In this article I’ll talk about the original concept around my home brew Grey Knights successor chapter, what I’ve built so far and what my future plans are this project.

The Grey Sanctifers are a successor chapter to the Grey Knights. They are of a secret founding in which seven chapters were founded. Each chapter has the sole purpose of combating, retrieving and purging equipment and Astartes of the traitor legions. Each chapter has a specific target legion which enables them to tailor their tactics to suit . The Black Legion is too large for a small chapter to attempt to cleanse alone. The Night Lords are not seen as a primary target as their primarch has already been eliminated. The ultimate goal for these chapters is to capture the traitor primarchs and attempt to purge the chaos from their souls, thus potentially bringing them back to the side of the Imperium. Failed attempts at purification would result in immediate termination of the primarch. The Sanctifers assigned target is Mortarion.

The Grey Sanctifer’s home planet is a largely unheard of world called Evangelion in the north west of the galaxy. Incursions of gigantic, otherworldly monsters of the warp are frequent. With the expansion of the Cicatrix Maledictum now splitting the galaxy in half the Sanctifers deploy en masse to aide the imperium against the encroaching forces of chaos. When reports that Macragge was under attack by the Nurgle Primarch himself reached Evangelion the entirety of the Grey Sanctifers chapter was redirected to the home of the Ultramarines.

The Concept

The lore for my Grey Sanctifers was largely dreamt up long before I even owned my first Grey Knights models. I shared most of these with my friend Lemonskull who actually bought and painted my first strike squad based on my ramblings. He did a pretty good job!

Over the course of time the original ideas have been developed further and were even helped by the launch of 8th edition. The major concepts I had were;

I wanted them to have a more specific purpose for being founded I wanted them to have an arch nemesis of sorts I wanted two hand weapons used almost exclusively The standard red would be replaced by green I wanted to have all of my marines named so I could follow their deeds from battle to battle

I wasn’t sure how to build the rest of the story around my chapter. So I just started with the easiest of my concepts.

The Grey Sanctifers generally hold the belief that the halberd and spear are the best kind of weapon when outnumbered. Why? Well because I like polearms. But I wanted to have a bit more variety than just the standard Grey Knight Halberd. I wanted scythes, but I thought that my army should have a good reason for wielding power scythes, the iconic weapon of the Death Guard. At that point, everything clicked and fell into place.

The Death Guard are actually my favourite of the traitor legions and Mortarion is one of my favourite primarchs. I also like that the Death Guard, save Typhus, never embraced chaos. They were forced into the decision that was made for their own survival. Its a tragic bit of lore that I really love. I get the feeling that the plague marines lament what they have become. I often wonder whether legionnaires or primarchs would take the path of redemption if it were all possible. I also really thought that that line of thought could make for really cool narratives. So the primary goal of the Sanctifers and their brother chapters was made. This Reclaimer founding was for the sole purpose of bringing the traitor primarchs back into the fold.

Naturally then not only would the ultimate goal of the Grey Sanctifers be the reclamation of Mortarion but the natural enemy would be the one who turned him; Nurlge. Nurgle really gets under my skin. He is my least favourite of the chaos powers and I think the ‘gifts’ bestowed upon Nurgle’s follows are just horrific. So I thought yep, my guys hate Nurgle and they’ll route it out wherever possible. To combat Nurlge their deploy large amounts of incinerators for obvious reasons and focus on fast moving units like interceptors to counter the relatively sluggish plague marines.

After battle the Grey Sanctifers would strip fallen Death Guard marines of their power armour and weapons. What could be salvaged were subject to ritualistic ceremonies and purging flames aimed at removing the taint from the war gear. If successful Grey Sanctifers would either store the weapons away in their vaults or wield them in future battles. What couldn’t be salvaged, which would be most things, were thoroughly destroyed.

The reasoning here is simple and draws a little bit from Castellan Crowe; wield the weapons of the enemy so that they can not be drawn against you. After battle, if any prisoners are able to be captured they will be assessed for the possibility of purification. In my head their methods haven’t been tested to the point that they think they could attempt an exorcism on Mortarion. Not yet.

It was a twist of fate that 8th edition should drop at the same time I was developing the lore for my own chapter. It fell right into the story very well. Mortarion and the Death Guard were assaulting real space in the plague wars. An opportunity for the Grey Sanctifers to fulfill their purpose has presented itself and they flew to tabletop.

For this models I decided to give him one of my standard falchions as well as a Grey Knights falchions. I see this as a gift from the Grey Knights as the chapters fought side by side during the plague wars.

As my little army started to grow I needed to home in on a bit of where they came from. At the time I was coming up with all of these ideas I was rewatching one of my favourite animes, Neon Genesis Evangelion. I named of the homeworld became Evangelion. The link here would be that creatures not unlike the Angels of the anime would emerge from the warp and assail the planet, requiring considerable efforts by the Grey Sanctifers to rid them from Evangelion. In my head I think of these creatures as not acting under the influence of a chaos god. They are separate warp entities that get flung into real space at random points. The native population of Evangelion revere the Grey Sanctifers as their saviors and protectors. The chapter recruits directly from the population. Otherwise the populace live to serve the chapter in whatever way they can, whether it be providing supplies or acting as militia during warp incursions and in relative isolation to the galaxy at large.

The naming converntion I developed for my chapter is drawn from religious mythologies and other popular universe. Because I think they sound cool, all names end in either -ael, -iel or -uel. I had to do a lot of research finding names in mythology and popular fiction. Interestingly all of the names I found belonged to either Angels or Demons. I found this to be very fitting given the setting of Warhammer 40k and suited my Grey Sanctifers nicely.

On The Tabletop

I wanted my Grey Sanctifers to be easily recognizable as Grey Knights but with enough of their flair to stand out if they were placed next to their canonical brothers. On the table my Sanctifers replace the standard Grey Knight red with warpstone glow. All force weapons are also powered by an eerie green glow, as are the lenses on helmets. I’m personally not a huge fan of gold so instead I went for a copper or antique brass like look. For the bases I wanted to try something that I had never seen before in my local scene and also test my skills a bit as a hobbyist. I decided on a swampy type base and found a really good tutorial that was basically exactly what I was looking for.

All of my Justicars/Paragons have the loin cloths in a stark white which indicates their seniority.

You can see here I did a very mild conversion with the standard Voldus to make my Grand Master Castiel, Chapter Master of the Grey Sanctifers.

I never liked the baby-cradle Nemesis Dreadknight. Not only do I think it looks bad but it also doesn’t feel like it makes much sense in combat. It feels very easy for a sharpshooter to take out the pilot. So I made an attempt at an unoriginal conversions and I think that it came out pretty good!

It’s a very simple army scheme that looks really great when the whole army stands side by side.

You might notice that all of the large shields are split by white and green colours but with no chapter markings on top. I do have plans for this, but I need to improve my freehand a lot more before I feel comfortable attempting my own chapter symbol on my models.

To date the army total around 2750 points. Its enough of an army that I can change up the lists but still stick to the main idea behind them.

Here is what I have left to complete;

Stormraven, Purity Manifest. I’ve fielded it in a lot of games and is always a high performer. But it’s paint job isn’t full complete so I need to finish up layers of ironbreaker and get to finishing the little details 4 Purifiers. Primed but no base coats 4 Interceptors. Primed but no base coats. Brother Captain. Primed, some base coats. Display board. Primed

I really have no reason for completing the marines other than being lazy. My colour scheme is super simple and doesn’t take much time. The Stormraven is something I need to properly sit down and dedicate a few days too. Unfortunately my Tau has taken precedence at the moment as I prepare for tournaments later this year.

The display board is another victim of laziness. All I need to do is get the right colours and drybrush to my heart’s content. I could finish this up in an afternoon probably with the right motivation. I do want to add trees and giant mushrooms to make it feel properly swampy, but those are details I can add in after the paint, Still Water and reeds have been put on.

Like any good wargamer I like to say that I will complete what models I have before I buy any more. Hypothetically…if money wasn’t a barrier I would add the following before I called my Grey Sanctifer chapter finished;

Stormraven 5 interceptors 10 strike squad 2 Razorbacks Dreadnaught 10 terminators Brotherhood Champion

For the Brotherhood Champion I am planning to kit bash him. Rather than a sword I think I’d like to model him with a double-bladed scythe, not unlike what the Dark Templar use from the Starcraft universe. I do own a Deathwatch Captain Artemis and he has quite a nice dynamic pose. The Deatchwatch heraldry blends in with the Grey Knight That’s going to be my starting point anyway and I will build from there.

There is of course what will be the centre piece to my Grey Sanctifers. It is still very much in the development phase but I am planning on converting the Daemon Primarch Mortarion into a purified, reborn version of himself. The first step is to remove all Nurgle iconography and decayed armour off the model. I want to keep him flying but not with the cowl, so I have to figure out how to have him on the base. I’m going to ditch the rebreather and instead make him faceless with a shadowy mask. By far the biggest challenge will be his wings. For that I have two ideas. Either fill in the gaps of the bug wings, clean them up and add a second pair of smaller wings (probably from plague drones). Or, make my own wings out of wire and green stuff akin to the angel wings from the Diablo universe. Something like that would really stand out but I’m quite hesitant at the moment because something like that is far beyond my skill level at present. Once he is completed I’d like to come up with a fluffy rule set so that I could use him in games with my friends or anyone else that would indulge me.

I’m looking forward to posting future articles on my progress for this Grey Sanctifers project.