Crocodile Rock and Smasher's Bane

I painted up the first figures from the Reaper Miniatures Bones 4 set: two giant crocodiles from the “Dire Beasts” pack. I was surprised to find that I only had a couple of crocodile figures from previous D&D sets in my collection, so these fill at least a minor need. These Reaper crocodiles are great sculpts, with nasty, gaping maws. They fit perfectly on Huge bases, so would work well for 3.5e or 5e giant crocodiles.

Although the North is much too cold to support native populations of giant crocodiles, these figures are still very handy for the Great Dungeon. In 3e, fiendish giant crocodiles can be summoned using summon monster V. And the swamps and warm seas of the Terrarium demiplane harbor plenty of giant crocodiles.

These crocs were my first chance to work with the new Bones Black material. It was much easier to see mold lines on these figures, and they aren’t any harder to clean up with a metal file and x-acto knife. I felt like the material took paint a little better than the PVC material used previously. The new material really does hold details much better: the little crocodile teeth and ridges along the back came out sharp and clear; I suspect they would have been mostly lost on the old Bones.

In general, the Bones Black material seems superior in almost every way. It seems like it is harder to cast these figures as single pieces, and so they seem to require a little more assembly work. And although the stiffer material seems to result in fewer droopy weapons or limbs, when you do get one it seems a little harder to fix than with the older material.

The T-Rex is from the WizKids’ Nolzdur’s Marvelous Miniatures line and was a Christmas gift that’s been patiently sitting on my workbench these last few months. This was blast to paint: it’s a nice sculpt with lots of great looking scales. Like the other figures from this line that I’ve worked on, the component pieces didn’t match up very well and required quite a bit of Green Stuff to fill the gaps. But once that was done, this painted up really well. Unlike the beholder, I didn’t use primer on this one.

I posed this tyrannosaur with a lizard man in honor of a deceased character from an earlier campaign. While trapped in the Terrarium demiplane Smasher the Lizard Man charged a full grown T-rex. Though the character didn’t survive the encounter, the memory will live forever.