Squat (Warhammer 40,000) - History of The Squat Home Worlds

History of The Squat Home Worlds

The Squat Home Worlds were colonized during the Age of Founding (known to the Imperium as the Dark Age of Technology). The planets were rich in minerals and ores human civilization desperately needed, and so millions of ships full of miners and explorers were sent out. The worlds were high gravity with brutal environments. The settlers dug deep into the bedrock of the planets to survive, and so the first strongholds were born.

The Age of Trade, which lasted for almost three millennia, saw a decrease in the warp storms isolating the Home Worlds. The Squats traded with the Orks and Eldar during this period. The Age of Trade was ended in an enormous attack on the Home Worlds by the Ork Warlord Grunhag the Flayer. The Squats pleaded for assistance from their Eldar trading partners, but were rebuffed. This led to the Squats' enmity against Orks and Eldar that has lasted through the Age of Wars into the current Age of Rediscovery (or Age of the Imperium). The Forces of the Great Crusade launched wars against the Squats in the belief that they were aliens, but eventually the Squats were accepted, along with other abhumans, as being human in nature. The millions of Squat Strongholds spread across their homeworlds joined the Imperium, but continued to retain their autonomy as an independent but allied empire to the Imperium.

The Home Worlds maintained trade and mutual assistance with the Imperium, trading military hardware, allowing Commissar military advisors to join their armies, and sending recruits to the Adeptus Mechanicus. In the forty-first millennium, Tyranid Hive Fleet Behemoth (Citadel Journal 33; "Hundreds of years ago") threatened to sweep through the Home Worlds, capable of destroying the Squats as a power in the galaxy. The council of Ancients decided to unite with humanity to provide a unified front against the Tyranids, and the hundreds of thousands of Squat Homeworlds were integrated by the Imperium (almost tripling its official size) as DaoT protectorates over several centuries before facing off the Tyranids during the attack by Behemoth.

Although the vast majority of the Squat race joined the Imperium, a few Squats remained separated from the council and carried on independently. Some became pirates or mercenaries, others joined the Imperium and the Imperial cult after acknowledging the Emperor as their God, while many fought for the Imperium in exchange for the promise of being granted new Homeworlds and building up the Squat race. These Squat outcasts were gradually named the Demiurg, the Squat word for defiant, as they turned their backs on their ancestral strongholds to seek freedom from the Imperium.

The Squats carried grudges for millennia, and none so strongly as against the race of Orks, who betrayed the Squats on more than one occasion and inflicted many losses upon them in war.