Planning ahead for future adventures, I found myself in need of some dwarf miniatures. Citadel miniatures may well have top tier models, but they're very specific to Games Workshop games (I do wonder sometimes why they don't expand their line to include common mythical creatures). For that reason, my default miniature vendor for tabletop roleplaying games is Wizkids, purely out of habit. I'm under no illusion that they're the best (because they're very emphatically not) but their website tries to sort minis by ancestry, class, and gender, and they do tend to carry answers for most stuff you find in popular RPG systems. For a collection of dwarves, though, I decided I wanted as motley a crew as I could find, and Wizkids is heavily biased toward D&D or Pathfinder classes. So I purchased from Reaper miniatures, and this is my review of two of the dwarves I ended up with.
Olav Gunderson, dwarf gambler
Olav Gunderson (model 50319) is part of the Chronoscope series of miniatures, I guess, because the word CHRONOSCOPE is emblazoned across its packaging. I didn't realise when I purchased it, but it's a metal miniature. I only own 2 or 3 metal miniatures, and I tend to avoid them mostly because they're unknown territory for me. The first metal miniature I bought was a Reaper zombie, and it was one of the worst sculpts I'd ever seen, much less tried to paint. But the metal miniatures I've gotten lately (also Reaper) have been fun to paint and fun to use in my games, so I may be warming up to them, or at least I'm learning to not fear them.
Olav is a dapper gentleman wearing a nice suit complete with a vest and long coat. He's smokes a cigar and carries an ornate walking stick, and one of those fancy black powder weapons on his belt (and its holster bears a rune). He's got a full head of hair and a stylish beard and mustache.
The miniature required no assembly aside from sticking the puddle base onto a proper wargaming base. After I did that, I added some sand around the base to even it out, and then primed the whole thing grey. He was a pleasure to paint, and in fact he reminded me a little of Janus Draik from Blackstone Fortress, and I admit I borrowed a few ideas from Draik's official paint scheme.
This nice thing about Olav is that the sculpt is simple without being boring, with just enough detail to pick out with your paints but not so many details that they blend together or "melt" into Olav's larger form. Detail work notwithstanding, I got Olav painted in about an hour.
Dorn Ironspike, dwarf warrior
I'll admit it, I got Dorn Ironspike (model 30089) because of he made me think of Gotrek Gurnisson from Warhammer. Unlike Gotrek, Dorn doesn't wield the axe Zangrom-Thaz, but he does dual-wield warhammers. Like Gotrek, he sports a mohawk, runs round the battlefield shirtless, and looks really really tough.
Reaper has outdone themselves with this one. Dorn is exactly what I think of when I think of classic miniatures. He's a single chunk of material, and he basically has no articulation from the waist down. Because he's wearing a pelt at his waist, his legs and the pelt he's wearing are sculpted as a single piece. The effect is that that his puddle base, along with the lower half of his body, form a nicely solid foundation for the dynamic pose of his chest, arms, and head. It's a completely different feel to modern models that sometimes barely touch their base with just the tip of a toe or heel. This is a solid miniature, and he looks the part of a fierce immovable warrior.
Like Olav, Dorn is simple but far from boring. He's mostly flesh, with just pants, a pelt, and boots left to paint once you're done his entire upper half. There aren't many details to get lost in the sculpt or, if you're new to painting, to overwhelm you.
Of course I painted his mohawk and beard orange.
Reaper dwarves
As is the case with too many miniature companies, there's basically no baseline scale within Reaper. Next to Dorn, Olav reads more like a halfling or a gnome. That's alright for me, and I've already rewritten Olav's story to make him a ratling rogue trader. But had I really really needed a band of dwarves, this would have made for a confusing pair.
In terms of the sculpt, the last several models I've gotten from Reaper have been pretty impressive. They're nowhere near Citadel quality, but then again each Reaper miniature is made from a single mold and, for the most part, they've been coming out alright. I'm certainly happy with these 2 dwarves, even though I won't be using them both in the same game due to scale and style differences. They're nice models, they were fun and easy to paint, and in the end they look like impressive characters for my games.
Photos licensed Creative Commons cc0.