Musings of a Green Man

Yesterday/this morning i touched on the squat ancestor cult and the evolution of Living Ancestors from Spiritlords to Ancestor Lords. By the time I got there, the post was already getting long, so I decided not to keep up the diatribe. What follows refers to old school profiles, when all stats was the higher the better, and movement rates hadn't been standardised to 6" uniformly, and humans, marines, etc., had a move of 4, and a run or charge of 8". First edition's Living Ancestors had profiles that were those of faltering, geriatric crones, for the most part. Compared to a standard squat, their movement was 2 rather than 3, WS 3 rather than 4, BS2 rather than 3, and the same Wounds, Initiative and Attacks. They did have a Toughness of 6, higher than any other squat, and the mental characteristics of a Major Hero (the normal racial cap in first), to make up for it, but at 190, even as Level 4 psykers with medipacks, it seems steep, especially with only a force fiel...

To go back to the topic of Sunday's post, I'll explain some of what I mean about the tyranids eating the Homeworlds making the squats make a lot more sense. Beyond the basic thing of dwarfs needing to be a people who are struggling against the odds, pining for past glories, and overcoming some great tragedy, squat culture, heraldry, etc., all make more sense this way. I'll explain it in stages, for ease. The material I'm referencing is all very old, coming from the Warhammer 40,000 Compendium (1989), Codex lmperialis (1993) and White Dw arfs from 1987-1998. This stuff is all hard to come by in its original formats, so I'm not going to cite references. A number of specialist sites have transcriptions of some or all the relevant texts, for those that are iterested. Then Leagues, Strongholds, Guild and Brotherhoods. In first edition 40k, the Brotherhoods, traditionally, would supply a force to their Stronghold equivalent to a platoon, consisting a Warlord and Hea...

It's something that we can almost take for granted, but scale is somewhat key to miniature based hobbies, and is something that, as a designer making terrain, is a major headache at work. Conventional model design has a fairly straightforward approach to scale. If you buy a kit that's 1:72, you can be fairly sure that the model will be 1/72 the size of the original. If you tried fitting a 1:35 rifle to a figure therein, however, it looks ridiculously oversized, since it's nearly twice the size it should be. Scale gets a little more complicated when we get into railway modelling. At the core of model railways is the track. Of all elements in such a set-up, the track is the most mass-produced component. Tracks, in real life, however are far from universal in dimensions, with different gauges in Britain, Ireland, mainland Europe and the Nordic nations, to give a small selection. To deal with this, either the modeller has to accept that the Flying Scotsman couldn't be use...

I've said it before, and I know that I'll say it again. It may sound shocking to some other Oldhammer players, but, in my opinion, getting eaten by the tyranids was the best thing to happen to the Squats of 40k. Obviously, it wasn't pleasant for them, but, from a lore perspective, it was what they needed. Back in 1987, GW launched the Rogue Trader game that they'd been teasing for over 4 years. Originally it was to be a sci-fi RPG, then a trading game, like Elite, but neither of those saw the light. What we got instead was Warhammer 40,000. In part this was to strengthen their brand, since they had the Fantasy game well established. In part it was to avoid confusion with Rogue Trooper, a boardgame they'd released a few months earlier based on the 2000AD strip. And in part it was laziness, of a sort: by tying it in with Warhammer Fantasy, they could just morph across the Fantasy races, rather than putting too much effort into designing alien races for a game that mi...

Let me take you on a trip back through time... In Rogue Trader, 40k's first edition, the Grimdark was new, and finding itself. Back then, the Imperial Guard had access to Rhinos, Predators, Land Raiders, even bikes, jetbikes and Land Speeders. They got a proper army list in White Dwarf 107. The list was riddled with problems, foremost amongst them, the profusion  of lascannon. Every command squad had 2, every infantry squad and conscript squad had one, and every support squad, back then squads of 10, had 4 and a missile launcher. They could be swapped out for Conversion Beamers for free, but those heavy weapons were compulsory, and had a movement penalty. It made little sense to have so many, and they were next to useless in Assault platoons - platoons whose squads had pistols as standard, and could have jump-packs - and Beastmen Attack platoons - where squads of beastmen were the squads. There were, as i said, a lot of problems, but that's a rant for another post. One thing ...

Hi, I'm Olaf/Ollaimh, the designer in Chief at Green Man Miniatures, and this blog is an off-campus place for me to put my games and miniatures musings. To start with, a little bit about me, and why my musings might be of interest. I was born in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles. To make matters worse, my parents were an Irish Catholic and an English Protestant, so i was socially caught up in the middle of it all. My father was, at the time and for many years to follow, a model railway enthusiast, and a child of the "Airfix Generation," so I've been building and painting models since before I had the co-ordination to do them justice. My first painted model was a 1:2 Scottish Terrier, which basically got slathered in multiple colours of runny tempera. It was a mess, basically, but we'd 2 of them, so my father had one that was painted up properly. Building in miniature always fascinated me. While most kids would have been playing outside (despite ...