Gangbusters: TSR's Best Game You Never Played

 

“Gangbusters? What now?”

I hear some of you (younger) gamers ask.

Believe it or not, there was a time before Grand Theft Auto, before Vice City, and before the immortal line, “…here we go again.” A time when games about gangsters doing gangster things didn’t require consoles, modded skins, or five-star wanted levels.

True story.

And beyond that true story sits an incredible game.

Before all that, there was a brief—but brilliant—epoch in tabletop gaming history when TSR (yes, that TSR—the company behind Dungeons & Dragons) published a slew of games that weren’t about elves, dungeons, or beholders. One of the brightest gems in that overlooked crown was a little game called Gangbusters.

Let me tell you about it.

---

The Forgotten Classic 

Released in 1982 and designed by Rick Krebs, Gangbusters is one of the finest games TSR ever produced. A crime-and-corruption sandbox set in the roaring 1920s and ’30s, it offered players a world of Prohibition, tommy guns, crooked cops, backroom deals, and political ambition.

Think The Untouchables, but on your table.
Think Boardwalk Empire—decades before it existed.

At a lean 64 pages, the rules are elegant, tight, and—frankly—better than a lot of what came out of TSR at the time. While Dungeons & Dragons (in all its forms) was soaking up the spotlight and the dollars, Gangbusters quietly delivered a complete, flavorful, and intelligently designed role-playing experience.

And then?

It vanished.

Not because it was bad. Far from it.

It vanished in the whirlwind of TSR’s own making;a company rising fast, flying too close to the sun, and eventually burning itself out in palace intrigue that would’ve made Hamlet roll his eyes. In that mad scramble to expand, monetize, and outproduce the competition, Gangbusters got lost in the shuffle.

A casualty of success.
Like a corpse in a back-alley gutter in Lakefront City.

And that’s a damn shame.

---

Not Just Nostalgia

You can find deep dives elsewhere—YouTube retrospectives, blog series, forum threads, even posts from Rick Krebs himself. That’s not what this piece is about.

This is about design.

More specifically: intentional design.

Gangbusters knew exactly what it was and never flinched. It didn’t try to be all things to all people. It wasn’t built to chase trends or contort itself into whatever TSR thought would sell more boxed sets that quarter.

It was clear.
It was focused.
And it was un-apologetically about one thing: Living, thriving, or dying in a world of 1920s crime and corruption.

With decades of hindsight. After wading through countless bloated systems since, I appreciate that clarity more than ever.

---

Why It Matters Now

There’s something special about a game that knows exactly what it is and leans into it, hard.

Gangbusters didn’t apologize for its tone, its scope, or its play style. It carved out a corner of the RPG landscape and said:

“Here’s your world. Bootleg or bust.”

And in an era of sprawling mega-corebooks, endless supplements, and hyper-optimized character builds, there’s a refreshing honesty in that approach. It’s one I didn’t always appreciate when I was younger.

I do now.

So if you’ve never cracked the cover on Gangbusters, maybe it’s time. You might be surprised what treasures are buried in those 64 pages.

Not everything old is outdated.

Some things were just ahead of their time.

 

The Word of Hashut, The Dawn Before the Forge - Part II

Building from Part I of the series of The Word of Hashut and how it came to be. 

Before the Word of Hashut had a name, a team, or even a whisper, the fan-made ezine world was already shifting. It wasn’t a movement yet. More the tremors before the quake. Small, uneven, sometimes chaotic, but full of potential.

The first sparks came in the mid-2000s.
Druchii Herald arrived with three issues that proved what raw motivation could achieve. Soon after, the Orc and Goblin tribes launched Waaagh! Magazine. Both projects were bold for their time. The layouts were rough, the writing inconsistent, but none of that mattered. They showed something the Warhammer scene hadn’t really seen before: fans could build real magazines if they were willing to grind.

Then came the second wave — and this one changed the landscape.

From the Under-Empire rose the Skavenblight Gazette, and with it a new standard. Here was a group swinging above their weight: better structure, cleaner presentation, and an unmistakable editorial voice. It proved that a faction-focused publication didn’t have to be “good for fans.” It could be good, period.

Other armies followed.

• Bellower appeared among the Ogres.
• Citizen’s Levy came out of the High Elf tower-cities.

Suddenly, the idea didn’t seem far-fetched: a dedicated forum could support its own magazine with lore, art, tactics, and community content.

But in all that creative noise, one faction was absent.

The Chaos Dwarfs had nothing.
No early attempt. No abandoned prototype. No rough PDF hiding in someone’s hard drive. Just silence and a scattered diaspora of players keeping the army alive out of sheer stubbornness. GW had left the Dawi Zharr behind, and most of the community wrote us off as a footnote.

That silence wasn’t going to last.

In early 2008, on the newly formed Chaos Dwarfs Online forum, I posted a message. Short. Intense. Direct. A question wrapped in impatience: why did every other faction have an ezine while we had none? Why had the most forgotten army in the game not even tried?

Looking back now, the tone is unmistakable. The urgency was already there. The drive was already there. The quiet implication — if no one else is going to do it, I will — was absolutely there. It reads like someone who had already decided what was coming next.

That post became the spark.
The forge lit.

And a faction that GW had abandoned was about to create something entirely its own.

Volunteers stepped forward. Sketches arrived. Drafts, concepts, and templates followed. Even before a single page of Issue #1 existed, momentum had started gathering around it. The other armies had shown what could be done. Now the Chaos Dwarfs would show what happened when a determined community decided to outwork the odds.

---

Reflection: The Shape of the Hammer

Looking back on that 2008 post now, I can see it with a clarity I didn’t have then. I didn’t know a thing about DISC types or what “High D” and “High C” meant. I only knew how I naturally operated: fast, focused, structured, and already mapping out the end before anyone else had agreed to the beginning.

Reading that old thread today, nothing about it feels strange or exaggerated. It feels exactly like I’ve always been. Direct. Driven. Already building the framework while others were still floating ideas. It was normal then, and it’s normal now.

What I recognize in hindsight is how that style probably landed for others — especially people wired differently. The intensity, the expectation of movement, the clarity of direction. For me, it was simply stating what needed to be done. For some, that kind of certainty can feel like a lot.

But that mix of High D and High C wasn’t a flaw. It was the reason Word of Hashut existed in the first place. The drive pushed the project forward. The structure and standards gave it shape. Without one, the ezine never would have started. Without the other, it never would have reached twelve issues and become something people still mention fifteen years later.

At the time, I didn’t know any of that. I only knew the Chaos Dwarfs deserved better, and waiting for someone else to make it happen wasn’t an option. Years later, I can see the wiring behind those decisions, but it doesn’t change the conclusion.

This is simply the way I’m built.
And for that particular moment in the hobby, it was exactly what was needed.

The next part will cover the early days of the ezine and also in a fit of insanity also producing Gold and Glory. The ezine for the Dogs of War.

 Looking back? That is the right word: insane. 

Stranger Things: The Echo of a Generation

 

To say that Season Five of Stranger Things has been mixed would be an understatement. It has been that and more. I'm not wading into any of that today, but focusing more on the feel of it. Especially for a Gen Xer. You know, the generation that always seems to get overlooked.

But not this time. This time, it was about us. And yes, sorry Boomers — not everything revolves around you. The Wonder Years hearkened back to your childhoods. This recalled ours.

Regardless of which season — One through Five; it was, it felt as if a teleport without error spell was cast and bam, there we were once again. The 1980s all over again.

It’s about a place and time. A feeling, however fleeting, of our childhoods before we got overwhelmed with life. That’s not to say other generations didn’t experience childhood, rather, the one depicted here was ours.

Despite not being Gen Xers themselves, the Duffer Brothers tapped into the zeitgeist of Gen X memory and did it well. As I noted previously, I'm likely not alone in this: Stranger Things very much represented our formative years — or at least a very good approximation of them.

• The dawn of the personal computer age
• BMX bikes
• The end-stage of the Cold War
• No cell phones, no internet
• A freedom almost no generation before or since has had

Playing D&D in wood-paneled basements? Campaigns that seemingly lasted forever? The anticipation of going on adventures with your friends?

The feel.

But layered over all of this was simply not knowing how fleeting it would be. All too soon, life would change: obligations, jobs, cars, driver’s licenses… girls.
 

And D&D would recede.

A Quick Note on D&D and Generation Jones

Now, it can be argued that D&D was experienced by Generation Jones (aka the later Boomers), especially when you look at the age cohort of those who created the game. But that’s not the point.

For a certain segment of us in Gen X, it was smack dab in the middle of our adolescence.
I’m a perfect example: born right at the halfway point.
And I suspect, like a lot of us, I never gave that look back much thought — until Stranger Things came along.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see why.
As Xers, we’ve never been a generation that has really been pursued.

This Isn’t About Attention. It’s About Recognition.

So in a sense, this isn't about attention: it’s about being pleasantly surprised, maybe even shocked, that media was aimed directly at us.

Sure, call it dangling key-chains, memory berries, or whatever.
Whatever it was though? It worked.

And as I noted in a previous post, the thing that's landing the hardest?
It’s the finality of goodbye... again.
It was a return, yes; but a fleeting one.

While it’s true the show lasted for nine years, it’s only 34 episodes in total.
Some might say not enough.
Some will say it should’ve ended after Season One.

I’m not here to argue that.

What I don’t think anyone will argue is the effect. Forget the controversies or the actors themselves and simply ask:

“Can you see yourself here again, in the 1980s?”

I think if anyone is honest with themselves, the only answer is: yes.

The Double Goodbye

With the close of the series, we say goodbye to Hawkins, Eleven, and the party.
But at the same time? We say goodbye again to that piece of childhood we never expected to feel so vividly.

And that’s likely why it’s hitting so hard.

It dropped on New Year’s.
Out with the old, in with the new.

And doubly so for my daughter and I. Every holiday we watch all six movies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In our yearly re-watch, we only have Return of the King left, the most emotional of the six (I mean, Sam, c'mon!") and it hits directly in the feels.

And perhaps that’s why this one’s hitting unexpectedly hard too.

Maybe,just maybe, under our Gen X exterior is something besides nostalgic.
Something that is not so stereo-typically “us” in these moments.

Just don’t tell anyone. We won’t admit to it.

The Grey Havens

So as a door opened… and then closed again…
I'm left simply with one saying I’ve heard and used myself:

“Don’t cry that it’s over, smile that it happened.”

Sure, it’ll linger like something melancholy. But like Frodo and Gandalf saying goodbye at the Grey Havens…So it is with Stranger Things.

Until we meet again.

The Citadel Giant Saga- Part II: The Citadel Giant That Shouldn’t Have Been Found

 

Every collector knows the feeling:
“If I’d been five minutes later, it would’ve been gone.”

This was not that.

What happened with the Citadel Giant wasn’t a near miss, or good timing, or even great luck. It was a sequence of events that—taken together—should not realistically occur in the normal life cycle of a collecting hobby.

Here’s why.

THE Citadel Giant after the first pass of paint removal.

 

Not One Improbability — A Chain of Them

Most rare finds hinge on one unlikely thing going right.

This required many, and every one of them had to succeed for the outcome to happen at all. Miss any step, and the chain collapses. 

Think of them as “gates.” If even one stays closed, the Giant is never found.

I should add I was doing these in real time in about 20 minutes start to finish. Checking and referencing sites, is this a legitimate sale? What should I offer? All the while what amount I should offer as I raced the clock knowing that someone else might find it and get a claim in before me.

Primary Seller Gates (Shipment 1)

These gates describe everything that had to go right before the Giant was ever discovered.

Gate 1 — The Giant Had to Exist in the Wild

This was not a standard retail Citadel Giant. It was an internal-cast example pulled from legacy molds—never sold through normal channels and almost never seen publicly. Most collectors will never encounter one at all.

Gate 2 — The Owner Had to Let It Go

Owners of items this rare typically keep them, trade privately, or pass them quietly to other collectors. In this case, the owner chose to sell it openly instead.

Gate 3 — It Had to Be Listed in the "Wrong" Place

Rather than appearing on eBay or a specialist forum, the Giant was listed on Bonanza, a low-traffic marketplace that most collectors do not actively monitor.

Gate 4 — The Search Had to Use the “Wrong” Engine

The discovery depended on using DuckDuckGo instead of Google. DuckDuckGo indexes and ranks obscure listings differently, often surfacing results Google suppresses or ignores.

Gate 5 — The Listing Had to Sit Unnoticed

The Giant needed to remain unsold long enough to be discovered — not snapped up immediately, but not hidden forever either.

Gate 6 — DuckDuckGo Had to Index It at All

Low-authority marketplaces are not always indexed consistently. DuckDuckGo had to successfully ingest and surface the Bonanza listing.

Gate 7 — The Result Had to Appear in a Narrow Visibility Band

The listing landed deep in the results — far enough down to avoid early interception by other collectors, but not so deep that it was functionally invisible.

Gate 8 — A Nonstandard Search Phrase Had to Work

The search phrase used (“The Warhammer Giant 1983”) was conversational and imprecise. It did not match catalog-standard naming and would normally fail to surface an obscure Bonanza listing.

Yet it worked.

Gate 9 — The Timing Had to Be Right

The discovery happened late on a Friday night — a low-competition window when fewer collectors are actively searching.

Gate 10 — The Search Had to Be on Mobile

DuckDuckGo’s mobile search behaves differently from desktop, favoring natural-language phrasing and long-tail results. The search was performed on mobile, not desktop.

Gate 11 — A Deep Scroll Had to Happen

The listing appeared several pages down. Most users never scroll that far, but in this case, it happened.

 

Interlocking Market Gate

Gate 12 — No One Else Could Find It First

During the narrow window when the listing was discoverable, no other collector ran the same search, using the same engine, at the same time, and scrolled deep enough to see it.

If anyone had, the story ends there.

THE Citadel Giant, stripped down of paint.

Secondary Seller Gates (Shipment 2 — The Parts That Shouldn’t Have Appeared 

Together)

After the Giant was secured, a second, unrelated sequence unfolded — one that depended entirely on the first.

Gate 13 — Another Seller Had to Have Loose Giant Parts

A separate seller happened to possess multiple loose components from the same rare kit — something that is itself uncommon.

Gate 14 — A Casual Purchase Had to Spark a Question

A non-rare head variant was purchased, which prompted a simple follow-up inquiry: “Do you happen to have any other Giant parts?”

Gate 15 — The Rarest Head Had to Be There

The seller’s unlisted inventory included the Feral Beard head, the rarest of all Giant head variants.

Gate 16 — Multiple Rare Hands Had to Be There Too

That same unlisted inventory also contained both rare non-club right-hand variants — parts that almost never appear together.

Gate 17 — The Seller Had to Respond and Agree

The seller replied, confirmed the parts, and agreed to sell them — rather than ignoring the message or declining.

Gate 18 — All of This Had to Happen Quickly

The entire secondary sequence unfolded within six days of the original acquisition, before circumstances, attention, or availability changed.

And if this weren't enough? Two different sellers, two different locations and shipping methods. Two separate paths through customs and two different sets of delays in shipping? Both arrived at my door within hours of each other on the same day.

Why This Matters

Any one of these gates opening would be unremarkable. All of them opening? In order is not.

Add to this all of the gates are not weighed evenly. Some like 6,7,8,10 and 11 are beyond absurd that they worked out that way. Gate 6 in particular? I found the giant on page 5 of my search results. DuckDuckGo had indexed it just enough, but not too much to get to a "Goldilocks" zone for me to find it after being diligent enough to drill down.

This is why the story of the Citadel Giant isn’t just about finding a rare miniature. It’s about a fragile chain of conditions that almost never align, aligning once.

And then closing behind it.

Part III will deal with the math behind such an unlikely turn of events. When I said at the onset this "should not realistically occur in the normal life cycle of a collecting hobby?" 

That's not even close to the true. You could run this time after time and the numbers become astronomically rare. I lived it and I still don't believe it really happened.

Note: His restoration progress will be taking place at Oldhammer.org for updates. 

The Citadel Giant Saga- Part I: Or, How Probability, Patience, and USPS Collided

There are purchases, and then there are events.

This was the latter.

"The BIG Giant!"

What began in late November 2025 as a straightforward (if ambitious) acquisition of a 1983 Citadel Giant turned into a multi-week exercise in probability theory, logistics archaeology, and patience-testing uncertainty, capped off by an ending so absurd that it deserves to be documented properly.

This post is that documentation. A follow-up post will contain the mind bending series of improbabilities that led to me finding the giant, but that is for a last day.

Now, because the story needs embellishment, it really doesn’t, but because it illustrates something collectors understand instinctively and outsiders rarely see: the journey matters almost as much as the object.

The Find

The giant itself needs little introduction to Oldhammer collectors. Early Citadel giants are iconic, heavy, and un-apologetically of their era: full of character, strange proportions, and sculptural craziness.

 

What made this one unusual wasn’t just condition or completeness, but the seller’s claim of provenance:

• Cast directly from original Citadel molds

• Not a retail release

• Produced long after normal production had ended

• Originating from a former Games Workshop staff member

That combination alone put this piece firmly outside the normal collecting pipeline.

I made an offer.

It was accepted.

And then… shipping in late November/early December “happened.”

The Waiting Begins

Once the package actually entered the shipping system, things accelerated — and then immediately became opaque.

There were two shipments tied to the giant:

• Shipment 1: The giant itself

• Shipment 2: A secondary shipment containing rare hands and two heads including

the feral bearded head; the most difficult of the five to acquire.

 

Tracking information oscillated between “in customs,” “shipping,” and “somewhere that definitely exists, trust us.”

At various points, both packages appeared to be:

• in New York,

• not in New York,

• cleared customs,

• not cleared customs,

• and possibly sitting on a pallet that both existed and did not exist simultaneously.

Schrödinger’s pallet, if you will.

The Absurd Resolution

Then, on a quiet Saturday morning, reality intervened.

At 9:19 AM, right within my normal USPS delivery window, the giant arrived.

No warning.

No accurate tracking update.

Just… there.

A fleeting phone notification earlier that morning hinted at something “giant”-related, then vanished. The databases hadn’t caught up, but the truck had.

Later that same day — while we were out shopping — Shipment 2 arrived as well.

Both shipments.

Same day.

After weeks of uncertainty.

The system didn’t announce victory.

It simply delivered the boxes and pretended nothing unusual had happened.

Perspective

The giant is really cool. The heads and hands are fantastic. The odds involved were absurd enough to be memorable. But in the end, this was a good problem to have, and one that resolved without loss.

Before paint removal but having safely arrived.

Actually when I say the odds were absurd? That’s an understatement. Part 2 of this story will contain the roughly 18 steps of improbability that I successfully navigated to come out the other side with a complete giant…in six days. This shouldn’t have happened even once, but it did.

Epilogue: The Name

The giant has been named:

Duncan the Drunken.

He currently resides downstairs in the man cave, awaiting his turn on the painting table. There will be tartan. There will be red hair. There will be decisions made slowly and deliberately.

For now, though, the saga is complete.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s a simple one: Tracking is advisory. Reality does what it wants. And sometimes… it’s just Saturday and an ultra rare citadel miniature shows up at your front door.

I Painted the Dwarf Allies…And Broke Warhammer Allies (1988)- Part I

From White Dwarf #108: "Eradicated Gremlins GW? More like they lived on for nearly 40 years."

There I was, happily painting up a Dwarf Ally Contingent from the 3rd Edition Warhammer Armies Book from 1988. I had a handful of figures left over from my six thousand point Dwarf army, so it felt like an obvious project. This also tied into my larger plan. I have been trying to collect all eleven armies in the book (Norse from White Dwarf #107 eventually too) and every Ally and Mercenary Contingent, each with its own dedicated set of miniatures.

As noted on the blog previously, years ago, I consolidated and rebuilt my Dwarf Mercenary force using leftover Battle for Skull Pass figures from the later editions. Even after that, I still had extra metal models from the period, along with plastic Dwarfs from the old Warhammer Regiment box set. You know how this hobby goes. A few Quarrelers, some Ironbreakers, a hero, and you think you are ready to field a proper contingent. That was the plan, at least. I was wrong.

While I was finishing the Dwarf Warrior unit, the question hit me. “Okay, who can actually take these guys?”

It seemed simple. Open Warhammer Armies from 1988, check the ally lists, match these stout warriors to the army that could field them, and move on with the project.

Except this is where the wheels came off: no one can take them. Not one of the eleven armies in the book.

• Not Empire.
• Not Bretonnia.
• Not even the Dwarfs themselves.
• No Army AT ALL.

That could not be right, or so I thought. But it was. By painting a simple ally contingent, I had stumbled onto one of the most quietly funny and completely uncorrected design mistakes in the entire 3rd Edition era.

The best part? It was right there in plain sight for thirty seven years and nobody ever noticed. ETA (12/3/25): turns out despite my best efforts to source this out, someone else did notice! So no shame here, credit where credit is due! Oldhammer discussion

How I Found the Break Point

After rereading each army entry and its allowed ally list, I decided to reverse the logic.

Rather than asking “What allies can this army take?”
I asked a different question. “Which armies can take these allies?”

I doubt Games Workshop ever approached it this way. I will talk more about that in Part II. I went contingent by contingent and built a full matrix. As the list grew, the pattern became obvious. Army after army had nothing but empty space under the Dwarf Allies category. The Dwarf Ally entry is fully written, fully pointed, and laid out just like every other valid contingent, but no army in the book is actually permitted to use it.

I still did not believe it. So I checked my notes again and kept cross checking online. The result never changed. I even checked the Norse list from White Dwarf #107, which is an official 3rd Edition army. They cannot take Dwarf Allies either.

Then I pulled out both of my copies of the Army Book, the hardcover and the softcover. The same gap appears in both. I will come back to that in more detail in Part II.

Surely This Was Fixed in an Errata?

That was my next thought. I went straight to the web to look for it. This had to be a known issue. I expected to find a long forgotten White Dwarf sidebar, a footnote, a FAQ, a designer comment, or something buried on an old website. Anything at all.

There was nothing.

So I turned to the two White Dwarf issues that are always cited as containing the 3rd Edition corrections for Warhammer Armies from 1988.

• White Dwarf #107
• White Dwarf #108

And guess what?

Still nothing. Not a single word about Dwarf Allies. Those errata entries only address small housekeeping items. They mainly correct point values and attribute scores for Dark Elves and Skaven. The Dwarf Ally issue is not mentioned anywhere.

The only conclusion I could reach is that the Dwarf Ally Contingent was and still is completely orphaned. It is a dead entry in Warhammer Armies from 1988, and none of us caught it. I have handled that book thousands of times and never noticed it.

And now that I see it, the whole thing feels right in line with the era.

The Most Oldhammer Thing Possible

Welcome to 3rd Edition, where Chaos mutations contradict their own points formula, where Fimir somehow ally with Norse in ways no scholar of fantasy biology can explain, where Nippon mercenaries can be taken only by Dark Elves for reasons known only to the gods, and where the best way to understand the rules is to accept that nobody in 1988 was paid enough to cross index the ally matrix.

This is peak Oldhammer. Creative, chaotic, brilliant, flawed, and absolutely perfect all at once.

Why I Never Noticed This in the ’80s, Even Though I Used Allies

I used allies all the time during the 3rd Edition years. Wood Elves, High Elves, Halflings and Norse saw plenty of table time for me, but I never once used the Dwarf Allies. That alone explains why this flaw stayed hidden from me for almost forty years.

There was another reason as well. Everyone else in my group had started playing before I did, and we had a simple rule. No one could play the same army. I took Empire because it was still open. That choice dictated the allies I reached for. When I looked at Dwarfs, my attention went straight to the four dwarf cannons from the Dwarf Mercenary Contingent. That was the obvious path for an Empire player.

The Dwarf Ally Contingent itself did not help matters. There is nothing in it that you cannot already get from the main Dwarf army list:

• 
  
  1 Contingent Commander
• 0–40 Dwarf Crossbowmen
• 0–10 Ironbreakers (really, what are you doing with just ten???) 
  
• 10–80 Dwarf Warriors (that's like a whole army!)

It is a perfectly serviceable group of troops, but nothing that would tempt a player who had better and more cost effective options elsewhere. 

So What Now?

Well, in my case?

I fixed the oversight in my own matrix I created. Dwarfs are available to Empire and Bretonnia and Dwarfs themselves as Allies (see here).

But the real fun was the discovery itself. I set out to paint a few allies… and in the process, I broke Warhammer Armies (1988). I didn’t just paint Dwarf Allies. I painted a glitch in the game’s original source code.

Not bad for a weekend project.

The Word of Hashut, A Look Back - Part I

 

(With apologies to Conan the Barbarian, 1982)

Between the time before social media and the rise of the sons of Hashut, there was an age undreamed of. And unto this came Willmark, destined to bear the burden of the Word of Hashut upon a troubled brow. It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga. Allow me to speak of the days of the ezine era!

I had more hair back then...

In the early 2000s, Games Workshop was a slumbering behemoth, and a few armies were abandoned in the wilderness. Chaos Dwarfs were cast into darkness; Dogs of War wandered the fringes of the Borderlands with no marching orders; Warhammer players scoured the world for scraps of lore like exiles clutching broken tablets.

From this desolation came a spark.
That spark became the Word of Hashut: a fanzine forged in the deep furnace of the Dawi Zharr’s will. A magazine not written by a corporation but by a community that refused to die.

From there the era grew.
Skavenblight Gazette rallied the ratmen and became an undisputed leader. And from Tilea came Gold & Glory, the last great banner of the mercenaries, stitched together with pride and desperation in equal measure.

These were not simple PDFs.
They were acts of rebellion.
Declarations that no army would be forgotten so long as one fan still drew breath and had a half-functional copy of Adobe Acrobat.

It was a wild age. A mad age.
An age driven by passion instead of polish, by camaraderie instead of clout. It burned fast and bright and left its scars, some of them literal. The Word of Hashut was not the first ezine, yet its impact may have been the mightiest.

And now, years later, the time has come to tell its story.

Now that I have your attention. As many of you know, my name is Willmark, Editor-in-Chief of Word of Hashut. And after a time, I also served as Editor-in-Chief of the ezine Gold & Glory for the Dogs of War, two of the armies abandoned by Games Workshop from seventh edition onward.

Here is the inside story of the Warhammer ezine era you never knew existed.

We are coming up on fifteen years since the last issue of the Word of Hashut. In many ways it seems like yesterday; in others it feels like a lifetime. My life has changed, my children have grown, and now there is an old man staring back at me in the mirror each morning.

Before all that, a frazzled, time-starved Chaos Dwarf enthusiast worked many nights into the small hours to produce the Word of Hashut. Looking back, it is a blur but also a heady time, when nothing constrained us. Games Workshop had forsaken the Chaos Dwarfs, but the fans had not.

Before we take even the first step, it is important to point out the landscape as it existed. The Word of Hashut was not the first ezine or webzine to exist, far from it. Several came before. In fact, the Word of Hashut would arrive later in the overall scene.

Faction	Ezine	Years	Issues
Chaos Dwarfs	Word of Hashut	2008–2012	12
Skaven	Skavenblight Gazette	2007–2011	11
Vampire Counts	The Invocation	2008–2012	12
Ogre Kingdoms	Bellower	2008–2011	8
Dogs of War	Gold & Glory	2009–2010	3
Dark Elves	Druchii Herald	2005–2007	3
High Elves	Citizen’s Levy	2008–2009	3
Dwarfs	Doomseeker	2008–2010	3
Orcs & Goblins	Waaagh! Magazine	~2006–2008	~4
Wood Elves	Asrai Lookout	2009–2010	2
Chaos Dwarfs (proto)	Word of Hashut Holiday Specials	2008–2011	2
Dogs of War (minor)	Tilean Dispatch / 6th Column	2009–2011	2–4

There they are. When viewed now, the list seems shorter than it felt at the time. Perhaps memory plays tricks. There always seemed to be a great deal of activity across the various forums, and always a new ezine being launched or announced. I know; I was on the primary site for each faction daily back then. Likely there were more ideas than finished projects, and the effort required proved greater than most expected.

I think I can speak to that. I handled the layouts and the Editor-in-Chief roles for two ezines. More on that soon, but it seemed wise to first set the stage before we dive in. It was a wild and wonderful age in which fans banded together to create something Games Workshop had forgotten: a hobby magazine rather than a glorified sales catalog.

The ezines had something White Dwarf did not — a soul, and it showed.

Next up: The Dawn of the Ezines, Part II.

For reference, the current Chaos Dwarfs Online site: https://discourse.chaos-dwarfs.com/