The First Fantasy Adventurers

The first miniatures that I owned came from Citadel’s Fantasy Adventurers range.  For Christmas in 1979, my parents bought me a copy of the Basic D&D boxed set (Holmes edition), and my grandmother chipped in with a selection (selected by me, from the Games Workshop mail order catalogue) of figures from Citadel and Ral Partha.

In those early, youthful days of D&D, everyone seemed to take a turn at DMing, and we all had multiple characters which had somehow managed to acquire high levels and plenty of magic items. This was odd considering how often our characters died horrible deaths, more often than not at the hands of fellow party members!

So, we all needed plenty of player character figures, and a good selection of monsters too.  Most of my favourite character models came from the FA range, with a few Ral Partha ES range figures added (a personal favourite was ES01, Tom Meier’s ‘Evil Wizard’, which I used to represent several different Magic User characters).

Fig. 3   FA1 – Fighter in Plate Mail with Sword, FA2 – Wizard with Staff, FA3 – Cleric with Cross and Mace & FA4 - Sneak Thief with Dagger.

Fig. 4  FA5 – Druid with Sickle, FA6 – Bard with Sword and Lute, FA7 – Monk with Staff & FA8 – Ranger with Sword & Bow.

Fig. 5  FA9 – Barbarian with Two-handed Sword, FA10 – Paladin with Sword, FA11 – Illusionist & FA12 – Ninja Assassin with Sword.

The first 12 miniatures in the Fantasy Adventurers range depicted male human versions of all of the character archetypes of D&D/AD&D.  Demi-human and female characters would be added to the range later, as well as some evil characters and villains. Strangely, of these 12 models, 3 had already been replaced by remodelled versions by the time I first bought them in 1979.  Early versions of the Thief, Monk and Ranger will appear here at a later date.