Orctober: Harboth's Orc Archers

If you can't already tell by the nostalgia rages that often engulf this blog, I'm a fan of classic, 1980's style Warhammer. But there's one issue on which I part company with the canon. I've never been able to swallow the bright green of traditionally painted orcs. After GW introduced Citadel Inks in 1988, things only got worse -- Eavy Metal began recommending that orcs be glazed in yellow ink, which only added to their glow (see White Dwarf #100 for example). These orcs seemed too goddamn healthy to me, as if they were about to suspend rampaging and try their hand at photosynthesis. 

Nope, for me, Orcs should be green, but it should be an unwholesome green -- the colour of a damp rug or a forsaken tub of yogurt. To showcase my pigment of choice, in this Ortober post I'm presenting my rendition of Harboth's Orc Archers, sculpted by Kev "Goblin Master" Adams and released in 1987.

Above is the command section. I painted the skin tones in five shades, starting with (the old) GW Catachan Green as the base layer. For the next shade, I added a little GW Rotting Flesh to the mix, and a little more for the next layer, finally working all they way up to 80% Rotting Flesh as the highest of highlights.

Another issue I struggle with in orcs is ornamentation. Traditional Games Workshop orcs (especially when painted by the Eavy Metal crew or Kevin Adams himself) often featured bright shields with leering faces of extraordinary artistry. First, I don't have that talent for these embellishments. But second, I think your average goblinoid marauder would spend less time accessorizing and more time eating prisoners. So my orcs tend to be less flashy. The leaders sometimes sport looted gear (like Harboth's striped pants) but in general, their equipment is simple and in bad repair. I try to add interest to the miniature through rust effects and other signs of wear.

The rank and file are a mixture of original Harboth boyz, plus some other vintage orc archers who took my fancy. I don't like my orcs looking too uniform...

Their traditional battle cry is "Pulp the stunties!"

Orctober: Green Orcs and Ham

For Orctober I've been discussing the evolution of the orc, from  Tolkien to the present. There's one feature I'd like to zero in on today... the colour of their skin. How did they become green?

I've already noted how Tolkien envisaged most orcs as having sallow (i.e. yellow) skin. However, in The Lord of the Rings he wrote about different breeds of orc. In Tolkien's mind, the nastier the orc, the darker his skin. In Moria (in The Fellowship of the Ring), Gandalf surveys a war party of orcs and mentions that some are stand out as "large and evil: black Uruks of Mordor". (Uruk is the word for orc in Black Speech). And in The Two Towers (1954), the narrator describes one of Saruman's elite orcs as "a large black Orc". Whether Saruman's black orcs and Mordor's black orcs are the same breed is not clear from the books, but the important thing for my purposes is that they were black.

Hmm, asiatic orcs, black orcs... Tolkien does seem to be hitting a lot of squares on the Bingo Card of Unfortunate Stereotypes. Well whatever - we know from the Old Man's speeches and letters that he abhorred apartheid and antisemitism.

In any case, Gary Gygax's pig-faced orcs were not really green either. The Monster Manual (1977) describes them as "brown or brownish green with a bluish sheen". Ah yes, the colour of a spoiled ham... but still not the snot green that we've come to expect.
 
I have two theories for how orcs became green. The first is that it is all Spiderman's fault. Although I can't find any trace of green goblins in early English poetry or children's books, Spidey's nemisis, the Green Goblin, has been kicking around since 1964. The influence of Marvel Comics has been so great, it seems natural to me that the bright green of this villain's skin would have leached into the fantasy genre.

My second theory is less likely but more fun. I think (or hope) is was Fungus the Bogeyman who turned orcs green. For those of you who were cruelly deprived of bad influences when you were children, Fungus the Bogeyman (1977) is a children's book by British artist Raymond Briggs. It has been called "the nastiest book ever published for children" and "a masterpiece of complex nihilism". The titular character has that fluorescent green which became the hallmark of Games Workshop's orcs in the early 1980's. So how did orc's become green? It was Fungus' fault.

Harboth's Orc Archers, Citadel (sculpted by Kev Adams, 1987)

Orctober Fest: Evolution of the Orc

Welcome to Orctober! I'm proud to joining my fellow Oldhammer fanatics Erny (who invited me to the party) and Zhu (who drew the gorgeous Orctober Fest banner). I hope lots of others join the fun!

Big. Bald. Green. This is now the iconic image of the orc, and it's one of Citadel/Games Workshop's enduring contributions to the fantasy genre at large. But it wasn't always so. In this post, I want to analyze the evolution of orcs (and their miniatures) from their beginnings to the present day. I'm thankful to a number of very talented miniature painters who joined me in providing the pictures to illustrate this evolution.

Magar Ironfist painted by the author, Citadel (sculpted by Perry Bros., 1985) 

Before Citadel came along, orcs were not big and green. As Zhu has demonstrated, monstrous orcs are the invention of JRR Tolkien. But Tolkien was vague about the appearance of what he named "goblins" in the Hobbit (1937), and "orcs" in the Lord of the Rings (1954), merely calling them "ugly" and arming them with "curved scimitars".  However, we know they were short; in the Fellowship of the Ring, a "huge" orc-chieftan is remarkable for being "almost man-high". 

In his letters, Tolkien described orcs as "squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes." The short, sallow orc is tolerable as far as it goes, but unfortunately Tolkien went on to call them, "degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types." This is racist (re: the Mongolians) and ridiculous (re: the orcs). The Mongol king Kublai Khan is about the least orcish face I can imagine. In any case, what Tolkien leaves us with is a small, roughly Asian gremlin with a Saracen's weapons.

Then Gary Gygax came along, and improved on Tolkien's orcs by wrapping them in bacon: "Orcs appear particularly disgusting because their colouration -- brown or brownish green with a bluish sheen -- highlights their pinkish snouts and ear. Their bristly hair is dark brown or black..." (Thus spake the Monster Manual). The artist Dave Sutherland III ran with this reference to snouts and made orcs into pig-men in his iconic image in the Monster Manual (1977). Gone is the eastern-tinged scimitar, the slant eyes and the broad face.

But hairy, porcine orcs didn't inspire miniature sculptors (with a few exceptions). Most early orc miniatures were ugly and fanged in a generic sort of way. This simple pattern continued in the early Citadel sculps (like the Fiend Factory's Red Orcs launched in 1979).

Fiend Factory FF24 - Red Orc In Chainmail With Sword, sculpted by Michael Perry, (1980) painted by BPI

But somewhere around 1982, under Bryan Ansell, Citadel orcs began to evolve. Starting with the Fantasy Tribe range, their skulls became elongated, allowing for an exaggerated jaw and underbite. The ear became pointy, the brow beetling, the head smooth. Orcs became taller but they also grew more stringy, with long, apish limbs. They turned into a new race. 

In my view, Harboth's Black Mountain Boys are the best example of these early orcs. I don't own any of these striking miniatures, but here's one (with slight conversions) painted by Peter Armonstrong and posted to his excellent blog. I love those teeth!

Harboth's Black Mountain Boys, painted by Peter Armstrong, Citadel (circa 1985)

The next stage in the evolution of the orc occurred when Bryan Ansell hired a young novice sculptor named Kevin Adams. And all of a sudden, this new race of long-skulled beasties had their own Loki to blow life into them. Adams has many colleagues in the top tier of the sculpting profession, but no one (no one) has a greater talent for infusing orcish features with personality. During the mid-1980's, Citadel (and Adams) created the most compelling orcs ever released: grinning, boasting, clowning and yet always menacing.

Orc Commander, painted by the author, Citadel (sculpted by K. Adams, circa 1985)

I will touch the orcs' subsequent history briefly. As with so much else, throughout the late '80's and '90's, Citadel took a "moar is better" approach to orcs, turning character into caricature. Their heads continued to expand, reaching hydrocephalic proportions. Weapons and muscles also became oversized. But worst of all, the joie-de-vivire that Adams invested into the race of orcs was gradually overtaken by nothing more interesting than savage violence. In my view, this genetic decline started with the Marauder sculps by Trish and Aly Morrison (1988), and headed downward from there.

Although I don't love the Marauder Miniatures, I do love this paint job by Blue. His clean style gives these orcs a compelling comic-book feel. His bases are also a work of art.

What does the evolution of the orc signify? That's up for grabs, with some people even writing academic papers on the subject. My own view is that orcs gradually changed because Warhammer gamers wanted to play games as orcs  rather than merely fighting them as enemies in dungeons. Tolkien's Asiatic grotesques, or Gygax's pig-faced orcs simply don't have the depth or charm to make gamers want to inhabit them as characters. In the 1980's, the genius of Citadel was to reimagine orcs in the image of Citadel's clientele: a rowdy, gangley tribe of punks.

The success of these Warhammer orcs was so dramatic that it influenced everything that came after. Although few game designers were able to maintain the mischievous mentality of Citadel's 1980's orcs, their physical image is stamped deeply into our collective imagination. Now systems as widely separated as World of Warcraft or Shadowrun feature the green skin and dramatic under-bite that was pioneered at Citadel. There's something in that face that says, "I'm big, I'm violent, and I'm also a lot of fun."

Thanks for reading. Next week, we'll look at another stupid question: why are orcs green?

Beyond Rogue Trader: Ultramarines

If you are a Oldhammer fanatic, it's easy to bash the miniatures of the 1990's as clunky, awkward, and abnormally prone to splaying their limbs. Sweet Jebus - why did they think that men charging into battle would start doing jumping jacks? Don't they know that you can ruin your back if you hold a two-handed sword at arm's length for too long?

Well, before I completely lose my shit and fall into a foaming nostalgia rage, I want to qualify myself. There were still some beautiful sculps coming out of Citadel after 1990, and I'm going to show some favourites from my collection in this post, all of them Ultramarines. The best of the best, in my view, is Jes Goodwin's solid metal Space Marine Dreadnought (1994).

Dreadnoughts should be awkward and clunky, so I guess Goodwin's sculpture played straight into the prevailing aesthetic of the Citadel studio. Its square posture broadcasts power. But more than this, this is a well balanced figure: The smooth shapes of its armoured surfaces contrast beautifully with the textured machinery in the rear of the figure and under the plates.

I decorated the miniature with some modern plastic bits, like purity seals and a laurel crown. The inscription on his right plate ("VAE VICTIS") means woe to the conquered.  The battle damage is silver paint applied to the edges of the armour, sometimes with an outline in black or grey. I distressed and rusted the gears by applying thin washes of Chestnut Ink... ah, the long out-of-production Chestnut Ink from Games Workshop. I still have the first bottle I bought (about 10 years ago), and I carefully dole it out like precious saffron, since I don't believe I'll ever see its like again. Urk. I can feel the nostalgia rage coming over me again.

Speaking of nostalgia, in my last post I wrote about the role-playing elements in the original Rogue Trader rules set (1987). I received a lot of thoughtful responses, several of them pointing out that more recent editions of Warhammer 40K have tried to re-insert a role-playing feel into the game, but that there's some resistance from 40K players, who just want tournament play.

And yet, I still think there's something special about Rogue Trader. But what? Over the past week, I've been flipping through my battered copy of RT, and comparing it with the most recent Warhammer 40K edition that I own (5th edition published in 2008). It's hard to fault the more recent version: it's a polished book, with pithy text, spacious pages, and lots of bright colour photos of well painted dioramas.

In contrast Rogue Trader is primitive. It's predominately printed in black and white, with just a few grainy photos of miniatures. Although illustrations abound, they are by almost a dozen different artists, resulting in a confusing aesthetic. The text is dense and long as the King James Bible -- if there was an editor, he had a light touch, or simply died of fatigue. And the layout is cramped, with a self-conscious effort to make the page look like a blue-print or a technical manual.

All of these elements should make Rogue Trader a disaster. But they don't -- in fact, they make it a classic. And I think the reason is because the claustrophobia in the pages of Rogue Trader oppresses the reader with the claustrophobia of 40K universe. The book causes sensory overload, in the same way that you would be overwhelmed when entering a Chapel of the Administorum or when walking the galleries of a Hive World. In other words, this book didn't just describe a game -- it was a portal into a different world.

But this sort of stunning success is its own undoing. The profits and popularity of Rogue Trader led to better production values for subsequent editions: colour printing, tighter writing and cleaner layout. All of these improvements are generally good things... but none of them conjure up the shadowed world of the Rogue Trader.

The Age of Dark Technology: Rogue Trader Miniatures

It's time to break out (and refurbish) some of my Rogue Trader miniatures! My last post was a rumination on the close and mutually beneficial connection between roleplaying games and war games in the 1980's. This conversation seques right into Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader (1987) by Rick Priestley.

It's easy to forget how much Warhammer 40K has changed since 1987. Contemporary Warhammer 40K (now in its 7th edition) is mainly a system for competitive tournament play, along the same lines as De Bellis Antiquitatis or Flames of War. But Warhammer 40K's original form, Rogue Trader, was something radically different. It was a story driven adventure game featuring intricate plots and deep background, all supervised by a Game Master. The result is not so much a tactical battle as a cinematic shoot-out. My favourite manifestation of this is the "Plot Generator" on pages 240-248, which includes such entries as "Abdul Goldberg stole your ship - the poker game was rigged. Your crew are unhappy - having been turfed from their ship together with their possessions. The ship leaves tonight - unless you can steal it back!" (Incidentally, I'll mention that Rogue Trader seems full of Space Hebrews like Abdul Goldberg. Other examples include Pedro Cantor and Myron Jubalgunn.)

Ultramarine Communications Officer - 2nd Company

Of course Rogue Trader was not completely a roleplaying game either: the players controlled multiple models, they generally fought against one another, and these models had no capacity to develop if they survived from one battle to another. This made Rogue Trader a quick, unsentimental game. It gave players the flavour of a roleplaying game without all the calories.

This hybridization of role playing and wargaming led to some grand results. In my view, Rogue Trader remains the best illustrated, most original and engrossing rule book ever produced. It is no exaggeration to say that every one of its 272 pages contains some image, quotation or photo that stimulates the reader into populating the Warhammer world with his own imagination.

 

But that's not all. The story-and-character driven nature of Rogue Trader had an important impact of the designs of the miniatures. These early sculpts placed a real emphasis on giving each miniature his own persona, like bucked-toothed inquisitors, skeletal astropaths or bulbous-headed Space Marines. As well, rather than the homogenous armies that would come in later editions of Warhammer 40K, the original Rogue Trader range was populated by misfits: space pirates, adventurers, mercenaries and (my favourite) Eldar outcasts. These characters didn't and never would fit into any army list. Uniforms were not uniform and weaponry was improvised: Space Marines carried shuriken catapults and Eldar carried shotguns. These were just the sort of figures to rescue your ship from that schmuck Goldberg.

 Eldar Mercenaries (note that two are carrying shotguns)

The Web of Eldaw: the first warhammer fantasy roleplay adventure

Thirty years ago or so role playing games and war games were not yet separate hobbies. It’s well understood that D&D evolved out of miniature war gaming rules like Chainmail (1979). But it’s also interesting to see how the first and second editions of Warhammer (1983 and 1984) straddled these two different categories, with one foot in the world of fantasy armies and the other foot rooted in role playing small encounters with lots of character development and dungeon-crawling. 

Eventually, these different impulses split Warhammer into two different games: Warhammer 3rd Edition (1987) and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1986). But one of the things that made Warhammer so much fun as a war game was that it retained the flavour of a role playing game long after it was just used for table-top battles. I think that’s a huge part of why Oldhammer is so popular now.

A neglected fossil that captures this moment in Warhammer’s early history is the scenario The Web of Eldaw by Rick Priestly (1985). It’s found in a Games Workshop magazine entitled “The Good Games Guide Vol. I”, which is itself a unique historical document. The Good Games Guide attempts to survey the entire field of the hobby as it existed in 1985, listing every AD&D module with helpful commentary, detailing games as diverse as Fighting Fantasy to Advance Squad Leader, and profiling the best games from GW’s competitors, such as Steve Jackson or Avalon Hill. As even the ads in this magazine show, it comes from an age when Games Workshop sold games of all sorts and so promoted the hobby at large. Sadly, this ecumenical approach to gaming was banished from GW just a short time later when it (and White Dwarf) decided to focus exclusively on promoting GW’s own games. And so, we never got a Good Games Guide Volume II.

That the Web of Eldaw is a hybrid between a war game scenario and a role playing adventure is apparent from the fact that it’s written with stats for both Warhammer and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. In fact, the Web of Eldaw is the first Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay adventure ever published, predating WHFR itself (the rules for which don’t seem to have been finalized by the time of the Web’s publication, since stats in the Web are wonky). The adventure consists of a short dungeon crawl, with the players taking four pre-generated characters and facing off against a referee, who takes the role of the dungeon’s guardians.

The Web of Eldaw itself is of middling quality. The text lacks any illustrations, the perils of the dungeon are boilerplate and the climax of the adventure (an army-sized battle royale between the heroes and villains) is skipped over in just a few sentences on the last page. But that being said, there are some priceless touches. My favourites include a guardian demon, who is described as “polite and apologetic but will slay anyone who tries to pass” and the discovery of a very special magic crown. Not only does the crown grant the wearer immortality, but it can only be removed with the wearer’s permission. Unfortunately, its current owner, King Lufric, was decapitated several centuries ago, and his still-living head was stuffed by his usurper into a box, where Lufric was forgotten. By the time the adventurers find this grisly trophy, the King’s head under the Crown “looks more like a brown leather bag, the features... so distorted and putrefied”. It is, however, still alive and drones in an gurgling whisper about better times.

Although the Web of Eldaw is a flawed gem, it shows how some of the most exciting parts of Oldhammer gaming come from role playing. Like the Terror of the Lichemaster, it uses very few models, making it into a quick and deadly skirmish where one bad roll can doom you to defeat. Like Blood Bath at Orc’s Drift, it throws several players together on one side, but gives them different motivations, goals and victory conditions. Like the Tragedy of McDeath, it derives its spooky mood by drawing on (and parodying) Shakespeare’s plays. And like all of the early Warhammer scenarios, it requires a referee to guide the characters into a rich adventure. Unlike these scenario packs, however, Citadel didn’t give the Web of Eldaw its own dedicated range of miniatures.

As a postscript, I'll say that I believe that war games and role playing games are once again converging, allowing each to benefit from the strengths of the other. Dead Man's Hand is a good example (although one far away from the fantasy genre). This is a skirmish game set in the Old West combining small scale competitive battles with character development and lots of story. Let's hope that games like this become more of a trend!

A pdf of the different pages of Web of Eldaw is below... Please let me know if you ever run it as a game.

The Web of Eldaw pdf full text

The Blue Yonder: a review of the Flotone graduated photography background

I'm not saying that you have to have an obsessive streak if you're going to paint miniatures, but it certainly helps. My latest obsession has been improving my miniature photography, as evinced by my recent purchase of a Foldio Light box. But even then I wasn't happy because the strong light I used to illuminate the figurines' fine detail was now washing away the colours in the paint. It reminds me of the Zen proverb, medicine cures the disease, but what cures the medicine? And so I decided to invest in a professional grade photographic backdrop. 

I'm glad I did. Here's one of my first photos with this background:

By way of contrast, below is the same miniature, taken with the same lighting, but using the white foam backdrop that was included in the Foldio:

The difference is astounding.  The blue background makes the entire miniature seem warmer and more vibrant. This is especially true for the orange flesh-tones -- through the magic of complementary colours, the blue lends them a lifelike glow. The graduated effect is also important. It gives the miniature a sense of being suspended in space. Finally, I think the deepening blue draws the eye upwards and into the faces of the miniatures. (Incidentally, the Yalta miniature is one of the Moments in History Vignettes offered by that excellent organ of our hobby, Wargames Illustrated.)



The backdrop that I'm using is the Flotone Graduated Background - 31" x 43" in Blue Jay colour. I bought it for $33.50 from B&H Photo Video in NYC (+$18 in shipping and duties to Canada). B&H was a fast and pleasant retailer. The Flotone itself is a heavy PVC material with a matte finish, making it sturdy and attractive.  In order to adapt it to the dimensions of my lightbox, I cut the massive Flotone into a number of smaller sheets.

Cutting up the Flotone was a handy thing to do since it allowed me to customize a number of continuums (continua?) of gradation from blue to white. This will be useful because I don't want too intense a blue behind miniatures that are themselves blue, for fear that the background will drown them out.

My only complaint about the Flotone is that it scuffs very easily. After taking a number of photos with it, its surface was marred by smudges from my miniature bases (as seen in the photo of this Mimic). These marks are easy to wipe away with a damp, soapy cloth, but the process of washing is a pain in the ass in the middle of a photography session. 

In sum, the Flotone Graduated backdrop is a fine product and a benefit to my photography. I now think of my backgrounds like I used to think of the base of the miniature -- a precious opportunity to highlight the figure itself.