Citadel's Fantasy Tribe orcs and D&D

All Gygaxed up: orc chieftain with sword and flail (centre)

This is a post that may well interest no one. And its conclusions are a little, "Well, duh!". But here goes.

I've long thought that Citadel's marvellous Fantasy Tribe orcs from the early 80s were designed specifically for Dungeons and Dragons rather than for any other purpose. They're certainly not Tolkien's orcs: they're too tall, for one thing, and they've often got long, protruding faces or upturned snouts, as well as a bizarre array of dentistry: tusks like those of a boar or a walrus.

Note the dentistry to either side of the bodyguard with battleaxe.

Now, on the one hand, this is obvious. The Fantasy Tribe range predates Warhammer, and the genesis of that game has been well documented as a means to get people to buy more Citadel miniatures than they'd need for a dungeon crawl.

Later in the 80s, when Citadel acquired the licence for Middle Earth miniatures, its orcs changed in appearance, with some becoming noticeably shorter and more bow-legged, and a larger number of bows

But I think there's a fair bit of evidence that the Perry twins - or someone else at Citadel - was paying a fair bit of attention to to the descriptions of D&D orcs as set out in the 1979 Monster Manual. Look at how the Monster Manual describes orc armament:

And look at the weaponry of the Fantasy Tribe range here or below:

(From here)

It's not an exact match: the Fantasy Tribe range includes an orc with a mace and one with a sword. But it's pretty close. All the Monster Manual variations are covered (barring the absence of an axe as a sidearm for the crossbow and polearm guys), including such combinations as "sword & flail", "axe & spear,  "sword & spear" and "axe & bow" (the archer has an axe tucked into his belt).

Note, too, that the rarest combinations ("sword & flail" and "sword & battleaxe") are assigned to Citadel's (sword & flail) and bodyguard (sword and battleaxe - always a two-handed weapon in D&D). And of course the Monster Manual tells us that orc chiefs have 5-30 bodyguards, so I think we can spot the provenance of those titles too.

And what of the other Fantasy Tribe ranges? Well, the dwarfs show the influence of the Monster Manual even more clearly:

(From here)

The first seven before the standard bearer match up to their Monster Manual equivalents perfectly - and the "chieftain in plate mail w. sword" nods to the note about "dwarfs above normal level".

But all of this only deepens the mystery of the Fantasy Tribe gnolls. By the time of Warhammer's first edition, the "gnolls" had been rebranded "great goblins". They might have passed muster as the original D&D's gnolls, who were possibly a "cross between gnomes and trolls". But they were nothing like the hulking hyena-men of the Monster Manual. Nor were they armed accordingly. So, given the Monster Manual's clear imprint on the orc and dwarf ranges, it's a bit of a puzzle that the gnolls were so defiantly free from its influence.