Squat
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- 6th update someone? Apparently page 405 in the 6th rulebook mentions squats.
A Squat is a space dwarf. They used to exist in Warhammer 40k (with a planned Codex mentioned in the Second Edition Codex: Imperial Guard); in fluff, their worlds supplemented the capabilities of Forge Worlds, and were independent of the technology-worship of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
Squats in 40K
The Squats were only ever covered in the basic army book that came with the core game, and never really expanded out into a full army list. They were more or less tougher Imperial Guard, only with a lot more bikes, Terminator-style armour and horribly complicated weaponry like Mole Mortars and Thudd guns.
Squats in Epic
While in 40K the Squats were roughly half an army, in Epic they really worked. As well as the biker companies you suddenly had access to an enormous supply of hardware with which the Squats would punish anyone who said they were compensating for something. These included giant tracked mortars, Land Trains, and massive tracked crawlers with Void Shields that were basically the Squat version of Titans; one, the Cyclops, was armed with what the modern fluff calls a Lance and could burn through multiple shields before hitting the target. They had ironclad airships, helicopters back when most Epic armies had no aircraft at all, and generally ruled.
When suddenly...
They were eaten by Tyranids. It is popularly believed that Games Workshop sends out teams to assassinate, kidnap, or otherwise inconvenience anyone who dares mention them. One possibility is that the Squat nobles demanded that some impossible-to-acquire item be put in each of their rooms, and thus locked up the entire working class of Squats, and the whole race starved. Another theory is that Creed is using his tactical genius to hide them until the final showdown with Chaos. It's kinda likely that, what with their "We haz teknologeez!", being Dwarves, drinking, not being assholes, and generally not being depressing, Games Workshop decided they weren't grimdark enuff, and subsequently fed them to the Tyranids (who exist to eat Games Workshop's mistakes, obviously), and at the same time branding the mention of <censored for heresy> as heresy. Heresy - the perfect excuse to retcon!
They're now /tg/'s version of the Candlejack meme, since mentioning them gets GW to send death squads after you. Fortunately, the two memes cancel one another out.
Fa/tg/uys fear that the Sisters of Battle will become 'Squatted' (be made obsolete). However, recent updates in White Dwarf and leaked pictures of new designs make this seem unlikely.
Squats Sighted With Bigfoot on the Island of Mu
It has always been suspected that Squats weren't simply lost to a Tyranid attack. After all, men don't get their legs broken just for discussing people who have been eaten. Rather, the Squats probably saw something they weren't supposed to see and had to "disappear" for a while. Come to think of it, there is a race called the "Demiurg" who are short, drunken miners with a love for technology and a hatred of Greenskins and Eldar. Strangely enough, they popped up after the Squats disappeared; it's probably a coincidence, though. They sell their services to the TAU of all people, so it must be.
A rare case of GW being completely honest
This is from 2004, back when honesty was A Thing, it seems:
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 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 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 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 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 prejudice 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...
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
What actually happened to the Demiurg?
Essentially? Nothing.
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Welcome to the club, Sisters.
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Rally to m
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"Squats are common inhabitants in the Imperium..."
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You may include troops but we won't.
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Militant-armored-cybernetic-warrior-space-midgets? Yep. They cover all the bases in the 41st millennium. (Or they used to...)
