I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it now: Warhammer’s heart of dark fantasy didn’t die when Age of Sigmar injected fresh color and quirk into the setting in 2015; it just evolved into weird new forms. And the latest of those forms – giant Skaven daemon character Vizzik Skour, Prophet of the Horned Rat – is a gloriously Satan-flavored model that vindicates my shadowy, ever-challenged faith in Games Workshop as much as it whispers in my dreams.
If that comes across a little dramatic, well, so did Vizzik when GW revealed it in an Age of Sigmar preview livestream on Saturday – behold:
Of all the Age of Sigmar armies, the perfidious ratmen of the Skaven have always appealed hugely to me for two main reasons (leaving aside the obvious one that they’re hilarious, wriggly rat-people).
First, unlike most modern Warhammer factions, they’re refreshingly nasty: unqualified, unmitigated, un-humanized villains. I’m generally strongly in favor of more nuanced, ethically and politically conscious faction lore in Warhammer – but there’s an undeniable joy in including a faction who’re simply complete and total bastards.
It’s not because I want to feel hate for them (I don’t, they’re fictional rats), but simply because it adds a unique source of absurd humor and genuine dread in equal measure.
Second, they have delicious undertones of body horror and eldritch horror which scratch a surprising number of my psychological itches at once. Skaven are material creatures, but they dwell in their own extradimensional, subterranean realm, and tunnel up inside your castle walls without warning.
They’re servants of Chaos, broadly, but serve themselves just as much. They’re very real, solid combatants – but they’re also the skittering inside the walls, the creeping rot in the back of your mind. They’re malevolence, hunger, and greed, but they’re also degradation, filth, and entropy. They do the Warhammer Chaos ‘thing’, but they do it very much their own way, and I love that.
Which brings us back to Vizzik: it (for it is an ‘it’) embodies those two themes more strongly than any of the other, equally exciting, new Skaven models GW has unveiled since Age of Sigmar 4th edition dropped in July.
Described by GW’s designers as “a manifestation of the Great Horned Rat in his ascendant form as a new Chaos God”, Vizzik is a towering daemonic beast – apparently comparable in size and form to Skreech Verminking (that’s him in the image below) and the existing Skaven Verminlords, with an eight-horned head and long, barbed tail.
Much of Vizzik’s evocativeness comes from its pose: with one hand placing weight on a long, gnarled, rune-engraved ‘Gnawstaff’, and one clawed foot planted forwards onto a wrecked wall, it’s literally climbing up out of the earth – inviting us to picture the glowing green rupture it’s emerging from, and living torrents of rats flowing out between its feet.
Oddly, I think it’s Vizzik’s face that most puts me in mind of the Devil of medieval romantic art: the six massive, spiraling horns are suitably goat-like, recalling those of the Verminlords we know and love, but the two dinky little ones in the forehead look more cartoonishly human-luciferian. They remind me of depictions of Cherubael, the Daemonhost companion of Inquisitor Eisenhorn in Dan Abnett’s celebrated Warhammer 40k books.
We may not know an awful lot about Vizzik’s personal lore just yet, but as any good poet will tell you, just a few words can evoke a vast amount of powerful imagery – and I don’t know about you, but WarCom’s gorgeous phrase “A protean daemon of ruin emerged from the heart of the Masterburrow” sent a few shivers down my spine.
In my 20 years or so of Warhammering, moments of simultaneous artistic stimulation and the joy of horror have more often come from reading Horus Heresy books, or learning about the weirder, darker Warhammer 40k factions, than they have from Age of Sigmar. The arrival of Vizzik Skour onto the scene is a very welcome exception – and I cannot wait to paint this monstrosity.
Source: Wargamer
