Grenadier recasts available in the US!

Grenadier Models were the first D&D figures I ever bought and have always been among my favorites.  When Grenadier went under in the 1990s, their molds were mostly bought up by Mirlton, an Italian company that has done a great job keeping a lot of their later figures in print, although this has mostly been the Fantasy Warriors line — some great stuff mostly by Copplestone and Nick Lund, I think.  There are some great monsters and such, including the wicked Chaos Giant, too.  The cost and difficulty of ordering from overseas has kept me from buying any of this stuff, but good news — Tony Korman has worked out an arrangement to import them in bulk and sell them inside the US.

With Tony’s permission, I’m reposting his announcement.  Hurry up and get you some!

I’ve decided to do my pricing differently.  If you go to the Mirliton site www.mirliton.it you will find their prices listed in euros.  To get the USD price you would have to multiply the euro amount by a factor of 1.4 and this will fluctuate from month to month.  If you enter your items in the online shopping cart and enter it to the point that it shows shipping, add your euro purchase cost to the euro shipping cost (which I think the minimum shipping is 18.50 euro($24.05) and then multiply the total by that 1.4 factor to get the USD price that you would pay through Mirliton in Italy directly.  If you order it through me take that same USD total and subtract 15% and that’s what you will pay ordering through me.  For this first months order I am asking for a minimum $50 USD order (that’s the price of the items in USD prior to adding the foreign shipping amount).  Please list the items product code and product description along with the prices and email it along with your name and mailing address to kormanstudio[at] hotmail [fullstop] com.  Thanks, Tony

The Grenadier lines on offer there in the Fantasy and Nightmares sections.  I’m pretty sure the 15mm fantasy is Grenadier too.

Looking for Don Wellman

I bought myself a Monster manuscript off of Amazon last year; it was something I’d always wondered about.  Grenadier Models put it out in 1986 or so, when they were also releasing a series of boxed monster figures; naturally it was a tie-in.  The art in the Monster manuscript was by John Dennett, who also sculpted the bulk of the figures; the text is by Don Wellman, who as far as I know did not publish any other gaming materials. (Too bad — some of the new monster write ups in this are pretty awesome.)

Anyway I’m hoping to get in touch with Mr. Wellman, as I have some questions.

Yes, I tried Google and such. It turns out there are a LOT of Don Wellmans in the world, and I don’t want to bug a lot of people asking them about something so esoteric, so here’s hoping someone in blogosphere will find this and know him…  Leave a comment or email me at mike fullstop monaco et yahoo! period cawm if you can help.  Thanks!

Frost giants

I think I like frost giants more than any type of giant, even fire giants, probably because of the D’Aulaires’ Norse mythology books I read over and over in elementary school.

I painted the first three guys recently.  Left to right, a Ral Partha, Citadel, Grenadier, and another Ral Partha.

The last one I painted blue a long time ago, and repainted a few years ago, before the other three.

The first RP giant may be the first giant I ever acquired.  When I was a kid, there was a hobby shop in the “Berlin Farmer’s Market” (a sort of flea market/outlet mall, about 10 miles from my house when I was a kid, and the destination of one epic hike/bike ride for me, my brother, and a friend some time around 1983) which had tons of Ral Partha, Minifigs, and Heritage Models in their front window, and I found him there.  I was amazed at the time by the level of detail in RP stuff.

The three recently painted guys all have dead, white eyes.

The Grenadier giant was originally painted in a regular European flesh tone, with a black beard… I wanted him to be generic enough to be any kind of giant, I guess.  I like him much more now.  There was also a very similar version with s hammer instead of an axe.  The axe on mine was broken in the blister I bought — I actually assumed it was made that way to be assembled, but when I opened it up I realized it had just broken in the package. The repair I did here extended the axe’s haft a little, and unfortunately I didn’t realize how bent it was until I was finished gluing and pinning it.

The Citadel giant was a ‘donation’ that I took some time to identify, as he was replaced in Citadel’s catalog by a much ‘better’ Tom Meier sculpt when he visited England and did some work for Citadel.

The second RP mini has always been another favorite.  The mace-and-chain weapon, and the pose (he looks ready to charge head-first), make him look very menacing for a smaller giant.  I would be tempted to repaint him more in the style and palette of the other three, but there is nothing wrong with his current paint job, so he’ll just be a slightly different-looking member of the tribe, or maybe a visiting cousin. <Update: He’s the “Hecatron giant” according to the RP catalogs, so I guess I just made him a frost giant because of the horned helmet or something.>

A couple more minis

Left: A Grenadier AD&D Fighting Man.  He originally held a guisarme (or a bill hook, or a bill-guisarme , or glaive-guisarme-guisarme-fauchard-guisarme…) but the blade broke off long ago and I’ve replaced it with a spare halberd head from a Zvedza kit. (Oddly, the Zvedza minis are pretty close to 25mm but their polearms were large even by modern, post-GW scale creep standards).  On the right: A RAFM cleric.  Nice morningstar.

The fighting man came in a boxed set that my brother & I got back in 1981 or so; the RAFM guy was just given to me by Scottsz a couple of months ago when he found a shop with a bunch of old lead.

The pics are blurry because I did not use a tripod.  They make a huge difference when you’re photographing small things like minis.

The otyugh: what an offal monster

The otyugh is one of those D&D monsters that doesn’t come from folklore, literature, or any identifiable source other than Gary Gygax’s imagination.*  The Monster Manual doesn’t give any indication of their coloring, but given their habitat of offal, refuse, and dung, I’m thinking brown or red-brown.

So here’s a sort of step-by-step guide to how I painted mine.  The minis I had were two Grenadier Otyughs (one I’ve had since the 1980s and another Scottsz gave me); a TSR neo-otyugh (purchased very cheaply at Origins 2006); and a TSR Otyugh (also a gift from Scottsz).

1. Sprayed with grey primer.

2. Painted with somewhat thinned Burnt Umber craft paint (I use Ceramcoat mostly).

3. Dry brushed with a mix of white and burnt umber.

4. This is where I got sloppy and stopped photographing each step.  I painted their eyes, mouths, and bases black, and then dry-brushed their tentacles a mix of pink and (Caucasian) flesh.  Then I gave the tentacles a wash of thinned down Citadel red ink.  (I bought a set of their inks in about 1989 at NeoVention.  I don’t use them that often and still have them.  They never dried out!)

5. The finished minis.  I painted white eyes, spines, teeth, and claws, and inked the edges of the mouths red, and gave the neo-otyugh a pink tongue.  In hindsight maybe a little yellow would have enhanced the teeth.  I don’t think they actually brush or floss.

Having two Grenadier otyughs let me use one as a ‘rough draft’ while figuring out the paint scheme.

.

.

*There was some speculation, maybe at Dragonsfoot or some blog, that the otyugh was partly inspired by the ‘garbage disposal monster’ in the first Star Wars movie.

Finally painted some more minis

This weekend we got some “craft time” in, and I finally finished a few figures on my painting desk.  I am noticing that my eyesight is significantly worse than it used to be, and my ability to paint small details, especially eyes, is plummeting, although my ability to whip out a mini in about half an hour remains strong.  I think I spent four hours total painting this weekend, which accounts for the above five minis and work progressing on about a dozen others.  Of course some of the work on these guys was already done (the fighter had been started last August to give you an idea of how rarely I’ve been painting lately).

Anyway the first two are a satyr produced by Mega Minis from an older Metal Magic mold, and a TSR “korred” that I picked up at Origins about five years ago.

Black hair speeds things up immensely since I get to skip shading.  I sometimes highlight black hair but not on these two.  For a TSR mini, the korred is not bad.  He actually has a lot of character that was not evident before I painted him.

The next two are lamias.  Again there is a Mega Minis recast of a Metal Magic figure (on the right), and an older original — a Grenadier lamia that was very graciously sent to me by Scottsz.

Lamias are another monster from Greek myth, like the satyrs, but interestingly the Greek version was half woamn, half snake, while the D&D version is half woman, half mammal (I think the Grenadier one is supposed to have the lower half of a deer or elk, while the Mega Minis one is clearly half cat).

Lastly there is one of the Citadel “Fantasy Tribe Fighters” guys that was sent to me by Mike at Specter Studios.

I am not terribly satisfied by this one, but I know he’ll never be anyone’s first choice for a PC so I just did a ‘wargame’ standard paint job on him — he’s only ever going to be a NPC.  I like his pose but he’s not very inspiring for a ‘hero’.

Don’t ask me what that little maggot-looking thing on the ground next to him is.  I didn’t see it when I was photographing them.

The ones that got away

The only pic I could find of the original Mithril Beorn (center)

Having, as I do, more minis than I can really finish painting in the foreseeable future (especially at my current rate of zero per month), it’s pretty stupid that I still think wistfully, once in a while, of the minis I’ve lost, traded away, or had stolen over the years. (All pictures from the interwebs, obviously.  Re-posted after much crap from WordPress, which prefers to merge all the pictures for some reason)

Lost: This was the largest loss, although it must have been a good dozen, maybe 14 years ago!  We were playing a GURPS campaign set in Norman England, which was a fairly long and involved game.  We usually played at a friend’s house as my brother & I were living in a crummy apartment.  I knew a large battle was imminent, so I brought a large number of Vikings and knights (mostly Ral Partha, Grenadier, and Citadel mins, several Mithril LotR figures, plus some plastics from HeroQuest and a Battlemasters set) as well the minis we’d been using for the PCs.  We used them to play out a skirmish-sized portion of the larger battle, and another battle next time seemed likely, so I put them back into a pair of tackle boxes and then into the paper grocery bag I’d brought them in.  The ‘gaming room’ was a finished attic our friend used mostly for gaming, and which was usually undisturbed from one game night to the next.  Not this time.  The best I can guess, another player had placed some garbage from the game (pretzel bag, etc.) in the same bag, on top of my minis boxes, and then he or the homeowner’s wife threw the lot out in the trash.  I was really bummed by the fact that the minis I’d brought had been carefully selected to represent some of my better paint jobs and also by the lack of remorse on the part of the player and his wife.  Even a simple “I’m sorry about that” would have been nice.  I know now I shouldn’t leave stuff at other people’s houses, but I think they can’t possibly have realized how much work went into those forty or so minis.

A Citadel berserker. I painted tattoos on mine.

A (very small) barbarian from an early Ral Partha boxed set.

The barbarian from HeroQuest -- the second best mini in the game after the dwarf

The Mithril figures were from their first Middle Earth line, and I can’t even find good pictures of them now online.  There was “Woodman” and a Beorn for sure, and maybe a few others.

Another smaller loss occurred when I was carrying a box of minis home from a game at my brother’s house a few years later, and dropped them on the sidewalk in front of my apartment.  They were mostly giants and trolls and several broke into pieces. It was dark and I figured I’d find the remaining loose bits and pieces in the morning.  But it snowed that morning ( a good several inches) and the was off and on snow for several weeks before I saw the pavement again, and who knows what got shoveled away then.

Thirdly there are a number of individual minis I remember owning but just can’t find anywhere.  Maybe they broke at some point and I tossed them, or perhaps a few were melted down in my brief frenzy of home-casting with Prince August molds?  A Heritage Black pudding, several Grenadier skeletons, and a few TSR fighters fall into this category.  (I’m sure I didn’t melt down any monsters though!  That would only be the worst of the TSRs!)

Traded: I feel much less bad about giving up some of my minis in trades with friends, way back in the mid-1980s when I was still a kid.  I know I traded away a Grenadier beholder, but that is the only one that really stands out.  I know I reasoned at the time that I would encounter on in D&D and whatever I traded it for must have been cool!

Picture from the Lost Minis Wiki

Stolen: These are the ones that really hurt, and actually happened way back in 1982 or 3, before I was even painting and when I had only begun collecting minis.  some of my older friends had come over and looked over my figures — I am sure we didn’t actually play D&D just that day — and several figures were mysteriously gone.  The one I missed the most was a lich blowing a ram’s horn from the Grenadier “Monsters” box.  Man, that one was awesome.

Image from the Lost Minis Wiki

What the hell is Ghola Scale?

Got some stuff I’d like to eventually post about, including reviews, but in the meantime just found a neat newish blog about restoring old minis.  It’s called Ghola Scale (?) and when I saw the pingback from his post I went through and left comments on some of his posts but now his blog looks weird with mostly comments from one dude one every post so would you please be so kind as to stop over and tell whoever is running the blog how awesome his blog is already shaping up to be (if you’re into minis)?

BTW I never read Dune but Google tells me that a ghola is a sort of clone made from dead tissues.

Some more little people for the Bruce Galloway Memorial Home

So I’ve been getting some old lead minis from generous donors who share my appreciation for the golden age of Heritage, Grenadier, Ral Partha, etc.  I’ve been calling this the Bruce Galloway Memorial Home for Wayward and Convalescent Lead Figures, not that Bruce Galloway was all that into minis but more because he deserves some kind of gaming-related memorial online to counteract all the sniping by internet trolls regarding his Fantasy Wargaming book.  At some point I do hope to find new homes for any minis I don’t expect to use, but as it is I’m kind of behind on my painting lately.

Anyway  Scottsz of Old School Jump/Sorcerers of Doom/The Cold Text Files sent me yet another shipment, mostly of Grenadier:

The goblin is Heritage and the sea-troll is TSR, but all the rest are Grenadier, from the AD&D line.

Scott is entirely too generous, not that I’m complaining.

The dwarf with the sword and dagger is easily my favorite dwarf thief ever cast. The orc in Aztec regalia is one of the more interesting designs Grenadier came up with too. I wish they’d done all the guys in the Orc Lair box as Aztecs. I can really see orcs performing barbaric sacrifices of prisoners of war.

In fact, that sounds like a pretty straightforward adventure seed: rescue the villagers from the orcs before they sacrifice them at solstice, which is just a week away! That should give the party barely enough time to scout out the orc’s temple complex (Chitzen Itza would be a nice template) and plan and stage their daring raid…

Russ effing Nicholson!

So I mentioned a while back that my idea for an illustration for the LotFP:WFRPG was selected to be used, and I was stoked about the prospect of a free boxed set.  Now I’m even more stoked because I found out that the artist who did the illustration was Russ Nicholson!  I first saw his work in the Fiend Folio.  Since then I’ve come to appreciate his work even more, although I always loved the FF illustrations.

Mr. Nicholson now has a blog so you can see some of his stuff there.  I can’t wait to see what did with my suggestion.  I’m honored that idea was picked at all, and even more honored that someone as talented as Russ Nicholson created an illustration based on it.  One more thing to look forward to in the “Grindhouse edition” of the game.

And now for something completely different: I realized that it has been a long time since I posted any minis pics, and that is largely because I have not been painting much lately.  But I did finally finish the seven (!) Grenadier lizardmen generously donated to the Bruce Galloway Memorial home.  They will reinforce my lizard folk nicely.

I painted all my old Grenadier lizardmen blue and think of them as Troglodytes.  The few metal implements they cary are bronze, as it would be both a more “primitive” material than steel or iron and less prone to rust.  Realistically the bronze weapons should be corroded rather than bright and shiny but maybe they oil their weapons.  With human fat.