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Forge World have a Squat bounty hunter in their store- to be used in Necromunda.
This is an official release that proves that the existence of the Squats, and the name "Squat" are both current canon.
- For those who do not remember the great Squatting of the Squats in the 90s, the Squats were just neglected out of existence. During the 2nd ed days, the Squat line of minis was discontinued thoroughly with no replacements, and the rules for them never got updated past the 2nd ed release (although some codexes did refer to squats- in that they could be taken as allies).
I never heard anything official about the end of the Squats, but the rumor around my LGS was that the Tyranids ate their planet (that might be official canon for all I know- I never found the source). Others claimed that it was a complete retcon- the Squats never existed in the setting in the first place, and any past references to them should be ignored. By that time, there were so few Squat players that this made a sort of sense (I only knew one, but he might have been an illusion, right?)
But, we know for certain that there was at least ONE Squat to survive the Tyranid invasion and/or their creator's genocide through neglect- and here he is:
Unless of course Nucromunda is set before the Great Om Nom Nomming.
Stormonu wrote: For me, the joy is in putting some good-looking models on the board and playing out a fantasy battle - not arguing over the poorly-made rules of some 3rd party who neither has any power over my play nor will be visiting me (and my opponent) to ensure we are "playing by the rules"
Could Forge World do Squats for their Horus Heresy range?
I need to doublecheck my maps, because I thought that the Squat homeworlds were pretty far from the early Hive Fleet attacks (I guess the tyranids snuck through most of the galaxy just to squat the squats).
Squats clearly survived the great fall of their world (from what I recall the Tyranid devouring it is one of those things that sort of wasn't canon that got thrown around so much its sort of become canon).
Considering how many must have been spread through the Imperium it stands to reason that some would not have been on their home world when it was taken. However its also clear that with the loss of the bulk of their population they have been unable to recover numbers to a point where they can pose as an actual military might in the 41st millennium. There might be the odd left over army here and there, but nothing that makes them register on the radar any more.
Of course the galaxy being what it is nothing would stop them having hidden and managed to slowly setup a new home world and to thus return to war; but I think that there is just no drive or interest from GW's development side to bring Squats back. Indeed originally part of the reason they were dropped officially is because the development and design team just felt that Squats (even the name) didn't fit into the evolving lore and no one in the team really had the spark of inspiration to carry them forward fully. They did rename them and leave room for a new Squat like race - the Demiurge(sp) but that only got as far as mentions in the list of allies for Tau
I never heard anything official about the end of the Squats, but the rumor around my LGS was that the Tyranids ate their planet (that might be official canon for all I know- I never found the source).
Basically what happened is developers found themselves in a corner. They had made squats into a form of biker gang army turning archetype of proud dwarves into more or less a joke race. Then when time to update squats started to come...well basically none of the developers had any sort of inspiration/motivation. Idea was more or less "zzzzzz...". So they were dropped rather than leave them in stasis.
Common theory was they didn't sold enough so were axed but squats outsold ranges that were kept around so...
Oh, I found roundabout mention of the squats in the 5th ed Tyranid dex - in fluff snippet about the Hive fleet Jormungards destruction in the Battle of the Black Nebula.
"Admiral Vortigern Hanroth assembled a great fleet, boasting not only the finest ships that the dockyards of Bakka and Sodremund could provide, but also Space Marine Battle Barges and a loose alliance of vessels from smaller worlds. These vessels included Vassalian Slavebirds, Cimmeriac Shadowcruisers, Donorathi Thunderprows, reportedly a pair of Demiurg commerce vessels, and a few ships of a kind not seen since the ruin of Golgotha..."
Overread wrote: They did rename them and leave room for a new Squat like race - the Demiurge(sp) but that only got as far as mentions in the list of allies for Tau
Squats and Demiurg are unrelated. They got some lore, rules and models in BFG, although they were quite mysterious about how they actually looked. I think they were just a second attempt at a dwarf race that never really took off.
Overread wrote: They did rename them and leave room for a new Squat like race - the Demiurge(sp) but that only got as far as mentions in the list of allies for Tau
Squats and Demiurg are unrelated. They got some lore, rules and models in BFG, although they were quite mysterious about how they actually looked. I think they were just a second attempt at a dwarf race that never really took off.
By "never took off" you mean "GW never once made a mini for a single one of them," right?
I know a lot of people think that the two are one and the same- and with some of the renaming GW has done (aelfs and Aeldari) it seems plausible that the demiurge might be our squats.
Is there any Demiurg artwork that shows what they look like? At this point, I'd be kind of surprised if GW made them look just like their old space dwarves.
Of course, if they wanted to conflate the two races, all they'd have to do is add a little addendum about how imperial scholars used to think they were two separate races, but then discovered the revised fluff.
odinsgrandson wrote: Is there any Demiurg artwork that shows what they look like? At this point, I'd be kind of surprised if GW made them look just like their old space dwarves.
Of course, if they wanted to conflate the two races, all they'd have to do is add a little addendum about how imperial scholars used to think they were two separate races, but then discovered the revised fluff.
odinsgrandson wrote: Is there any Demiurg artwork that shows what they look like? At this point, I'd be kind of surprised if GW made them look just like their old space dwarves.
Of course, if they wanted to conflate the two races, all they'd have to do is add a little addendum about how imperial scholars used to think they were two separate races, but then discovered the revised fluff.
By Jes Goodwin
Ok, so that's an incomplete concept sketch by Jess Goodwin, right? It clearly hasn't been canonized, so they're still free to make the Demiurge into something totally different.
odinsgrandson wrote: Is there any Demiurg artwork that shows what they look like? At this point, I'd be kind of surprised if GW made them look just like their old space dwarves.
Of course, if they wanted to conflate the two races, all they'd have to do is add a little addendum about how imperial scholars used to think they were two separate races, but then discovered the revised fluff.
Weren't they described in one of the Cain books?
Automatically Appended Next Post: Edit: Found it -
The armoured figures seemed unusually squat for tau, and a moment of further observation revealed the reason. ‘Demiurg, by the look of them.’ Which finally confirmed the long-standing rumour of a contingent of the blocky xenos accompanying the tau fleet.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/09/24 17:46:14
odinsgrandson wrote: Forge World have a Squat bounty hunter in their store- to be used in Necromunda.
This is an official release that proves that the existence of the Squats, and the name "Squat" are both current canon.
- For those who do not remember the great Squatting of the Squats in the 90s, the Squats were just neglected out of existence. During the 2nd ed days, the Squat line of minis was discontinued thoroughly with no replacements, and the rules for them never got updated past the 2nd ed release (although some codexes did refer to squats- in that they could be taken as allies).
I never heard anything official about the end of the Squats, but the rumor around my LGS was that the Tyranids ate their planet (that might be official canon for all I know- I never found the source). Others claimed that it was a complete retcon- the Squats never existed in the setting in the first place, and any past references to them should be ignored. By that time, there were so few Squat players that this made a sort of sense (I only knew one, but he might have been an illusion, right?)
But, we know for certain that there was at least ONE Squat to survive the Tyranid invasion and/or their creator's genocide through neglect- and here he is:
Delvarus Centurion wrote:
Squats have never been removed from the lore and have always been cannon.
That's not how my Squat player friends remember it.
Anyway, they weren't so much written out of the lore as they were eliminated from the setting. They were destroyed inexplicably by a hive fleet that was hell and gone from their location on the map. There were no novelizations, no stories, no events or mini-games to mark their falling. Rather, they suffered from years of complete neglect and were just sort of 'gone' one day (I don't even know the source on the 'Tyranids ate them" account).
beast_gts wrote:
odinsgrandson wrote: Is there any Demiurg artwork that shows what they look like? At this point, I'd be kind of surprised if GW made them look just like their old space dwarves.
Of course, if they wanted to conflate the two races, all they'd have to do is add a little addendum about how imperial scholars used to think they were two separate races, but then discovered the revised fluff.
Weren't they described in one of the Cain books?
Automatically Appended Next Post: Edit: Found it -
The armoured figures seemed unusually squat for tau, and a moment of further observation revealed the reason. ‘Demiurg, by the look of them.’ Which finally confirmed the long-standing rumour of a contingent of the blocky xenos accompanying the tau fleet.
Interesting that it is described as "squat" and nothing else. From this account, he could have a long beard like our space dwarves of eras long past, but he could also have six eyes and tentacles in place of a mouth. "Squat" is the only descriptor we have.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I have discovered the reason the Demiurg won't have their own book!
The word already exists in English, and is therefore immune to copyright!
it is a philosophical term designating a creator god (or creator of the universe). This seems pretty inappropriate for the Squat-like race.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/10/02 16:06:32
Demiurg are meant to be master creators of tech, though.
As to squats they got shout outs in both the 6th and 7th ed BRBs as non-extinct sanctioned abhumans. At this point they have been an explicit part of the background for more editions of 40k than those in which they were overlooked (iirc 3rd-5th).
Jervis wrote: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 % quantaties 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 realised 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 regreted 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 tendancy 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 realisation 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 ont he 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 lilely that they *don't* make the cut than do, as there is a certain predudice 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 Mniature ever made from MO. However, there are now so many of these 'back catalogue' 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 catalogue miniatures are kept available. At present we're still struggling to produce special catalogues for these ranges (in the US there is the 'Phone Book' catalogue 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 permenantly available, the plan is to offer up other parts of the back catalogue for limited periods of time. In effect this will divide the back catalogue into three parts: a range of classic models that are permenantly 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 licencing agreement changes. So far we're still slowly working on deciding which classic models we want to keep permenantly 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 exisiting 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.
Thanks for reposting Jervis' words on the subject.
One of the biggest troubles with the end of the Squats is that it makes no sense from a fluff standpoint (according to the 'nid and squat fluff they had written).
There were thousands of Squat homeworlds, but all of them were centered on the Galactic Core. These worlds were all settled by humans because the planets tended to be mineral rich.
The stars were generally darker red giants (quite unlike the yellow dwarfs that humans prefer).
The planets were more massive than the average human planet, and these were somewhat resistant to terraforming, and were generally devoid of life.
That led to a sector of human space populated by the Abhuman Squats.
On the other hand, the Tyranid hive fleets enter from the fringes of the galaxy- mostly from the Eastern Fringe. If you look over any map of the Imperium, you'll see that the Eastern Fringe is quite far from the Galactic Core- and the Tyranid Hive Fleets were characterized as invading and eating all systems in their path (although each successive fleet seems to be better coordinated than the last).
So- Hive Fleet Behemoth is destroyed in the Ultima Segment, and Hive Fleet Kraken is off on the fringes fighting Ultramarines at Ichtar IV and Eldar at Iyanden- all on the Eastern Fringe (the Squats were destroyed before any other 'nid fleets arrived).
During all of that, a branche of the 'nid fleet Kraken flew into the Galactic core, ignoring all of the millions of systems in between, and ate the Squat worlds- planets with relatively little for the 'nids to eat. Then, rather than start gobbling up planets nearby, they flew back to the eastern fringes to continue fighting alongside the other Tyranids.
Yeah- that's the official story.
I honestly would have really preferred if the Squats homeworlds were re-annexed by the Imperium, and were added to the Imperial Guard (or Astra Militarum) as abhumans.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2018/10/10 16:02:58
