Every Dungeon had a Dragon....

Back in 1980, every dungeon had a dragon in it!  There were a few dragon miniatures on the market at that time, including some nice 'imports' from Heritage and Archive in the USA, but most of these were beyond the limited financial means of my circle of 15 year-old gaming friends.  So when we stumbled across the new FF33 - Great Fire Dragon, a snip at £4.95, many of us bought one.

FF33 v2 - Great Fire Dragon

To this day, it's one of my favourite dragon models.  Big enough to put the willies up a band of 25mm adventurers, nicely posed with a menacing but powerful grace, and sculpted with just about the right amount of detail for even a basic paint-job to look pretty good.

Strangely, this version of FF33 is the second to be released.  The earlier FF33 Emperor Dragon, an ugly and clumsy-looking sculpt, was soon replaced in the Fiend Factory range.  Despite its obvious inferiority as a piece of art, the Emperor Dragon is much sought-after for its rarity.  I have one in my painting queue, and I'll be tackling it later.

Despite most of the FF range consisting of quirky refugees from the pages of the earliest issues of White Dwarf, there were a few 'generic' fantasy monsters in there too.  A couple of the models, FF17 - Minotaur and FF53 - Ogre, saw constant use in our D&D games.  They also both survived the great cull of 1982, so they're a common feature of many 'old school' miniatures collections.

FF17 - Minotaur & FF53 - Ogre

As I mentioned earlier, I have started work on some of my FF Goblins, so we'll have a look at them next time.

Dungeon Inmates & Artifacts.

Now, we come to the third of the 3 ‘F-Series’ ranges – the Fantasy Specials.  It’s a quirky and eclectic collection of dungeon scenery & tavern furniture, non-player characters and dungeon vermin.  Again, sculpting quality varies hugely across the range.

When my group of friends first started to play D&D in 1979, floorplans were never used.  A dungeon chamber would be depicted on the tabletop by a hastily scrawled map on a sheet of paper, with miniatures used to represent player characters and monsters, sometimes even the correct monsters!   

The majority of the models in the Fantasy Special seemed to be fairly superfluous, and unlikely to get much use.  And why would anyone buy a Magic Mouth Doorway, which would see very little game-time, when you could get 3 Goblins and 3 Orcs for the same price?

Fig. 6  FS1 – Dungeon Doorway, FS2 – Magic Mouth Doorway, FS3 – Demon Floor Trap & FS4 – Living Wall.

 Well, for me it wasn’t just about the gaming.  Something about the range triggered my imagination, as did the bizarre ‘Valley of the Four Winds’ range made by Minifigs, and I bought quite a few figures from the FS range.  I also owned most of the infamous nude torture victims.  I’ll take a closer look at those later.

The first 4 models in the range were an interesting mix of the useful and the weird, with a very handy dungeon door, the afore-mention Magic Mouth piece, a model which was probably supposed to represent a Trapper from D&D, and a Living Wall oozing and dripping with slime.  These were all pretty chunky models for their time, and quite pricey for those with limited pocket money!

In the next few entries, I’m going to switch between the 3 ranges to cover some of my favourite models, before getting back to covering more models in a roughly numerical order.  My painting table is currently covered with Goblins, with a patient queue of Red Orcs waiting in the wings.