Corvus Belli has two decades experience making science fiction miniatures for its classic skirmish wargame Infinity, and it has honed a style packed with realistic anatomy, incredibly fine detail, and extremely cool sci-fi chrome. But the firm - which started life making small scale historical figures - is packed with history buffs. It's even headed up by a competition winning Historical European Martial Artist skilled in classical fencing and longsword, and it really shows in the remarkable historical realism in the arms and armor in the firm's new fantasy miniature wargame, Warcrow.
HEMA, or Historical European Martial Arts, is a modern discipline that recreates medieval and renaissance fighting styles from writings and diagrams found in historical sources, with training schools, clubs, and tournaments. Three of Corvus Belli's four founders are HEMA practitioners, including the art department manager Carlos Torres.
As Torres explains, "Learning how different historical weapons were used, the mechanics of the human body, the practicalities of hand to hand combat - it's an unparalleled basis when you then are designing fantasy arms and armor".
"A lot of the forms" - the stances of the models holding weapons - "are taken straight from seminal works like Johannes Liechtenauer's 'Zettel'", Torres explains. For those who aren't up on their medieval martial arts treatises, he clarifies that it's "the foundational text for the German Kunst des Fechtens, or Art of Fighting", part of the canon of historical texts that HEMA is based on.
Admittedly, "sometimes proportions are exaggerated for cool factor - like larger weapons and decorations". Warcrow doesn't use 'heroic scale' sculpting, but the parts are large enough to be visible at table distance and not so thin as to be fragile. And as Torres says, "it is a fantasy game after all!"
Still, the commitment to verisimilitude is clearly visible. You'll find a great example in the Feudom models in Warcrow's upcoming new starter set, Song of the Dormant.
The Knight of the Sacred Relic might wear the most plate armor, but "a large part of his torso is protected by a mail shirt" which "gives protection to areas that need to move such as the neck, the arms, and the armpits".
The knee guards - or "poleyns", as Torres helpfully clarifies, have flared wings on the outer side, so "not only do they protect the knee, they make it harder to reach down and cut the hamstring or back of the knee joint". Then there's the "mitt type gauntlets" which "cover four fingers together, the index, middle, ring, and little, while the thumb is armored separately".
Contrast this with the three Guisarmiers, peasant soldiers who naturally don't get such finely made equipment. Rather than mail shirts they wear thick cloth gambesons to protect their torso joints, and no hand protection beyond leather gauntlets - but they are wielding longer-ranged pole-arms compared to the Knight's two-handed hammer.
They might have less metal than their noble superior, but their vital organs are protected by small breast plates, while their "chapelines, whose shape imitates a hat" protect from cavalry sword attacks and projectiles falling from above. And they all warrant a set of "cuisses, greaves, and sabatons - a full set of leg armor, that's indispensable for protecting critical points like the femoral artery".
One other armor detail is very telling - neither of the two female characters, High Priestess Verena of Aurtigard or Inquisitor Morgane of Jauffret, is wearing boob armor. Fantasy art often includes breastplates with molded boob shapes. Now as parade armor, boob plate might work like the sculpted abs of the "muscle cuirasses" of Rome and ancient Greece, projecting an exaggerated, heroic version of the human form.
But it's no good for war - creating a valley-shaped divot in a breastplate creates a trap that directs enemy blows towards the heart, and even if the blow doesn't pierce, the force pressing in on the narrow strip of metal between the two boob cavities could break ribs or crush the sternum.
Which isn't to say that Verena or Morgane aren't feminine. Verena is a classic fantasy priestess, albeit one with greaves under her robes and pauldrons over them who looks like she could take a hit. Morgane is a completely armored warrior like the Knight of the Sacred Relic, but her frame is far smaller, and additional culet plates culet plates "both protect her waist and hips, and help to define them in the model's silhouette".
It's still fantasy and it's still fiction: no-one ever looked this well dressed. And as Torres jokes, not everything has a historical explanation. "Amaury, who comes in the Beyond Song of the Dormant expansion box, has a helmet that I simply cannot explain". But this fantasy is built on a foundation of knowledge about how weapons work and how armor can, and can't protect from them.
It's one of the best starting points for fantasy - the fantastical looks so much more fantastical when it's contrasted against something realistic. And as a happy side effect, it means that every single set of armor and weapon used by humans in Warcrow can be translated directly into cosplay, without any awkward questions like "how the hell am I going to turn my neck?"
If you're excited by the minis in Song of the Dormant, you can pre-order it right now from the Warcrow webstore.