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.