Battle Masters: Rethinking Iconography

Further on the journey of remastering the MB Games / Games Workshops board wargame Battle Masters.

Having played two games I'd already decided that the addition of the move frequency stat needed to be done for further testing purposes. This means updating and reprinting the Battle Masters: Pocket Edition Prototype and also creates an opportunity to revisit the rest of what is going on.

The main problem with the icons as they currently stand, is that they don't really help communicate the tokens game role to the player. A great example of that is the Chaos Archer, which is just the head of a guy with a mohawk. The second problem is that several aren't very easily distinguished from each other, the Man-at-Arms and Crossbowman just look the same, as do the Chaos Knights and Chaos Lords.

What do you mean, you're not thinking 'archer' right now?

So my first approach is to draw full-body figures that attempt to visually communicate a bit more about the troops, and help differentiate between them, more like the icons of traditional Fantasy Hex and Chit wargames.

Rather than fiddle around with detailed character designs, at this stage I just want to block out the basic shapes and ideas, to ensure the information is being carried forward and the images are readable. Has to be remembered that the tokens are only ½".  Once the basic concepts figured out, the design silhouettes are settled, these can be worked up, detail defined and forms finalised - still plan on using white-on-black for the Evil side and black-on-white for the good.  Overall  have the forces of  forces of light facing right and the forces of darkness facing left, going against natural reading direction, rather than with it. Not only does this makes them more sinister, but reinforces the difference between the two sides.

So these are my first thumbnail roughs of a "Fantasy Dark Ages" silhouettes for Battle Masters, ditching the late middle ages, central European Warhammer Empire tropes. I'd be lying if I said I spent more time drawing them than writing this blog-post. I wanted to visually express that the Knight gets more moves than the Lord, so the Knights horse is at a trot, and the Lords is standing to attention, as well as detail the arms and armour, the crossbow doesn't quite read as clearly as the archer, but there is no getting away from that without replacing the whole figure with just a weapon icon, which is just a bit too abstract. 

The Evil Side of Evil Darkness, presents a great opportunity to go back to the original imagery of Warhammer from the early 80s rather than the tired and derivative 1990s designs that Battle Masters was based on. The silhouettes are largely inspired by 'pre-slotta' figures, such as the Chaos Broo for the Beastmen, and the gangly C16 Orcs, an C30 Amazonian Tribeswoman seems to have crept in as the Archer, and the shadow of Uthmog Elvenblade makes an appearance as the Chaos Warrior. In our games Gorefist has become a female character, so a Lady McDeath, Morganna Le Fay,  Narnian White Witch type or perhaps something inspired by John Blanches gothic-punk use of fetish tropes. I realise this is fallen into the trap of portraying the feminine as irrational 'chaos' but there we are.

And there I stopped. 

The roughly drawn figures all seem to work as intended, a bit of rifinement up here and there and they'd be done. But something wasn't quite right, and it bothered me, so the rough thumbnails were put aside, while other more pressing matters were attended to. Then it occured to me that the problem wasn't in the drawings, but the design direction of Battle Masters itself.

Battle Masters presents a conflict between a multi-racial, diverse force (orcs, ogres, goblins, beastmen, men) against a mono-racial ethnostate (men men and more men), and uses the cliched tropes of 90s fantasy to code the ethnostate as goodly 'human', and the diverse state as an 'unnatural' evil. The arbitrary nature of this coding is made all the more clear when there are no mechanical differences between a Beastman and an Orc, they just look different, wheras the Men are only visually differentiated when there is a mechanical requirement. So the representative scheme across the two sides is not equally applied - and diversity is only used to represent evil. Looking at the lines of silhouettes of the two factions made the uniformity of the good and the diversity of the evil even more apparent.

This good vs. evil = ethnostate vs. diversity mytheme isn't one that I'm interested in reproducing, at all. In fact, quite the contrary, but not only are such clumsy ideological constructions tedious in their own right, the heroic portrayal of monocultures have little to do with the traditions of Fantasy literature.

Pauline Baynes | Fellowship of the Ring

In Tolkien's Middle-earth it is the multi-racial, multi-ethnic alliance of Men, Elves, Dwarves, Eagles, Ents, Hobbits, Woodwose, Oathbreakers, Rohirrim and Gondorians, that stand against the evil mono-racial ethnostate of Orcish tribalism and their Nazgûlian supernatural overlords.

Pauline Baynes | Aslans Army

In C.S. Lewis, Narnia,  we have centaurs, satyrs, fauns, and a menagerie of talking animals against an equally diverse roster of Evil under the White Witch (except the profoundly racist A Horse and His Boy).

Druillet | Mercenary Army

In Flaubert's Salammbô the mono-cultural Carthage is portrayed as the corrupt and spiteful enemy and it is the leaders of the multi-racial Mercenery Army of Campanians, Greeks,  Iberians, Lusitanians, Balearians, Gaetulians; Gauls, Libyans, and Nomads, who garner our sympathy.

I could go on, from the expected diversity of the average Dungeons & Dragons party, to the diverity described in the original Warhammer scenarios, Sven, McDeath, Lichemaster, to the heroes of Star Wars vs. the monolthic Empire, to the multicultural crew of Star Treks vatious Enterpises. Different people work together to overthrow evils of the world, rather than evil being whatever appears to threatens a single homogenous group.

Despite all this, we ended up with this insipid racial monoculture nonsense dominating fantasy wargaming from the 90s onwards, with the Codexes and racially determined Army Books, and here we are with Battle Masters. As I'm re-designing the icons anyway, it seems like a golden opportunity to go back to the literary roots of Fantasy to diversify the racial profile of the Goodly side, and also, perhaps draw the 'technology' more towards the Dark Ages.

Out goes the Mighty Cannon and in comes a mad greybearded wizard with random magic - his rules would be the exact same so his magic would destroy friend and foe alike, a dangerous Odinic wanderer choosing the slain from the battlefield. The Crossbowman becomes a Gnome, drawing on gnomish tinkerers, the Archer an Elf (what else), and the Knight a Centaur.  The King holding up his magic sword as a bare cross might be a little over-egging the Narnian influence (see also Valhalla Rising) and end up looking more like Van Helsing than King Arthur, it may be Joan d'Arc figure to counterbalance Gorefist.

The more diverse line not only looks better (well except my dodgy centaur!) but also allows for a more imaginative fantasy narrative to emerge.  Having almost settled on the concepts for the diversified goodly side, next decision is whether to pull the evil side inline, have the massed uniform  perhaps all Beastmen or all Orcs, or maybe the Undead as they're unequivocally evil (except in Tolkien, of course), and just use variations of weaponry and size to distinguish between the mono-racial forces of darkness.