What do the power-armored super humans of Warhammer 40k get up to when they’re not facing off on the battlefield? The canon answer is “a mixture of high intensity workouts, military drills, and prayer”, but there’s plenty of scope to imagine fun alternatives – such as this diorama of an Imperial Space Marine and a Chaos aligned rival playing their own, even tinier, miniature wargame.
The miniature scene is the work of Ryan Trotter and his flatmate Rhubarb-and-Cluster (who prefers to go by their online handle). Trotter’s Salamanders Space Marine chapter and Cluster’s Black Legion traitors have faced off regularly in their Warhammer 40k group’s Tyrannic War campaign, leading to a rivalry between their forces.
“Our first game was so close, and came down to whether one or two minis survived combat”, Trotter says. Over subsequent games, “because we were using a lot of the same units and characters each time, narratives began to form”, such as when “their terminators and my bladeguard veterans would inevitably end up in a mid-table brawl”. The pair “wanted to capture that playful animosity” in the diorama.
The two flatmates designed the diorama collaboratively. “We set aside some time to pool through old parts that we could use for terrain, agreed on the pose for each of our minis and the overall layout of the table”, Trotter says.
The friends then separately kitbashed their models. “We used a sprue of old epic scale minis” as the tiny miniatures that the regular-sized models are playing with, “and some Battlefleet Gothic parts for the terrain”. The objective in the middle of the table “is an old Terminator teleport homer”, while the table itself and the rulebooks the models are referring to were made using a 3d printer.
Trotter and Cluster painted their minis separately to ensure they matched their Warhammer 40k factions, while Trotter did the table and terrain. You can find more of Trotter’s miniatures, and particularly his converted Salamanders army, on his TikTok.
Though the two “don’t have any immediate plans for another collaboration right now” they “both enjoyed the process and seeing it come together” – so another collaborative diorama may not be out of the question.
Fun fact; wargames actually exist in the Warhammer 40k universe. The Horus Heresy books Angel Exterminatus and Perturabo: Hammer of Olympia show some of the culture of the Iron Warriors legion before their total fall to chaos, and they make extensive use of wargames to test stratagems and hone their tactics. So while this precise pairing may not match up to the lore, it’s not quite as out there as it seems!
Source: Wargamer
