Squat Survivors (xenos Imp Renegades)

So I said I would finish the Orks before I went onto another project.... erm... well I failed. lol

Here is the start of my Imperial Renegade Xenos Unit (basically I will have mostly squat survivors with some other aliens as the mutants and an Ogryn). Agfter initial recruitmen I wont use the mutation rules (As any promoted model will be a Squat and the aliens will be set types).

Here are the first two, but don't expect any more (just one more in the works) for a while its a fair amount of effort to convert these bodies to remove all the pouches from the front so i'm looking at doing a few more and then casting them up, but I can;t afford the materials until next year. I may do the aliens sooner than that though .

Here we go.
First guy I did (note the face looks much better in person)


The second guy:


Comments and criticism welcomed.

Love Squats!!!!
and I haven't see anyone do them yet.
Should be a zoat in there somehow!!

Oh, pretty cool I especially like the beanie (it's called beanie, isn't it?) on the second guy And wow! Converted/sculpted arms! That's point I want to reach one day...
Do you think you can take picture of one of them next to some "normal" model? Marine or IG? Just to get the idea of size of them.

Lazi wrote:

Oh, pretty cool I especially like the beanie (it's called beanie, isn't it?) on the second guy And wow! Converted/sculpted arms! That's point I want to reach one day...
Do you think you can take picture of one of them next to some "normal" model? Marine or IG? Just to get the idea of size of them.

I don't have a lot of "normal" models in my collection, but I will see what I can do... an Eldar maybe...

Yes, Eldar should suffice I meant anything that we probably have seen IRL

Ace start - your green stuff work is a really high standard. Good use of a heresy shotgun (where's the other weapon from?).

Squats are retro and cool - just don't stand for any of this Demiurg nonsense!

Cheers Laney

Squat? What is squats? Google translate cannot tell me

Laney wrote:

Ace start - your green stuff work is a really high standard. Good use of a heresy shotgun (where's the other weapon from?).

Squats are retro and cool - just don't stand for any of this Demiurg nonsense!

Cheers Laney

The other gun is from an inquisitor (54mm) figure.

I like the idea of Demiurg too, it's just I would have maybe 5 Demiurg in a 40k army (in MASSIVE battlesuits) in a skirmish it would I guess be one Demiurg and a plethora of little (and not so little drones).

Komfritten wrote:

Squat? What is squats? Google translate cannot tell me

Not been playing 40k long then ? lol:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squat_(Warhammer_40,000)

EDIT: actually that WIKI article is base 50% on fact and 50% on some total made up crud, there is no written link between the Demiurg and Squats at all unless something has changes in the last 5 years I don't know about...

Thank you! No have actually only played Mordheim, and some minor Ork 40k battles - only starting to learn about the fluff now =)

I really like the arms on the first one - can't figure out how You make the details, and flat surfaces so good!

Looking forward to see more when the time and money allwos it

Komfritten wrote:

I really like the arms on the first one - can't figure out how You make the details, and flat surfaces so good!

As I posted above (you may have missed as you posted after me) that wiki article should not be treated as fact, though it's partly right some of it appears to be made up I discovered after posting.

Getting flat surfaces is fairly easy with a clay shaper - best thing to improve my sculpting yet .

I have also sculpted my own figure from scratch (apart from the damned head (can't do heads) which is being cast up (and sometime in the future will be avaiaible to buy) at Troll forged miniatures (it's been a long wait so far though, he's moulded but not cast yet)).

I would really like to sculp myself one day. Note the focus are on painting, and maybe the next project should be to learn that... Seeing this inspires me allot! Weeee I love this forum.

maxxev: You have a ARTIST touch... excellent sculpting skills! WOW! I'm VERY impressed!

Komfritten: In the OLD days (when Warhammer was starting) there was a tendency to 'translate' races from the 'past' (Warhammer Fantasy, to be precise) to the 'future' (Rogue Trader, which eventually became Warhammer 40,000). Some races made sense... Orcs became Orks. Same principles... idiots who love to fight! WHAT?!?! I love 'em! Anyway, Elves became Eldar. Chaos (evil sorcerers) became Chaos (evil psychics). To be honest, the design was... urrr... lazy. Lots of the background was so similar it was... lame? Rogue Trader has LOTS of Role-Playing elements... the mutation tables was D100! Lots of weird (and useless) stuff that had LOTS of character.

Rogue Trader had lots of geeky and black humor... DeafNala calls it 'Tongue and Cheek' humor. You can see it on the miniatures... IG had women fighters, as well as Orks... UGLY women! You can find old Chaos (and Ork) models flipping the bird (hehehe...) with their Power Fist to the enemy, Demonettes had multiple titties exposed and so on. GW decided to add other race; dwarves.

Following the 'humor' they named them Squats. Yes, 'squat' as in 'squished' or as in "Crouch or sit with knees bent and heels close to or touching the buttocks or the back of thighs" (sometimes to relief yourself of solids in the wilderness!) But the Squats were none of that! They were tough! Their bikers looked like outlaws, their guns ridiculously big. They looked comical... but that was OK back then.

As GW started working on fluff and game mechanics, and 40k started to take shape, lots of things changed. It was time to become a business for profit, rather than gamers who made some money. Orks got 'toned down', Eldar became more 'mysterious' and Chaos more... organized! Races had to have a real reason to be and function.

The Squats were miners and builders of huge ships and warmachines. That fluff did not fit in 40k game mechanics. It fit the game of Epic and Battlefleet Gothic, but GW's business model was about to kick Epic to the curve (more money on 28mm than in 10mm models) and we all know about GW's love for Specialist Games (yes... I was being sarcastic!) Role Playing elements died from 40k (the Warhammer Fantasy RPG died too! ) and so the Squats found themselves in an acquard place... Corporate Exterminatus. As GW 'borrowed' a concept from HR Giger (www.HRGiger.com), creator Visual Effects and set design for the film Alien... the Tyranids were born. Background became more grim and dark... more serious. Since GW needed to make the 'Nids really scary, capable of gobbling up complete civilizations and needed to remove the not-so-fit-for-40k Squats, the little miners got themselves consumed quietly by the Hive Mind. Win-win for GW... fans lost (again).

Back in 2003, Jervis Johnson (the last of the Old-School GW designers still working in GW today) posted on the Specialist Games forum...

Quote :

I know I shouldn't get drawn on this... but... can't... resist

Seriously, a couple of points just so you can have an informed debate based on the real reasons that Squats are no longer available. Be warned, it is going to be hard reading for people that like the Squat background.

First of all, Squats were *not* dropped because they were not selling well. There were then, and are now, plenty of other figure ranges that sell in the sort of % quantities that the Squats pulled down, especially when you look across all of the ranges produced by GW rather than just those for 40K.

No, the reason that the Squats were dropped was because the creatives in the Studio (people like me, Rick, Andy C, Gav etc) felt that we had failed to do the Dwarf 'archetype' justice in its 40K incarnation. From the name of the race (Squats - what *were* we thinking?!?!) through to the short bikers motif, we had managed to turn what was a proud and noble race in Warhammer and the other literary forms where the archetype exists, into a joke race in 40K. We only fully realized what we had done when we were working on the 2nd edition of 40K. Try as we might, we just couldn't work up much enthusiasm for the Squats. The mistake we made then (deeply regretted since) was to leave them in the background and the 'get you by' army list book that appeared. With hindsight, we should have dropped the Squats back then, and saved ourselves a lot of grief later on.

Anyway, the Squats made it into 2nd edition, and since we were doing army books for each of the races, we started to try and figure out what to do with them. Unfortunately we just couldn't figure out a way to update them and get them to work that we felt was good enough. The 'art' of working on an army as a designer is to find the thing that you think is cool and exciting about an army, and work it up into a strong theme. This 'muse' didn't strike any of us, and so, rather than bring out a second-rate product simply re-hashing the old background, we kept doing other army books instead, with stuff we did feel inspired by.

Now, while this was all going on for 40K, we were actually doing some rather good stuff for the Squats in Epic. On this scale there was a natural tendency to focus on the big 'hand-made' war machines the Squat artisans produced, and this created an army with a feel that was very different to the biker hordes in 40K. However, this tended to reinforce the problems we saw in the Squat background rather than alleviate them, underlining what we *should* have done with the Squats in 40K.

In the end (and it took years to really get to the roots of the problem) this led to a realization that we were going to have to drop the Squats in their 'Squat' form from the 40K background. There was little point having a major race that we weren't willing to make an army book for, and their inclusion in the background meant that people kept asking us when we'd do a Squat Codex. Instead we decided that we'd write the Squats out of the background by saying that their Homworlds had been devoured by a Tyranid Hivefleet. This would give us the option in the future to return to making a race based on the Squat archetype for 40K. This race was given the name of Demiurg, and a certain amount of preliminary work was done to get a 'feel' for what the race would be like. At present the only hint of the Demiurg in 40K is the Demiurg spaceship for BFG. However, we do have this race 'in our back pocket' as a possible new race for 40K, or an interesting character model in Inquisitor, or whatever. So far the Demiurg have lost out to other projects, and it may be that their time never actually comes, as they will have to win through on their merits, not simply because we once made some Squat models in the past. At present, I have to say that it is more likely that they *don't* make the cut than do, as there is a certain prejudiced these days to simply taking races from Warhammer and cross them over to 40K like we did in the early days, so it may be that the Squats/Demiurg end up remaining a footnote in the history of the 40K galaxy. Only time will tell...

The second point I'd like to make is about 'old moulds'. In the past, Mail Order in the UK and US used to be the place that we kept all of the retired moulds for Citadel Miniatures, and we used to offer a service where you could order any Citadel Miniature ever made from MO. However, there are now so many of these 'back catalog' miniatures that it is simply impossible to keep all of the old moulds in Mail Order and offer this service. Instead, we pick and choose which back catalog miniatures are kept available. At present we're still struggling to produce special catalogs for these ranges (in the US there is the 'Phone Book' catalog with everything in it, while the UK has special 'collectors guides' that are themed round a race). Once we've ironed out the kinks in the way we deal with the range of collectors models we want to keep permanent available, the plan is to offer up other parts of the back catalog for limited periods of time. In effect this will divide the back catalog into three parts: a range of classic models that are permanently available, a range of classic models we dip into and bring out for a limited release, and a range of retired models that will no longer be sold either because we've decided that they are embarrassingly bad, or because we are no longer allowed to sell them due to licensing agreement changes. So far we're still slowly working on deciding which classic models we want to keep permanently available, and its going to take several years to work through just those. The old Squat range is most likely to end up as retired models, I have to say, though there is a good chance that the Squat war engines they could simply into the limited release classic range. Once again, only time will tell...

I'll finish off by saying that whatever we decide to do 'officially', there is nothing stopping players with Squat armies from using them, either in Epic or 40k for that matter. There is no GW 'rule' against using old Citadel Miniatures, as long as you use them with existing army lists and in a way that won't cause confusion for other players. I recommend taking a positive stand by saying "Have you seen these cool old models? They're called the Squats and GW used to make them back in the late eighties/early nineties. I love 'em, so I count them as Imperial Guard and use them with the current rules..." Put like this I can't imagine that anyone would stop you from using your army.

Best regards,

Jervis Johnson
Head Fanatic

Believe it or not... the Squats STILL have a HUGE fan-base! The models sell like hot cakes in eBay and they are responsible for multiple sales of dwarves-in-space creations (check out Warpath). There are rumors that some Squats have survived deep in Tau Space, re-branded as a more 'serious' Demiurg. They could be like Tau's Human Auxiliaries, Vespids or Kroot. Who knows.

Hope this helps about the Squats.

The demiurg are not Squats.

Rumour has is they are sort of stone golems.

Demirug was the 'official' attempt to 'fix' the Squats background on Battle Fleet Gothic. Straight from the horse's mouth (Jervis Johnson). What GW do with them... who knows!