Today pair of models once again hail from The Temple of Elemental Evil Dungeons and Dragons Adventure Boardgame. This pair is a half-step up from the better WotC sculpts, being from the first of the games in this line where Wizkids licenced the game line from WotC. Due to that, these models are more or less on a par with earlier Nolzur’s models, which is where many of the figures going forward will have also made appearances.
As you can see by the fur texture of Alaeros’ cloak, and the rest of the fur on him, the sculpts here are still pretty simple. Ratshadow’s cloak at least offered the opportunity to quickly practise blending out a nice dark cloak. I couldn’t really find a definitive palatte for Ratshadow’s outfit, so I went with “Rogue” while Alaeros did have several pieces of art around, so I went with those as my overall colour guide.
As with the majority of the models in these lines – both the boxed games and even the majority of the overall Nolzurs’ miniature lines, the models aren’t anything super special, but are good enough for a boardgame and certainly “level up” the experience over playing with unpainted grey or even unpainted coloured plastic figures. Oh yeah, these two also complete all of the set of five adventurer heroes from the Temple of Elemental Evil Boxed set. Unfortunately, I still have quite a lot more models to paint to complete this box, so unless there’s a demand to see them arranged together, it’ll have to wait until the box is done!
Azazel's Bitz Box. 
Excellent work mate, I see you’ve made the best of the sculpts textures, and like the way you’ve got the different tones in there.
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Yeah that fur is pretty ..different. I see what they were going for but it seems more an illustrative style than one suited to sculpting.
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Nice job on these! Whenever I see a large Barbarian and a smaller thief guy…my mind immediately goes to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser! Though in this case, it might be the Gray Mouse instead! 😉
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I have no idea who they are, and even after googling I still have no idea! 😀
I did see a decent looking Mike Mignola cover, though… 😉
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Ah, they are the two main characters in a series of stories written by Fritz Leiber. He was around during the time of HP Lovecraft and Robert E Howard. All three (plus Tolkien) heavily inspired D&D. Whenever you see a big Northern Barbarian or a dextrous slight of build Thief, they are likely inspired by Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Especially if you see the two together! The stories were never titled “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser”, so that’s why you probably didn’t find much by googling. ‘Works of Fritz Leiber’ should turn up more. Here’s a DCC product with them on the cover: https://goodman-games.com/store/product/dungeon-crawl-classics-lankhmar-boxed-set/
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Oh, I saw the Fritz Lang bit -I just didn’t make any meaningful connection to it or read further. Kind of like if you’d never heard of maybe Krull and googled it.
“Oh yeah, some fantasy thing I’ve never heard of. Cool.”
There are another …3? 4? Heroes from this set, so it just turned out this way that I painted (and finished) them together instead of the others so that’s probably more of a generic D&D party thing for them, but kinda cool that you spotted a connection. 🙂
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Nice work as always Az!
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Thanks Guru!
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Excellent work on these straightforward sculpts. They will look great in your future games.
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Thanks mate. They’re not instagram display models by any means but they will work fine as the playing pieces that they are. 👍
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Nicely done mate 🤘
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Cheers mate! 🙂
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Very nice! 🙂 Ratshadow’s a great name!
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Fits in with how I feel about hobbits as well! 😀
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