This week, Warhammer Age of Sigmar‘s newest army, the tusk mouthed, big hatted Helsmiths of Hashut, make their big debut. And, while I knew I was going to have a bundle of fun painting Games Workshop’s hellishly rejuvenated Chaos Dwarfs, what I didn’t expect was that I’d fall in love with their repulsive lore. The Helsmiths, you see, are absolute, unmitigated bastards. And I adore them for it.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a Warhammer setting we’re talking about: all the Age of Sigmar armies are awful in some way, shape, or form. Arguably, AoS makes its deliberate morass of mutually assured immorality even clearer than the Warhammer 40k factions do, because every army sits in one of four ‘Grand Alliance’ categories – Order, Chaos, Destruction, and Death – and each of them is about as charitable and idealistic as it sounds. It’s Warhammer; even the goodies are only goodies relatively speaking.
The Helsmiths of Hashut, though, contain almost no shades of gray. They’re horrible, twisted, bloodthirsty, narcissistic, nihilistic pieces of shit who care only about their own power and supremacy, and will serve those aims at any cost, up to and including burning all the mortal realms, and everyone in them, in the fires of their ambition.
Aside from their fabulous drip, they have no redeeming features to speak of. Even their ‘tragic’ origin story, such as it is, yields them little sympathy from me. These are the dwarfs (Duardin) who refused to abandon their treasure halls and join forces with other races when the Age of Chaos swamped the realms, instead sealing themselves in with rune magic, hunkering down with their gold and their racial pride.
As food started running out, and daemons came ever closer to breaching their hidey holes, the Zharrdron’s survival tactic was to pledge themselves to the lone Dwarf ancestor god aligned with Chaos, the bull headed fire god Hashut. He taught them to use daemons as fuel for their industry and war machines, in exchange for their eternal worship – which would, of course, require a steady stream of pain, murder, and devastation to provide the soul-fuel for their new empire.
Except for a few “holdout clans” (who became the first victims of the Helsmiths’ ascendancy) these guys chose their dark path, knowing the cost would be an insatiable quest to wreak pain and death on others and ravage all the worlds’ natural resources. There’s no sense in the new Battletome’s 40 pages of lore that they’re particularly remorseful about it.
Quite the opposite, in fact: in their minds, everything they’ve done was forced unfairly on them by outsiders, and the daemonic powers they’ve gained through committing atrocities only prove how inherently superior they are to all other races. They’re full of the pathetic, weaponized victimhood that’s fuelled the darkest days, and deeds, of real world humanity.
They’re not greenskins, yoked to a pathological, uncontrollable need to destroy. The villainous necromancer Nagash hasn’t entrapped them into his nefarious service with an unbreakable curse of undeath. They’re just the worst Dwarfs there are, completely committed to doing as much evil as possible, and proud of it.
As properly hateable factions go, that’s already a pretty strong resume. But what really gets my ‘love to hate it’ senses tingling is that the Helsmiths are a delightfully unsubtle, lightly satirical send-up of the evils of unregulated capitalism and Ayn Rand style libertarian ideals. Stay with me here.
See, Zharrdron society is something of a ‘social Darwinist’ paradise where a few individuals at the top enjoy extreme wealth and influence, while everyone else is climbing a cut-throat hierarchical ladder hoping to supplant them. Your social status comes from your individual power, and your individual power comes from a combination of your talents for daemon magic, personal ambition, and calculating brutality.
Everybody hates each other, everybody’s in debt to someone, and while there is theoretically an entrenched upper class of ‘royal families’, it’s just a veneer over a merciless, magical meritocracy. According to the Battletome, those ‘royal blooded’ families regularly adopt lowborn Duardin children in secret, just because they’re magically powerful and therefore valuable. Might is everything, and – to quote a mediocre book I wish I didn’t still love, by an author I deplore – “Magic is Might”.
As for their external influence on the realms, the Helsmiths are as obvious a stand-in as you could want for the wanton environmental damage caused by heavy industry and short-sighted capitalist greed.
For unspecified fantasy reasons, the Zharrdron’s evil magic requires rare minerals as raw material as much as it needs the souls of their slaughtered enemies, and they’re more than happy to lay waste to their environment to get them. Wherever their conquering forces go, they leave devastated landscapes, dried up or poisoned rivers, industrial slag, and daemonic sludge in their wake. It’s Saruman burning down Fangorn Forest all over again.
Interestingly, alongside some more minor continuity retcons, Games Workshop has cut out one big problematic part of their previous lore, while keeping the overall evil levels nice and high.
The Helsmiths’ Chaos Dwarf forebears, in what’s now Warhammer the Old World (and also Total War Warhammer 3), were almost identical in lore terms, except that they enslaved thousands of members of other races to fuel their war efforts and daemonic experiments. GW has expunged the slavery part, in favor of having the new Helsmiths draw all their power from shackled daemons, and get it by killing people, plundering natural resources, and corrupting the landscape.
I think that’s an unequivocally good thing. Partly, that’s because Warhammer has a tendency to engender uncritical and militant enthusiasm (in some fans) for their chosen faction, and uncritical militant enthusiasm for people that keep slaves is not something I fancy dealing with in my leisure time.
But mostly, it’s because it gives the Helsmiths focus. It makes them into a more deliberate, pantomime-villain satire of reckless, greedy, power hungry, self assured industrialists who think they’re rich and successful because they’re inherently superior to others, and that’s the way things should be. The evil of the Helsmiths is the evil of bitter, conceited, self interested individualism – and I love them for it.
Am I right, or am I right? Come let me know just how right I am in the free Wargamer Discord community, where we debate all things tabletop with tusks fully bared. Some praise for those gems on my War Despot’s beard decor wouldn’t go amiss either; I’m so very proud of them.