Yesterday we cracked the lid on the first in a series of round table articles for Warhammer: The Old World. Today’s article is digging into the design decisions behind the new miniatures and the heraldry that accompanies the Kingdom of Bretonnia and the Tomb Kings of Khemri.
Where did you start with the new miniatures for such beloved factions?Giorgio: The Bretonnians and Tomb Kings hadn’t really been the stars of a previous edition for a while, but as the community loves both, they felt a natural fit for the return to the Old World.
Rob: Giorgio actually managed to find a massive tome of Bretonnian concept art, background, heraldry, and everything that the old Warhammer Design team had put together years ago.
Giorgio: It was essentially a style guide from the old studio. It had been put together at the end of a project, and they had collected all of their assets – box art and packaging, transfers, copies of concept art, everything – into paper form and then rationalised it all. It’s effectively the legacy of that particular period.
Rob: That book gave us a great launch pad for new miniatures. It also contained the seeds of new things that we’ve not done before, such as the locks, which are a new motif in the Bretonnia range.
Giorgio: The big desire with the Knights of the Realm on Foot was finding specific themes that could be particular to Bretonnia – and then showing them through their attire, equipment, amulets, and little trinkets.
Alastair: It would be very easy to make them look like historical knights, so we had to dig into what makes them Bretonnian and not another generic fantasy knight, and importantly what separates them from Empire Knights – those two factions have similar aspects, so how to differentiate them?
Giorgio: The legendary Arthurian-style fantasy of the Questing Knights, with their devotion to the Lady, is the angle we wanted to hone in on and make evident in the miniatures. The helmets have these oversized heraldic elements, and one even has a sculpture of the Lady on it. That came about through revisiting old concept art and original miniatures and paying tribute to them.
The locks that appear on the miniatures have an element of superstition to them. They’re a symbol of how they’ve bound themselves to the Lady, a representation of their faith and a reminder of their quest. It was a very immediate and relatable way of representing these promises.
Alastair: Many of these knights have gone on quests, some campaign for their duke, and they’ve made promises to people. Some have the strange little reliquaries and boxes on their person, with odd little Warhammer-style stuff locked away in them – perhaps a body part or a bone, something a bit mad that makes them uniquely Bretonnian.
Giorgio: We worked really hard to be faithful to the original designs and also to the Warhammer aesthetic. We wanted to pull back slightly from where we ended up in the End Times, to simplify some materials and details, focus on fabrics, and root the aesthetic in this earlier time period.
Digital sculpting has changed things a lot. We can get a level of accuracy and detail that we just couldn’t before, but it also increases the amount of space that we can work on for each miniature – so balancing that is important. There can’t be detail for the sake of it.
Rob: Just through the way older technology works, the older frames had so much space on them compared to the new frames – there’s a statement of intent here; this is what you can expect from the Old World going forward.
What is the genesis of the new centrepieces and character miniatures?
Jonathan: One thing that we knew is that we wanted a new centrepiece for each range, and ideally, we wanted that to be in the launch box for each. They became the Lord on Royal Pegasus and Necrolith Bone Dragon.
Giorgio: The Pegasus is archetypal for Bretonnia. Pegasi have been in different factions in the history of Warhammer, but when the Pegasus Knights were designed for Bretonnia, it sort of cemented them as a feature for the army. In a lot of ways, the miniature explains itself. It comes from this long history of Warhammer art and miniatures, and so, we had an idea in our minds about exactly how it should look.
The challenge was coming at it from a more contemporary angle. The opportunity to make a kit like this in plastic is a crowning moment – it’s creating almost a perfect kit with a level of detail and finesse we could only imagine in the past. For the Pegasus, so much of the impact comes from its wings – always one of the hardest elements to sculpt, but beautiful in the end – so graceful and with connotations of the angelic, the divine, the legendary. The Tomb Kings needed a centrepiece to match, and we gravitated towards a Dragon because, in Warhammer Fantasy, a Dragon is this great and grand thing.
Rob: But for the Tomb Kings, it’s also a horribly evil thing. In Bretonnia, the Pegasus is a symbol of virtue and nobility, whereas the Dragon which faces off against it is an ancient evil, representing inhuman power.
Giorgio: In part, it’s about resurrecting old glories – for us, that’s going back to the big Spined Dragon design, and its wings without membranes, while for the Tomb Kings themselves, it’s the glories of their life before resurrection. There was some freedom to pluck features and symbols from across the expanse of Warhammer art, but also freedom to explore technical challenges such as the big wings and the big arch on the palanquin.
Khemri, even more than Bretonnia, are a faction that has not changed in years within the fiction. They essentially hit a point of stasis when they died, so we really couldn’t change the aesthetic too much – they are quite literally preserved. It would be hard to imagine them as something else.
The magical vulture for the Liche Priest is a nice example of us pushing the boundaries. In the past, there were things you couldn’t achieve when sculpting. Technology means there are fewer limits, but it’s important to consider how far we can push things while still remaining in the Old World.
Is working on the World of Legend different to working on other settings? Are there limits on what can be changed?
Alastair: The Questing Knight Paladin was one of the earliest miniatures that we worked on, and we swiftly realised that we had to determine an aesthetic for these “new old miniatures”. We couldn’t do something completely new in terms of aesthetics because we are re-releasing lots of classic miniatures, but we also couldn’t just blindly recreate what has come before. We had to dip our toe into what the future might be, but also keep one foot in what’s come before.
When the opportunity presents itself to capitalise on designs we’ve seen in artwork or concept art, especially if it seems appropriate, it’s foolish not to leap on that. What we like to say a lot is we want to “bend, not break” things, which is a step-by-step process. We push things here and there, sometimes in subtle ways, but in other places, we’ll push far enough out that in the future, there’s scope to come back later – and push things out a little further!
Rob: There’s definitely a lot of respect and a love for the artwork of days gone. The influence of Warhammer is far-reaching. It extends beyond just our games and miniatures into merchandise and video games. Some of this classic art has resonated for decades now, so some of those miniatures really are direct love letters to specific pieces of art. Others are taken from five or six different pieces of art and concept work, all blended together to make something that’s new but still feels like Warhammer.
Giorgio: It’s important not to forget the core identity of a faction, to always carry that forward with every new idea we have. And when we talk about new elements, we’re mainly talking about a new way of looking at miniatures because of the time difference between the originals and now, rather than a new way of looking at Bretonnia.
Holly: There are more places to find inspiration from than you might think – it’s not all concept spreads. Some of it comes from page furniture, old miniatures, and designs for boxes.
Jonathan: There is definitely a thread here, though, that we’re realising across all of our game ranges where we’re finally seeing the miniatures we imagined as kids! But in reality, we actually just have the technology to create miniatures with the same fidelity as older artwork.
Alastair: We’re not here to change what Warhammer is. It’s more about reminding people what they love, picking up where things left off, and then taking the next step. There are a lot of things we can do now, with regard to finesse, detail, the fineness of the material, and the negative space we can play with, that we could never have done in the past. Throughout the whole process, we are trying to stay true to what people remember Warhammer Fantasy Battles being, but we still want to push things. It’s funny, though, because your memory of a miniature versus what it looks like can be different, but there is still a certain feeling associated with that memory.
Giorgio: Everyone who has worked on the project remembers getting into Warhammer and playing the game, and all the emotions that go along with that – sometimes that nostalgic feel is more important than the reality. So we’re really trying to pay tribute to those feelings as well as the aesthetics, trying to bring a bit of that fun we all remember back in.
How has the iconography changed in the years since the end of Warhammer Fantasy Battle?
Jonathan: The art and the iconography go hand in hand – while the miniature designers are working on sculpting, the books and design teams are working on the artistic implementation of heraldry and so on.
Holly: For Bretonnia, we looked at examples of earlier iconography to try and decide what was and wasn’t clear, what was missing and so on. For each dukedom, we drafted a few different examples and worked on drilling down into the strongest, most immediately recognisable examples. There was also an element of making the iconography consistent, as opposed to a series of diffuse elements.
Jonathan: We essentially rationalised things down to make it more concise – the rules for Bretonnian heraldry, what the motif is for each dukedom, and what their primary heraldic device is. For example, the symbol of Quenelles is the Unicorn, which is the primary element, and it will be seen through all of its fiefdoms.
Holly: Another example of a shift in our approach is the fleur-de-lys that appears across heraldry. This is a fairly generic heraldic device, but it has now been made into one that is indisputably Bretonnian with the inclusion of the sword in the middle and the sharper crescents. It’s far more representative of Warhammer.
The difference between the world of the End Times and the World of Legend also shifts our perspective on what Bretonnia is. In the World of Legend, it is a shining beacon of chivalry and honour. At this point in history, they really are walking that walk. The rest of the world is primarily meeting Exiles and Crusaders, not the paragons of chivalry that live in Bretonnia itself. We reflect that in the heraldry and the coats-of-arms. There are strict rules understood by the knights that are reflected in the art, background, miniatures, and painting, but it might be slightly different in this setting from what you’re used to.
Jonathan: The Tomb Kings of Khemri were interesting and, in a lot of ways, different. There were lots of ideas floating around from the old days of Warhammer, but nothing as concrete as the iconography we’d worked on for Bretonnia. It gave us a lot of room to get creative.
Holly: Khemri is a collection of kingdoms, essentially an empire from before the word empire even existed in the Old World. We focused a lot on the idea of crowns and their adornments to define each kingdom – each on top of a skull, because it’s the Tomb Kings. There’s also this idea that perhaps some of these crowns are the ones they were buried with when they died. There are even some hints at the older gods of Nehekhara in there, if you know where to look.
Of all of the heraldry, the symbolism of the Mortuary Cult was the most heavily layered and thematic. The skeletal vulture evokes a few ideas, as a two-headed skeletal creature that feeds on the dead. There’s the idea of the ouroboros, and there’s phoenix imagery in there, but decrepit and skeletal – a nod to the duplicitous nature of the priests. They promised the royalty a shining gold afterlife, but what they’ve delivered is something else entirely.
The other icons of Khemri are heavily embellished, enamelled and jewelled, and so the simple nature of the Mortuary Cult’s heraldry emphasises the self-aggrandisement of the Tomb Kings. It has to be humble. The Liche Priests can’t be seen to be attempting to seize power by force. They are insidious, and do strange and dark things.
Yet more enthralling stuff from the people behind Warhammer: The Old World. Tomorrow we will be serving you up another slice of what goes on behind the scenes, with an article all about how ’Eavy Metal applied their specific set of skills to the World of Legend.
