There’s a metal Ciaphas Cain out there somewhere, and almost nobody owns it. Black Library made one back in 2005, a limited run of 500 figures bundled with a posh edition of the books. Five hundred. That’s barely a release at all, more of a wink to collectors. If you’ve got one it lives behind glass, and you are absolutely not putting it on a table anywhere near dice. So the new Ciaphas Cain miniature that Games Workshop showed off this month is, technically, his second. It’s the first one that means anything, though, because it’s plastic, it comes in a box, and a normal person can actually buy it.
The reveal landed on the 18th of May, tucked in among all the usual edition-launch noise. Cain and his aide Ferik Jurgen, two models in one kit, with the option to base them separately or stick them back to back as a little diorama. Alongside the models, Black Library is reissuing For the Emperor, Cain’s first novel, as an illustrated and annotated edition. I’ll get to the book, because I think the book is the more interesting half of this whole thing.
I came to Cain late and by accident. Around 2009 I borrowed Pete’s copy of For the Emperor before a long coach trip to a tournament down in Maidstone, mostly because I’d forgotten to bring anything else to read and his Imperial Fists were already boxed up in the boot. I got through the whole thing before we’d cleared the M25, spent zero of that journey thinking about my army list, and then played three games running on no plan and a head full of Valhallan in-jokes. Lost all three. Never did give Pete his book back.
What the Ciaphas Cain miniature gets right
The Cain model is doing the pose. Chainsword resting on the shoulder, greatcoat caught mid-billow, chin up, and the face is wearing a smirk that the design studio clearly fought hard to keep. That smirk is the whole character. Cain spends a quarter of a century of fiction insisting he’s a fraud while everyone around him keeps pinning medals on him, and the model has to sell both readings at the same time. The dashing hero off the recruitment poster, and the man underneath who is already working out the fastest route to the nearest exit. They landed it. He looks like he’s posing for a portrait he doesn’t entirely trust.
Then there’s Jurgen, half a step back, wrapped in a heavy Valhallan greatcoat and a fur hat, holding his meltagun the way a man holds a tool he’s used far too many times to be impressed by any more. The sculptors gave him his flask and his mug, the ones he uses to keep Cain supplied with tanna, the strong sweet tea the Valhallans drink by the gallon. Nobody needed that detail. It’s there anyway, and it tells you the people making this kit had read the books.
The back-to-back basing option is a nice touch as well. You can run the two as separate models, or slot them together so Cain faces out front looking heroic while Jurgen quietly covers the angle nobody else is watching. The whole partnership is sitting right there in how you choose to glue them down. You assemble it however you find funniest.
Put the pair next to the standard Commissar look, the snarling Yarrick type with a power claw and a face full of zeal, and you can see exactly what GW usually does with the Astra Militarum’s political officers. They are meant to be terrifying. The whole grim joke of a Commissar is that your own side is more scared of him than the enemy. Cain’s model is the inversion of that: a Commissar who badly wants you to like him, because a well-liked Commissar is one who doesn’t get shot in the back during a rout.
It’s worth asking why this took so long. Cain has been one of the most beloved characters Black Library ever printed since the late nineties, and in that stretch GW has happily made models for far more obscure names. My read is that the smirk was always the problem. A comedy character is a risk in a setting that sells itself hard on grimdark seriousness, and a plastic kit can’t add a footnote explaining the joke the way a novel can. They had to trust that enough people would already be in on it. Twenty-odd years of steady book sales probably made that call an easy one in the end.
Jurgen is the better model
The more I look at the two of them, the more I think Jurgen is the stronger sculpt, which feels right. Jurgen is a blank, a pariah, one of those rare humans the warp simply refuses to acknowledge. Daemons recoil from him. Psykers get a splitting headache standing too close. He is also perpetually filthy and somehow beneath the notice of every authority figure he meets, which is precisely why he can walk a meltagun into places it has absolutely no business being. I wrote up the full Cain and Jurgen partnership a while back, so I won’t redo all of it here.
The meltagun matters more than it looks. A solid chunk of Cain’s famous heroics are, when you read closely, just Jurgen quietly melting the thing that was about to eat his Commissar. The pattern across the novels is consistent. Cain blunders toward danger he was trying to flee, something enormous turns to kill him, and a short smelly man in a greatcoat steps out from somewhere and reduces it to slag without comment. Putting that man on the table with that gun, in that coat, is the sort of detail that gets cut when nobody’s paying attention, and it didn’t get cut.
The new For the Emperor is the bigger deal
The reissue is what I keep circling back to. For the Emperor was the first full Cain novel, the one that set the whole template, and Sandy Mitchell is annotating his own twenty-something-year-old book with 130 notes and 15 new illustrations. The author, going back through his debut, line by line. That’s a director’s commentary track for the story that kicked the entire series off.
The 15 new illustrations are the part I’m quietly most pleased about. For the Emperor came out in a fairly plain mass-market paperback originally, the sort of thing that lived on a spinner rack in a train station, and Cain has never really had a fixed visual the way the big primarchs do. Commissioning new art for the book that started it means somebody finally has to decide what this man’s face actually looks like, in the same month a model lands trying to answer exactly the same question.
If you’ve somehow never had anyone tell you this, Cain is 40K’s Flashman. George MacDonald Fraser wrote the Flashman novels as the fake memoirs of a Victorian coward who keeps blundering into every famous battle of the age and walking out covered in medals, narrating the whole time about how terrified and selfish he genuinely was. Mitchell took that exact engine and dropped it into the 41st Millennium. A craven narrator the reader slowly stops believing, because the man’s actions keep flatly contradicting his account of why he did them.
What I don’t know yet, and what I really want to know, is whether those 130 annotations are Mitchell the author talking, or whether they’re written in character. The Cain books already arrive pre-annotated by Inquisitor Amberley Vail, who edits his memoirs for the Ordo Xenos archives and keeps cutting in to correct his self-deprecation. If Mitchell layers his own factual margin-notes on top of Vail’s fictional ones, you end up with two narrators arguing over one coward across two separate layers of reality. If they’re just “I wrote this bit in a pub in 1997” notes, that’s fun too, but it’s a much smaller book.
I said up top that the book was the more interesting half, and I’ll half take that back now. The model does one thing the reissue simply can’t. It puts Cain on the table next to everyone else’s army, where anyone who’s read the books can recognise him on sight. The bloke across the table sees the smirk and the smelly aide with the tea flask, and either he gets it straight away, in which case you’ve found something to talk about, or he doesn’t, and now you’re explaining over the dice why your Commissar is grinning like he’s trying to sell you a speeder.
So, yeah. Cain. Model’s coming, book’s coming, both soon, no firm date because of course there isn’t. Is he any good in the actual game? No idea. Probably fine. Sandy Mitchell joked he’ll be bringing his own lucky dice to test the rules, which is honestly the most in-character thing a tabletop release has ever shipped with. Point is he’s finally here. Took about twenty years.
Pre-orders are “soon,” which in Black Library terms means anything from next Saturday to a saint’s day nobody can name. I’ll be picking up the book first. The model can wait behind the 500 people who already have a metal one.
