Old school renegade guard?

[zpromax777]

Out of curiosity is that something people were doing in the RT and 2nd era? If so how were they going about it? Just breaking out the green stuff and doing some coversions?

 

[symphonicpoet]

People that were doing chaos in the Rogue Trader era were mostly using renegade marines. Chaos developed kind of slowly. The warp is discussed in Rogue Trader, and horrific things that dwell there eating the minds and souls of psi-sensitive people. It's mentioned that there had been rebellions. But there isn't even an imperial guard yet, just an imperial army. Chaos really gets detailed first in fantasy through articles in White Dwarf, and then eventually that gets carried into 40K. And the demons were the demons on both sides, so you could pretty much just carry them over. The first really dedicated 40K chaos models were the generic chaos space marines. I think that might be about all that predated 2nd edition. About the same time 2nd ed is coming out you start to get chaos marines dedicated to specific gods; some Slaneesh noise marines, a juggernaut of Khorne, eventually plague marines and so forth. I did know a few people that painted up ordinary guard in crazy colors, or gave them different weapons. That was even sort of official, at least with the Genestealer Cult, which was almost kind of a chaos army list anyway. (The patriarch could be chaos possessed, for instance.) Things were a little faster and looser back then. You just used what was available. (You could even officially used IG in an ork army, as Blood Axe allies.) People did make conversions, but I think it's more common now. (Certainly there's more of us doing it now that are mature hobbyists. In the 80s your more experienced modelers were still mostly doing historicals, and 40K was more of a kids game. Though it caught on pretty quickly.)