Pirates

The undead pirates I scored a while back at my FLGS remind me that I have a huge backlog of swashbuckler figures to paint. Huge. But here are some finished pirate and swashbuckler figures. Most are pretty old, and nowadays they market is lousy with pirates, but back in the late 1980s/early 1990s when most of these were made, there was not a lot of selection.

Here’s a scurvy crew indeed, sons of guns all.

Three Grenadier pirates, from the mid-1980s.

A Grenadier (Julie Guthrie, I think) rogue and a bard, most likely Rafm. The skull & crossbones on the hat turns a bard into a pirate, despite the little mandolin on his belt.

The guy on the left is a Castle Creations superhero figure (my brother got a set of two dozen super hero figures that were advertised in a Dragon Magazine some time around 1983, when we were playing Villains & Vigilantes). The guy on the right is Rafm, I think, and was sold as an elf marine in a set with several others I still need to paint.

Two landlubber orcs (a Nick Lund sculpt, Grenadier, sold as a war ogre, and a Citadel crossboworc).  I need to rebase these, and probably repaint the Lund orc.  My brother ran a “fantasy” pirates campaigns in GURPS (basically the historical Caribbean but with fantasy races, monsters, and a little magic added), which must be the best game I ever played in. This inspired me to adapt as many fantasy figures as possible to be pirates. I should post the naval rules we cobbled together using GURPS and the Games Workshop game Man o War. We had some great fun. The game had up to nine players at a time, plus the GM.

Two Dwarfs. I think the one on the left is by Marauder (an offshoot of Citadel) but the other one is a classic Citadel dwarf lord. He has a powder keg (or beer keg?) strapped to his back.

Two later Ral Partha figures, a pirate and a musketeer (D’Artagnan, no doubt).

A Reaper skeleton pirate and a cheap dollar store toy. The toy represents a half-ogre pirate.

Scale creep on the high seas. The Grenadier figure is a short 25mm and the Reaper stands almost 40mm!