Warcrow has a fantastic range of miniatures, a deep fantasy world, and quick-playing game mechanics, but do you know what it has been missing? An army of dwarves! Every fantasy wargame and Warhammer rival needs an army of dwarves - it's just the rules. Well, that omission is being put right: the dwarves of Mounthaven have been part of Warcrow's lore from the very beginning, present in the dungeon crawler board game Warcrow Adventures, and now Corvus Belli has revealed the first new models that will make them into a full wargame faction.
Corvus Belli coyly announced the new faction via its subscriber email on Tuesday. The video below, presented by Warcrow's lore maestro Hoopoe, states that Mounthaven will be the firm's "big Adepticon release", and an Action Pack full of short stacks is on its way. If you're new to Warcrow, Action Packs are complete warband-in-a-box sets, which so far have each contained ten models.
Images and videos on the updated faction lore page for Mounthaven give us a glimpse of the minis. There's a set of sturdy dwarven warriors, wearing diamond shaped scale mail and carrying shields and axes - a classic look for any dwarf.
The Orichalcum Smith is considerably different. This is a dwarf capable of working with the magically-resonant metal that is the source of magic in Warcrow's world Lindwurm. These smiths "have the ability to perceive the essence of any object or living being and then replicate it on a sheet of pure orichalcum" - and judging by the miniature photograph, they realise that as a form of metal-folding origami.
And then there's Olga, Princess of Mounthaven. If you were wondering whether female dwarfs in the world of Lindwurm have beards, we seem to have an answer - some of them get sideburns. It's a strong look. Overall the new range seems to have a distinctive identity, but not so different from other dwarfs that you couldn't use the character models in a Warhammer the Old World faction - though we don't yet know how they'll scale up with other ranges.
One big difference between Mounthaven and other fantasy dwarves is that these are not a fading race. Lindwurm is caught in one of its periodic ages of turmoil, when the star known as Warcrow brings the power of magic to the fore and leads to terrible strife between nations. The dwarves call this new epoch the Last War, and they are guided into it by a Master Plan laid down by their ancestors. They're fighting not just to survive, but to emerge as rulers of the world of Lindwurm.
A new narrative campaign will accompany the Mounthaven action pack, this time called "The Last of the Wilds". A separate blog post gives some hints of what to expect. Sylvia Waurda, the chief archivist of Mounthaven, has commandeered an old civic library in a border town to help consolidate local archives of lore - and in the process she's uncovered something quite unexpected within its basement, an ancient and mysterious document. What that may be we don't yet know, but she has written to her friend the princess Olga, requesting her presence.
Sylvia also makes mention that the region is under constant threat from raiding Sÿenann wood elves, suggesting who the opposing force for the narrative campaign could be.
What's your favorite range of dwarf miniatures, and why? Come and let us know in the Wargamer Discord community. If it's Citadel miniatures, you have to specify which range you mean - Games Workshop has been releasing dwarves for longer than it's been publishing Warhammer. For a round up of the best stories on Wargamer each week, make sure you're signed up to our regular newsletter.