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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
On the other hand? A race noted for its technological knowledge and capability sending its warriors into battle with a ballistic vest for armour….doesn’t sit right.

Their current gear echoes the Terminator armour project. Starting from mining and industrial equipment, and finding a way to turn that into useful armour, without comprising the original benefits (sealed environment, comms units etc).

That's pretty much a problem across the game. As the Space Knight faction the Space Marines kind of the corner on heavy armor, everyone else's standard troops must be more lightly armored.

"We Eldar are a dying race, our light flickers but we shall never let it die, we shall fight, fight to protect the remaining embers of our once-great civilizations and protect every precious Eldar life! So yeah, Bha'Bi the Flower Arranger, here's your 12" range gun and your semi armored bright yellow jumpsuit with a pointy hat. If you die, we will make a passing effort to join your soul stone to the Infinity Circuit."

And considering the Lacerations of Venus send folks into battle shirtless I'm not sure it's been fixed.

Eh, the design team at the time couldn't find a place for them as they were and I can't blame them.
Sometimes things are just too goofy and need to be stripped to the basics and rebuilt.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
On the other hand? A race noted for its technological knowledge and capability sending its warriors into battle with a ballistic vest for armour….doesn’t sit right.

Their current gear echoes the Terminator armour project. Starting from mining and industrial equipment, and finding a way to turn that into useful armour, without comprising the original benefits (sealed environment, comms units etc).

That's pretty much a problem across the game. As the Space Knight faction the Space Marines kind of the corner on heavy armor, everyone else's standard troops must be more lightly armored.

"We Eldar are a dying race, our light flickers but we shall never let it die, we shall fight, fight to protect the remaining embers of our once-great civilizations and protect every precious Eldar life! So yeah, Bha'Bi the Flower Arranger, here's your 12" range gun and your semi armored bright yellow jumpsuit with a pointy hat. If you die, we will make a passing effort to join your soul stone to the Infinity Circuit."

And considering the Lacerations of Venus send folks into battle shirtless I'm not sure it's been fixed.

I’m not sure that tracks.

Space Marines are indeed Space Knights.

But being Space Dwarfs, why not Carapace armour? And why Lasguns, when Bolters existed, and Eldar got their Shuriken weapons super early on.

4+ Save(carepace), bolter or ion gun.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

Here in the States, there's a linguistic distinction between various poses. For example, a man might "hunker down" and be engaged in thought, or planning, but when a guy "squats," there's an assumption that he's attending to a call of nature.

Perhaps in your part of the States. In my part, it's either an exercise, or something a small group of men do when they're out in the wild and want to have a quick, impromptu planning session (and might end up using dirt as an impromptu drawing surface).

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’m not sure that tracks.

Space Marines are indeed Space Knights.

But being Space Dwarfs, why not Carapace armour? And why Lasguns, when Bolters existed, and Eldar got their Shuriken weapons super early on.

I think you already know the answer: the Eldar were a design priority and the Squats weren't. The Eldar codex was one of the first ones published, while the fate of the Squats was uncertain. Like the Eldar, the Squats has something of a militia force with light weapons and armor, and then heavier "professional" troops that could be lavishly equipped. GW's design team simply never got around to it.

Obviously, the Lampreys of Victoria got a bit more attention, what with a full army and all that.

My first game of 40k was RT, but I didn't start playing and collecting until midway into 2nd, so much of the lore had taken what was assumed to be its final form. Squats were simply being starved, and I think the writing was plainly on the wall when the Necrons popped up in WD and the Squats still had, well, squat.

Again, I think the core problem is that Dwarfs...in...Spaaaaace just doesn't resonate with a lot of people. The Eldar made the jump by simply being even more otherworldly and having strange, super-advanced technology. Orks went the other direction - junk dealers roaming the galaxy beating people up and taking their stuff. Road Warrior is a fun and cool concept, and GW went with it.

A huge reason why the Laughter of Vogons is now viable is that GW has no problem with cluttering up the design space - the Dark Eldar and later the Tau demonstrated that. The design team during the 1990s was much more self-conscious about the integrity of the product, and folks have corrected noted a sense of "Okay guys, let's make this a serious game" going on.

As a sidebar, I will note that the Battle Bible actually referred to the current version (circa 1998) as the third edition for 40k, not the second. We've retroactively lumped all the RT stuff together, but the publication of the Compendium was apparently taken as a version 2.0, and of course 2nd when it came out, was a further refinement and expansion.

Which is why actual 3rd was such a shock, because it broke from both established practice at GW regarding Fantasy but also the way in which 40k itself had evolved.

Kid_Kyoto wrote:
That's pretty much a problem across the game. As the Space Knight faction the Space Marines kind of the corner on heavy armor, everyone else's standard troops must be more lightly armored.

"We Eldar are a dying race, our light flickers but we shall never let it die, we shall fight, fight to protect the remaining embers of our once-great civilizations and protect every precious Eldar life! So yeah, Bha'Bi the Flower Arranger, here's your 12" range gun and your semi armored bright yellow jumpsuit with a pointy hat. If you die, we will make a passing effort to join your soul stone to the Infinity Circuit."

It took a while, but eldar actually feel reasonably well-armored at this point. The basic troops are wearing 4+ armor making it comparable to the armor human elites like scions wear. And at least in the case of aspect warriors, it apparently shakes off damage well enough to warrant an invuln save (unless that's meant to represent aspect training; idk.) My space elves aren't wrapped in a tank's worth of power armor, but they also don't feel like they were given a flakk jacket and a thumbs up for their basic equipment. Their guns are longer-ranged now too, though reasonably people could definitely argue that they should have had a lasblaster options all these years.

Eumerin wrote:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

Here in the States, there's a linguistic distinction between various poses. For example, a man might "hunker down" and be engaged in thought, or planning, but when a guy "squats," there's an assumption that he's attending to a call of nature.

Perhaps in your part of the States. In my part, it's either an exercise, or something a small group of men do when they're out in the wild and want to have a quick, impromptu planning session (and might end up using dirt as an impromptu drawing surface).

I grew up hearing all these interpretations. After finishing a set of squats at the gym, your friends might pop a squat to make weekend plans and decide to go camping meaning you'll have to be ready to pop a squat in the woods due to the lack of plumbing.

Again, I think the core problem is that Dwarfs...in...Spaaaaace just doesn't resonate with a lot of people. The Eldar made the jump by simply being even more otherworldly and having strange, super-advanced technology. Orks went the other direction - junk dealers roaming the galaxy beating people up and taking their stuff. Road Warrior is a fun and cool concept, and GW went with it.

Hot take and super nerdy rant incoming: I think the problem is more with dwarves in general. Tolkien/D&D/Warcraft kind of cemented this idea that dwarves and elves are both definitely their own things, but mythological dwarves were sorta-kinda interchangable with elves. And not-"dwarves"-but-short-magical-guys in non-norse myths were similarly sorta-kinda interchangeable with other "fey" creatures. Like, classic dwarven things include stuff like opening magical portals to other locations (vaguely webway gate-y, although the webway is more of a Faerie lands analogue), having hats that make them invisible (stealth tech), doing magic in general (let's call that psychic powers), crafting physical objects out of ethereal concepts (going to stretch and make an argument for comparing this to bonesinging), being associated with concepts of sleep/dream (vaguely reminiscent of being "elf-shot") and just generally just falling into lots of "fey" tropes.

The booze-and-beards version of dwarves a lot of people think of today are kind of more of a modern meme than an ancient aesthetic. Like, the eldar can draw upon all the fey, elf, and "other"/"outsider" tropes they want, and that gives them a pretty rich aesthetic to work with even before you get into their pretty cool 40k-specific lore. But for something like squats (or most fantasy takes on "dwarves"), you either have to lean into the beards-and-booze thing, or else you have to create something more or less wholecloth.

Which is a very long-winded of saying that yeah, without the "silly" elements like the biker motif or the angry beard guy angle, what was really left of old squats for people to resonate with that wasn't already covered by other human factions? But then again, I have trouble getting into dwarves in most games, so maybe this is just my bias showing.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Again, I think the core problem is that Dwarfs...in...Spaaaaace just doesn't resonate with a lot of people.

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:
Tbh, this explanation of the LoV and their relation to the squats is not at all bad, I have notm grudge against it. I don't like their aesthetic though.

Has anyone got memories of when DE were introduced? How did their introduction compare to that of LoV? Mostly considering that rather than a whole new race, they are a facette of the wider Eldar race, much like LoV would be the wider species of squats.

Doc maybe?

My memory of DE being released was when GW could just to a chaos version of an army a bit like in WFB. Back then they seemed to be someone at GWs creative outlet for the S&M fantasies. Lots of DE witches in skimpy outfits torturing men for the fun of it, blood orgies and so on. And they didn’t it for the fun of it not because they were saving themselves from slaneesh. I think they had just gone over to slaneesh. But they had always been there and I don’t think GW felt the need to explain their existence as 40K was a setting back then an who know what else is out there. It was in the same period that white dwarf gave us army lists for space pirates and penal legions.

And how were tau and necron releases felt?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Apart from the noobcrons meme I mean

I'm not sure what people expected. Squats barely survived into 2nd edition and that was thirty years ago, the other races have had a continuous existence and so their models track slow changes over time.

The term Leagues existed in the original lore as did the ancestor spirits that are now the Votann super computers. Votann replaced Grungi as that term.

The only real change is getting rid of the bikers and that really wasn't a bad thing.

I thought they just changed the bikers to hoverbikers?

Kind of. The point of origin is obvious, but they’re a development of making bikers rational in a formal army.

So leather jacketed baldies became pioneers, rugged individuals tasked with recon and finding new resources to exploit.

The same DNA I guess, but recombined,

 Haighus wrote:
I thought they just changed the bikers to hoverbikers?

Those old squat bikers were just a fist full of cliches and had a similar vibe to crazy bikes that orks had back then. To be fair the old squats sit somewhere between the pioneer survivalist that we see on necromunda and the high sci fi tech LOV. I really think that GW did the squats justice with the LOV despite them not having any lore or releases In a 30 year time frame

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:
And how were tau and necron releases felt?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Apart from the noobcrons meme I mean

The infamous thing when the 3rd Ed Necrons came out was GW shoehorning C’tan into essentially everything thing they could:

Fear of death
War in Heaven
Places the Nids avoid
Abaddon getting his sword
Cypher losing his sword
Creation of the Eldar and the Orks
And all sorts of other stuff.

Charax wrote:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Again, I think the core problem is that Dwarfs...in...Spaaaaace just doesn't resonate with a lot of people.

*big graphic*

GW knew there was a market for Dwarfs in general (heck, they had a Fantasy line for it), but the design team at that time could not find a place for them.

I think this speaks well of them, because they wanted each army in 40k to feel very different, not just in fluff but in game play. GW subsequently had no problem with design overlap because they wanted to sell miniatures, period.

One could also note that the Squat nostalgia market decided to go for the pure version, and if the game is half-decent and doesn't auto-reset every three years, they may be onto something.

Anyhow, I note that they do not call themselves the Legates of Vault.

 Gert wrote:

People need to stop using the word "retcon" whenever new things are added to the background. The Squats of old are represented as Kin who joined with the Imperium and were largely wiped out by the Tyranids. They were the outermost worlds of their race and still had advanced tech but not to the degree of the homeworlds in the galactic core.

Just where have you got this from? It's not what the current lore says about them.

A League who "joined with the Imperium and were wiped out by the Tyranids" who were at a lesser tech level than the rest has not been even hinted at in the lore of the Votann. There is no specific League Kin who represent the squats of old, the Leagues overall are the Squats.

There was 1 small League that did get wiped out by the Tyranids, but absolutely no connection has been made between that and the Imperium and Tau thinking they were wiped out entirely.

Were the old awaits part of the imperium? I didn’t think they were I thought they were allies. And they had their own vendetta with the Orks.

I don’t think LOV are specifically upset by the Orks unless I missed it

Leagues definitely do not like Orks. At all.

Some Squats were members of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and some Holds would readily fight alongside the Imperium.

I’d need to check my books, but I think IG used to be able to field limited Squat weapons.

IG had access to the like of capitol imperialis, a mega tank covered in meters of armour designed by the squats and provided in freindship to the imperium. That was back to when old Epic was a thing apparently

We do have those few Jes Goodwin (I think?) prototype sculpts, which might give some idea of what further Squat releases will have looked like. Again closer to the Epic style I think with artisan armour, axes etc. - as has been pointed out above, maybe something more like the Kharadron Overlords if you gave them bolt guns.

Anyone know where I put my Leagues codex?

Can’t find it anywhere.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Anyone know where I put my Leagues codex?

Can’t find it anywhere.

Have you looked behind the sofa?


In the Votann 9th ed codex, there's reference to hatred of Orks and that certain Leagues went out of the core worlds and changed much of their aesthetic. We can read that as talking about the old RT and Epic era Kin. There's then a couple of mentions of some of those Leagues being devoured by the Tyranids. Some of them being more closely aligned with the Imperium. Then you have other Leagues who were trading with the Tau who looked quite different and so the assumption was that these were a completely different alien race and as the Kin don't much care for outsiders it doesn't bother them what the Imperials thought happened.

There's a really nice piece of artwork which has a mixture of all the Kin on it, the suggestion being that yours can look however you wish.

@Pacific - those Jes Goodwin sculpts are delightful. I have a good plan in mind for my next Kahl. That could fit the bill..

 Olthannon wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Anyone know where I put my Leagues codex?

Can’t find it anywhere.

Certain Leagues went out of the core worlds and changed much of their aesthetic. We can read that as talking about the old RT and Epic era Kin.

Then you have other Leagues who were trading with the Tau who looked quite different

Can you give a quote for this? What does the codex say about Leagues "changing their aesthetic"? I've not seen that anywhere.

We have mention of 1 small League being eaten by Tyranids though, and it did not say anything about them being closely aligned with the Imperium.

The whole "They look like aliens" thing isn't a particular league either, it's just something that happens to the Leagues overall because of the cloneskein mutations affecting their appearance. It's not something with the Tau trading Leagues specifically.

 Mentlegen324 wrote:

 Olthannon wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Anyone know where I put my Leagues codex?

Can’t find it anywhere.

Certain Leagues went out of the core worlds and changed much of their aesthetic. We can read that as talking about the old RT and Epic era Kin.

Then you have other Leagues who were trading with the Tau who looked quite different

Can you give a quote for this? What does the codex say about Leagues "changing their aesthetic"? I've not seen that anywhere.

We have mention of 1 small League being eaten by Tyranids though, and it did not say anything about them being closely aligned with the Imperium.

The whole "They look like aliens" thing isn't a particular league either, it's just something that happens to the Leagues overall because of the cloneskein mutations affecting their appearance. It's not something with the Tau trading Leagues specifically.

I'd have to look when I'm near the book.

No indeed, but clearly the League or Leagues trading with the Tau had a high abundance of these specific cloneskeins as they were markedly different and became known as the Demiurg in universe

Given that the Demiurg were a way of reintroducing the Squats the cloneskeins were a nice way of combining the two.

 Olthannon wrote:

 Mentlegen324 wrote:

 Olthannon wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Anyone know where I put my Leagues codex?

Can’t find it anywhere.

Certain Leagues went out of the core worlds and changed much of their aesthetic. We can read that as talking about the old RT and Epic era Kin.

Then you have other Leagues who were trading with the Tau who looked quite different

Can you give a quote for this? What does the codex say about Leagues "changing their aesthetic"? I've not seen that anywhere.

We have mention of 1 small League being eaten by Tyranids though, and it did not say anything about them being closely aligned with the Imperium.

The whole "They look like aliens" thing isn't a particular league either, it's just something that happens to the Leagues overall because of the cloneskein mutations affecting their appearance. It's not something with the Tau trading Leagues specifically.

I'd have to look when I'm near the book.

No indeed, but clearly the League or Leagues trading with the Tau had a high abundance of these specific cloneskeins as they were markedly different and became known as the Demiurg in universe

Given that the Demiurg were a way of reintroducing the Squats the cloneskeins were a nice way of combining the two.

The "Demiurg" thing isn't to do with the Tau though, it's just one of the names the Leagues have gone under over the millenia, they were even encountered during the Horus Heresy as "The Demiurg".

A weird thing to be finickity about? I'm saying that the Demiurg were a Dwarf-like Xenos auxiliary to the Tau when they were introduced.

The Horus Heresy book you are referencing came out a few years after they were mentioned in their BFG supplement. This was to establish them as part of the universe by putting them in at the Heresy. Regardless, the Demiurg are most closely associated with the Tau than anything else.

Now, the established canon is that the Demiurg are the Leagues all along just the cloneskeins made them more alien looking than the more humanoid appearing Squats. Thus, GW tied up all the loose ends with their prior attempts to reintroduce Space Dwarves.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
On the other hand? A race noted for its technological knowledge and capability sending its warriors into battle with a ballistic vest for armour….doesn’t sit right.

Their current gear echoes the Terminator armour project. Starting from mining and industrial equipment, and finding a way to turn that into useful armour, without comprising the original benefits (sealed environment, comms units etc).

A lot of other design choices for the new Leagues of Votann range likewise make good sense, and suits Dwarfs in space with their maximalist and perfectionist approach. Load up the gear!

The NASA-punk look is not bull's eye aesthetically, but the story it tells with visual ties to the Dark Age of Technology is still beautiful and good for the setting as a whole.*

I agree that Kharadron Overlords fit better aesthetically, but the beauty here is that a great deal of variation will fit in fine under the wider Squat banner.

Rogue Trader and Epic Squats are solid in the aesthetical department. Looks were never an issue; background was, and background has now been fixed to good results.

Cheers

_______
* Coincidentally, the DAoT angle played right into my hands with ongoing writings and doodles. As a diehard Dwarf fanatic I'm laughing all the way to the bank on this one.

I find the 60/70s hard sci fi look fine, it just doesn't sing to me. And the occasional random Norse flourishes just seem out of place.

Much prefer the steampunk vikings of epic and the Sky Dwarves of Age of Sigmar.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
I find the 60/70s hard sci fi look fine, it just doesn't sing to me. And the occasional random Norse flourishes just seem out of place.

Much prefer the steampunk vikings of epic and the Sky Dwarves of Age of Sigmar.

But that’s the AOS look. And I think GW had to do something different or a lot of people would have responded to LOV with a sense of “we’ve seen it all before and we weren’t interested then”.

I do think LOV just need something extra, they have this open book for AI and I’d like to see some sort of killer mining machine with lots of legs and the ability to drill through ceremite. And have the covert part of the Ad Mech desperately trying to capture one and take it apart