So Close, So Far: Warhammer

I was an avid reader of White Dwarf magazine in the early and mid 1980s, and I was painting miniatures when the license to produce AD&D figures moved from Grenadier to TSR to Citadel to Ral Partha over a few short years. So I had a ringside seat as Games Workshop began to transition away from providing third party support to games published by other companies such as Chaosium, Game Designers’ Workshop, and TSR. Instead, White Dwarf increasingly focused on new products from GW and Citadel under the name Warhammer.

Initially billed as the “Mass Combat Fantasy Roleplaying Game,” I really wasn’t sure what to make of Warhammer. I was certainly interested in incorporating gigantic, army-scale battles into my D&D games but I couldn’t figure out if Warhammer fit the bill. Could I use this boxed set as a D&D supplement? The early reviews were mostly positive but Warhammer sounded like a separate thing altogether. The notion of having enough money to purchase an entire army’s worth of figures, as well as having the time to paint them all seemed bonkers. 

At about the same time the art direction of White Dwarf and Citadel miniatures began to embrace a more gonzo, punky style that I wasn’t really sure I liked. Now, I was a huge fan of the artwork from the 1e Fiend Folio, which was quite a bit wilder than the art in other AD&D books. This is partly because the Fiend Folio was produced by TSR UK and as such featured UK artists such as the late, great Russ Nicholson. There was a lot of overlap between TSR UK and Games Workshop staff.

But the new Games Workshop/Citadel style was like Nicholson turned up to 11: more dynamic, bold, and cartoony, often infused with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor and a grittier, post-apocalyptic look. Instead of staid, Tolkien-esque dwarven warriors we suddenly got snarling, tattooed dwarves with mohawks wearing Mad Max-style armor and wielding enormous cleavers.

Despite my reservations about the new art style, I bought a lot of the Citadel D&D miniatures in part because they included so many monsters from my beloved Fiend Folio. In general, these figures were better sculpted and better cast than anything that had come before. And the new art direction, with exaggerated elements, really helped make those tiny miniatures pop. The only thing I really disliked about these figures were the plastic “slotta” bases.

My miniature painting phase was relatively short-lived. And in 1984 TSR released an abstract mass combat system in the D&D Companion Set that adequately addressed my interest in army-scale battles. So I really wasn’t paying much attention to what was happening with Warhammer. By the time I got back into gaming in the 1990s, Warhammer was a phenomenon. I was vaguely aware of this development—local game shops suddenly had sand tables and displays of brightly painted figures—but no one in my immediate group ever took the plunge and I really knew very little about the game.

It seems strange, considering how much D&D I played over the ensuing decades, that I remained so ignorant of a hobby that had so much in common with D&D. I was always flabbergasted at Warhammer’s success: how could a game that was clearly so expensive and time-consuming have such a large following?

Flash-forward to a couple of years ago, when one of my friends bought a copy of the Harbinger Starter Set for Warhammer Age of Sigmar. He had painted up the two factions and we played out a scenario. It was a fun, fast-paced skirmish game. I was impressed by the streamlined rules and am a sucker for d6 mechanics—I also liked adding a random component to movement rates.

I’ve been watching many miniature painting videos over the last few years to try and improve my own painting skills and I’ve been frankly blown away by the work done by the Warhammer community. It’s clear that many of the next-level skills I’d like to master—color theory, wet blending, glazes—are old hat for Warhammer painters.

So given all this I picked up a boxed set of Warcry: Flesh-Eater Courts, not quite understanding the difference between Warcry and other Age of Sigmar sets. The Flesh-Eater Courts is a faction of ghouls, and many of the models would work well for the Eaters of the Dead band of ghouls in my Great Dungeon. I’d long been on the hunt for Large-sized ghouls for my Hulking Ghouls, and this Warcry set had three that fit the bill perfectly.

Opening the box, I was surprised that the models were still on the sprues and needed to be assembled. I also didn’t realize that the figures could be so customizable by swapping in a wide variety of different limbs, heads, or weapons that in some cases would produce completely different models. While I knew kitbashing was common in the Warhammer community, I didn’t know that the models were really designed to support this practice.

The models are made out of a very lightweight, fairly rigid plastic material that holds details extremely well and is roughly comparable to Bones Black. Once snipped from the sprues the parts had very little in the way of flashing or mold lines. Another surprise was that the appendages do not connect with pegs and sockets, but instead use a very clever ball and socket system. You have to get these parts aligned just right, but when they are seated properly they form surprisingly tight attachments with relatively little gaps.

I primed these models with Army Painter spray-on primer and used Reaper ghoul flesh acrylics for the base coats. The sculpts have lots of grotesque details—exposed flesh and sinew, eruptions of pus-filled boils and spikes, limbs held together with impaled bones, and so on. I didn’t try to go all-in on the gore, but did try a few different techniques to render diseased and bruised skin.

I was pretty happy with the overall experience of painting these Warhammer models. I’m not nearly ready to begin assembling an army any time soon, but I have been slowly backfilling my understanding of the game and its lore. I certainly expect to pick up a few more sets to round out my Great Dungeon of the North rosters.