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...

4 comments:

  1. Just found your blog thanks to Spooktalker over at Belched from the Depths, and I am blown away by this figure! It is SO strange and awesome!

    I had no idea such a thing existed, and now I'm going to have to try and find one...

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  2. Lovely blog good to see an old cast get painted.My Asgard storm giant has a fat sword and used to have a shield which may still surface from the pile

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  3. Thanks for all of the kind comments! IMHO the old Asgard figures have a certain naive charm about them that newer figures rarely have... really matched the style of the original D&D game.

    I am guessing that the other Asgard Storm Giant you've got is a different figure - FM39 Armoured Storm Giant, which does come with a shield?

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  4. hmm, nice paint job on that huge piece of lead.....

    Not one I'd want myself though.....

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