Oh your Chaos Dwarfs are a mess - how fitting...

Today BOLS released some pictures from Games Day UK showing a small glimpse into the future of our hobby. There was a great deal of Dark Eldar (revamp of an entire line - enjoy this moment, it will never happen again) as well as some Forgeworld Empire, Chaos Ogres and yes - Chaos Dwarfs. (Forge World revamp)

While the pictures are generally fairly poor - shot through your standard glass display case - I give all of the props I can to Strangleweb and the guys at BOLS. I guess my London reporter fell through. There's loads to be talked about here and I will probably do a series of a few articles on all of the different topics. 

First of all, lets talk about your Chaos Dwarfs. I would love to be able to say MY Chaos Dwarfs, because I have always had a soft spot for this model range, but I can't as I don't play fantasy, don't own a single Chaos Dwarf miniature, and don't even own a Chaos Dwarf Blood Bowl team. But somehow, they are still mine. I have had a soft spot for them that can only be explained by the Kurt Cobain effect. It may be similar for my love for Squats, they both had amazing potential in my opinion and both were taken from us before their time. What is left of the Chaos Dwarf line, as with the Squats is a perfect look back into our hobby circa 1990-1994. Today I pulled out my green North American Citadel Miniatures Catalog and drooled over some of the old Chaos Dwarf pictures. 

Unlike the Dark Eldar revamp, somehow I am not as willing to allow Forgeworld the chance to change very much in the Chaos Dwarf line. Stop the presses, DA PAtrick does not allow this design change. Lets look at a few of the design changes that Forgeworld has given us. 

 Within the newly available pictures, the Chaos Dwarf crew gives the most insight into the future of the range in my opinion. We haven't got a look at rank and file troops at all in this batch of pictures and until we do, I think these guys are most likely to represent what they will look like in the end. These models are very dynamic for fantasy models, something that we must expect from Forgeworld, especially with models that don't have to rank up. Their beards are right - sort of - where are those huge mustaches of old? The hats are just way wrong. What we have to ask ourselves is will this look like a unit of Chaos Dwarfs were you to rank up 10-15 of them?

 Here is a unit of old Chaos Dwarfs, hats and all, with large mustaches for comparison. I will let you decide how closely they will match.

Some better news comes with some of the heroes that are in the batch. They get the beards right - lose the mustache and get the hats sort of right - are these Chaos Dwarfs or Santa's Elves? Look, basically all there is to a traditional 4th edition Chaos Dwarf model is a big crazy push pin hat, Huge mustache and long curly beard. As long as those models had that, it was a Chaos Dwarf. These models come fairly close to that, but I am afraid that this design will only be present in the heroes characters.

 We then get a series of war machines. Clearly whoever just finished up with the Ork range for 40k simple started right in with the Chaos Dwarfs. I am fairly underwhelmed with this line. I understand that it was a part of the Chaos Dwarf design, but as very few of the models ever came to the general public, I have never seen this as part of the 'real' Chaos Dwarf line. These are interesting, but this release will fail to excite with what is there.

Right now I am very disappointed with the look and feel of these Chaos Dwarfs, it just didn't give me enough of what I expected to see and ended up confusing. Perhaps that was the plan - they didn't want to release the classics from the line, they wanted to show people that they were going to mix it up a bit.

Well until I see a Giant Taurus, a Lammasu, or some Bull Centaurs, I will not be eagerly awaiting this release. These 3 models would totally be the bread and butter of a Forge World release, I can see them doing amazing jobs on any one of these 3 classic designs, but so far - nothing. Heck, as I mentioned earlier we haven't even seen a single troop selection, let alone a Hobgoblin.



Where am I?

Fuck you, where am I?







Look, I don't need things to look exactly the same and I understand that things have to be developed and evolve, but i also think that Forge World should be keeping a lot of what made the Chaos Dwarves who they are today.

Check out THIS Chaos Dwarf Army. It keeps the original design intact while still updating the model line. You look at it and know that it is Chaos Dwarves, but you also notice how dynamic the models are and that the line has been brought in to the modern look of the hobby.

I'm not sure how well Forge World is going to do Chaos Dwarves and I certainly hope that in the next few months we get to see some better pictures of the releases and I come back on here and take it all back, but currently it is just such a weird selection to put out in an initial release that I have a knee jerk reaction to the overall design of it. Maybe it will grow on me, or maybe it will simply reduce the price of current Chaos Dwarves on ebay so I can pick up some older ones.

Regardless, I eagerly await the Giant Taurus, perhaps all will be forgiven. Let me know how wrong I am in the comments.