"Here Coran could see anything he wished to know about the 'Soultakers',
it was a frightening thing to realise."
Yes, the Catachan XXII, an catachan army of my own devising.
The name, 'Soultakers', was given to the regiment, after being attacked by a Dark Eldar
force. The Soultakers managed to succesfully kill all except two of the enemy. During the
battle, the Soultakers realised that the Dark Eldar had Eldar spirit stones around their
necks. These stones belonged to Eldar of the craftworld they were conducting peace
negotiations with at the time. The Soultakers took the spirit stones from the Dark Eldar,
and returned them to the craftworld. Of course the peace negotiations totally failed!
anyway, that's the history bit over with, on with the rest.
I have 90 actual Imperial guard, but they are not all Catachans. One is a chimera, one is Commisar Yarrick, and 12 are last chancers. They haven't taken part in that many battles, but then, my space marines have only been in about six themselves. as well as catachans, I have the last chancers, who I have played one of those suicide missions with, but only once. My sentinels look great now they have been built, but I haven't used them yet.
The catachans are colour coded!
Yes, it may seem a little odd, but I have colour coded the catachans' bandanas. It is very useful, because most of them are the multi-part plastics, and are very similar. It is not too conspicuous either, and anyway, even if it was, the jungle is full of wildlife with colour to scare off the predators!
How does it work?
What I have done is split the bandanas in half (front/back) using an imaginary line (no not the equator) and painted the front half with the squad colour and the back half with the platoon colour. If they are not part of a platoon they are all one colour. I then painted an orange stripe onto the sergeant (normally along the belt thing that goes round their upper body). After that I named all the squads depending on their colours, and this is what I came up with:
Left platoon, the angels (dark angels green) (their lieutenant has just got dark angels green on his bandana)
The angels of the moon (bad moon yellow)
The angels of the forest (goblin green)
The angels of ice (ice blue)
Right platoon, the skulls (skull white) (same as above)
Skulls of blood (scab red)
Skulls of fire (fiery orange)
Skulls of gold (shining gold, hmm)
The other squads
The flesh of Androska* (command HQ, rotting flesh)
Blood of kenfaris* (assualt team, blood red)
The waters of Hanfrite* (mortar team (water, mortar, get it), ultramarines blue)
The woods of Shenloris* (veterans patrol, camo green)
Scent of flesh* ** (sentinels, no colour)
Ogres of da utha wurld* **(ogryns, no colour)
Bullets of Flysaner* ** (snipers, green, maybe?)
* Where there is no platoon, they have a planet name instead of a platoon name which comes after the squad colour/name.
**when there isn't even a colour, I've replaced the squad colour/name with something else.