It started small and sensible. A miniature of an ork with one foot on a helmet to give him a more dynamic pose, or a dragon attached to a rocky protrusion to suggest flight. Somewhere in the years since then we lost our way. We went too far. We climbed too boldly and too steep, and we ended up with a dwarf, a member of a species defined by their status as short kings, absurdly perched mid-leap off the head of a fallen statue so he can look tall and dramatic on the tabletop.
He’s far from the only sinner. Look at Maugan Ra, the Phoenix Lord of the Dark Reapers, straddling two separate tactical rocks at once so he can stand in a power pose as if he’s just been appointed home secretary. He doesn’t look ready to harvest souls, he looks ready to pull off a guitar solo with too much deedly-deedly in it.
(Image credit: Corvus Belli)
While other miniature manufacturers aren’t immune to the lure of tactical rocks (Corvus Belli sells them separately, with names that reference Dwayne Johnson and The Rolling Stones), it’s Warhammer where they’ve become an unavoidable plague. Games Workshop even had an April Fool’s gag where they pretended they were making a life-sized one you could stand on at home.
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Surely at the point where the tactical rocks have become so omnipresent you’re mocking them yourself, you might tone them down a notch? But no, they keep putting little dudes on so much rubble they look like they’re surfing down it.
The original intent was fairly clear. You want your army’s general and other members of the command group to be readable as “important” so your opponent can recognize them across the table. Often those characters are mounted, or just huge enough to stand out on their own. When they’re not, you put them on a little rock like Orikan the Diviner’s 2012 mini or the Chaos Terminator Lord from 2013 (though I’d argue he’s imposing enough without it).
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Games Workshop has spent a decade-plus turning the dial up on the size of its tactical rocks, as well as tactical branches, ruins, pipes, statuary, and corpses all modeled for the sake of being stood on. Eventually, it starts to seem like insecurity. Kragnos, the End of Empires, is a straight-up god and big enough not to need random stone protrusions to prop himself up on like a man who has lied about his height on a dating profile.
The tactical rocks designed to give the illusion of flight have become ridiculous too. Inquisitor Coteaz has a pet eagle that looks like it’s colliding with a metal spar, and the Chaos Lord with a jump pack who is attached to a helmet by smoke drifting out of it looks like he stepped in chewing gum. Bring back transparent flight stands, even if it takes some effort to keep them attached.
I’m aware that, of all the petty complaints I carry around with me and have stitched together into something that passes for a personality, this is one of the pettiest. Surely these are just a bit of extra plastic to give some little guys slightly more exciting poses than they’d have standing flat on the ground?
But I like to make my command group stand out by changing up their color scheme, maybe giving them a banner pole, and putting a bit more effort into how they look. I don’t want a crutch, and especially not one that looks like a stack of random stuff that makes my toy soldiers more fragile and harder to fit in a box so I can actually get them to a table.
Also they look dumb and I hate them.
