Artisan Guild: Blackcrag Orcs für Juli 2024

The Orcs are Back

Hello dear friends!

This month has been a hell of a ride, and I’m extremely proud to finally share with you the trailer for the set of July, the Blackcrag Orcs! You are invited to turn on your audio and click play on the trailer above!

If you want, I’d love to tell you the story behind this orc set, so get prepared for a very personal and long post.

The Orc Barbarians

With Orr’ugs (half ogre), the Oni, and the dread Frostmetal Clan, the only pure orcs I sculpted were the Orc Barbarians from Set 03, in July 2019! It’s funny, but I didn’t notice until now that they were also released in July! The Orc Barbarian set was one of our most popular. Even though it was published in 2019, I remember sculpting some of these orcs back in 2013 when I was working full-time with my dear friend Benoit Guerville from Raging Heroes. At that stage, my orcs & dwarves project was just a hobby, sculpting for fun. I never imagined I would seem them painted by so many hobbyst one day.

I remember when Benoit helped me improve those orcs. The Warcraft movie wasn’t out yet, and the orc imagery in games was quite different, more goofy. „Work on the attitude of that orc chief, make it more like a rockstar,“ he said. He is great at art-directing minis, and I can’t thank him enough for helping me become what I am today, especially because he even helped me with my side projects.

When 3D printers became popular, I wanted to finish the orcs I had started and make them suited for the 3D printer generation. I was less experienced then, and my style wasn’t fully developed yet. Besides, 3D printers have improved a lot, allowing for finer details. Even my stylized sculpts, designed to be easy to print and paint, could benefit. After so many years, I knew the 2019 orcs deserved better. At the end of May, just after the trailer release, I decided to spend a day on ZBrush to make an orc from scratch.
Orcs are one of my favourite race, and I would just make him like my ideal orc for playing an rpg.
I never got to work on the classic orc barbarian after 2019.

My rule was simple: let’s sculpt from scratch without looking at the old one. After a few hours, I was happy with the new orc design (the green one to the right) and opened one of my old sculpts… wow, what a change! I loved the new orc. I called him a Blackcrag Orc since the old ones didn’t have a place on the map (the Map of Mundus was less detailed back then).

I couldn’t stop there; I wanted to recreate the Orc Barbarian from scratch, with innovative mounts (since with the modular mounts system you can put the new orcs on Worgs, Dire Wolves, or dozens of other mounts from previous months). „You know what?“ I said. On Discord, someone suggested Orcs on larger Orcs could be cool, so why not giant apes? I never worked on an ape-like creature, and it could work as Barlgura for DnD, demon gorilla, or anything else. I’ll call them Ape Fiends, apes corrupted by the Lord of War and Blood… and one will have four harms, as requested in our Discord!

Five minutes in Photoshop and I was extremely happy with that. The Orcs, after fleeing the tentacular Slathaai prisons thanks to the Chainbreaker rebellion, passed through the jungles, tamed some Apefiends, and reached the Blackcrag, those mountains in the north. I couldn’t make an Orc Warlord sculpt, which was mandatory as one of the Heroes of the Set, but I wanted to bring justice to my old Throgar Chainbreaker. He is one of my favorite characters, and I wanted to reimagine him in an even more epic version, as a liberator of orc slaves becoming an Orc King. I wanted to do the same for Vesdra, the orc shaman, resculpting her with more experience and tools. Honestly, I’m extremely happy with the final result!

This time, Throgar would have a truly epic mount, since Epic Bosses are now part of every monthly set. A worg is cool, but I’ve made tons of them. I craved to make something legendary, and a Manticore fit perfectly! This huge beast, standing on a 10cm base, is raging and massive, perfect as a mount for your wargames general or as a beast to face in any RPG.

I don’t want to spoil all the surprises in the set, so make sure to check out the trailer above. Are you excited for the Blackcrag Orcs? What do you think of their design and weapons? Share your thoughts in the comments!

The Blackcrag Orcs will be live at the beginning of July.
We are heading to the convention at Cres (check our previous post) in few days, hopefully we manage to publish the set from there on day 2 from the mobile app. Thanks for your patience!

Cheers dear friends!

Andrea