Lost Warhammer: Heroes for Hire

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Lost Warhammer: Heroes for Hire

The ad that got me thinking.

before I start, I should acknowledge that the first part of the title was stolen from Gideon’s excellent Awesome Lies blog. As part of his mission to document the complete and utter history of Warhammer in all its incarnations, he has a series of posts on projects that never made it to print – and there were plenty of those. I’ve contributed to it here and there, but that’s only one reason to check it out. Find it here.

My recent post on Ogres and Trolls, and especially the ad pictured above, stirred some long-dormant neurons and reminded me of another of my project proposals that went nowhere.

Fans of Warhammer’s second edition (by which I mean the battle game, not WFRP 2nd edition) will remember Regiments of Renown: those boxed sets containing a unit of troops with a leader, a musician, and a standard bearer – and a short, frequently silly story on the back of the box.

Bugman’s Dwarf Rangers is one of the best-known Regiments of Renown.

There were quite a few of these sets in the period immediately before Warhammer 3rd edition came out, and it often fell to me to write the box text. In fact, I got to write a lot of box text and ad text at that time, including one memorable occasion where I wrote a full-page at for White Dwarf while a taxi sat idling outside reception to take the finished page – a last-minute replacement – to the printers. No pressure there!

But I digress.

Regiments of Renown had been a part of Warhammer since the Forces of Fantasy boxed supplement in 1984, and the range continued to expand throughout 1986 and 1987. To my surprise, though, there was no mention of them in 1987’s Ravening Hordes army lists, and I immediately proposed collecting all the box-back text into a book, and filling it out with some new regiments so that every army had a good number of options for these famous units. I even combed through the Citadel Miniatures catalogue and selected some figures that I thought could make new Regiments of Renown.

To me, it was a no-brainer: the bulk of the text was already written, the bulk of the units were already photographed, and the book would supplement the army lists, giving players new options and promoting the sales of the boxed sets. But I just couldn’t get anyone interested in the project, and like so many of my proposals, it went nowhere.

Then I got to write the ad at the top of this post, for two new Ogre character models. Skrag the Slaughterer was created by Jes Goodwin, and like everything Jes made the character came with a detailed backstory that I essentially transcribed for the ad. Hrothyogg was my own creation: I noticed that he was wearing the Belt of the Eater, which was already a famous Ogre artifact from having been worn by Goglfag, the leader of not one but two Ogre Regiments of Renown dating back to the earliest days of Warhammer. Based on that, I wrote the story of how Hrothyogg won the belt from Goglfag in an eating contest. It was all great world-building detail, and a good opportunity to flesh out (pun intended) Ogre culture as I worked on my proposal for an Ogre culture pack.

Then it hit me: if there are Regiments of Renown, why not also have Heroes for Hire? These could be character models (Major and Minor Heroes according to Warhammer convention of the time) that could be attached to any suitable unit as the leader? I spent the next few evenings at hone, hammering out the proposal for a separate book on my trusty Amstrad PCW-8256. I had previously been told that as a roleplaying specialist I “didn’t understand toy soldiers” – with the distinct implication that this did not bode well for my career at Games Workshop – and I was eager to jump at any chance to prove my worth by helping to boost miniature sales.

Once again, I turned to the Citadel Miniatures catalogue – or rather, I combed back through White Dwarf, The Citadel Journal, The Citadel Compendium, and every mail order flier I could find, and I put together a list and pictures of the most impressive character models to go alongside Skrag and Hrothoygg in this volume, which would be a companion to (or perhaps a section of) my proposed Regiments of Renown book. And, once again, the idea was turned down.

I enjoyed writing the box-back stories, and the ads, with their mixture of humor and world-building, but apparently doing anything more than that was straying out of my lane as a roleplaying writer, however good my intentions were.

I’m still a little sad about these two. They would have been a lot of fun to write, and I still think they would have helped shift some metal (the first plastics were still a little way off). I wish I still had the sample write-ups I put together for the proposals, but they stayed behind when I left GW and they’re probably lost for ever.

But maybe I was wrong. Maybe the boxed Regiments of Renown didn’t sell as well as loose miniatures, and maybe that’s why they were dropped in the third and subsequent editions of Warhammer. At this late date, we’ll probably never know.

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