Come with me if you want to live: Oldhammer Terminators

 

In January 1989, White Dwarf introduced the first rules for Terminator-armoured marines. They were great: there was an option to equip a squad of Terminators with jump packs*; there were no models for that but imagine it just for a second!

Pootle here with a very quick update on some proper old-school Terminators. In late '88, over the course of just a few months three separate sculpts were released, this one by Jes Goodwin, another by Bob Naismith, and then what would be recognisable today as a (rather blocky) Terminator. This is all a bit hazy for me as I didn't start 40k until late '89, but I remember several friends who collected these originals and I still have a copy of White Dwarf 109 with the rules in.

Anyway, last summer an old school friend of mine gave me this fellow, who had been languishing in the bottom of a pencil case for thirty years. The original was meant to have had a pole for a back banner, but that must have been eaten by a rogue pencil sharpener.

My friend is actually a first rate artist and produced some awesome Harlequins in the early 90s, but this must have been done in the very early days and probably crawled into the pencil case in embarrassment. 

I stuck him in a jar of Tesco Multi-Surface Cleaner (with a load of my own old lead Termies) and lo!

Here's the finished article, and I couldn't be more pleased with him.

He joins a few other (very slightly more modern) lead Terminators that I've painted up recently**:

The normal pose for the arms on the Hammer/Shields is rather undynamic, so I angled them in more interesting poses and filled the gaps with green stuff. 

I've still got nearly a dozen more to come. So I think the relevant line here is, "I'll be back!"

* Jump packs were indeed an option, but your basic Terminator Marine only had toughness 3 and one wound (like his power-armoured brothers in those days) and there was no such thing as an invulnerable save (though a 6++ came in fairly soon for Termies). On the other hand, he did have WS and BS 2+ (denominated as 5 in those days, which was functionally the same) and his Storm Bolter was naturally AP -1 (with a further +1 to hit within 12").

** Yes, since you ask, these guys are all on small bases: I still play the original Space Hulk with my son and the original bases are just the right size for the squares on the board tiles.