Interview with Trevor Hammond

For those of you not in the know, during the 1980's Trevors Hammonds work was regularly featured in Games Workshop publications such as White Dwarf, Warlock, Black Sun, as well as advertising. Hammonds visuals injected both a sense of humour and a grimey atmosphere into articles on wide ranging roleplaying subjects from assassination to zombies and everything in-between.

Trev kindly took time out to answer a few questions and put pen to paper...

The Black Sun: Issue 2 (Sept-Oct 1984)

So after many weeks of begging around the interwebs and generally hassling GW fandom  I finally managed to get my hands on a single copy of the Black Sun fanzine. And what a A5 black and white beauty it is...

Firstly the awesome cover by Trevor Hammond introducing a host of characters from the GW Mail Order Catacombs. The Black Sun is a parallel universe where GW mailorder is a dungeon complex rules over by the slave-lord Zlargh the Mighty, and populated by depraved Man-things,  zombie-ghoul like slaves. The editorial is an introduction to this otherworld of Zlargh the Slavelord, off to holiday in Skegness.

Tales from the Crypt comprises news of Games Workshops games developers and other industry news. Albie Fiore (best known for Field Factory / FiendFolio and the Guardian crossword) finishing off Golden Heroes (which is now currently available as Squadron UK) and Ian Marsh starting work on a Doctor Who RPG. As far as I know, GW never published this, but Marsh did have his TimeLord RPG released by Virgin Books in 1991, and now gives it away for free on the interwebs, not sure about its relation to the work in progress mentioned here, but as it shares an author and a subject it probably is a version of the same rule-set. Quite amazing that these two old British titles are still around today...

Next up is a comic strip by Trevor Hammond entitled Torture Tips, wherein Gunatha misunderstands water torture and ends up smacking a hobbit round the back of the head with a bucket. This is not Hammonds finest hour, Gunatha seems to have the same fixed expression in every panel, and there's a lack of coherence to the whole thing, nonetheless it has an early Viz-like 6th Form quality.

The centrefold comprises a very long review / description of Ringworld by the Chaosium. It really does make it sound like an excellent product (as most Chaosium tended to be back in the day) and goes into much more detail than the WD review of the same article.

Lord Zlargh's Catacomb Clearout features a list of explicitly 'end of line or slightly damaged' and implicitly 'taking up space and not selling well' RPG items, all typeset at a jaunty 45 degree angle.

The Castle of Cross Moles - a brilliant single page spoof on the solo adventure "The Castle of Lost Souls" by Dave Morris which was running in White Dwarf at the time. It's satire is actually quite funny - including berating the player for cheating (claiming they had an object which doesn't exist) and a combat system that allows you to "pretend you won anyway", the fact you're playing an ancient race of Warrior Moles fighting against the evil horde of Necroworms just makes it all the better.

Gutter Press column reviews various RPG fanzines. I shall, for your erudition and entertainment list the titles: Tempestuous Orifice #5, Misers Horde #7, Journal of the Senseless Carnage Society #6, Necropolis #1, Dead Elf #1, Morrigan #2, SEWARS, Demons Drawl #6. Yes indeed.

Finally Agaroths Mindflayer, a quiz section that makes very little sense.

Frankly, the obscurity, cockeyed humour and unique styling make this pure collectors-crack. I'll be pawning my shoes and hassling people on public transport "oi, mate, got any Black Sun?" any day soon.

Rabid Shadows: Trevor Hammond - Lord of the Black Sun

White Dwarf 48 / Zlargh Slave Lord of the Black Sun

Trevor Hammonds brilliant graphic use of black and white, manic energy and preference for half-orc-half-dead, double-barrelled subject matter summoned to half-life a darkly comic, grimly violent and depravedly supernatural world of... the Games Workshop Mail Order department.

Opening a copy of White Dwarf in the early 80's meant getting punched in the face with Trev's eye-blistering and irreverent mirror-world, where Zlargh the Slave Lord ruled over his game-despatching minions Ugbash Facesplitter, Ted and Granny. By illustrating the page one GW mail-order ad, month in, and month out, Trevor created a secondary cover, an alternative piece which inadvertantly set the tone for the whole mag. Trevor reflected a kind of irreverent sub-cultural undercurrent now sadly lacking from the mainstream of fantasy gaming, which is all too often a drab po-faced wacom-painted vision.  I like to imagine Hammonds was drawn with black bic and custom chiselled felt-tip marker pens stolen from WH Smith.

White Dwarf 62

As much as John Blanche incorporated some punk aesthetic in his work, there was always something slightly decadent and fetishistic about it, slightly new-romantic. Hammonds vision on the other hand is authentically yobbish, grimy and extreme. Whilst there are slicker artists out there ploughing vaguely similar black angled territory (thinking of Simon Bisley's b+w work on the ABC Warriors) it really does not get any more Hardcore Old-School British Dungeon-Punk than Hammonds world. You can almost hear the low fidelity crypt-recorded proto-blackened-death metal by simply looking at this stuff. Perhaps that's the superficial similairty Paul McHales cover for Boltthrowers debut album In Battle There is No Law, or maybe the caffeine...


As well as many of the spot illustrations in White Dwarf (mostly for AD&D and Runequest) Hammond also provided covers for the give-away GW fanzine Black Sun which accompanied White Dwarf (anyone know where I can get those?), alongside some White Dwarf subscription ads and also handful of monsters in the Out of the Pit column and a couple of articles in the Fighting Fantasy magazine Warlock - and that's about the whole published corpus of his work. Hammonds art stopped appearing in White Dwarf shortly after Citadel bought Games Workshop  and moved the offices from London to Nottingham, and I've yet to find any published art credited to him after this time, the Pen and Paper RPG databases list is unfortunately very incomplete.

White Dwarf 73

Whilst Hammonds aesthetic is missing in the daily art-department duties of Games Workshop, I'd like to think somewhere the accursed spirit of Ugbash lives on, perhaps enshrined in the Skull Throne of the usurper Khorne, waiting for the blood moon to rise and lead his fellow slavelords to victory!