Weta Workshop veteran and top character designer Johnny Fraser-Allen is back! This time around, the master craftsman is following up on his stunning work creating wizards and gnomes with an unusual take on orruks – and a little of his personal hobby history...
I was 16 when a girl at high school gifted me a mint-condition copy of Hero Quest she didn’t want. I had wanted this game my entire childhood, having seen it at an older cousin’s house many times. This flawless masterpiece was not only my gateway into another world but to the tabletop gaming hobby itself.
At 16 I had no internet, there were no YouTube tutorials, and none of my friends shared my passion for it all. My one source of knowledge and inspiration was White Dwarf magazines. It was in these pages that I discovered showcases of other people's armies, and I was immediately drawn to those who had creatively branched out from the suggested configurations of models by combining other armies' bits and bobs to create personalized characters and units. Of course, my early kitbashes and paint jobs were terrible, and my teenaged budget for new boxes to work with was limited, but I soldiered on, slowly seeing improvement and learning what I was good at.
This entire orruk army of monstrous conversions started with one very small idea. I had bought the incredible gargant model and loved all the options the sprue offered up. I also had a spare orruk chariot and thought that would look cool atop his back.
This made me recall my happiest experience working in the film industry:
While working with Guillermo del Toro on his vision of The Hobbit™, he had me design the three Trolls. He wanted each one to have a big backpack to carry away their stolen hoards. I wondered what an uncreative, clumsy, stupid Troll would make a pack out of? This led me down an exciting journey of creative discovery, cramming henhouses into fish smoking huts on top of a wagon, upturned rowboats atop stage coaches crammed with goats, and catapults covered in horse troughs and farming tools. The more creative the approach, the more Guillermo loved it.
I decided I’d emulate the unhindered whimsy and fun of that experience by only using the existing catalogue of Games Workshop products on this giant conversion. As a conceptual designer, those sorts of limitations lead you to far greater creative outcomes, though I must say I was spoiled for choice. I love that the Games Workshop website now includes pictures of the models’ sprues. This is so helpful to a kitbasher, allowing me to see prior to buying exactly how I can use individual components on each project. Although I studied every picture online to see what I could use, having the pieces in front of me often inspired whole new ideas and in some cases, whole new projects. As options and ideas opened up to me I soon realized one giant wasn’t enough and I began to create other war machines... bigger war machines.
This is my king of the orruks. I wanted a monstrous presence on the tabletop for him that visually depicted a tyrant who destroys everything he encounters. Because I was also creating an Alliance of Order faction of wizards, I worked to incorporate the same narrative rules I’d created for that army into these orruks. My main concept was that magic is incredibly hard to generate, requiring decades of practice and research – not something greenskins would be interested in! Having discovered that magic can be drained out directly from its human source, my chieftain's driving impulse is to capture wizards and drain their power for immediate destructive use.
Like the packs of Guillermo’s Trolls, my set of giant meat machines opened an opportunity to tackle this narrative rule in three unique ways. The king uses his captured wizards as blood banks, with their magical blood being filtered through the stomachs of goats and boiled into a breathable vapour. My shaman channels the souls of freshly smashed wizards through a Tesla-coil like device to return as arcane blasts, while my goblin king puppeteers the magic out of fresh victims in a gruesome fashion!
Thanks, Johnny! You can see more of Johnny’s incredible work on his Instagram page. Looking for some more inspiration? Why not check out the webstore and start plotting your next project?
