Heartbreaker: rethinking the critical hit (plus new Alliance minis!)

Time for more of Heartbreaker, my sub-blog about my purely amateur interest in d20 fantasy design. Again, I'll start with a quick news blast for the Cheap Fantasy Miniaturists here who don't care about RPGs, then I'll continue with the meat below the fold.

Via VK.com's 1/72 group, here are some intriguing pics from Alliance, one of the two big 1/72 fantasy hobby miniature lines out there.

     

The description the Alliance guys give for these is interesting. When they were making their Amazons sets, they were thinking of whom the Amazons might fight and came up with the figures on the left. They describe them as Conan-esque (the Russian word for barbarian transliterates as "varvar," by the way), though they look a little like Chaos warriors to me. The figure on the right looks more like how I wished Alliances Amazons looked—less cheesecake, more Joan of Arc. Not many details on when or how these might show up, but they are very interesting.

Now to the RPG stuff. Just click the "Read More" link below the "You Might Also Like" stuff.

Giganticisms (and Bugbear-icisms)

Time for a new project, yes? Actually this is one I started a while ago but am just getting around to featuring. You may remember these nifty Tim Mee cavemen. They make great 1/72 hill giants, no modification necessary. But I just couldn't leave well enough alone.

The red guys are the cavemen. The gray heads are bits from one of the Warhammer ogre sets, acquired via Hoard o Bits. The green bod is a World of Warcraft board game ogre. The white is a Reaper Bones ettin. The Warhammer heads are great, but they have big gaps in back that I had to fill with glue and putty. They are arguably a little bit too large, but I think they look pretty good. Here's a shot of them primed.

I also have a few more bugbears I'm working on.

These are all D&D boardgame pieces with some mods. The left is a Temple of Elemental Evil bugbear with a Warhammer bit for a shield. The middle is a ToEE hobgoblin with a headswap. The right is a Wrath of Ashardalon orc with arms from the same bugbear that gave the hobgoblin its new bugbear head. This last figure has a close cousin that I already painted; the armswaps are so it doesn't look entirely like a clone.

Here they are primed, along with another old D&D bugbear I just got for pretty cheap.

Painting? Who knows?! It's the holidays, which are of course busy, but maybe not as busy as they could be this year. Stay tuned!