We recently spoke to the Warhammer Studio team to grill them on all the seismic changes to the new edition. We’ve been publishing their words throughout this week as we get ready to pre-order the Skaventide launch set on Saturday, and it’s finally time for the one you’ve all been waiting for – the Skaven exposé.
Warhammer Community: How did you decide to put the Skaven front and centre in the new edition?
Sam, Design Manager: We knew we were going to be doing Stormcast Eternals, but we wanted a darker, grittier feel to the story that could still be easily recognised. We’ve also wanted to champion Skaven for a while, to bring them up to the forefront and make them a big player in Age of Sigmar again – to make sure they became a real threat this time, rather than the pernicious vermin that live in the outskirts.
We went straight in with concepting the Skaven, which is something we’d been working on for a while. Seb, who also worked on the Cities of Sigmar, had done some initial work on new Skaven based on some high-concept John Blanche sketches. What you see now in the Skaventide launch set is a refinement and evolution on those initial concepts.
These are wretched, horrible little ratmen. We wanted to bring the dark, gritty Skaven into Warhammer Age of Sigmar.
Warhammer Community: How did you go about fitting Skaven firmly into the wider scope of the Mortal Realms?
Steve, Miniatures Designer: John Blanche did a lot of conceptual exploration on what we can do with Skaven, and came up with a lot of ideas – including some extremes. As part of the refinement process, we looked at the whole range of Skaven miniatures and art produced by the Warhammer Studio since the mid-80s and discovered a few key things.
Firstly, Skaven are incredibly Warhammer. If you look at everything that’s been made for Warhammer over the years, the Skaven stand apart from classical fantasy and are immediately identifiable. They don’t need reinventing from that perspective.
They’ve been around for many decades, and they started from such a strong place that we’ve never needed to diverge from those initial ideas. The challenge wasn’t to reinvent them, or recontextualise them for a new setting – it was to take such a strong idea and rework them with modern technology without losing what made them so unique.
Sam: They sum up Warhammer so succinctly that we took the original design ideas and ran with them. The challenge pitched to the design team was this: “People who know Skaven love them, but they’re very weird. How do you translate them for a wider audience? How do you express this fundamental Skaven archetype alongside these fresh new ideas?”
Max, ’Eavy Metal Content Lead: One thing that has followed through from design to painting was to keep them extremely sinister. We have never strayed from the core Skaven identity since the 80s, but there have been lots of expressions of what a Skaven is over the years. We had to be very clear about which of these we wanted to reinforce and champion.
Skaven are so innate to Warhammer that we need to hone them to a razor's edge – we’ve got this diminutive, dirty, rebellious archetype, but how do we make that differ from a grot? What’s quintessential to Skaven? We had conversations about how grots have this ‘ignorance is bliss’ thing going on and get pure joy from burning things down and ruining things for everyone, whereas Skaven are smart enough to see what other people have, covet it, and just be bitter about everything. They have a very different mind set.
Sam: They’re smart enough to scheme, but not necessarily clever. There’s still room for fun stuff. On the other hand, we really want to hammer home the horror aspect – their pernicious nature, the fear that people rightly have of them.
We discussed very early that we wanted this whole launch box to feel really gothic, really moody, and very bleak. Dominion had a sense of slightly higher fantasy, epic heroes versus nasty monsters – a winged angelic Stormcast Eternal leading her forces against lanky orruks with whimsical grot companions. This is bringing in some harder edges, making it all feel more robust and bleak, and Skaven are the perfect adversary for that idea.
Darren, Miniatures Designer: We wanted to ground it a little. We started Warhammer Age of Sigmar in the sky with some very high-concept armies, which is fantastic, but we wanted to try something different here – pull things back while retaining that identity. One thing I love about the Skaven half of Skaventide is that they all have individual character, despite feeling like a great seething mass.
Steve: There is a tonal thing, too – while there is one core identity for Skaven, there have been tonal shifts that changed them over time. They started as dirty, gritty, and disgusting, but as time went on they got a bit cleaner and more uniform. They never got cute, but a little cleaner and a bit softer.
In the early stages of this project we went back to the basic Clanrat and decided what we wanted them to look like. We wanted to go really wretched with these Skaven – dirty, malevolent, and awful. Everything about them is damp and horrible – while rats are cute, a sewer rat is far less so!
Sam: The more whimsical Skaven notions are tied into the End Times. There was some really high fantasy stuff in there, and some elements of what you might expect from a well-fed rat with round ears and little noses. To the uninitiated, that might be what you think of when you think of Skaven, but when you pull back the layers you get to that core identity which is quite grotesque. What Steve was in charge of was directing the team to make rats that really horrified and repulsed you.
Steve: It’s a challenge because the more you push into the terrifying and the disgusting, the less it looks like a rat, and Skaven have to look like rats. There was a balancing act, and the team really stepped up to make these horrible creatures that were still unmistakably Skaven.
Darren: These are also push-fit miniatures and that requirement comes with a range of design decisions that can be challenging, but the end result here is a fantastic selection of characterful Skaven infantry.
Warhammer Community: What kinds of fun ideas did you come up with for the characters in Skaventide?
Steve: We’ve always said that Skaven don’t have cavalry, but when you’re making characters, you’re often creating a miniature that either exemplifies or bends the rules of that particular range. Sometimes, you want to say “let’s break a rule here” to make them unique, so we looked at a giant rat mount from one of John’s sketches – a Skaven riding a strange, skinny rat beast creature. This is a Skaven who has been out there and seen other generals and heroes riding horses and monsters and thought “that makes them look really important. I want to look important”.
Max: It's that covetous nature again.
Steve: Exactly, it’s a very Skaven thing to see something and be jealous. But Skaven don’t have mounts at all, so the Gnawbeast has the anatomy of something that isn’t naturally really four-legged… it could have had its origins in a Clanrat at some point
Max: The Gnawbeast could have been sculpted in a similar way to most other cavalry, holding a rider up in an imperious manner or bounding over some terrain in full motion. Instead, it’s stalking over some scenery in a more sedate, sinister manner.
Steve: It’s there for the prestige of the Clawlord saying “I have this, therefore I am the most important” but it probably isn’t the ideal mount. Phil said that it looked like it was about to die, but it just keeps going…
Sam: You’ll find these exemplars and outliers on both sides of the launch box. The Clawlord on Gnawbeast is an outlier, intentionally breaking the rules. But Skaven are fundamentally fantastical, and we needed to ground things a little, which is why we have the Grey Seer and the Warlock Engineer in there – classic Skaven archetypes that have stood the test of time. There also needs to be some balance because this is a launch box with two forces, and putting a big mega wizard in there always helps to demonstrate the arcane fantasy element of the setting.
Max: From a painting angle, there’s this idea of keeping the strong points of the theme of a faction. There’s this idea of a heatmap of all the archetypes and ideas that occur through a faction over time, and so although we’ve done Grey Seers multiple times, you can’t then hit your umpteenth revision and leave them by the wayside. This always happens, looking at ideas we’ve done over and over and seeing which parts we want to leave, which parts we want to retry, which parts we want to bring back, and which new parts we want to add in.
Darren: Skaven have a lot of archetypes sewn in, which comes from that fantastic depth of history. There are shadow assassins, maniacal engineers, crazed wizards, and so on. It’s such a rich background to mine for ideas and character concepts.
Ben, Product Developer: Elements like the brass orbs, the mutations, the Grey Seer, and the Warlock Engineer – they’re all things present in the launch box that have always been synonymous with Skaven, and it’s important to hit those notes even when we’re presenting new ideas
Steve: Jes was instrumental in creating that range, and it still resonates. It’s all so well thought out and so coherent.
Warhammer Community: Skaven have a lot of very recognisable imagery from their long history, so how did you begin to update these in line with the new, grittier feel?
Max: There’s a lot of really strong faction iconography which John and Jes worked on. Jes especially approaches projects very holistically, making sure miniature design and iconography work together. Once we’d figured out the fundamental structure of the Skaven in Warhammer Age of Sigmar, we went back to the existing iconography and figured out what we needed to work and change to make their intentions read even more strongly. Some symbols you might recognise got updated slightly, but their cores are essentially the same as they’ve always been.
Steve: Everything we did was evolution rather than revolution. We put together a selection of Skaven iconography over the years, which helped us identify some minor inconsistencies. We grouped them by clan symbols and icons that don’t mean anything in particular, and then Max was able to pull that apart and use these as building blocks to create something a lot more comprehensive and expansive. While something like the Cities of Sigmar design was created from the ground up, Skaven have the advantage of building on phenomenal existing work.
Sam: Everything from the history of Warhammer in Skaven was fair game to look at, including the old Uniform and Heraldry books, the Loathsome Ratmen book, and even Mordheim.
Steve: I looked at old WHFB catalogues, old White Dwarf issues, and army books, but I also have lots of the original 1980s Skaven at home for reference.
Darren: With ranges that are as old as the Skaven, you need to really go back to the original to make sure you’re not creating photocopies of photocopies when you’re designing. Over time and iteration, certain elements can become exaggerated or diluted, so it’s important to actually look back at the original design. You realise that sometimes things have been lost or changed, so it’s always good to check the originals out.
Steve: One of the reasons Skaven have stayed relatively consistent for nearly 40 years now is that, if you look at who contributes to the overarching direction of things, it’s primarily Jes, Brian, and Seb – veteran designers who have guided this faction for so long.
Sam: The box feels like classic low-fantasy Warhammer, partly because inspiration was taken from the source material in quite a pure state. It wasn’t modern riffing; we were referencing classic concept art that John worked on before Warhammer Age of Sigmar existed – certain sketches he did were the genesis of where we’ve ended up with Stormcast Eternals, for example. Steve and Darren built on this, alongside a fantastic new generation of concept art, for Skaventide.
Steve: The new Rat Ogors are quite classic in design, though they’re a little more rat and a little less ogor. While we call them Rat Ogors, they’re not necessarily related to ogors – whatever the Master Moulders have mixed into them, they’re big, mutated Skaven and need to look verminous. We needed to do them quite early on, again working from some Blanche concept art that made them look bigger, faster, and nastier, so we took that and played up the rat vibe even further.
Sam: They moved away from the anthropomorphic muscle-rats of old. Some of the more recent ones are quite graphic and muscular, but we wanted to move more into the rat angle.
Steve: I think it worked out really nicely – they’re these big hulking beasts that feel uniquely Skaven now.
Warhammer Community: Are there any little details that you’re particularly fond of?Sam: For me, it's the unit of Clanrats that Sergi designed. You look at the whole block of 20 on the table, and they feel like a cohesive unit, but then you pick one up and go – “Oh wait, he’s got a little hood on and a shuriken in his tail”. They’re actually all individual models with callbacks to the Great Clans, and you notice the one with a beast-skull helmet, or another where he’s particularly diseased with boils on the face. They’ve all suddenly got a little bit of character to them, within that incredibly robust and identifiable silhouette.
Steve: Skaven society is based on aspiration and climbing the ladder. Most Clanrats probably won't amount to anything, but they’ll still shape themselves around that aspiration even if they won’t ever get there. They have to keep their options open – only one in a million might make it up the next rung on the ladder!
Ben: Just like you’ve got an army here led by a Clawlord, you could have one perhaps led by a Deathmaster, and then those Clanrats who’ve fashioned Eshin-styled hoods might feel they are being looked upon more favourably than the rest!
Steve: Yeah, and while you have these Skaven that have Clan-styled visual hooks, they’re still part of the seething mass of Verminus. They’ve just got aspirations. Then with the Clawlord on Gnawbeast, I wanted some practical details on there to sell the fiction, so instead of a saddle and reins he’s tied onto the beast with cords around his feet, and there’s a handle built into the collar.
That might seem pretty impractical, given he’s also holding a warpstone halberd and a little ratling pistol, so I made sure he had a sling so he could stow the gun and hold the handle. Those little bits of plausible storytelling really help ground these more fantastical elements, so they’re my favourite details.
Warhammer Community: You mentioned that the mass of Clanrats include a lot of Skaven who pattern themselves after the Great Clans. Can you elaborate on that more?
Max: One of the things that we’ve changed in Warhammer Age of Sigmar is how we deal with the Great Clans – and specifically how we do it at a grander scale than we ever used to in Warhammer Fantasy Battle. We have to think about how these huge, sprawling clans are rationalised.
Steve: None of the Clanrats are properly defined as being specific to the Great Clans, but there are nods on the miniatures to the individuals who feel a little bit Pestilens, a little bit Eshin, and a little bit Skryre. Perhaps they’ve got aspirations of ascending through those Great Clans, but to be honest, it probably isn’t going to work out.
Ben: The Great Clans, like the Clans Skryre and Moulder, are large umbrella organisations, so you can also have a smaller clan led by a Clawlord who might bring in Moulder beasts and some Skryre war machines under their own banner, and then have them emblazoned with his own colours.
Sam: A lot of weight was placed upon the painting team to make these elements work together, because although the brief was to make Skaven miniatures that feel agnostic to the Clans, Rat Ogors and the Ratling Warpblaster are clearly on loan – or perhaps pressed into service under duress – from specific Great Clans. The painting team had to unify them together in one army without losing that identity.
Max: We spent a lot of time with the background writers making sure that the initial impression people get from the painted models engages with the different Great Clans, but also highlights the makeup of a Skaven army. There are all of these backdoor deals and Clawlords amassing armies, and we wanted the box to speak to the way that Skaven culture has backstabbing as a fundamental part, with alliances that may fall apart any minute. It’s a different beast, a different culture, and a different outlook on warfare than you might be familiar with. It makes total sense for a Skaven warlord to look at an objective, and then amass resources and a cobbled-together force. They grab things in order to go and invade and conquer, they don’t raise uniform armies to defend cities.
This lets each Skaven player come up with a variety of options for forces they might like to create, giving them lots of routes into the hobby aspect of the models. We wanted to present those options right in the box, and instead of painting everything just one colour, we wanted to present a variety of styles and colour schemes that the Clawlord has brought together.
Thanks again for the time, lads! The Skaven are swarming all over the Mortal Realms in the new edition, and your first chance to get stuck in comes this weekend when the Skaventide boxed set goes up for pre-order.