Asgard Fantasy Monsters FM64 Land Dragon and Lizardman

I haven’t posted for a while, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been painting – it is just that we’ve had so much rain recently, I simply haven’t had an opportunity to varnish the figures I’ve completed, and I preferred to wait for a couple of dry days rather than suffer the dreaded vanish frosting due to moisture in the air.

Anyhow… next to be extracted from the Lead Mountain was this rather splendid beastie from Asgard. The Land Dragon does seem to share a common ancestry with the Asgard Wyvern which I did earlier this year, but that is no bad thing.

The model came in 3 parts – rider, the main body of the Land Dragon, and the tail. The joint for joining the tail to the body was really poor, and it took quite a bit of superglue plus Milliput to get it in place. As with the Wyvern, the original Asgard catalogue drawing showed the tail hanging down, whilst in reality it is obvious from the casting the tail is supposed to curve upwards. It certainly makes for a more dramatic (if more fragile) figure! Originally the rider just sat on top of the Land Dragon, and there were huge gaps in the casting – this was alleviated by adding a leather cushion (sculpted from Milliput) for the rider to sit on. He certainly looked a lot comfier after the addition of the cushion!

And so on to painting. Quite a simple job, really; yellow for the underbelly of the Land Dragon, then red for the main body of it and the rider, with brown for the rider’s furs, followed by GW red shades to bring out the depth, and then highlighting. The base is just flock with a few garden twigs added.

I was quite pleased with the way this turned out – it’s a well detailed sculpt, especially for Asgard, who did turn out a lot of very coarse models, especially on the larger ones – and it is a very dramatic figure too. Having said that… there are definite issues with it, and I wonder why Asgard actually produced it. The rider is very small, especially when compared to other Lizardman figures from the Asgard FM range, although I suppose you could argue that the Lizard man race selected small riders for the same reason we select small jockeys to ride horses! If it were used as an encounter for a standard DnD session, I suppose the Land Dragon could give the party a hard time, but this figure strikes me as being more suitable for war gaming, with a unit of them charging the enemy ranks. Whilst this is a good idea in principle, I am guessing that the sheer cost of assembling a unit of Land Dragons and rider (plus the low popularity of Lizardman armies amongst gamers I know) meant that this just didn’t happen. Bit of a shame, as it is nice figure – just a bit too specialised for regular use.