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So I like to play my Berzerkers, but asked myself manytimes where does their helmets come from.
From which historical of fantasy world did GW stole the Idea of the helmets, i saw these kind of helmet on some "Word of Warcraft Titan God" too.
I read some thing like, it should look like horns or it should look like the khorne symbol/skull itself.

First off, GW is far ahead of WOW in terms of every thing, if any thing was copied ( which im not saying it was ) it would be the other way around.

And i dont know why it looks like that, but it looks cool.

The Zerker helmets are meant to echo the silhouette of a Bloodletter, same goes for the Plague marine ones whose single spike or horn echoes the silhouette of a Plaguebearer.

And they i think are similar to thousand sons aswell


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but slightly different

They come from Conan the barbarian, as with much of the fantasy and 40k chaos look it pretty much Conan with bells on, later on GWs homage* would later be ... homaged* ? By other companies like Warcraft/Starcraft.




*you can say ripped off if you want.

Maybe a khorne lord could have a Functional chain axe fsrcing forward on his helmet so he could do chain ax headbutts? ("Subtle" and "restrained" are not in the khornate lexicon.)

I may be incorrect in this, but I vaguely remember the current 40k berserker helmets are a corruption of a certain 30k helmet you can get from FW, and that helmet represented either an experienced pit fighter/cage fighter (due to Angrons past as a pit fighter with ANGRY NAILS in brain) so this makes sense.

However, Grimtuff is also bang on the money - make no mistake that the 30k designs are easily corrupted to their 40k counterparts, such as pickle helm MkIII helmets easily corrupted to look like a plague bearer etc.

Cant see any thing when i search conan the barbarian that is the same, there is that helmet with 2 snakes facing each other, but thats hardly the same but roughly similar structure but i dont know if you could really compare the two at all

Perhaps it's one of the few Games-Workshop design elements that's genuinely original?

 Formosa wrote:
They come from Conan the barbarian, as with much of the fantasy and 40k chaos look it pretty much Conan with bells on, later on GWs homage* would later be ... homaged* ? By other companies like Warcraft/Starcraft.




*you can say ripped off if you want.

"Homage" is just French for lobster ...

oh, that's "Homard" ...

It's french for "ripoff".

It kinda reminds me of Galactus' helmet (or is that is head?)

Maybe the World Eaters were inspired by the guy who eats worlds?

They look to be loosely based on real-world historical Gladiator Helmets:

 Stormatious wrote:
Cant see any thing when i search conan the barbarian that is the same, there is that helmet with 2 snakes facing each other, but thats hardly the same but roughly similar structure but i dont know if you could really compare the two at all

Its ok dude, I am a big fan of the conan series so It may be that I am a bit more familiar with it, here you go though.

Big "Thank you" for posting the pictures and solving this mystery.

LoL, someone thought i would be original content ;-P

Nothing is original, everything draws off all the work that came before it.

I still dont think the helmets are close enough to be called the same. Only thing similar is the top points in same direction but its not enough for me to think gw took it from conan, its more like there are heaps of helmets/hats with shapes on top, so yeah.


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it would have to be atleast slightly blatantly obvious i think before you could say gw took it


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BUT i see what you mean thats for sure but yeah you know what i mean

Chaos Warriors with horned helmets predates Khorne, I think; once the iconography of the gods is established, you start seeing ornate helmets like that for all the gods (there's Nurle-followers with helmets supporting flies, tri-lobed runes of Nurgle, etc, and there's at least one Slaanesh model that ... ain't SFW). For whatever reason, the Khorne one is the one that stuck, although if you look at Jes Goodwin's classic Chaos marine models, all four have something sticking out the top of their helmets.

Skullphoquer wrote:
So I like to play my Berzerkers, but asked myself manytimes where does their helmets come from.
From which historical of fantasy world did GW stole the Idea of the helmets, i saw these kind of helmet on some "Word of Warcraft Titan God" too.
I read some thing like, it should look like horns or it should look like the khorne symbol/skull itself.

You do realise they had those helmets way before WOW...

These kinds of crests are far older than most would realize. Conan didn't come up with the concept, 13th century Germanics did.

Tiennos wrote:
It kinda reminds me of Galactus' helmet (or is that is head?)

Maybe the World Eaters were inspired by the guy who eats worlds?

Quoted several times as Galactus the World Eater.
So it’s a close fit.
The helmet is so so similar though.

The Conan thing to me is no more similar.
A Conan fan would say that’s where the influence or rip off is from.
But to me as a casual observer, it’s again only moderately similar.

13th century Germanic is also just as possible by that picture.



But everything builds on everything else.
All the idea and images people get in their minds for something, subconsciously draw on references of things you’ve seen.
They may not have thought let’s make it look like this, but rather “oh hey look what I just drew. Yeah looks suitable enough”

 Wyzilla wrote:


These kings of crests are far older than most would realize. Conan didn't come up with the concept, 13th century Germanics did.

Conan ones are influenced by that and others, Fantasy and Chaos marines/Warriors are influenced by conans asthetic specifically, Like i said in the other thread you can literally drop the whole conan series into warhammer fantasy and change nothing and it would work

 Wyzilla wrote:


These kings of crests are far older than most would realize. Conan didn't come up with the concept, 13th century Germanics did.

Blood for ye auld Blood God.

 Delvarus Centurion wrote:

Skullphoquer wrote:
So I like to play my Berzerkers, but asked myself manytimes where does their helmets come from.
From which historical of fantasy world did GW stole the Idea of the helmets, i saw these kind of helmet on some "Word of Warcraft Titan God" too.
I read some thing like, it should look like horns or it should look like the khorne symbol/skull itself.

You do realise they had those helmets way before WOW...

Did you realise that i aint saying warhammer riped of wow...


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 Wyzilla wrote:


These kinds of crests are far older than most would realize. Conan didn't come up with the concept, 13th century Germanics did.

that is to great for being real.

Is there a fluff explanation for them? I know in master of mankind they briefly mention the helms being a recent redesign off top of my head

I don't think so, they may be copies of the helms used by the gladiators of nuceria though?