Vlätkrig Special Edition: Amböl Ûlks

From secret forges deep in the Ünterwyld emerge the Amböl Ûlks!

Two Khaötic Mutant Undead Insectoid Warbeasts and one Necro-Shamanic Beast Herder - three brand new, unique, hand drawn, black and white, old school, paper miniatures. 

Inspired by the Umber Hulk of classic D&D and the Ambull of Oldhammer 40k Vlätkrig Special Edition: Amböl Ûlks is designed  for you to print, glue, cut-out and play with your favourite TTRPG and Skirmish Wargame rules in both printable PDF and VTT friendly PNG formats.

Download Vlätkrig Special Edition: Amböl Ûlks free or pay-what-you-want (all contributions gratefully recieved) at https://zhu-industries.itch.io/ambol-ulks

If you want to read a rather rambling account of the creative process of making these, put the kettle on, make a cup of tea and read on, after the jump (it's 2026, does anyone do that on blogs anymore)... 

I've been slowly working on a set of insectoid paper figures for a while, probably larger than the usual number of figures in a Vlätkrig set when I came across Haric Lilred's Paper Miniature Jam on itch.io and thought it would be fun to speed run an element of that set, and settled on the Monstrous Infantry. 

I had loose idea, a mental image, in this case a thing that I can only describe as a Giant Khaös Mutant Undead Antrhopromophic Stag Beetle. Once this vague visual idea has settled, I get to work putting together an inspiration board.

Inspo Board

There are few different approaches to this kind of research phase. One is to gather references, when the end drawing is intended to be 'exactly' that kind of thing, so for example, the number of joints on an insect leg.  Another is more of a mood board, where textures, shapes, visual themes, blend together, but still the idea is to narrow down the design options. Thirdly theres an 'inspo board' which is more there to creatively bounce off, a starting point for exploration rather than a ring-fencing around the idea. It's all too easy to end up subconsciously reproducing something seen elsewhere, especially in genre works, so sometimes it's more than useful to do a deep dive research around the idea to make sure things are genuinely fresh and creative.

As it is, I pulled together some nice anonymous antique fauna etchings of a Stag Beetle and Fiddler Crab - both the males, as these creatures have very strong sexual dimorphism, alongside some genre pieces that connect with these, or feel right alongside the overall image. Stag beetles are a threatened species, but quite common around these parts, and ever since I was small it's always been exciting to see one lumbering along, with their huge mandible-antlers and fragile legs, the very definition of a 'mini-beast'. The Fiddler crabs asymmetry is just so unsual to see in nature, and it's echoes of shield, oversized weapons etc. As an aside, I dare say there's something about chaos, crabs (colloquial term for genital lice) and Slannesh as the deity of sexual anxiety in Warhammer. 

On the genre side we have Dave Sutherland's Umber Hulk from the original Dungeons & Dragons, Tony Ackland's Ambull, from Warhammer 40,000 (which itself is a creature based on the Umber Hulk), Brian Froud's Garthim from The Dark Crystal which was also inspired by Fiddler Crab. Finally a skull masked armoured chaos warrior by Christos Achilleos in a painting entitled "Who Dies First" - which I believe was originally commissioned for a planned but unpublished Games Workshop edition of a game based on the Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks, but ended up just being used to advertise the 60mm plastic figure range, one of which was based on this artwork. I suspect the character was originally designed by Tony Ackland, under direction from Bryan Ansell - Undead Chaos was a big thing in the early 80s that seems to have sadly been vanquished to the discard pile of old-school memes, but underpins a lot of the world of Vlätkrig, and surfaces in the Khaos Deth Swordwraiths and the Vackreth Deoghast.

Alongside the visuals, Vlätkrig also plays with language, so translating stag beetle into my favourite inspiration languages, including Anglo-Romani, Old English and Old Welsh. As it is these didn't get used much and smashed together the gaming references Ambull and Umber Hulk, to create... The Amböl Ûlk.

With all of that floating around, time to get the pencils out:

Amböl Ûlk Sketches

Rough, thumbnail sketches drawn in an A5 sketchbook. Pretty much everything goes through this stage of just scribbling rough ideas, some things stay there, others escape and take on lives of their own. With Vlätkrig I tend to use the mantra of 'first idea is the right idea', rather than developing a lot of different creative options. It's kind of punk like that. Exploring posing on a static - dynamic scale, and features on an exaggerated - natural scale. 

Being a paper miniature design and not a flat illustration, attention to the back of the figure is never an afterthought. Although Stag Beetles have beautiful shiny carapaces, I  wanted to introduce some aposematic 'warning' markings, potentially some cup and circle neolithic scrimshaw, or going back to the moodboard and looking at Chris Achileos's undead warrior,  some kind of spiky 'tribal' glyphic skull to inspire terror and underline the Undead Khaös theme, with some vague stylised Rodney Matthews, Druilette, Tony Ackland inspired vibes. 

The backbone of the creative work done, it's always worth thinking about production early. The original plan was to just release a single Amböl Ûlk for the Paper Mini Jam on itch. Nice and simple. However, even though it would be a 'large monster' on a single A4 sheet it would have left a lot of paper wastage, which runs counter to the grain of environmental awareness that runs through the Vlätkrig project.

page layout

So, the obvious choice looking at the sketches is to just have the two different Amböl Ûlks on the sheet. But then there's a convenient little space at the bottom for... something? To the sketchbook!

This time, rather than just sketching rough ideas, there is a specific space to fill as well, so tried to keep that in mind. Two ideas made sense - one is a herder or handler for the beasts, and the other an objective token or scenic item.

shaman and sceneic sketches

As I've already started work on a Bytlevölk army (more on those later), making a herder, or necromancer, or shaman. I really like the horn blowing guy, but perhaps too much like a 'regimental musician' for marching ranks than someone who is controlling monsters, so save that one for later. For the scenic objective tokens - well Stag Beetles eat rotten fruit and mate / lay eggs in rotten wood, so some of that, along with a monolith, perhaps decorated with mandibles etc. 

Obviously a necro-shaman-herder is more entertaining than a pile of mouldy apples or a log, so decision made, time to start drawing up the artwork...

final pencils of the Ambul Ulks

The males pose is more dynamic, defensive and interrupted, perhaps about to slash with his small claw, rather than simply aggressive, and the female more solid and ponderous. 

As the dimensions were set at layout (based on the rough sketches), drawing up to size, in this case 2-up or twice the finished print size. Vlätkrig artwork is always drawn on A4 5mm grid paper, using staedtler tradition pencils. It used to be WH Smiths A4 graph paper, but since the death and rebirth into TG Jones, I couldn't. Instead turned to education stationary suppliers Rhino (who donate some profits to saving actual, Rhinoceros) - whose school exercise books I use for various note-keeping. No doubt as much a nod to Tolkien's initial drafts of The Lost Tales in cast off exercise books as my own nostalgia. Literally using old school stationary - the same materials I would have had when I was 10 and first got into Fantasy. It's an intimate, personal, nostaglic and thematically relevant materials process, rather than just an attempt to create a surface, it's intentionally constructing an artefact. Again there is something quite punk about that (recording capturing a live, physical playthrough rather than endless takes and mixing), and although highly advanced internet technology is used in the production and distribution of the work, the 'original art' object is a raw, brutalist thing.

pencils for the shaman

As mentioned working on the Bytlevölk, so keep it roughly in scale with those - slightly smaller to reflect his non warrior status. The Bytlevölk are based on the Noble Chafer (a 'priority' species - i.e. in need of conserving), and using them to explore traditional 'rank-and file' uniform and historical troop manoeuvres and miniatures poses, so marching, receiving charge, charging etc. split along traditional classifications Infantry (Heavy/Light) Ranged Infantry (Heavy/Light), Cavalry etc. At it's core the idea is just drawing a line between chitin, exoskeletons and plate armour.

The shaman has a herding stick with an Amböl Ûlk mandible to goad them along, another mandible around its neck as a charm, robes made of wings, and a rather large broadsword strapped to his back incase he loses control and things go very wrong. His pose reflects that of the male Amböl Ûlk - suggesting a dynamic connection between the two, some kind of magical, psychic puppeteering going on.

With the pencil work for the front of the characters done, flipped them over, traced the main features onto two new sheets and penciled in the backs. I have to admit I use a light-box for that job. It would be more old-school to sellotape them to a dreary rain-stained classroom window and trace them off the bleary grey light reflected from the concrete ad tarmac playgorund. Alas. It is still a small conceit to a physical graphic design craft practice that is almost dead in the age of what is termed 'digital art', where just click a button to flip horizontal and push pixels around, or just instruct an AI to do the same, but that's all just indeterminate magnetic ones and zeros not a thing of ink and paper.

All the rough outline and pencil-work done, it's time to start inking, using Berol Handwriting pens, for more truth-to-materials old school authenticity. These aren't as horrible as I remember them, but also, as times have moved on they haven't been manufactured in the UK since the mid 1990s. Unfortunately unlike my daily workhorse technical pens - Rotring Isographs - the Berol pens are disposable, and so not very environmentally sound. I'm experimenting with making them little more eco-friendly by refilling them with drawing inks - unlike a fine liner, which nibs tend to wear down before they run out of ink, the nibs of a Berol are designed to be used by heavy handed children and very hard wearing.

Front inks

Back inks

Aposematic - 'warning' markings across the elytron and pronotum (wing-casing and 'shoulders')  resembling a glyphic Sunskull ov thee Ûnterwyld. If you're thinking along the lines of egyptian scarab symbology, dung, sun beetles, global warming, the undead animal apocalypse, then you're in the right area.

The finishing of the inks marks a significant transition point - although the design and layout was always guiding the creative process to the end result - the sizing, the spacing, the quantity of elements - the focus shifts from creating individual unique art objects - physical drawings of ink and graphite on paper, to the global distribution of infinitely reproducible craft objects. Walter Benjamin recoils in horror.

The production process begins with scanning them to digital files in 1200dpi greyscale, and then filtering out the 5mm pixel grid to leave the linework. A betrayal of our brutalist, materials led aesthetic principles for an idealised mass consumable image? Perhaps, but there's enough to contend with the honest inkwork, fantastical and labour.

The advantages of doing layout before art is that the figures invariably all fit on the page, and it's very quick to go from scanned image to final PDF, rather than playing around moving everything. Less time sat at a computer pushing pixels around the better. Doing the layout in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. 

Time for a first run prototype, fire up the laser-printer:

Prototype print edition 1 of 1

Printing out, black and white laser toner on slightly distressed A4 80gsm paper. I like to imagine Vlätkrig is generally being printed out on office printers on the sly, while the Print Monitors back is turned. But these days with office closures and working from home, probably not. Nontheless, using basic office paper stock, nothing fancy, making accessible. It all fits. 

Pre-glue folding

Separating 'ranks' scoring the folds with the dull side of the blade, testfolding, ready to glue (PVA) and then leave under a large stack of heavy wargaming books overnight while the glue cures. This is one disadvantage of using lightweight paper stock is that when using wet glue, the paper can buckle and generally misbehave. That's why leaving overnight under weighted boards is critical, the paper dries flat. The 80gsm paper is now two substrates making the figure 160gsm, which is actually quite nice, still feels like 'paper' rather than card-stock.

Cutting out

Cutting out the figures from the glued sheets using a scalpel. I think of cutting as drawing with a knife. I like to leave a 3-4mm white space, and use the cuts to draw and emphasise the forms, rather than disguise them in a rectangle or simplified cloud.  Personal taste, probably  informed by animator Ivor Wood's work on the 1976 Film Fair adaptation of Paddington Bear, and the joys of glow-in-the-dark Letraset Space Adventures series of Action Transfers and gives them a suitable 'pop' against any background.  For me this is when the characters finally come alive, no longer an idea, a design, a drawing, an artwork or an illustration but a weird, two dimensional object, a paper wargaming flat, drawing a line of heritage back to Robert Lewis Stephenson's Paper Theatre and 1960s fantasy wargaming pioneer Tony Bath.

Around this time I realised I hadn't named the things, and would need to add the little name tags. 

• Deþurdä ("death herder") - the necro-shamanic Amböl herder of the Bytlavölk. 
• Amböl Ûlkeoröt - the male undead khaös Amböl Ûlk, with enlarged claw and antlers, gendered suffix from the Old Engish for stag - Heorot - stag (also the Meadhall in Beowulf). I was going to name him Jeremiah Beetle as a pun on Jeremy Beedle a 1980's television presenter with one hand larger than the other, but thought better of it.  
• Amböl Ûlkda - a female undead khaös Amböl Ûlk, gendered suffix from the Old English da for doe, a deer, a female deer. 

Names in place all that was left was to herd the little creatures outside to take photographs of the prototypes for the PDF 'cover' and project pages. The result of which is at the top of the page. And that's the end of that journey, all that's left is to output the Virtual Table-top 32 bit pngs with their little drop-shadow, produce the images for itch.io, write the description and upload the files.

Amböl Ûlkeoröt VTT token

Hope you've enjoyed reading this little behind the scenes look at the creative process, if you'd like to see the final product and craft your own set of Khaös Mutant Insectoid Monsters you can download VSE: Amböl Ûlks for free at https://zhu-industries.itch.io/ambol-ulks