Just a wee post of the latest beastie. He's 'Zolkor' from the Citadel CH4 Chaos Beastmen range (1987). The range was sculpted by Kev Adams, Jes Goodwin and Mark Copplestone. While it's not 100% clear who sculpted what, I reckon Zolkor is probably one of Kev's.
The shield was half-inched from a Vendel Miniatures orc. The motif is a modern GW transfer. While I prefer freehand shields, I think this one works OK.
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ReplyDeleteThat’s a very cool figure! The old beastmen had so many varieties, they really seemed chaotic. I miss that. Slapping more skulls and runes on a ‘roided up goatman just doesn’t quite give the same impression, in my opinion.
DeleteYou're preaching to the choir and I couldn't agree more.
DeleteI have been wondering about the changing aesthetics of not just beastmen, but Citadel miniatures in general and I think I have an explanation. Citadel was set up to produce miniatures predominately for RPGs (D&D, RuneQuest, MERP and then later on WFRP) where variety was important for your PCs, NPCs and your 2d6 orc ambushers. As the '80s rolled on Warhammer/wargaming became more and more the company's focus, and the runaway success of 40K meant that the production of fantasy miniatures needed to be hived off to Marauder Miniatures while the main studio focused on sci-fi.
As I understand it, Marauder's brief was to fill the gaps in the WFB 3rd ed. army lists, so their focus was wargaming regiments. As a customer, you've now moved away from cobbling together units from dispirit RPG miniatures to buying bespoke regiments, where each distinctive troop type is clear at a glance. I know Regiments of Renown had been doing something similar for a while, but Marauder feels like the tipping point for uniformity across entire armies. To be clear, I love a lot of Marauder's output (the landsknecht dwarves are brilliant), but I don't think this approach worked well for chaos, especially given that the Marauder goat headed beastmen were proceeded by Jes Goodwin's brilliantly batshit Realm of Chaos range. But it's the aesthetic that's stuck for the last 30 years.
I have collected a few Marauder beastmen and 4th ed. Perry twin's beastmen for this project. For one thing, they are a damned sight cheaper to buy than '80s beastmen. Hopefully there will be enough '80s weirdness to break up the uniformity.
That explanation for the shift towards more uniform figure types makes a lot of sense. I definitely noticed a shift from WFB 3rd edition to 4th, where 3rd was very much a “sandbox” system with a background world that players could use if they liked it, then 4th cut out a lot of the options and tied everything that was left quite tightly to the Old World setting. Kind of standardized and homogenized the fantasy offerings, which was a shame IMO.
DeleteYeah, agreed. I preferred the setting when it was more loosey goosey. And, as you can tell by all the 'Oldhammer' tags, I enjoy that 'RPG' aesthetic for fantasy stuff (even though I haven't played RPGs for several decades). I also think that the '80s stuff was just more metal! :D
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