective over at the sister blog for an example of how I usually approach panting undead miniatures since these Legionnaires).

There are some plastic leader figures, a couple savage Necromutants and a Centurion. One of the reasons I didn't like the Centurion plastics was the barrel on his pistol. They were odd little rhomboid shapes that didn't come close to the artwork (see the Metropolitan Prophet mini above for what a Dark Legion pistol barrel should look like). This is the only one of the plastics that got any kind of conversion work. I used a bit of rounded sprue from a model kit and drilled a hole to both pin and show there's a place for giant bullets to come out.

Now THAT is a proper barrel.

I made up a bunch of bases to be similar to the Chaos Waste Micro-Art Studios bases. I've used up most of them on these plastics, but having made almost 20 of them, I'm sure I can improve the process. Heck, even if the process is not simplified it will still be a blast.

The Necromutants and Centurion were always too big to nicely fit on a 25mm base, so they got 30mm bases and look much more comfortable.

Now comes the painting part. Unlike the metal Legionnaires, these guys are all the exact same pose (and they are probably my favorite plastic monopose miniatures EVER). I'm still not certain if they should get the same colors or if there should be a few groups with the same colors. This decision is still being debated.

And what about the mysterious Spike 5? It might come to pass once the rest of the spikes have some more progress...