Those Who Trade: Slann

 Space frogs: in space.

ready to drop some fresh tracks

I love Slann. Slann are easily one of the best parts of the #oldhammer movement. They exemplify that period of weird Warhammer, where things were sometimes just a little dumb but were stranger and more outside the norm of speculative fiction. Frogs who once ruled a mighty and magical empire, now collapsed into decadence and primitivism.* I especially love space Slann, because you get all that in space.

One of the things that first drew me to the Colony 87 range was the fact that it included a Slann. Jon called him an 'Amphiran', but we all knew what he was. When Crooked Dice took over the range, they included a new one. They knew what was up. Space frogs, man.

Adjunct Gilda Citlax, Slann trading contingent

On the one hand, colour schemes for space frogs should be easy, there being so many Terran equivalents. On the other, I actually wanted to avoid the obvious green to emphasise the space alien nature of them. I also wanted to bring in vaguely Mesoamerican colour schemes, to tie them in with the Warhammer fantasy cousins.

So, turquoise.

I stuck with gold for the tech and jewellery, with no steel colouration anywhere, and oranges, reds and greens for clothing. She came out pretty well, for all that the white tunic + red cape combination is a little more Roman than Aztec.

Pash Grolin, Slann trader

The leader of the Slann merchants shares Gilda's colouration. Are they from the same spawning? Related? Does turquoise indicates some kind of caste system among these hideous ambphiboid xenos? These are questions for some learned scholar such as Inquisitrix Kills; for us mere mortals, it's enough to know that it raises the kind of narrative ambiguity that makes a setting like 40K all the better for being unanswerable.

You'll notice, I'm sure, that both Slann civilians are bearing weird pale green holograms from their strange tech devices. This was a fun experiment using the Mengel Miniatures technique for wraiths. Gilda's sceptre design hints that it opens up to reveal the hologram inside, while Pash's queer sphere seemed a kind of projector to me. I think this works far better than just painting them as gold or bronze greebling, which was my original intention.

Sergeant Yoitz, Slann trading contingent

One of only a handful of space Slann produced by Citadel before they evaporated from the Warhammer 40,000 setting, Sergeant Yoitz here provides the Slann traders with some military backup. His colours indicate that he has come from a very different spawning from his betters, emphasised by his size and bearing.

Of course, 'Sergeant' is a low Gothic approximation. His rank is properly 'Call Leader'.

His furs and feathers mean that he is from some decadent backwater of the Slann empire, long since regressed into barbarism. The Mon'keigh are not the only species whose ancestors once trod the galaxy and whose kin now wield sharpened spears rather than matter accelerators - indeed, they are merely the latest, where the Slann were the first and eldest.

His weapon is a weird tube, a feature of the early Rogue Trader sculpts, which often feature ambiguous weapons that require player interpretation to turn into rules. In the case of the Slann, this is especially effective, as they ought to have weird, gonzo technology that isn't easily understood by human minds.

In this case, I've painted it in the same sorts of ceramic colouring that I use for Eldar heat lances and occasionally melta weapons, so I think it might be some kind of heat ray. Could use it as a meltagun or a lasgun, I suppose? Not that Slann are ever going to be given modern 40K stats.

(Although you never know!)

That's it for this entry into the civilians project. I'm coming up on the end of the Colony 87 range, with only a few left to go. I have several twists left in this project though, so stay tuned.

I leave you with this thought: Given the obvious wealth and advanced technology of the Slann traders, what are they really searching for out on this backwater rock?

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*The bit where the magic frogs are vaguely Mesoamerican is on the one hand cool - an underexplored part of speculative fiction - but on the other hand very awkward as 'decadence and primitivism' looks an awful lot like 'a non-Western culture'. :/