Today marks the third day of Warhammer Community’s Grand Conclave celebrating the upcoming release of the Cities of Sigmar Army Set.
Our Whisperblades have gathered the great minds of the Warhammer Studio to find out how they went about creating every aspect of the new range. In the first part of our round table chat, they revealed the work that went into the miniatures range, while yesterday they explained all about creating the new lore.
Today, the gathered luminaries broke out their sketchbooks and provided a glimpse at the process behind designing the iconography and heraldry that defines each of the 11 Free Cities in the new battletome.
Seb – Miniatures Creative Lead: One of the ways the Cities of Sigmar feel unique as miniatures is that they are covered with a range of motifs and shapes that feel uncommon in the Mortal Realms. There are a lot of 45- and 90-degree angles in their armour, weapons, and shields, giving them very distinct silhouettes.
When it came to figuring out the iconography and transfers, we were thinking about how ranges like Space Marines and Bretonnians had done this in the past. Shoulder pads and kite shields are great spaces for a transfer – so when we created the Cities of Sigmar shields, we included diamond-shaped panels on them. This matched the angular motifs elsewhere, but could also be used as a space for transfers of the heraldry and iconography for the 11 most famous Free Cities.
Seb: Some of those cities have been in the lore for quite some time.
Phil – Head Writer: Certain big cities, including the Seeds of Hope – like the Living City and Greywater Fastness – were around from the Second Edition of the game onwards.
Seb: As we’ve discussed already, a big part of our job is realising that if a picture is worth 1,000 words, when we hand someone a miniature how many words is it worth? How eloquent have we been with that description? The iconography and painting that is then added provides an extra level of density.
Max – ’Eavy Metal Lead: We started working on the heraldry and iconography early on, by looking at the background written about these places in previous publications. With this release, we have a set number of units that have to represent all of these infinite cities, so the iconography and colour schemes do a lot to make these miniatures go further. Representing all of the major named Free Cities just made sense.
We’ve been working a lot on transfers recently – especially for the first founding Space Marine Chapters – and so we were well-equipped to explore this space. It was exciting for me not to go “here are three cities on the transfer sheet” but to go “here are all 11 major cities, and three unnamed ones”.
It’s also really interesting, because it helps further define some core identities and outliers. If you show three cities and two of them are more regular and one is really out there, a third of your choices are far beyond what you could consider “normal”. But if you have 14, you can have a bunch that are quite uniform and two or three that are quite unique. Within this spread, there’s a lot of flexibility and range to convey ideas.
Seb: Designing them is quite logical, in a way. Take Vindicarum as an example – you see this great city of faith and industry built on a volcano with a giant Iron Collar around it. That gives you the constituent parts you need to design the icon – the volcano, the cog, the collar. Then you get to work.
Sam – Miniatures Design Manager: The iconography has to be simple enough to resonate as the city’s archetype. One of the strengths of the Cities of Sigmar is that they are the everyman, so we could build on that with the icons – what do each of these cities actually do? What makes them stand out? We worked hard to keep it simple – a fishhook, a portcullis, the collar, the hammer, the tower, these icons resonate with the story of each city. And then we started making three tiers of each logo…Max: That came from the idea of responsive design, yeah. The field on the banner is bigger than the one on the shield, and then we needed something smaller to place on a strap or a bag. They aren’t just differently scaled designs, they have conscious linking elements, and so we went back and forth, working out some relationships between the different levels of icons.
Phil: We had a lot of fun taking up that baton with the art and design in the battletome. We took these icons that had been worked on as an example, from Greywater Fastness. We wanted to develop some illustrated heraldry, so we were thinking of traditional heraldic animals and wondered what would work with that city. We thought, it’s an industrial city, they’re going to be quite dirty, and so we went with a big black dog… and obviously gave him a rifle.
That seems like what they’d be into, right? Then the other dog has antlers and a stag‘s tail because they’re still from Ghryran, but it also has a hammer due to Greywater Fastness being all about hard work and war machines. These illustrations become a suite of information you can work from as a player and a painter.
Seb: Their initial icon was borne from similar ideas – they’re a very defensive city in the Realm of Life, so the design started as a portcullis motif and then had vines worked into it.
As a studio, we’re all growing and pushing ourselves. We’ve designed many transfer sheets over the years, but this came at a great time when we knew the next one would be special. Then we looked at the brief and thought, it has to cover how many cities? And units? And the Devoted cults too?!
Compared to having Space Marines, whose iconography and codification have evolved over 20+ years of tinkering and refinement – including the most recent update – this was a situation where the first hit of the ball had to be a home run.
Phil: We were shooting for the moon, but it was important to do so, because we wanted all of these cities to have a real sense of identity.
Sam: Max had a good suggestion early on – the range had to feel complete from day one. The status quo is set with the first wave of Cities of Sigmar miniatures, and they are designed on shared principles to give you the framework. But what if you want to make your army based around Ulfenkarn, the Cursed City?
We know what their icon is, and with all the work the team did on the iconography and heraldry, I thought "well, I can make them my city of bedraggled old men that represent this aspect of the Mortal Realms and act like this...”. You can use the city’s heraldry and iconography as a set of instructions on how to do that in an impactful way.
Max: We don’t want to build a sandcastle in a sandbox, point at it and say “look how cool this is!” We build a sandbox and let the person playing in it build the sandcastle themselves. For the Cities of Sigmar, these symbols and systems also help you understand how their structures and codifications work, and give you a framework to build from. It encourages people to engage with the fiction and the rules.
Specifically, with such a human-focused faction, it’s easy to go “my city will be like this!” and have an intuitive sense of how people will react to it – after all, they’re also human, and not a mad grot or soul-stealing aelf (hopefully).
Tomorrow the Cities of Sigmar Round Table will dial in on how the rules work to support the experience that the miniatures, background and iconography have created.
