Grenadier Fantasy Lords 2nd Series 025 Lord of Death

No two ways about it; Grenadier chose some weird subjects to sculpt in the 1980’s. Next out of the lead mountain was this chappie, complete with cowl, cloak and scythe (but sadly missing a cocktail stick stuck through small pieces of cheese and pineapple). The paint job was fairly easy – white primer, then a couple of washes of Army Painter dark tone, then lots of white dry brushing to bring up the white again. The cowl and cloak were then painted black, and then dry brushed with several shades of gray to bring it up, followed by various ‘touch up’ jobs in white and black to tidy the entire figure up. I'm not entirely sure what the strange thing around its waist is - a pouch for putting gathered souls in, or a sporran maybe? The base is simply model railway gravel given a dark tone wash, and then dry brushed red and orange to try and suggest that it is stalking around on warm coals.

It’s a big sculpt – the second picture shows a Grenadier Fantasy Warriors (FW) barbarian against it to give you can idea of the scale, and the FW range were big hefty sculpts themselves! – and I actually quite like it as a sculpt. It has a definite sinister air, and not something you’d want a group of adventurers to encounter at the end of a session. Imagine your Cleric trying to turn THAT!

The question I have about this figure is WHY Grenadier produced it - who it was aimed at? It is such a specialised figure that I really can’t see it getting much table time at all. I mean, how many D&D sessions need a giant skeleton with a scythe? It might potentially get some play as the centre piece of an Undead army I suppose, but even then I can’t imagine Grenadier ever shifting many copies of the figure. As a wild guess… was this figure ever marketed for the Heavy Metal and Goth market…? I should imagine it would find a few takers there. As it is, it’s a comparatively rare figure (although as with many Grenadier figures, it’s not of great value on certain auction sites).