Wednesday 19 June 2013

Asgard Fantasy Monsters FM19 Storm Giant

From the D&D Expert rulebook: "These are the tallest giants, often over 22' tall. They have bronze coloured skin and bright red or yellow hair." This is Asgard's take on a Storm Giant, painted with the above description in mind.

This is an absolute whopper of a figure, in solid metal, and seriously heavy - if you look at the base, I have attached the skull from a plastic Games Workshop skeleton to give an idea of scale. In fact, to illustrate this further, I've added another pic of the same figure with a "normal" sized Asgard figure from the same era. 
Whilst you get an awful lot of metal for your figure, the quality of sculpting isn't that great - as with many of the Asgard figures of the period, it is is very coarse, with things such as fingers pretty much reduced to just lines scraped into the main fist. Other lowlights include the detail on the helmet, the legs - basically two thick stumps - and the mace it is wielding. Still, I did my best; base colours first, then a couple of washes, then lots and lots of highlighting. The base is just builders sand inked over, plus a few rocks from the garden, as well as the skull.

It's a fairly dramatic figure I think; it certainly looks the part, striding purposefully forward to smite some unfortunate opponent. If you saw it on a D&D table you'd probably want to get your party of adventurers out of the way of it ASAP!  It's also a fairly rare figure from what I can make out - I've only ever seen it on auction sites a couple of times, and even then usually without the mace that figure originally came with. I suspect that its scarcity is probably because of the cost of the figure in the late 1970's/80's - something using that much metal would not have been cheap - plus the line drawings from the Asgard catalogue of the time didn't give any idea of the scale of the figure, or really do it justice. A bit of a shame really, because as a piece of old school lead I think it's fantastic, even after taking the coarseness of the sculpt into account.

Finally, this from a later edition of D&D: "Very rarely, storm giants have violet skin. Violet-skinned storm giants have deep violet or blue-black hair with silvery gray or purple eyes." I have another copy of the same figure in a very sorry state - broken off at the legs, missing the mace and undercoated in what appears to industrial strength white car primer - but if I clean it up, I may well paint it up as a violet skin variant. Watch this space...

Saturday 1 June 2013

Grenadier Dragon Lords Fantasy Box Set 5002 Monsters - Slime A plus Citadel Runequest Demon Amorph

Two rather peculiar figures next. The one on the left is a Grenadier sculpt, depicting a natural hazard much beloved of Dungeon Masters everywhere - a green slime - whilst the one on the right has been kindly identified by Joe Thomlinson as a Citadel Runequest Demon Amorph:
The green slime is a splendid sculpt - rearing up to strike at an unwary adventurer - and was very simple to paint, just a base coat of green, green and brown ink washes and highlighting. The rest of the base was coated with PVA glue and then inked up accordingly. I deliberately used a gloss varnish on this sculpt to emphasise the sliminess, and it looks a treat - unfortunately, it makes it very difficult to get a decent picture, and to be honest I don't think the picture I've posted does it justice.

As for the Runequest demon... I found it in the lead mountain next to the green slime, so at some time I obviously thought they should go together. Again, very easy to paint - a base coat of pink, then red ink wash, then highlighting, then a matter of picking out the various eyes, teeth and lips on whatever it is. The rest of the base was coated with PVA glue and then inked up accordingly, and it came out with a suitably unpleasant look as if it is resting on a thin sheen of blood (!). Originally I used a gloss varnish but somehow it didn't look right, so a top layer of dullcote was applied for the final result.

Very pleased with both of these - easy to paint, good final result - and I can see both of them getting a significant amount of play time!