Saturday, 12 April 2014

Asgard Fantasy Monsters FM71 Bugbear



Had a bit of time on my hands, so I’ve been able to finish off another nugget extracted from the Lead Mountain. Next up was this overlooked morsel from Asgard; as any followers of the blog will know, I am partial to Asgard sculpts ;)

No two ways about it; this is an odd looking sculpt. Bugbears are generally viewed as larger, more intelligent goblins – hence the green skinned paint job – and the actual sculpt of the head, arms and torso is fine, lots of detail there, whilst the club is suitably menacing. But what is it wearing??! It looks like a boiler suit! And as for those boots… very dapper, and totally incongruous! The clothes are just totally out of keeping with the rest of the figure. However, I understand that in later editions of D&D, bugbears could be player characters, and I’m guessing that the figure was designed for that purpose – otherwise, if you put this figure amongst a horde of goblins (even Asgard goblins) it’s just going to look right out of place.

A pleasure to paint though – standard goblin green for the skin, blood red for the hair (just for contrast) and then a light khaki colour for the boiler suit, with leather for the boots. Apply washes, then dry brush. Simples!

I’m fairly pleased with the end product, although I can’t see it getting much table top time. From what I can make out, it’s a fairly rare piece (although I understand that Viking Forge still produce it, along with a lot of the old Asgard range) – I suspect it didn’t sell well because it is such an odd looking critter.  


4 comments:

  1. Cool figure, though it is a very odd sculpt for a bugbear. The trousers do give him a steampunk look.

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  2. Another Asgard i didn't know of ! funny look :-)

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  3. Thanks for the comments - got to agree it is a very odd figure. I was originally very tempted to paint the boiler suit in very bright colours, a bit like a romper suit - but then the small devil of caution said to keep it simple ;)

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  4. it's Dungerees he's wearing not a boiler suit, prisoners in the states wear a variation of boiler suits as does engineers on old steam trains and such.

    Otherwise that's a fine looking mini with a great paint job.

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