Musings of a Green Man

I've been gaming for rather a long time. I know that i bought every issue of White Dwarf from December 1991 until June 1998, and my collection spans about 5 years further back in bits and pieces, with back issues and second hand copies to fill some of the gaps. So, more than 28 years, certainly.  There's a long standing joke that a dedicated miniature gamer will drop dead once they have finished painting every model in their collection. This joke comes from the backlog we all develop. We buy miniatures or are given miniatures that we want for forces we're building or components we want, and then life gets in the way or we find a new model or line or game that's just so much better/newer/fresher, and we have a pile of stuff that hasn't been painted and is now being ignored. I have years and years and years of that, without interruption. I also have inherited a few armies, when people have been clearing out their old gaming stuff, most pressing, at present, for me is ...

There's been a lot of fuss made over the past couple of years about 40k's new Primaris marines, about existing characters being upgraded and the doom of the traditional space marines.  There's some validity to it all, but, something most people forget, or simply don't know, is that a similar change happened almost 30 years ago.  Back in first edition, in Rogue Trader, marines started with profiles barely advanced from the humble Guardsman, with power armour that gave a 4+ save. A 4+ save was a big thing back then, and the other means of getting it - Carapace armour or layers, such as mesh and flak - came with movement penalties and other downsides. Back then, the S4 of the bolter made it an enviable weapon. Marines were a  powerful force. The miniatures, dating from before or around the time that marines became superhuman giants, were small by modern standards, about shoulder height to a modern traditional marine, mostly single-piece (except  for backpack) and wearin...

No, I'm not going to lay out a plan to get GW to revive the squats. I have a strategy in mind for the return of other things, now that the Legends have dropped, but that's an entirely different story. What I'm talking about here is my plan for the building blocks that will make up my squats.  Having started to build the army using the Dispossessed Thunderers and Warriors for the grunts, I'd planned to continue to do so, but the models got discontinued while I was 4 boxes short of what I planned. Rather than abandon the project (since I've 65 models still to build) i started looking at how to integrate the surviving options into the force. There are 3 sets that could be used easily, the Dispossessed Ironbreakers, Dispossessed Hammerers and the Kharadron Overlords' Arkanaut Company.  The old dwarfs had mail tabards, which I've painted as camouflage netting. I've used a few Ironbreakers, left over from an ancient RPG campaign to provide the Hearthguard for ...