"This way. No THAT way!"

"This way. No THAT way!" - Rein and Raus

You go high

I'll go low.

- Rein and Raus

Welcome, on this sunny Friday, to The Art of Caesura!

We're delving back into the Blackstone Fortress! Last week we gazed in fascinated horror at the Rogue Psykers and today we're looking at the most diminutive pair of explorers: Rein and Raus!

Rein and Raus are the Ratling brother (twins?) who are basically Space Hobbits!

I love that Games Workshop really leaned into the hobbit theme with Ratlings in 40k by even giving them hairy feat! On these models they even gave a nod to their obsession with food by given Raus (Rein?) a mini-fridge on his back!

This fridge has other significance. Because, in the lore, they arrived on the same ship as UR-025 and because I tried to paint UR-025 like an old fridge, I painted this fridge this fridge in the same way to draw a connection between these explorers.

In the campaign that my wife and I are playing, I am playing as Rein and Raus. While not my favourite models, I was really intrigued by the mechanic of having two heroes for the price of one. If they sound like a bargain...you get what you pay for.

In the game they're...not the best. One of them can zip around the map (and in one mission he almost had the whole thing completed before anyone else was out of the elevator), but usually it's just used to help him keep up with the others or to get him in position to act as a meat shield for a more valuable hero (Janus Draik) because he can barely attack to save his life.

The other one has a gun bigger than he is, but it must be unwieldy or something because you need quite a high dice roll even to fire the damn thing. So, much of their time is spent "double teaming" and using their crappy pistols.

Anyway, I was committed to painting the whole Blackstone Fortress box and these guys were the 2nd and 3rd to last minis that I had left to paint. So, buoyed by that fact, I launched in.

To be fair, the painting actually went quite quickly. Everything was fairly standard, except I painted their chest armour (cuirass) Leadbelcher and then (appropriately) Contrast Militarum Green.

If you have any questions about specific colours used, feel free to ask in the comments below, otherwise lets check out some atmospheric pics of the Ratlings (complete with Raus's (Rein's?) bag of sausages!).