Warhammer 40K’s Squats are back with a full army later this year
Warhammer 40,000’s infamous space dwarves, originally known as Squats, are returning to the miniatures wargame as a new faction called the Leagues of Votann. The announcement, officially made on Saturday by publisher Games Workshop, was preceded by a video trailer on April Fools’ day which many took for a gag. Fans should expect a new line of models and rules later this year.
The Squats have a long and storied history in the 40K pantheon that goes all the way back to the first edition of the game, where they were cast as a burly, pangalactic biker gang. But eventually they were dropped from the franchise, and much of their history scrubbed from its deep lore. The Fandom community wiki makes note of an obscure forum post from 2004 that seems to indicate why.
Perhaps the most iconic art of the original Squat Faction is this line drawing by Paul Bonner first published in White Dwarf #111 in 1989. The original sold for £950.00.
“The reason that the Squats were dropped,” writes former Games Workshop designer Jervis Johnson, “was because the creatives in the Studio [...] 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.”
For more than a decade, fans of Squats made do by fielding armies of space dwarf models that played legally under the rules of different factions. Then, in 2018, Games Workshop reintroduced the race to the canonical lore with a single miniature
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