WHITE DWARF · JANUARY 2005
Ogre Kingdoms designers’ notes and tutorials accompany the aftermath of the Storm of Chaos, Space Marine and Death Guard hobby features, a Witch Hunters battle and expanded Middle-earth naval and Battle Company rules.
COVER TO COVER
In printed page order
Three corrections amend earlier tactical advice: the Lady’s Blessing grants a ward save rather than the old targeting restriction, Tree Singing stops a moving wood when it reaches a model and Slann may not use High Magic. The notice identifies the affected pages, making it a useful companion to issue 299 rather than a new set of optional rules.
Designers explain the more dynamic plastic Terminators and forthcoming High Elf characters, while Forge World previews its Hierophant and Eldar super-heavy tanks. The wider news includes the next Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay edition, planned Inquisition faction books and a web-based War of the Ring campaign, showing activity across both major and specialist games.
After seven years, Paul Sawyer hands day-to-day editorial responsibility to Guy Haley and reflects on the people and travel that shaped his time with the magazine. Guy outlines continued changes to the publication’s hobby content and explains Paul’s new responsibility for the practical and financial work behind its production.
Studio projects range from Christian Byrne’s rapidly painted black, red and white Marines to Paul Rudge’s newly assembled Ogre army and modular battlefield. Greg MacGregor rediscovers older conversions, while Nick Kyme works on the final Bugman figures, a Gondor Battle Company and Enforcers for the coming Necromunda campaign.
Mark Chambers and Owen Rees explain how a growing but difficult-to-navigate UK website became a searchable, consistently organised hobby archive. Army pages, topic pages, printable articles and personal preferences offer several paths to the same material, with the team describing both the technical rebuild and plans to restore more archived content after launch.
Nick Kyme and Greg MacGregor report from UK Games Day 2004, moving between large participation games, developer seminars, hobby workshops and the painting competition. Their account connects spectacular Macragge and Pelennor tables with previews of future armies, archive games and the enormous working Baneblade, ending with the Golden Demon awards and the event’s social aftermath.
Guy Haley interviews Phil Kelly about the Ogre Kingdoms’ mixture of brutality, hunger and unexpected cultural adaptability. Ogre wanderers acquire customs before returning as Maneaters, while their uneasy relationship with Gnoblars and distant kinship with Halflings distinguish them from both humans and Chaos creatures.
Paul Jeacock describes taking the Ogres back to frightening folklore and the Gnoblars towards dishevelled, malicious small creatures. References to Brian Froud and vivid collaborative design meetings explain how shared imagery formed quickly, with the Gnoblars’ nasty humour acting as a counterpoint to the larger monsters.
Brian Nelson explains how changed anatomy gave the Ogres an identity beyond enlarged humans, then describes the constraints of turning drawings into plastic kits. Unique components, realistic shoulder joins and difficult integrated cannon arms demanded extensive mock-ups, making the small Gnoblar on a Leadbelcher’s shoulder an unexpectedly troublesome detail.
Phil Kelly highlights the Dogs of War rule on Bulls, Ironguts, Leadbelchers and Maneaters, allowing other armies to employ these Ogre units. He considers how paid muscle or portable cannons can change a familiar force’s weaknesses, while reminding readers that the same options are available to their opponents.
A miniature timeline traces Ogres from varied early mercenaries through renaissance-styled warriors, Morg ’n Thorg and the Mordheim hireling to the new plastic Bull. The comparison identifies older motifs that survive in ironfists and travelling Maneaters, connecting the redesigned army to several decades of Citadel characters.
Rough concept conversions communicate new troop ideas before artists and sculptors refine them into finished models. The Gorger began as a Rat Ogre with an enormous squig mouth, while competing Scraplauncher concepts used a converted Bull Taurus and chariot, illustrating how the design team selected and transformed promising experiments.
Large Ogre bodies benefit from intermediate skin layers, while Gnoblars use a much quicker green-and-grey treatment. The workshop also shows brass, bright steel, verdigris and stippled rust, then explains how shared red skin decorations can unify a tribe whose members have neither matching uniforms nor tidy heraldry.
Mark Jones builds a nomadic Ogre dwelling around a carved foam dome, with bent plastic supports and crumpled paper hides giving the tent its structure and texture. Overlapping skins, a rolled doorflap and trophies from the bits box personalise an easily resized design that can become a small camp or another faction’s shelter.
A sealed paper surface receives warm brown drybrushes followed by a pale bone finish. Selective brown or chestnut ink washes vary individual hides without changing the basic method, making the tent appear assembled from different skins and offering a reusable treatment for covered huts, siege towers or howdahs.
Asger and Tue Kaae transform a 40K Daemon Prince with an Orc Shaman head, reshaped wings and a putty hood that conceals the rebuilt neck and shoulder. A chained-head plague flail establishes Nurgle character, while tiny carnival Nurglings provide inexpensive, humorous musicians for the larger Plaguebearer units.
The second monthly allowance pushes the four collectors from initial purchases towards usable forces. A converted Nurgle prince, compulsory Tomb King characters, local Stirland archers and additional greenskin muscle expose different pressures on time and money, while early games reveal how easily a small collection can overlook an army restriction.
Stephen adds the Tomb Prince and Liche Priest needed to turn his battalion into a playable army. A chariot supports the prince’s fighting role, but the fragile Hierophant is kept among archers rather than exposed with cavalry, with an Icon Bearer and swarm using the remainder of the allowance to widen future choices.
Paul discovers that ornate Empire clothing and individual militia details make rank-and-file painting slower than expected. He keeps his Stirland theme by resisting fashionable cavalry and artillery, choosing Human and Halfling archers and a Mordheim Witch instead, while learning to assemble the figures so they can actually form ranks.
Paul shares the simple metallic sequence that helped him adapt from 40K surfaces to Empire armour. Brass underpainting, successive silver drybrushes and a thinned brown ink wash build a worn finish, with a bright final detail layer restoring the edges and sword after shading.
Dave expands his Black Orcs and Stone Trolls into a compact Border Patrol force and wins two quick games against Guy Haley’s Goblins. He then recognises that his Shaman-led ’Ardboyz list breaks a required character balance, tempering the victory story while planning a deliberately crude foam Effigy of Gork for the growing collection.
Gav Thorpe recounts Archaon’s stalled invasion, the relief armies’ costly attacks and the competing ambitions of Grimgor, Be’lakor and the Skaven. Valten’s confrontation with the Everchosen ends in severe injury, Grimgor claims personal supremacy and Mannfred’s intervention finally breaks the surviving Chaos army.
The campaign results translate the worldwide conflict into reported victories, controlled sites and regional outcomes. Alongside the large total of games played, the review explains how the defenders retained important advantages around Middenheim and how separate Lizardmen, Wood Elf and Tomb King campaigns broadened participation beyond the central invasion.
Adam O’Brien gives mutinous Imperial troops a visibly new allegiance while preserving much of their original equipment. Empire bodies, sinister Chaos heads, added visors and looted chainmail create a ragged renegade regiment, accompanied by an explicitly unofficial suggestion that loyalist Empire soldiers should hate their treacherous former comrades.
Graham McNeill follows the creation of a Space Marine through implantation, constant medical oversight, conditioning and dangerous Scout service. The account then describes specialised battle roles and the Chapter’s senior offices, connecting combat achievement to the preservation of gene-seed, spiritual discipline, technical knowledge and the living memory carried by Dreadnoughts.
Keith Robertson explains how the studio Ultramarines retain a common company identity while giving individual warriors and squads different ornamentation. Gold trim, varied heraldry, scroll cases and homemade purity seals support that balance, including a putty roller mould that reproduces a small seal impression for repeated use.
Mark Jones demonstrates building Space Marine vehicle colour with forceful but gradual drybrushing, using an Ultramarines Rhino as the main example and alternative recipes for three other Chapters. Large icon stencils and selectively placed damage then turn the basic hull into a recognisable vehicle whose wear follows tracks, doors, exhausts and crew access points.
Card stencils help place large symmetrical insignia across the Rhino’s uneven hull. The guide uses pencil outlines and an initial grey layer to refine the edges before filling the design solidly, with supplied squad and Chapter symbols intended to complement the smaller transfer-sheet markings.
Chipped paint, rusted exhausts and layered mud are placed where a working vehicle would receive the most wear. Dark outlines beneath metallic chips preserve contrast, orange stippling and black soot age the exhausts, and different browns distinguish fresh mud, dry deposits and the dirt caught within tracks.
A Kill-team project draws Mark Jones back into 40K and grows into a Death Guard army built around fast drybrushing and grotesque conversions. Steve Cumiskey describes how embossed shoulder symbols, a consistent dusty finish and selective use of metal figures make the force practical to paint while preserving the irregular character of Nurgle’s warriors.
Dark brown underpainting and successive green drybrushes establish the decayed armour, while orange washes and metallic chips make weapons and trim appear corroded. Pale skulls and unhealthy layered skin brighten the details without losing the dusty overall finish; the pustule instructions use general red and yellow washes rather than named additional colours.
Mark converts an Obliterator into a commander poised on the edge of daemonhood, replacing weapon mounts with claws, a chainfist and a new head. Sculpted stretched skin disguises the rebuilt areas and is repeated across the accompanying Terminators, whose simplified silhouettes and shared painting scheme keep the elaborate leader within the army’s visual theme.
Two plastic loyalist Dreadnoughts provide fire support once Mark has tried the infantry on the table. Battle damage and Chaos vehicle accessories bring them into the collection without delaying play, and the closing plans for living hulls and stranger engines show how a simple starting force can grow into more ambitious conversion projects.
Graham McNeill’s Witch Hunters seek Andy Hoare’s 13th Company Rune Priest in a two-thousand-point assassination mission. Waves of zealous attackers and Battle Sisters draw the Space Wolves into a dense urban fight, where Acts of Faith, counter-attacks and delayed bike reserves shape the approach to the protected target.
An attacking force must eliminate the defender’s crucial headquarters unit before the opportunity closes. Hidden deployment, fortifications and delayed defenders support the target, while the attackers begin the battle and infiltrators gain a preliminary move; the article presents this older advanced mission as usable with the revised 40K rules.
Christian Byrne responds to a difficult tournament by giving his Iron Warriors heavier artillery. Experiences with the revised vehicle rules lead him towards an extensively upgraded Vindicator, and the feature connects that battlefield ambition to a visibly possessed conversion with chains, warped metal and leaking daemon ichor.
A Rhino and Forge World conversion kit become a bound-daemon Vindicator through extensive chains and damaged surfaces. Pinned chains, putty-smoothed corners and textured patches of glue create restraints and corruption, with a distinction between effects that work on plastic hull components and those unsuitable for resin parts.
Christian mixes ink, metallic and flesh colours into sickly corroded surfaces, then drybrushes them with progressively paler greens. A separate green-and-white ichor recipe uses bright highlights and gloss coats to suggest fluid seeping from hull wounds, distinguishing the living corruption from the tank’s conventional metal armour.
Arkalli sustains a cluster of isolated Imperial worlds from beneath a mostly desert surface. Its coasts retain fertile regions, but older industrial remains lie buried in wastes once covered by higher seas and forests, where scavenger communities inhabit the debris; that history supplies visual reasons for the campaign’s vents, huts and sparse vegetation.
Steve Cumiskey develops a desert industrial campaign from the terrain and bases his group already owns. Buried factories reduce the need for enormous buildings, leaving vent towers, scavenger homes and fragments of ruins to establish Arkalli’s character while providing meaningful cover and objectives for Marines, Orks and Plague Marines.
Foam cores and corrugated cardboard turn scavenged material into convincing desert dwellings. One generator hut incorporates a Land Raider engine block and plastic bulkheads behind its entrance, while pipes and miscellaneous machine parts suggest inhabitants living among functioning remnants of a much older industrial civilisation.
Angled plumbing tubes create repeated clusters of large industrial vents that can block line of sight. Roughening the smooth tube surfaces helps paint adhere, fitted wire mesh supplies believable openings and a wooden platform with smaller pipes completes a reusable terrain piece without requiring a full factory complex.
Two reader-created Chapters illustrate the range of entries as the Northern European competition approaches its close. Bo Tolstrup’s Emperor’s Paladins use pale armour and ornate green-and-gold details, while Ad Paulus’s Outrider Chapter adds distinctive iconography and weathering to blue Marines; the page supplies examples rather than a paint recipe.
Raiders can knock defenders unconscious and drag them to an escaping boat instead of killing them. Three versions reward captured warriors, any enemy hero or one specific valuable leader, making transport, interruptions by combat and the choice of victim as important as winning the initial fights.
Mat Ward adds reasons for the coastal assaults introduced in issue 300: captives, stolen supplies, destroyed settlements and targeted enemies all change what the raiders need to achieve. Combinable objectives, campaign follow-ups and culturally different boats let the same landing rules support varied narratives, with the examples intended for agreed flavour rather than strict competition.
Loot markers, village buildings and moored vessels provide three kinds of material target for a landing force. Rules for carrying plunder, growing fires and desperate attempts to extinguish them turn the shoreline into an active objective area, with burning boats threatening neighbouring craft and their occupants.
Headhunting, inflicting disproportionate casualties and destroying siege batteries offer alternatives to theft or kidnapping. Different scoring rewards define what each side must protect, and the article suggests linking outcomes into reprisals or rescue missions so that a captured captain or damaged harbour has consequences beyond a single game.
Themed naval forces gain small differences reflecting their shipbuilding and seamanship. Haradrim craft need fewer crew but are fragile, Mordor’s unreliable vessels handle poorly, Lindon’s graceful ships gain a handling reroll and Dol Amroth’s sturdy boats withstand more damage, giving each coast its own character.
A historical raid on the mouth of the Gilrain demonstrates how to combine the coastal toolkit into a scenario. Gondorian defenders face Haradrim raiders under scattered deployment and prepared defences, with kidnapping, plunder and a targeted attack all available to give the landing more than one possible route to success.
An itinerant witness tells how Suladân’s punitive posting on the Khandish border becomes the foundation of his renown. Holding the decaying Pazghar fortress, accepting his lieutenant’s sacrifice and harrying a much larger army allow him to return at Abrakân’s crisis, where his personal victory over Vangaris turns a collapsing defence into legend.
Suladân and Haran defend an unreliable wall against a much larger Khandish assault. The attackers win by establishing a sufficient foothold on the parapet, while the defenders must drive them away; reduced protection from the crumbling masonry prevents the fortress from becoming a secure equaliser for the smaller force.
Harad’s defenders must kill Vangaris and break enough of his army before their own force collapses. Suladân’s mounted contingent starts off the table and may strike from a chosen edge later, recreating the unexpected attack on the Khandish rear that defines the accompanying story.
Twelve initially equipped Moria Goblins form a raiding band that can expand to twenty-five members. Ordinary warriors cannot gain troop-type promotions, but heroes still develop through courage, fighting and shooting skills, allowing a growing horde to acquire individual leaders without becoming an elite regiment.
Adam Troke expands the small-band campaign with two contrasting companies. Moria Goblins begin numerous and can grow far beyond the normal size limit, while a smaller Dwarf patrol gains resilience and the possibility of Khazâd Guard, with separate influence, equipment and advancement tables shaping their long-term development.
Seven Dwarves start a compact patrol whose durability offsets its small numbers. Influence can bring Khazâd Guard and better equipment, warriors may be promoted and heroes can improve their Defence twice, while resilience and favourable reinforcement rolls make survival and steady development central to the company’s identity.
Painters from several countries present a broad selection of Middle-earth figures, including a Rohan rider, Cave Troll and Balin’s Guard alongside familiar named characters. The gallery contrasts mounted, monstrous and character subjects, crediting each painter while leaving the colour choices as visual inspiration rather than a named recipe.
Mark Bedford removes the howdah and rebuilds the beast’s flank and leg joints to place it convincingly on its side. A larger wooden base supports the new pose, while flattened brass-rod arrows, broken weapons and scattered vegetation explain its fate without distracting from the enormous fallen body.
Three extensively converted Mûmakil turn the same large plastic kit into very different moments in a battle. A slain beast, a bellowing animal and a dying creature attacked by ghosts demonstrate how cutting, pinning and substantial resculpting can create narrative centrepieces whose bases and crews reinforce the main action.
Pete Bell depicts the creature immediately before the Rohirrim charge, covering the supplied fallen-rider base and rebuilding a shoulder so one foreleg can rise. Preserving as much original anatomy as possible limits the sculpting burden, while the lifted pose and open, bellowing head suggest imminent movement rather than a static march.
Before the Mahûd miniature was available, Pete Bell adapted Lurtz’s head to make a suitably bald and imposing commander. Transplanting the reshaped head onto the plastic chief and replacing rear spikes with a putty banner gives the howdah a distinctive leader built around the existing crew model.
Chris Baker builds a collapsing beast under attack by the Army of the Dead, supporting a new neck and trunk with florist’s wire beneath layers of putty. Cut howdah beams, a desperate commander and converted plastic Rohirrim phasing through solid objects extend the story across the miniature, with the project becoming a sustained lesson in sculpting as it progressed.
The Paris XII Games Workshop team turns admiration for The Return of the King into a two-metre model of Minas Tirith. Jeremy Mary leads the construction from foam and card, with detailed houses, arches and paving taking far longer than the outer walls; months of staff and customer work produce a setting for both small street fights and spectacular sieges.
Four compact methods adapt armoured vehicles to their surroundings: splattered white suggests snow, textured deposits build mud, grey streaking represents acid wastes and layered yellows create desert dust. The examples extend the main tank guide by combining surface texture with paint placement, giving environmental wear a stronger sense of location.