The Skaven Globadier is one of the most quietly terrifying units in the entire Warhammer world, and it earns that reputation without a single suit of armor or a blade worth sharpening. These hunched, goggle-wearing rats of Clan Skryre shuffle across the battlefield carrying fragile glass spheres filled with a swirling green vapor, and their entire purpose is to shatter those spheres in the middle of your best troops. What makes them memorable is not raw strength but chemistry: a handful of Globadiers can turn a disciplined shield wall into a screaming, clawing mob in the space of a single volley.
For anyone building a Skaven army, painting a Mordheim warband, or fighting through the tunnels of a Vermintide map, understanding this unit pays off quickly. Their rules and lore have shifted across editions, from classic Warhammer Fantasy Battle to Age of Sigmar's Skryre Acolytes and the Poison Wind Globadiers of Total War: Warhammer. The core identity, however, never really changes — a cheap, expendable rat holding a bomb that is just as dangerous to its owner as it is to the enemy.
Origins and Role in Skaven Society
Globadiers belong to Clan Skryre, the mad-scientist clan of the Skaven underworld, where warlock engineers trade in warpstone, unstable machinery, and industrial-scale cruelty. The poison wind globe is one of their signature inventions, a weapon born from the marriage of toxic gas and powdered warpstone. Skryre does not field soldiers in the traditional sense; it fields mobile delivery systems, and the Globadier is the simplest, cheapest delivery system the clan has ever produced.
Their status reflects that reality. A Globadier is not a respected warrior or a valued specialist but a disposable asset drawn from the lowest rungs of Skaven society. Clanrats, slaves, and debtors who failed to pay their warpstone tithes often find themselves handed a gas mask, a crate of glass spheres, and a shove toward the front line. If the battle goes well, a few survivors might be rewarded with a pinch of refined warpstone. If it goes badly, nobody bothers to count the bodies.
The Making of a Globadier
Becoming a Globadier is a process of degradation rather than training. Recruits are dosed with diluted warpstone vapors to build a tolerance for the poison wind they will breathe on a daily basis, a regimen that leaves most of them twitching, half-blind, and profoundly paranoid. Their equipment is deliberately crude: thick leather aprons, iron-rimmed goggles, and elaborate rebreather masks that look like insect heads stitched together from scrap. The masks serve a practical purpose, filtering enough of the fumes to keep the wearer functional during a battle, though almost every Globadier eventually develops the telltale hacking cough of chronic warp-lung.
The globes themselves are as fragile as the creatures carrying them. Each sphere is hand-blown glass, sealed with a wax plug and filled with a cocktail of chlorine-heavy gases, powdered warpstone, and whatever corrosive compounds the local warlock engineer had lying around. A Globadier typically carries a pouch or wooden rack of six to ten spheres, and a single hard fall on rocky ground can end the carrier's career instantly. Veterans of the unit learn to move with an awkward, careful shuffle — a gait that looks comical until you realize it is the walk of someone who knows a misstep means dissolving from the inside out.
Globadiers Across the Skaven Clans
Although the technology is pure Skryre, Globadiers appear in armies fielded by nearly every major clan. Clan Pestilens despises them on doctrinal grounds, since plague monks prefer their diseases to spread organically rather than through bottled alchemy, yet pragmatic Plague Lords have been known to hire a few anyway when a fortress wall needs clearing. Clan Mors and Clan Morrs, the great martial clans, treat Globadiers as a necessary evil — useful for softening an enemy line, but never to be trusted standing behind your own troops.
The economics of the arrangement are thoroughly Skaven. Warlock engineers lease Globadier units to other clans in exchange for warpstone, breeding stock, captured slaves, or political favors. These contracts are famously short-lived, since both sides usually try to cheat the other within the first week. In the lore, it is not uncommon for a hired Globadier band to "accidentally" bomb its employer's flank once the payment has been collected, a practice that Skryre officially denies and privately encourages.
Weapons, Tactics, and Battlefield Impact
The poison wind globe is a short-ranged, thrown weapon that creates a lingering cloud of corrosive gas on impact. In most editions of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, that cloud ignores armor entirely, wounds on a fixed roll regardless of the target's toughness, and punishes dense formations brutally. Against heavily armored elite infantry, the Globadier is often the most cost-efficient answer a Skaven general has — a few dozen points of rat can neutralize a unit worth ten times as much.
The flip side is fragility. Globadiers have poor leadership, minimal combat ability, and a genuinely alarming tendency to die in spectacular fashion. Many rule sets include a mechanism where a slain Globadier's payload detonates, spraying poison wind over anyone nearby, friend or foe. This makes them a psychological weapon in both directions: the enemy hesitates to charge them, and the Skaven player hesitates to keep them anywhere near their own general.
Variants and Upgrades
Skryre never stops tinkering, and the Globadier concept has produced several nastier cousins over the years. The most notorious is the Death Globe Bombardier, a heavier trooper lobbing spheres filled with a more concentrated and faster-acting toxin. Then there is the Poisoned Wind Mortar, essentially a crew-served version of the same technology that arcs its payload over friendly troops to hit targets behind cover — a weapon that Skaven engineers consider "safe" purely because the misfire rate is below forty percent.
In Age of Sigmar, the lineage continues through the Skryre Acolytes, who carry the same globe-throwing role into the Mortal Realms with updated rules and a distinctly more desperate aesthetic. Across every incarnation, the design philosophy holds steady: cheap bodies, expensive chemistry, and a total disregard for occupational safety.
| Globe Type | Typical User | Primary Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Poison Wind Globe | Poison Wind Globadier | Lingering toxic cloud, ignores armor |
| Death Globe | Death Globe Bombardier | Stronger toxin, higher damage output |
| Mortar Shell | Poisoned Wind Mortar team | Indirect fire, large blast radius |
Using Globadiers Effectively on the Tabletop and in Total War
On the tabletop, the golden rule is screening. Globadiers should never be the closest unit to the enemy at the start of a turn, because a single charge will wipe them out. Park them behind a block of clanrats or slaves, let the tarpit absorb the charge, then step the Globadiers out and lob over the top. Targets should be prioritized by armor value rather than unit size: heavily armored cavalry, elite greatswords, and monstrous infantry all melt under poison wind in a way that naked hordes do not.
In Total War: Warhammer, the same logic applies but the execution is more demanding. Globadiers require constant micro-management, since their short range means they must be repositioned frequently and their low health means one artillery hit or a flanking cavalry charge deletes the entire unit. Skilled players use them as flank protectors, keeping a unit or two behind the main line to punish anything that tries to wrap around, and pairing them with Warpfire Throwers or Plagueclaw Catapults to stack damage-over-time effects. Friendly fire is a genuine concern, so it pays to set them slightly to the side rather than directly behind your own infantry.
A common mistake is treating Globadiers as a mainline damage dealer. They are not. They are a scalpel, best used in pairs, best kept cheap, and best written off the moment they have done their job. That mindset — expendable, precise, and utterly indifferent to casualties — is exactly how Clan Skryre itself views them.
The Globadier endures because it captures something essential about the Skaven: ingenuity without conscience. If you are putting together a Skryre-themed force, or simply looking for a unit that punishes opponents who rely on armor and formations, a small band of these gas-masked rats will earn their points more often than not. Paint a few, test them in a friendly game, and watch how quickly your opponent starts measuring distances to stay outside that green cloud.