Warhammer’s First Special Character

While looking into the first Scenario from the original Warhammer rules I started to think about Who was the first special Character that Warhammer had?

Now.. What is a Special Character. When people think of Special Characters, they think of 4ed Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Earlier versions of Warhammer Fantasy Battle had rules for creating your own characters and Heroes with various levels. Where as in 4ed, you still had some of them but they had pre-made Characters for you, called Special Characters. This had speciality made weapons and equipment for play and mostly (not always) had special figures for these characters.

But ultimately, I’m defining what a Special Character as pre-made named unit (mostly single figure) who has stats which are different from normal for that unit type. Does that make things clear? I hope so. I may have to revisit this a bit later for reasons which will probably become clear when the time comes.

So. I think we can agree that the first Warhammer was volume one of the first edition of “Warhammer: The Mass Combat Fantasy Role-playing Game” by Bryan Ansell, Richard Halliwell and Richard Priestly from 1983 and I think anything before that might be Games Workshop, but isn’t Warhammer. Though we could debate internal testing stuff but.. no.. On the whole, we don’t have access to that stuff so Ignore it.

The first volume is entitled ‘Tabletop Battles‘ and it gives the rules for Mass Combat, Fighting In dungeons, and some Monster Types. By Monsters, it means any unit really and inside this is replaced by just saying ‘Creature List’.

It talks about the core rules of the game and terms being used etc as well say saying about figures which are in the Citadel range which the rules are designed to sell. While it has the main stat lines on the creatures later, some of the ‘most common’ are drawn out earlier for reference reasons and for easy to use. At this stage, the most common used types are Halfling, Orc, Dwarf, Man and Elf. Going on from Movement rules we have Psychology rules and Morale (isn’t that kinda Psychology?) before moving to Shooting rules, some grid charts for attacking and saving throws, then Combat as in Melee, list lists of weapons and then….

The First Ever Named Warhammer Character! A human Hero Solomon Klomp, with two images. One of him fighting an Orc and one of him fighting a Giant Rat. BUT is Solomon the first Special Character? I’m gonna have to say no. He appears in a couple of drawings, is named but there aren’t any stat lines for playing as him. He was just used as an example for how the advanced rule for follow on Combat is done (when you kill an enemy unit but another one is close, you can see if you carry on combat but now against the next enemy). And that is pretty much all we get of Solomon. IN fact, he is the only character listed in the rules as a whole.

But then we get to the First ever Warhammer Scenario, the Ziggurat of Doom which I have covered before. In it, we have 5 Dwarf Heroes who have slightly different stats from the normal dwarf. Now.. Technically, these are special characters as they are named and have different stats but I’m gonna say, they aren’t. They are more Elite Troops as the 5 are pretty much all the same (the only difference is two of them have a bow or Crossbow). None of them 5 are unique, which is something I’m gonna have to add to the Special Character definition. However, we now have what I believe is the first Ever Warhammer Special Character and if you read my talk about this Scenario, then you would know where this is going.

Thorgrim Branedimm is a Famous Dwarf Chieften and bearer of the Ancient Warhammer ‘Foebane‘ which is his symbol of lineage and majesty. He has even better stats and the special magical weapon abilities. He was later rebooted as High King Thorgrim Grudgebearer, King of Karaz-a-Karak who I also talked about before.

In this mission, the Goblins also get a Special Character, Guthnog Bristlenose, the Goblin Chieftain who has stats which are slightly bitter then a Hobgoblin so.. which form of Goblin he is is unknown. There isn’t even an image of him and he just has slightly better stats. Nothing more, so he kinda feels like a Character to me, more then a Special character. Characters could be named (in theory any figure could be named but do you want to name every character in 30 unit regiments?)

So… I would say the first ever Warhammer Special Character is Thorgrim, Dwarf Chieftain.

But now.. I wasn’t gonna settle for this. I looked through some old stuff I got and I happen to have 2 Pre-slotta Dwarfs from around this age. One had I think either a Sword or an axe so was out, but then I found one which was clearly holding a double handed weapon, like a Hammer but the top was missing. the only base Markings were the name ‘Bryan Ansell’. Well.. How about that for a match. Design wise, it could pass for the character shown in the image apart from two things. One is the broken hammer top I said about, the other was the helmet didn’t have that little dragon on top.

This figure is in fact, CP2 – 3 ‘Olaf Thorginson, Dwarf Hero‘ from ‘Bryan Ansell’s Heroic Adventures Starter set‘.. Or maybe ‘Odan Grimbeard, Dwarf Hero‘. It was first released in the 1983 CP2 set (which is Citadel Miniatures Presents) but later the were released as part of RAFM company (which were a Canadian distributor for mostly Ral Partha and Citadel Miniatures), who released them as a line of ‘Bryan Ansell Miniatures’ and mixed to the two dwarves names. One thing which slightly worried me is this figure.. has some white-ish marking on it which… oh dear, is that Lead Rot I see? but it’s very minor so hopefully a bit of a scrub and then priming will deal with.

In order to replace the Missing Hammer top.. I look through what I got. the first thing which came to hand was a Metal Hammer top. Yay. It’s bigger then what is shown in the image and what this figure first came with but looks more the thing for an ancient powerful warhammer. It’s pretty blocky and looks great as a Warhammer. One side has like a meat tenderiser .. do you call them spikes? don’t know. Which also works well for an Ancient Hammer.. the other side is the slight problem. That’s the symbol of Khorne (who funny enough, first appeared in CP1’s Chaos Marauders as Cormanti of Khrone, Evil High Priest, and Arralack, Ogre Priest of Khorne). where this hammer head is from? No clue. Technically it has a bit of the shaft at the top just before where the Hammer joints to the head but that works fine as a bit extra rim. (In fact, a bit of research makes it appear that the Hammer Head is taken from Jes Goodwin’s 021915 ‘Champion of Khorne‘ from the 1989 Realm of Chaos Range, later renumbered for the Champions of Khorne range where he became ‘Warhammer and Bestial Face’). All I need to do is file off that icon.

Now.. if you haven’t figured it out, I’ve decided that as Thorgrim Branedimm is the first Warhammer Character, I wanna make a Mini of him. I had hopped to have gotten a bit more work on this figure right now but, some minor delays (mostly with the helmet) and … It’s not on top of my list, but it has atleast been started.