The first great act of betrayal in the Warhammer 40k timeline is not the Horus Heresy – it’s the slaughter of the Thunder Warriors, the genetically engineered superhumans who conquered Terra for the Emperor, at the hands of the Space Marines who would replace them. Hobbyist Kade Strange tells Wargamer how he went about recreating this infamous scene in an epic diorama.
Newcomers to Warhammer 40k may not be familiar with the Thunder Warriors, as they’re a deeply buried part of the lore. Thunder Warrior characters only appear in a few Horus Heresy books: the novel The Outcast Dead, the novella Valdor: Birth of the Imperium, and in minor roles in short stories. But they’re a key element in understanding why the Heresy unfolded as it did.
The Thunder Warriors were the Emperor’s first attempt at creating super soldiers, but they proved unstable, prone to physical and mental degeneration, ending in psychopathy and schizophrenia.
After the conquest of Terra but before the Great Crusade left to conquer the Galaxy, the Thunder Warriors were wiped out in a great battle on the slopes of Mount Ararat, at the hands of the nascent Space Marine Legions and the Adeptus Custodes.
It’s this scene that Strange has depicted in his diorama ‘Not With a Bang, but with Thunder’. He says that ‘The Last Stand of the Crimson Fists’, John Sibbick’s iconic cover artwork for the original Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader rulebook, was a huge influence on the overall arrangement of figures.
Assembly “of both the base and characters took about eight hours total”, Strange says, “mostly spent posing the figures”. He used 3d models rather than official Games Workshop miniatures, saying “it was necessary in order to get that flexibility in posing”.
Painting miniatures for the diorama “took somewhere between 20 and 30 hours”, Strange says, “a lot of painting sessions where I completely lost track of time”. He adds that he “looked to a lot of baroque era paintings for their contrast, warmer tones and their overall moody and dramatic atmosphere” when choosing the colors and composition.
“The most challenging part was finding a balance in the composition”, he says, “both between the contrasting colors of the Astartes and Thunder Warriors, as well as having enough figures in the scene to make it feel alive and chaotic without it being too cluttered”. He’s very satisfied with the limited palette, and how “everything feels cohesive without the similar tones looking too muddy”.
The culling of the Thunder Warriors is barely a footnote in Warhammer 40k lore, but it resonates deeply in the fandom. Strange has a theory why there’s so much pathos for them: “these proud and capable, albeit unstable, soldiers spent their lives subjected to the most grisly battlefields and suffered at the hands of both their enemies and their own crude augmentations”.
Yet “despite the depth of their sacrifice and loyalty, all they received for their labors was a massacre orchestrated by the Emperor they chose to serve”. It’s peak grimdark, and a reminder of the Emperor of Mankind’s cold indifference to individual human lives.
As for the end that Strange has depicted for the Thunder Warriors, “I’d like to think at their darkest moments they chose to spend their lives fighting as warriors”.
He picked the title for the diorama as a conscious reference to the closing verse of T.S.Elliot’s poem ‘The Hollow Men’, which reads “This is the way the world end | Not with a bang but a whimper”. Elliot’s poem reflected the horror and malaise of Europe in the aftermath of World War One – Strange’s title subverts it to become bellicose and heroic.
If you’re interested in Warhammer 40k deep lore, you’ll find plenty in our guides to Warhammer 40k factions, and particularly in our guide to the Warhammer 40k Primarchs.
And if you’ve ever wondered why the Emperor betrayed the Thunder Warriors, instead of quietly funnelling them into an unwinnable war that would dispose of them for him, we have a whole lore guide answering the question: ‘Is the Emperor An Idiot?’
Source: Wargamer
