This Saturday, Codex: Space Marines will finally be here to pre-order, alongside a battalion of awesome new kits. There are fully multipart plastic Terminators and Sternguard Veterans, joined by Company Heroes, Jump Pack Intercessors, and a Captain who can fly – to name a few.
We spoke to five members of the Warhammer Design team about their experiences working on the new kits.
Warhammer Community: The new jump pack-equipped Captain and Assault Intercessors are some of the most requested units since Primaris Space Marines first appeared. How did you approach the design of these miniatures, and their super dynamic poses in particular?
Dom – Miniatures Design Manager: In general, we were looking at things that were very iconic to the Space Marines, and jump packs are a big part of their history. It was inevitable that we’d be able to do them eventually, and now was the right time. As far as the poses went… it was Neil who did the initial design work for that.
Neil – Miniatures Designer: Yeah, the dynamic movement. The main idea was to make the Captain look like a frontline leader rather than somebody gesticulating from the back, directing their troops. So he started as a more elevated version of what you’d imagine a Sergeant would be, with a guard here and a cloak there, and then we looked for ways to elevate him.*
Tom – Miniatures Designer: The Captain was the first non-vehicle model I got to do, so it was a great experience learning new things about character design. Early on we came up with all the ideas we associate with jump pack troops – the weight, the speed – and thought about how those mesh with the things you expect on a Captain.
This extends to his weapons too – we knew he’d fight with a power fist very differently to a power sword, so we had to figure out ways to get more variety out of his pose, and give the Captain three different attitudes while only changing the weapons around. It was a lot of work!
Ed – Miniatures Designer: Positioning the arms and legs properly was a big deal, because you want the most extreme sense of movement you can get in a believable way. You’ve got the large jump pack and pauldrons giving the Assault Intercessors a big silhouette, but they need to look fast.
Tom: Yeah, so we wanted to set them apart by giving them very exaggerated poses – Jes got involved with that, and showed us how to spin the model around so the models look good from every possible angle. A big deal for us was making sure the miniatures didn’t look floaty, like they were drifting around, because Space Marines landing should feel like an armoured fist punching the earth.
WarCom: What goes into creating multi-build units like the Terminators and Sternguard Veterans, which were previously available as single-pose miniatures?
Darren – Miniatures Design Lead: As far as the Terminators go, we had the original design by Jes Goodwin, and that was a big influence on the five new miniatures in the Leviathan boxed set. The job of designing the multi-build kit was then passed to me, so I had a lot to work from, and we had to think of all the things people would want – it always baffled us that the Sergeant couldn’t be armed with a power fist, for example.
The challenge was then to make sure that even when people get two, or three, or four boxes, they can make all of their Terminators look fairly different by swapping around heads, arms, and legs.
Neil: We tend to work on what we call a body chassis – which is the torso and legs together in a solid pose – which helps us to make sure that no combination of parts looks too ungainly and lopsided. The big difference from the single-pose miniatures is that we can use this chassis to work in more options that people want, and slight changes can make a model look quite different.
Dom: A good example comes from the Leviathan Terminators. We purposely chose to add the assault cannon to the squad, as it’s such an iconic Terminator weapon, and people will always want them around. But having a multi-option kit allowed us to add the cyclone missile launcher and heavy flamer back in, which opens up a whole load more flexibility both in how you use them, and how they look.
Darren: Plus, we definitely want to give people reasons to build the kits more than once, and we want them to stick around for a while. We now have a much clearer perspective of how miniatures age stylistically, so making sure that Space Marines in particular are future-proof informs a lot of the design decisions we need to make. It also means they’re a good foundation for–
Dom: Redacted.
WarCom: The new Company Heroes join a long legacy of Command Squads in Space Marine armies. How did you choose what to include in the unit?
Ed: I think Neil mocked those up, and gave the Ancient the biggest banner I’d ever seen on a Space Marine. I’ve always looked at the Company Heroes or Command Squads and felt like the guy who carried the banner got a bit of a raw deal compared to his fancier squadmates, so I tried to instead make the miniature really show off what an honour it is to be chosen to carry the Chapter’s colours. That’s why he becomes almost a living banner himself, with his big draped cloak – he’s taking it seriously now.
Darren: We ended up wondering what Veterans of each doctrine would look like. We’ve never really done a Veteran Devastator, for instance, and in the past there’s just been other, existing heroes like an Apothecary thrown in there, while the regular squad Veterans felt a bit left behind.
Dom: The old Command Squad was a bit of a grab bag, so this time we talked a lot about what it actually means to be a Company Hero – this idea that any Space Marine can be elevated through valorous deeds. Chapters base a lot of their training around the Tactical, Assault, and Devastator doctrines, and we wanted to reinforce these roles so there’d be a strong resonance between the squad and Space Marines as a whole.
So for Assault, you have the Company Champion, while the Veteran with a bolt rifle could easily be an elevated member of the Sternguard.
Ed: It also let us make each miniature look like an individual vignette. The bolt rifle Veteran is one of my favourites, and it’s a pose you’d never really see in a Sternguard Veteran squad – it’s much more like a singular, commemorative miniature we’d release elsewhere.
WarCom: Did any unique challenges arise when designing new miniatures for a range as visually consistent as the Space Marines?
Dom: The visual hierarchy of the Space Marine range is very important to the design team – that is, making sure that there’s a clear progression of visual upgrades as the Space Marines go up in rank. One of the things the Primaris range allowed us to do was go back and reset our expectations of what a Captain looks like, what a Veteran looks like, and what a regular battle-brother looks like. It was a lot of hard work to make sure the Sternguard in particular fit into their proper place.
Tom: We needed to make sure we were enhancing the miniatures without overly decorating them, so there’d be enough blank space for people to play with their spare bits and paint their own touches on.
Neil: It also came up against how we’d give people the option to go further with it if they wanted to, like adding all of the extra gubbins and relics, but not have the miniature look plain without them. They need to be very versatile, so in the case of the Terminators, we let the big, hulking armour do the talking. It’s the pinnacle of personal armour in the Imperium, and it finally looks like it – which means hobbyists can leave them relatively unadorned, or absolutely cake them in accessories, and either approach will work.
WarCom: And finally, what was your favourite part of the new units to work on?
Tom: Getting to do my first ever pure character model, definitely. The Captain with Jump Pack was a lot of fun, and I got to learn a lot from these guys’ ideas about what makes character models stand out.
Darren: From a design perspective, probably the bare heads for the Terminators, revealing what’s below that thick helmet and getting to add some new touches there.
Ed: Definitely the marksman-like bolt rifle veteran from the Company Heroes. I really loved the pose when I saw the mock-up, and he’s one of my absolute favourite miniatures now.
Neil: I’d say the Captain with Jump Pack, as although they’ve been a fixture of a lot of Space Marine armies for a long time, there haven’t been many models actually filling that gap. People had to convert their own in the past, or use one of the special characters, but now they get to build the absolute best version of an airborne Captain that we’ve ever had.
Dom: Just as an overall project, I’ve loved seeing the reactions of Warhammer fans who get to see these iconic miniatures realised in new, awesome forms that meld right into the modern faction. People aren’t loving these out of pure nostalgia, they’re also amazing designs in their own right, and you could clearly imagine newcomers like the Company Heroes having always been part of the range. The fundamental coolness that made people fall in love with the originals is present and correct, and if you’re new to Warhammer 40,000, you get to experience it too.
Thanks, guys! The new Space Marines are going up for a two-week pre-order this Saturday. We’ll have more to see until then on Warhammer Community, so check us out and get hype for the return of the Adeptus Astartes!
* Literally.