After discussing the core design and concepting work that went into the Helsmiths of Hashut, today we focus on specific miniatures from the range.
Martin – Miniatures Creative Lead: We made a concerted decision to go with blades rather than hammers for the Infernal Cohort. This was for a few reasons, but we realised that when they go to war they want to cause suffering.
Jordan – Background Writer: The Ashen Elder is one of the few Helsmiths with a hammer. Grungni is the god of making, but the Helsmiths know him as the Maker of Lies. They see the hammer as a crude implement, a symbol of toil and hard manual labour. They focus more on craftsmanship and precision, with industry doing the heavy lifting. Still, forges need hammers and the priests of Hashut are permitted to wield sacred Black Hammers, which are viewed as tools of both creation and destruction.
Martin: With industry at the heart of the Helsmiths, the Infernal Cohorts don’t really do a lot of work, as military service is a far more prestigious way of paying the Wage of Toil than simple labour. Spears and swords also help provide a varied silhouette for a duardin army. It also suggests a very organised, controlled way of fighting – a closely ordered unit moving forward with shields raised, hacking away with these brutal edged weapons.
Jordan: Pain and torment are key to controlling daemons, so these nasty weapons are a reflection of the forging process. Swing a hammer and you crush a skull and end the fight swiftly; hack away with a blade and you cause pain and misery, leaving deep wounds – that’s factored into their strategy. Causing this misery is often as much a campaign objective as conquering territory. There’s a reason they desolate as part of their battle plan.
Max – ’Eavy Metal Lead: It reinforces the arrogance they feel – in their minds, they own everything, and they will attempt to level everything to get what they want, killing the people who are left over. Even the basing on the ’Eavy Metal collection reflects how they fight. They are willing to raze everything just to build it back, flattening a slightly askew mountain just to replace it with a perfect ziggurat. There is not a lot of room for anything other than subjugation or extermination for them.
Jordan: Only the hobgrots escape that a little, but also there’s no negotiation with the Helsmiths, it’s all on their terms. Even if the hobgrots benefit in some minor ways, they’re just another resource to be used how the Helsmiths see fit.
Matt – Lead Rules Writer: It comes back to the vast cost of what they’re doing – they have a plan, they’re conquering, building up territory, they’re successfully subjugating daemons. Because it’s working, they just keep extracting, taking vast swathes of things – all to accomplish relatively minor things. They’re quite wasteful really, bonuses and results.
Jordan: It’s important to recognise that all their talk about focus, diligence, efficiency, that’s only true in a twisted, Chaos-style sense of the matter.
Matt: They’re efficient if you don’t care about waste, if you don’t care about any of the consequences other than the one you want. The end really justifies the means to them.
Martin: We imagined the Infernal Taurus as the pinnacle of craft that a Daemonsmith could aspire to, topped off with an ornate ancestor icon mounted behind the rider, which we can imagine has some great provenance for the Helsmiths. The version for Urak Taar is a stone slab with the icon of Hashut, speaking to something maybe even more primordial and profane.
Jordan: Urak Taar is the oldest living character in the Age of Sigmar who isn’t undead or divine. His pride, arrogance, and aggressive pursuit of arcane secrets have kept him alive so long.
Martin: You can see on the sculpt how far progressed the curse of stone skin is across them, especially across their back.
An Infernal Taurus is a statue that shows a Daemonsmith’s power to the ziggurat, so they need to be covered in decorative runes and carvings. They only come to life when an incantation is cast. We didn’t want to lock it to one material as part of the sculpting, making it so it could be painted as metal, marble, or any other material with a smooth finish really.
Max: We leaned into that when painting one as a brassy metal and the other as a jade stone. It lets us imagine certain ziggurats having their own signature material, giving them some extra character.
The fact it’s a carved idol highlights duardin craftsmanship. It also speaks to their need for total control. Any warrior powerful enough can tame and ride a creature, but it’s still a sentient thing. Creating a statue that can be brought to life is unique – they have full dominion over it.
Jordan: The Helsmiths also don’t really acknowledge the strength of anything else other than themselves – if you pick a powerful beast you’re acknowledging a strength not your own. It’s an effigy of their own power.
Matt: It’s one of the only units in the game that is both a war machine and a monster, which marks it out as quite unique amongst all the centrepieces in Age of Sigmar, which tend to be more organic.
Martin: We had a lot of conversations about how the joints work – do the blocks warp, does it have mechanical joints? We saved the mechanical aspect for the Dominator Engine, this is far more artisanal, and animated by magic. It’s the highest level of craft that this society can aspire to. The base is also one of the places in the range to show their effects on the realms, with the hollowed out, burned up trees.
Max: It keys back into conversations we had early on. The Helsmiths don’t necessarily have the skills of craftsmanship beyond the other duardin in the Mortal Realms, but they have the obsession to go beyond the reasonable expectations. They will go to extremes to imbue things with just a fraction more power than a regular weapon – raze a whole forest to power the forge for a single axe head, and then cool it with the blood of hundreds, just to make it slightly better. Going to these lengths is something other duardin could do, but why would they? It’s horrifying to them
Jordan: A lot of their automata are based on other ancient duardin automata. As far as they are concerned, they’ve just figured out a way to make those old designs better, finding efficiencies through dark means. The cost is justified by the results.
Martin: When it came to the Dominator Engines, these are the more battle-ready effigies of Hashut, using that imagery in a less decorative sense. While working on it, I said that I’ve always wanted to sculpt a giant sized duardin…
Sam – Miniatures Design Manager: We knew we had to differentiate the standard war machines and the Dominator Engines. A daemon engine is very unique to the Helsmiths. A lot of things overlapped in the design process: the need for something in the range to fit a certain size to help with the overall army silhouette, coupled with the desire for another war machine, and the bull imagery – a bipedal, mechanical effigy to Hashut ended up being a perfect fit.
Martin: It provided a place to play up the industrial aspect, you can very easily see in this machine where the bound daemons are at work, and it gave another place to reinforce the furnace aesthetic. We hear about all these belching factories in the battletome, and we see them in the art, but the Dominator Engine lets that factory image walk across the battlefield in your games .
Max: One of the visual hooks that runs through the range is strong, rigid shapes defining that idea of control. The banners that we’ve talked about being weighted down, the strong angular and solid forms everywhere. It’s a cool contrast to a lot of other ranges in Age of Sigmar that are very dynamic. The daemon engines and spellcasters create an opportunity for more dynamic plumes of flame and smoke that represent bursts of chaotic energy contrasting against otherwise prescriptive shapes.
Jordan: It sells the idea that they can’t totally control this forever, that there is going to be some explosive consequence to trying to tame these energies. The Dominator Engine shows how Hashut has such a thrall over them as well too, that even their war machines are effigies to him.
Martin: During the army creation there was a question – how many bulls do we want to put on things? It’s a key image, and it’s enjoyable to work with, and so it’s tempting to stick horns on every hat... but it’s better to keep the horns for the things they deify.
Sam: They revere the Taurus because it is a venerated symbol of Hashut, the physical manifestation of his divine spirit. Trampling everything – it makes sense to double down on it. Other ranges might have lots of animal imagery to define various aspects, but the bull is really key to the Helsmiths of Hashut. They have two particular images that they lean strongly into – strong ancestor faces, and imperious bull heads. When we combine the two, it’s even better.
Martin: We had a lot of conversations early on about the provenance of the Bull Centaurs, but we decided to focus on what they represent to the wider range. They’re very tied into the temple aspect of the Helsmiths; they’re looked up to, not just for how close they are to the divine image of Hashut, but also because they are literally quite large and imposing – fitting for their jobs.
Jordan: The Annointed Sentinels are the most zealous of their breed. The fully enclosed helmets are quite good at perhaps controlling them a little, reining in their most bull-headed – excuse the pun – traits, given they are quite braggadocious beings who see themselves as living embodiments of their god.
Max: The Sentinels are some of the only male (we have to assume that as they’re bulls) duardin in the range without beards. They don’t have them stuffed up in their helmets, so we imagined them ceremoniously shaving their beards off, with ornate tattoo motifs on their chests in their place.
It was fun working on that shape language across the range – the razor-blade style trim, the hexagonal/coffin shapes gave us some shape language. Some of the runes are based on the runes of power already used by the duardin, but twisted a little to make it Hashutite. They also have spoken language, as well as the Zharralid script. We spent days working it all out, getting feedback from the sculpting team to ensure we had a final spread that worked in sculpts and also on the transfer sheets.
Martin: The hobgrots take elements from the Hobgoblins of old, while blending in elements from the wider Helsmiths visual language, alongside elements from the Slittaz. Their weapons lean a little bit more towards tools; when they’re not fighting, you can imagine them using much of the same gear to toil away – axes for chopping down trees, hammers for working in the forges, picks for mining. The leader has a particularly cruel bladed lash, and there are one or two daggers in there as you might expect from these sneaky gitz.
They have perhaps got slightly nicer clothing and equipment than the Hobgrot Slittaz – but it’s at the cost of the general conditions being worse. They’re a little more hunched and bent double than the mercenaries, perhaps the rations aren’t quite so filling when you pledge to work for the Helsmiths?
Jordan: It’s worth pointing out that there are plenty of independent groups of hobgrots out in the world. Some have aligned themselves to the Kruleboyz, and in this book we’re seeing those that have joined up with the duardin of Hashut. The Vandalz are in full servitude to the Helsmiths and take the good of that with the bad, whereas the Slittaz are more mercenary in nature.
Max: They have some runes carved into their gear, which is obviously something they’ve done themselves as the Helsmiths won’t waste any time on them. Hashut doesn’t care about them at all. You can imagine the hobgrots looking at the Infernal Cohort and seeing them survive and prosper again and again, thinking “there must be something to that writing on their gear”. It’s a good way of getting the symbology in there without just repeating it verbatim.
Jordan: It’s also quite ingratiating… in an obsequious kind of way.
Tomorrow, we’ll be taking a closer look at the lore principles of the Helsmiths, and discussing some of the decisions made by the ’Eavy Metal team.
