Hey! A Reaper Miniature that’s actually not a Bones model!

This model is a long-neglected one with a story behind it. Sometime in the mid-noughties, the main independent games store in the Melbourne CBD (Mind Games) was having a painting competition involving Reaper models as a sort of promotion, apparently involving Reaper Miniatures themselves. I was a regular back then, and so I decided to join in. I looked amongst the offerings, and found this guy. So I bought him and took him home. I didn’t like the shitty square, lipped base that he came on, and decided to rebase him on a larger base, and as I’d “envisioned” the leaping-over-rock pose from the moment I saw the model, and a 25mm round just wasn’t large enough, or have enough gravitas.

So the next time I was in, a few days later, or possibly the following week, the sales attendant who I was on good terms with asked how it was going. I told him I’d started it and it was coming along, and that I’d changed up the base. He told me that the base thing would prevent me from entering and pointed to the part of the sign that for some reason specified that the figure needed to be based on the base it came on. I don’t remember my reply (it wasn’t rude, I’d have remembered that much).

So the next time I was in, he asked me about how the model was going again, and I told him that I’d lost interest because of the basing thing and wasn’t working on it anymore. He then told me that the base woundn’t matter, and encouraged me to finish it anyway to enter it, but the thing was, by that point, my enthusiasm had been completely deflated and the figure sat for over a decade, every so often I’d think about wanting to try to finish it, but basically, fuck-all had been done on it since.

And that brings us to now. This figure has sat in the tubs of stuff I’ve wanted to finish for at least a year now, but my recent run of working on Beastmen, along with this being a Neglected Model month was enough to finally get me to properly work on finishing this model off, though it was still something I had to force myself to do for the entire process – and it involved a hell of a lot of the work, as I hadn’t gotten a huge amount of it finished before the comment about basing that put me off completing the model.

Anyway, as you can see, he fits in reasonably well with the Citadel goat-headed Beastman Gors, despite quite a few colour choices that separate him (skin, fur, loincloth, shield). As I said, though – I was building on what was originally done in 2005 or thereabouts while trying to finally finish this bastard rather than going for a complete repaint (because then I’d never get the fucking thing completed). The armour was originally black where it’s now a blued silver, so I was probably going for a Khorne-theme back then rather than generic. Bloody typical!

Oh! And he’s now available in Bones!

This guy concludes my little Beastman/Beasts of Chaos tangent for this month, unless something amazingly unexpected happens in the next three days.