Workshop Wednesdays — Space Wolves Are Just Fun

Welcome to the table,

 

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war. Well, there is only war and a lot of really rad space warriors who engage in that war across countless planets and a webwork of systems in and out of the folded space of unknowable pockets of a hellscape reality.

It’s always fun for me to explore factions in Warhammer 40,000 with a unique flavor that elevates them to something more than “Big Armor Boy Hits Things,” and one of the legions of wild-and-wooly warriors that breaks that mold in their own weird and delightful way are the Space Wolves.

They are one of the Space Marine legions that are, for the most part, loyal to the god-emperor of mankind. Their Primarch, one of the Emperor’s genetically modified super babies, has an origin story that reads a bit like Superman mashed up with Tarzan and the Romulus and Remus myth if it were walked through a Frank Frazetta fever dream and fed a constant diet of raw meat injected with industrial levels of caffeine.

I’m talking about the one and only Leman Russ.

Leman Russ crash-landed on a horribly hard-to-survive world known as Fenris. As a tiny baby, he crawled out of his super space pod into the subarctic temperatures and would have died fairly quickly had it not been for the arrival of a she-wolf.  This was not any ordinary she-wolf, mind you, this was a Thunderwolf.

Thunderwolves are massive, growing to be the size of most war horses, with some standing over eight feet tall at the shoulders. The fur of a Thunderwolf is thick enough to repel minor weapons fire, and their teeth can chew through steel if given the chance. These beasts are massive, solitary hunters who attack each other on sight and adhere to a primal drive for dominance over other lifeforms they encounter.

This Thunderwolf looked at the tiny baby space warrior sitting in the snow outside his still-smoldering incubation pod and — through some predestined sense of kinship — thought, “Yeah … I think this is my new baby,” taking in little tiny infant Leman Russ to raise him alongside her other wolf pups.

Leman Russ lived with his Thunderwolf family until a bunch of Fenrisian tribesmen attacked the wolf pack, killing his mother and all but two of his pack mates. Leman Russ, naked as the day is long and armed with nothing more than tooth and claw, killed a dozen of these hunters before their leader realized he was a human child and demanded his hunters stop trying to kill the kid who had killed the vast majority of them. When all was said and done, the hunters’ numbers had been more than halved while Leman Russ and two of the Thunderwolves he managed to save were still standing, bloody and ready for more conflict.

This is hilarious to me because these hunters, inhabitants of this frost planet of death and doom looked at each other, at this kid covered in blood ready to rip them apart, these two reaming wolves, and thought “Ya’ know … maybe we just take the kid to our leader and let him figure it out.”

So off they go, through the snow, the bloody boy, the two Thunderwolves, and the remaining hunters who are at this point terrified this kid is going to eat them.

Upon arriving at their stronghold, the hunter’s leader immediately thought, “Yeah, this kid is amazing,” and adopted the kid and his wolves and raised him to adulthood as one of the warriors of their people.

This absolutely unhinged warrior with a superhero-like origin is the person whose genetic material is used as the blueprint to create all the Space Marines in the Space Wolves legion. And the gene-seed apple does not fall far from the furry tree.

One of the units available to the Space Wolves is known as the Wolf Guard Headtakers. These Space Marines work alongside their companion Thunderwolf, blasting through their enemies’ ranks, and causing chaos and confusion as the Thunderwolves break the formations of troops and the warriors hunt down the champions and commanders of their foes.

What I really dig about the Wolf Guard Headtakers set is that they come with multiple head options to really make your units feel unique and a slew of waterslide transfers to keep them uniform with your other Space Wolf units.

Any good Space Wolf is going to want to mount up on a Thunderwolf because, let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to ride a giant monster into battle, am I right?

For that, there is the iconic Thunderwolf Cavalry. I built a modified version of these guys over a decade ago, wanting to showcase my Space Wolves atop assault bikes, really combat-ready motorcycles, that had Thunderwolves running alongside them.

All things considered and looking back on it, the kit-bash I did was middle of the road at best, and I would have much rather had these minis to field on the table than what I came up with.

While Leman Russ is the zenith of Space Wolf, there are a handful of notable personalities who also serve under the Space Wolf banner. Njal Stormcaller was actually the first Space Wolf I learned about and the gateway into my fascination with these fanged warriors.

You see, Njal Stormcaller has the same kind of epic hero origin story as Leman Russ does. He was a child on a wooden ship on the icy death planet whose homeland had sunk below the waves. When the wooden ship was attacked by enemy forces, Njal leaped about from ore to ore, ship to ship, fighting with reckless abandon as he did his best to make the enemy remember who they were slaying.

As Njal lay on the deck of the ship looking up into the frigid sky, an enemy blade embedded into his chest, he knew death would soon come for him. He was wrong. One of the Space Wolf Rune Priests, known as Heimdall, swooped in and grabbed the dying child. Heimdall took Njal to the Space Wolf fortress at the northernmost pole of the world and there trained him and transformed him into the psychic powerhouse and leader of many Space Wolf crusades that he would come to be.

I would be remiss when speaking about the Space Wolves if I did not also mention Bjorn the Fell-Handed.

In a nutshell, Bjorn fought in the Horus Heresy alongside Leman Russ himself; he is believed to be the oldest warrior in the Imperium of Man. He would rise to the rank of Wolf Lord, and eventually, as his body fell apart, he would be transferred into a technological coffin that was strapped into a toddling death machine where Bjorn the Fell-Handed continues to serve as not only the moral and spiritual adviser for all Space Wolves, but he can unload waves of destruction against the enemies of the Space Wolves with his customised lighting claw known as Trueclaw and a devastating assault cannon.

Before we depart from today’s Workshop Wednesday, I am also going to tell you about the one slight drawback of the Space Wolves. If you can even consider it a drawback.

You see, there is this minor affliction called the Canis Helix. This little genetic blip can turn an already powerful Space Wolf into what essentially amounts to a 10ft tall Space Marine Werewolf armed with claws, weapons, power armor, and a bottomless rage.

The Wulfin, as they are known, are incredibly powerful and very unstable, acting much like the Thunderwolves who raised Leman Russ. These warriors seek only to slay their enemies and will fight anything and everything that gets between them and their goal.

I love the idea of werewolf space marines who are just out there on random planets fighting the good fight. It’s not just this wolf-man hybrid that already serves as a monster in the cultural consciousness, but it has this added layer of “Let’s put some nearly indestructible Space Marine armor on it, make it able to look into most second story windows, give it a shield and some laser claws, and set it loose to dispense some kind of chaotic justice upon anything it deems to stand in opposition of its strange theological ideals.”

This, my friends, is why I love Warhammer. What I just typed out sounds like nonsense almost everywhere else, but in this setting it’s just freaking cool!

Until next time, there is a multitude of other individuals who fall under the Space Marine banner, and with new miniatures coming out from Games Workshop, you can expect more coverage about these fanged fighters very soon!