I picked up a big pile of classic Epic Chaos this week courtesy of my friend Craig. It included a big pile of the old lead Lesser Daemons. Here they are alongside their smaller modern plastic counterparts.

They were massive infantry models. The later Epic 40,000 plastics corrected them back down to the 6mm infantry they should be.

Why were the old Lesser Daemons so massive?

When I was younger I assumed it was because working in lead you weren’t able to catch the same level of fine detail as plastic, so made them bigger to compensate. But then I saw the early metal prototype Space Marine and Ork infantry the Studio used to test the game, so out went that theory.

Then I thought scale was always very flexible in Epic (30 Marines inside the original Thunderhawk – never happening), so they weren’t really models of Daemons, just Daemon-shaped counters to represent Daemons.

I asked over on TacComs, and the most plausible theory was that larger models meant less fiddly detail, increasing the lifetime of the molds and decreasing the number of defects. The original prototype metal infantry were never meant for large-scale production, so they could be loaded with subtle detail.

And nowadays, with improved molding technology and white metal, we can produce viable 6mm infantry.