The dream of a full-sized Warhammer 40k army of Squats may be dead, here’s why they were canned according to GW.
Diehard Squat fans be warned, this may be a hard read for you, but the good news is this posting by the venerable Jervis Johnson was from 2004, so a lot has changed since then at Games Workshop.
However, it is likely that the Squats may never be coming back in a large army form too…
While we’ve seen some vague mentions of Squats and a few Necromunda Squat models, it seems like GW is just keeping them within the 40k lore for the meme at this point. Blowing the dust off of an old forum post we can see GW’s rationale for dropping the Squat line entirely, directly from the source.
Why Squats Aren’t Coming Back According to GW
Old artwork of armored Squad in 40k
Now we said that we were blowing the dust off these old forums but we really mean it. This forum is from 2004 where GW’s Jervis spoke up on the matter.
Be sure to check out the archived forum for yourself. But essentially some users were talking about rumors of why Squats weren’t making their way back into 40k. Eventually, Jervis from GW stepped in and cleared the air saying basically, they felt that they didn’t do the Dwarf archetype justice.
Although they tried to find a place for Squats to fit into 40k, it seems they just couldn’t get excited about continued support for the faction and wrote them out of the story by some Tyranids nom nom nomming their homeworld out of existence. You’d think with all that genetic material now in the Tyranid’s genepool, all the bugs from there on out would have some stubby legs.
You Can Still Use Your Squat Models
Wargame Atlantic upcoming Space Dwarf Model Art
He finally wrapped things up by saying that they had an idea of a Dwarf-like race called the “Demiurg” (which could be the patriarchal inspiration from seeing Squats added into Necromunda/short stories/etc.). But with where were are now, some 16 years after all of this was written, there’s essentially no sign of Squats ever coming back into the 40k fold as a whole army…
If you’re still a huge fan of Squats, you can obviously still use them in your games. You just won’t find supported 40k Squat-specific rules.
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