Designing the New Empire of Dust Plastics

TODAY WE’RE HANDING OVER TO DAVE FROM THE STUDIO TEAM, TO TALK ABOUT THE NEW EMPIRE OF DUST RELEASES. OVER TO YOU DAVE…

As I sit to write this, it occurs to me that the title of this blog is a bit of misnomer. When we came to approaching the new Empire of Dust plastic sprues, the range had already been designed. There was already an established style and aesthetic language for the models, we were just iterating that into a new material and medium. So this isn’t a story of designing the Empire of Dust plastics; it’s a tale of how many skellybobs you can cram onto a frame.

The original Empire of Dust models were released many (many) years ago as a hybrid upgrade set for the plastic undead. We concepted and produced a new range in a relatively short time, following the lore of the cursed Ahmunite Empire. The Ahmunites are what I’d like to call pseudo-Egyptian. This means that while they share many design cues with real-life ancient Egypt, they are crucially not the same, so we can deviate from that as much as we need or want to. The old range included metal upgrades to make spearmen, warriors, archers, and revenants (similar to the old Abyssal Dwarfs for any veterans out there). These came out alongside some metal characters and, of course, the awesome Enslaved Guardians. The upside of metal is that we could get a whole range out with (at the time) relatively limited resources. The downside is that metal hybrids come with their own issues for building, as anyone who had the old models found out.

We had two goals for this project. The first was to replace as many of the existing hybrid sets as possible, especially the core troops. The second I’ll get to in a moment. As I’ve said, we already had a solid design for the Empire of Dust so our sculptor created a skeleton (belonging to a Northern Alliance Clansmen) and recreated the armour from the metal models with some minor adjustments. The weapons were re-designed to be more ornate – the Ahmunite Pharaohs were ostentatious and liked to display their wealth and power through their troops. The armour was probably more valuable than the one wearing it. With a bit of work, we managed to fit warriors (swords and shields) spearmen (spears and shields) and archers (bows and arrows) on the sprue.

Since these are gaming pieces, strength and stability were important concerns. The clothing and the armour not only provide a canvas for painters, but reinforce the models around weaker areas that tend to be prone to breaking with skeletons. This is why they bear armour on their wrists and ankles, while the cloth hangs down to cover their hips. Bones are still visible through tears and gaps, as well as on the limbs, hands and feet, but the shining phalanxes of the Ahmunite empire are pre-eminent.

The second goal was to create a dedicated hard plastic cavalry kit. We’ve never actually done one of these separately before – the closest being the dual infantry/cavalry sprue for the Halflings. The Empire of Dust list includes two different cavalry units – Revenant Cavalry and Skeleton Archer Cavalry. We wanted to cover both of these, but also have the units look distinct enough from each other so that players can pick them out on the battlefield. Part of this work was done with the riders, via the infantry. Although they share bodies and legs, Revenants have heavy armour and death masks on their faces, which means they end up with a lot more metal showing. The cavalry are armed with lances and ornate shields. By contrast the skeleton archers are less armoured, showing more bone instead and are (obviously) armed with bows and arrows.

The other way in which the units varied were the horses. There are five new undead horses which are kept deliberately unarmoured and generic. Starting with this base meant we could add more armour to the horses for the Revenants in order to make them look like armoured knights, or leave the armour off for the lighter skeleton cavalry. This was done with optional plates that hang from the side of the horse – similar to the armour on our PVC horses. While this kit includes plates specific for the Empire of Dust, we’ve tried to future-proof them so that in theory, you could swap these plates out for ones specific to another faction or unit and re-use the horses there.

With limited space on the sprue, only the Revenants’ parts made it on to the Cavalry frames. Luckily, there are loads of spare archer arms on the skeleton sprues if you build spearmen or warriors. Enough so that if you’re putting together an army of these you’ll have plenty of spare arms and heads to make your mounted archers. The two kits are designed to be cross-compatible to facilitate this.

Between these two kits, you can make no less than five units for your Empire of Dust army (maybe even six at a push) and that’s just the tip of the iceberg…er…pyramid? We’ve got loads more up our sleeves built around this new range.

EMPIRE OF DUST PRE-ORDERS FOR THE ARMY AND MEGA ARMY SETS GO LIVE THIS FRIDAY.