Assembling the Shadows of Brimstone: Swamps of Death miniatures

After rifling through all the components of the City of Ancients box I turned to the Swamps of Death. I won't do a proper unboxing since most of the tokens are the same in both boxes; contents are similar although some of the floorplans are different, and of course the theme-specific cards and tokens are different too. (If you missed my City of Ancients unboxing click here.) Instead I will be focusing on the miniatures in this post.

All the models in the Shadow of Brimstone games are cast in a semi-soft plastic. Not as soft as the traditional soft plastic figures like Airfix, but not as hard as say Games Workshop or plastic model manufacturers like Tamiya. They take both plastic glue and super glue and are supplied with 30mm round bases for the most of the figures. There are some mould lines on the miniatures that need to be cleaned up but generally the casting is good.

I couldn't resist starting with the big baddie, the Harbinger.

Both core games contain four different Heroes, six Tentacles, six small monsters, twelve "hoard" monsters, three medium monsters and one large monster. Some of the larger monsters have 40mm bases and the big bosses have 60mm bases. The heroes and monsters are different between the core games except for the tentacles.



The Harbinger is an impressive model all on its own sprue, much bigger than the tentacle thingie from City of Ancients. It can be a bit tricky to assemble if you are not careful.

Starting with the body the parts are dry fitted before gluing. But don't glue it yet!

The head, the tail and the arms all have to be glued before glueing the body halves together.

I need three hands to do this... 

Finally! Despite dryfitting the fit isn't perfect and I had to press the body together until the glue had set.

On to the legs and feet.

The model is well balanced and can actually stand on it's feet without the feet or tail touching the ground.

Adding the wings.

It's still keeping the balance!

Nice details on the back.

The Harbinger is an impressive model. I will need to do some filling of the joints but it should paint up nicely. There's some shallow surface patterns on the skin which I will hopefully be able to pick out with a wash.

"This one next", the Harbinger whispered.

On to the next sprue which contains the smaller monsters. It contains four zombies, two flying things and one crab-like thing. You get three of this sprue making a total of twelve zombies, six flyers and three crabs.

The crab monster. It's called a "Slasher" apparently.

Not that many parts so it's a lot easier than the Harbinger to assemble.

Body is first glued together. Looks somewhat like a giant louse.

And then the arms and legs. Those big claws makes the model unbalanced so the Harbinger lends a helping hand.

Now for zombies! Two of the zombies are identical, but a carefully applied knife can make all the difference.

Two of the zombies, a lady and a gentleman (I think).

Two more zombies, note that the left zombie is identical to the one in the picture above.

The lady doesn't need any assembly. She looks more of a ghost to me than a zombie though.

On to the twins. As you can see there is a lot of flash on these.

Some of the mould lines spoil the pegs used to attach the arms, but as I'm converting them anyway I just sliced the pegs off.

As I mentioned two of the zombies are identical. On many of the figures the pegs holding arms (and other bits) are specially shaped, like five-sided trapezoid or a corner shaped piece. However many of these pegs -- which presumably are designed to ensure a perfect fit with the correct part -- are marred by mould lines or by the fact that the peg is used as the connection point with the sprue. This spoils the purpose of the odd shapes as you have to clean them up and often slice away part of the peg. On this particular model I'm going to re-position the arms to add variation to the models anyway, so I sliced off the whole peg on both sides.

And job's done. Sure they are still twins, but they no longer look like the chorus line from the Thriller video.

Last we have an old miner.

The Miner also need the a supporting hand from the Harbinger.

The Miner was also quite straight forward, although I first thought he should hold the pick in both hands which was a bit hard to achieve. Also, he's holding the pick like it's a club, but hey, maybe Zombies don't have any mining skills.

The flyer. Reminds me of the Cluster Lizard from the Lexx TV-show. But with wings.

The mouths are tiny, but with great big honking mould lines.

I bent the tounges... tentacles... whatever, to get some variation.

Not that much variation though. The mouths didn't fit on the bodies that well either.

And completed.

I think the flyers are the weakest models of the bunch. The flying effect is a bit marred by the clump of rocks on the base and the pose doesn't really work. I realise they are supposed to seem like they are hovering and launching downwards, but since they sit an a pile of rocks it looks more like a snake hunting mice -- a snake with wings stuck on. Still, some paint will probably bring them to life, and it's a board game after all.

Now for the heroes!

The hero sprue.

In Shadows of Brimstone: Swamps of Death you can play as either a Preacher, an Indian Scout, a Lawman or a female Rancher. These miniatures are cast in a slightly darker plastic which I think is a little bit harder and seem to hold the details better. I didn't bother with assembly photos because the heroes are not that many parts.

A mixed bunch really. The Preacher functions as a wizard, casting "sermons" instead of spells.

The Fab Four? Spice girls?

 And lastly a couple of comparison shots to show the different size of the miniatures.

"Stop in the name of the law!"

"Get off my property!"

The new parish members were all eager to receive communion.

Now things have got out of hands...

I just had to show the size of the Harbinger, he barely fits into my Foldio ministudio.

And to cap it all off a comparison with some other figures different manufacturers. The Shadows of Brimstone miniatures are a little bit bigger than other miniatures and the humans are all realistically proportioned, I feel they are perhaps close to 1:48 scale. As I have mentioned earlier in my post about scale it's a bit hard to say what scale things are anyway.

Perry miniatures, Shadows of Brimstone, Wargames Foundry and Forgeworld.

As you can see the Rancher towers over "traditional" 28mm figures like the Perry and the Foundry figures. Even the Warhammer 40k figure from Forgeworld is a bit shorter, but not by much.

The "Strangler" from the City of Ancients set and a Games Workshop plaguebearer.

The demons of course could be any scale you want, as you can't really say how big they would be in real life. Especially the Stranglers (the tentacled demons) from City of Ancients could work very well in Warhammer as Horrors of Tzeentch.

I hope you enjoyed the pictures. Now I will continue to punch out all the counters and floorplans so I can get a game in. Oh, and I need to glue the rest of the figures, I only did one each of the triple sprues so far...