Earlier this year I heard about an abandoned Russian cruise ship drifting around the Atlantic Ocean and inhabited by rats ( http://phys.org/news/2013-02-abandoned-russian-ship-km-ireland.html ) I had always wondered how you’d make sense of having rat-men in Warhammer 40,000 and this led me to think wouldn’t there be rats in the holds of space freighters? What might happen to those rats aboard vessels lost in the warp?
I imagine Space Hulks ( http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Space_Hulk )
aren’t just inhabited by Genestealers, Orks or Chaos Renegades. Sometimes the rats on board would have mutated having been exposed to the warp (and perhaps having eaten warp-tainted cargo and human corpses). Some might have mutated into rat-men! Their equipment would reflect the technological environment they live in; not much wood, tools you might find on a space craft, scavenged and improvised weapons and armour.
I’ve a couple more pages of these to colour in, including my version of how a Skaven Grey Seer could be done.
Skaven, Grey Seer and that sort of thing is copyright Games Workshop; this is fan art not intended to infringe GW’s copyright.