Hello Dear Heroes Infinite Subscriber!
We are nearing the Christmas and Holiday Season!
November also begins one of our busiest times of the year at Raging Heroes!
And so, what about you?
What will you be doing during this Holiday Season? Will you be traveling? Will you spend time with family and friends?
On our end, with Christmas approaching, we wanted to give you an early gift!
Dwarves??
You might remember me saying that I was not sure if I would work on Dwarves.
But you know, in the end, we're making Heroes infinite for YOU, and you asked us for Dwarves. Repeatedly.
In fact, when we were starting to plan the Summer and Fall releases back in May, we ran a poll to ask you your wishes for the coming months, and many of you, more than ever before, asked for Fantasy Dwarves.
So I decided to finally take the plunge on a subject I had never tackled before!
An ambitious desire…
As I always do, I began by going back to your feedback and I saw that Arcanepunk had been a recurring ask that kept on growing throughout the past year.
And as I was looking for a unique angle for our Heroes Infinite Dwarves, I thought: “This is it! Let’s give some of our Dwarves a touch of Arcanepunk.”
But while I was working on this Fantasy Dwarves project, after all the concept work had already been done for the release and sculpts were coming in, we ran another poll to find out what you wanted for the upcoming Winter season. And among the over 900 answers we received, many of you said: Sci-Fi Dwarves!
And so, suddenly, I was like: “Aggghhh, can I make all of that work together at once?”
As we saw November and Black Friday coming up, we actually thought that this could be the opportunity to try and come up with some kind of Sci-Fi/Fantasy double release…
We worked on that very hard. We developed super cool concepts, and even a few early sculpts.
But we had to face the truth: it was way too much for us to try and output inside a single month… So we shifted our focus back to give you the best possible Arcanepunk Fantasy Dwarves that we could.
And there you have it: the first chapter of the Dwarves story at Heroes Infinite / Raging Heroes.
For now, they are these proud, strong and extremely ingenious Fantasy Dwarves.
But the future of these guys now rests on your shoulders! Will you want to see Dwarves in a Sci-fi version? Or will you want more of the Arcanepunk ones? As always, please tell us in the comments below!
Please note:
There will be a separate blog post giving feedback on your Winter release suggestions! We wanted to wait until after we had released the Dwarves collection before posting anything about that Winter Poll.
Challenges make the best stories:
How does a team that usually creates lithe dancer-like models create small strong-bodied dwarves and still keep the style that our customers love?
This is the question we asked each other, and everyone came up with sketches and ideas to make this release a success.
We looked at some of our previous releases from both the Heroes Infinite and Raging Heroes lines. Doing this definitely helped when adding our own spin on Dwarves.
One thing was very clear to us: there are not enough Dwarves female characters in this world!
Going back to Raging Heroes…
One of our inspirations came from the line of models that started it all: the Jailbirds from our physical miniatures line at Raging Heroes. This incredible set is about women fighting against all odds to survive in a world that tries to control them. But they cannot be controlled, and everything, from their hair to their weapons, shows this. They always improvise and use what they find to create what they need.
We carried over that idea coming from a very different universe into this present Fantasy release. We brought back several hairstyles. More importantly, we extended to our dwarven female characters the Jailbirds’ personalities and charisma, together with their skills at leveraging their natural resources, wits and intelligence to win in battle.
We also wanted to add a spin to the traditional tribal and barbarian themes found in many fantasy games. We looked to our Blood Tribes at Raging Heroes for inspiration so as to summon the wild and strong spirit we wanted to give to some of our Dwarven females.
The tribal-inspired female dwarves in this collection show strength, bravery, and reliance on the natural world around them.
They are powerful, fast, and ferocious, especially on the battlefield.
“Hell hath no fury…”
All along the work I did on that release, I had this saying in my head: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”. I know this saying usually refers to a woman who has been romantically betrayed. But I thought that this idea of the power of women’s wrath was a perfect inspiration for our dwarven female fighters!
Also, I thought about having some of them use massive magically powered powerfists: slamming down adversaries who have done them any kind of wrong is a great way to express that you should not try to play them, or else…
I also really like the Ram Forge Spirit. It perfectly blends two core ideas of this entire project: taking the raw force of nature and totemic animals and combining it with the ultimate expression of dwarven brilliance! This results in an incredible piece of Arcanepunk technology designed and brought to life by the Dwarves' Engineers, Mechanics, Warsmiths and Alchemists.
And the result:
We think the work paid off, and you can check out our Release Video here!
Do you want to know more about these incredible characters? Then join our social media pages, where we post even more information about each character, competitions, and daily updates.
Facebook, our Facebook Painting Group, Discord, Instagram, Twitter, and our new TikTok!
What will you do with these models?
We have a few suggestions:
- ‘Not-so-classic’ dwarves for Fantasy Tabletop Games
- Enemies who’ll challenge your party in ANY Tabletop game
- NPCs in the Ebberon setting to bring more technological Dwarves to the game
- Arcanepunk Dwarves or classic Dwarves to any of your Fantasy wargame armies
- Enemies in the Spelljammer Setting as high-flying dwarven pirates
There are so many possibilities…
What stories will you create?
Tell us what you will use these models for! We want to hear your ideas and listen to the stories you create! What worlds will you build? What battles will you win?
- Benoit Guerville
