The Spectre project- Research

 

The Spectre project- Having the opportunity to build a sisters of silence army project thrust upon me, it was time for me to do a little research.  I started out with a lot of knowledge on the sisters of silence from having read the Horus Heresy black library novels.  I also had some knowledge of 40k sisters of silence from the dawn of fire series.  But I felt like I needed more.  I went about this in two ways.

1. Reading the lore and stories included in the codex.

2.  Reading Warhammer 40k wikipedia ( a good place to find a good in depth collection of lore.  Especially obscure lore)

My big take away from this was the resurgence of the sisters of silence in the indomitus era.  Specifically the creation and founding of new sisters of silence vigils.  With each newly created vigil similar to the founding of a new space Marines chapter.  This appealed to me and allowed me a lot of artistic freedom and license similar to creating my own marine chapter.

Early decisions-  First came the army name, the spectres.  Although vigils are normally named for there location many are also named for totem animals or spirits.  In the siege of terra series a sister of silence is hard to see and almost ghost like with a really strong paraih gene and training.  I like my grim dark to be dark.  I like the mystery and fear surrounding the sisters of silence and so I went for spectres.  A nod to the siege of terra depiction and to darkness, horror and mystery in 40k.

The sisters of silence are spread thin, between sending detachments to man the black ships, being seconded to Inquisitors and carrying out regular duties including progoms against dangerous and unregistered psychers.  A newly established vigil would be recruiting in mass.  The vigil would have a number of recruits many which would be battle ready or undergoing combat tour trials before taking the vow of silence.  This would allow me to use the extra sisters of silence heads on Sisters of battle models to create vigilators to represent this and create a unique appearance for my sisters of silence army.  It would add a bit of variety the current sisters of silence range lacks.

That's it for my initial research.  Future blog posts will include more research, army design and photos of conversions and models that make up this project which will probably take a year or two.