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Like the topic title says, the classic undead/zombie dragon, sculpted by Tom Meier and co-released by Citadel and Ral Partha back in the day - this 'un here - was re-released by Ral Partha Europe at the start of the month. Getch'yer rotting reptilian here.

And a pic, always helps:

I'll just chip in that when I was looking for a long OOP Shadowrun model, which RPE have the rights to, a couple of years back, they couldn't have been more helpful in trying to track it down.

Sadly, it was a fruitless quest in the end, but not for a lack of trying from them, so nobody should be afraid to give them their business.

They still carry older molds? I picked up a few Cold War era gun sprues that are fantastic which they made, but I can't find them on their site any more. If they still carry them I could find a lot of excuses to use those things, but for the moment those guns are too good looking and I sadly have so few that I'm afraid to use many.

Oooh reasonably priced. Ill get one.

That's pretty cool.

Not gonna lie, though, I opened the thread hoping you meant the 4th/5th edition Zombie Dragon(even though I know it wasn't sculpted by Meier):

 Wyrmalla wrote:
They still carry older molds? I picked up a few Cold War era gun sprues that are fantastic which they made, but I can't find them on their site any more. If they still carry them I could find a lot of excuses to use those things, but for the moment those guns are too good looking and I sadly have so few that I'm afraid to use many.

My understanding is they have a large collection of uncatalogued molds in a room somewhere. I was after the old Shadowrun Feathered Serpent, and got in touch with a lady (name lost to mists of time I'm afraid) who literally went out and dug through the pile to see if they had it. In my case, I was out of luck, but it can't hurt to shoot an email, I expect a model reference would be helpful if you can find one.

 Wyrmalla wrote:
They still carry older molds? I picked up a few Cold War era gun sprues that are fantastic which they made, but I can't find them on their site any more. If they still carry them I could find a lot of excuses to use those things, but for the moment those guns are too good looking and I sadly have so few that I'm afraid to use many.

It's always worth asking, they're very helpful and cast the stuff themselves, so have the freedom to run stuff that would not make sense if they used a contract caster and had to factor in shipping & a minimum number of spins

I'm guessing if they had the spined dragon it would be available by now?

Almost certainly, although the impression I got from my exchange was they don't necessarily know exactly what they've got on the shelves, so there may be a slim chance it's tucked in a corner somewhere.

So, i'll ask it. Whats the big hubub about this? The model looks, quite honestly, pretty crappy to me in comparison to some of the dragon offerings out there.

That's funny. Some of the dragon offerings out there look pretty crappy to me in comparison to this model.

 Vermis wrote:
That's funny. Some of the dragon offerings out there look pretty crappy to me in comparison to this model.

Really? Which ones?

I just can't imagine a modern or near modern mini looking that goofy, unless maybe it comes from Reaper.

It may be the nostalgia factor for some people.

You can trust me that I know dragon miniatures. It's almost a specialist subject for me. And to begin with, I refuse to believe that a member of a GW fan forum has not seen goofier dragons than this.

Modern dragon minis (heck, modern dragons in most media) tend to fall into two big, overlapping circles on a Venn diagram: said goofiness, with a near formless sock-puppet body, bad or phoned-in pose, chunky clueless detail, etc. Most GW and FW dragons fall into this one. In the other big circle things tend to be better sculpted, often very well sculpted, with lots and lots of sharp detail, but the problem there is that sculpting ability =/= design ability. These dragons tend to look like stretched out human bodybuilders wearing a lizard mask (or a '98 American Godzilla mask) Bipedal humanoid muscle arrangements rippling on the body of a quadruped creature, liberally coated with lots and lots of well sculpted humongous interlocking bone slabs and random spikes such that you wonder how the thing can bend a joint, let alone move about. Suffering from the same malady as 40K's aesthetic: trying too hard to look like a macho, grimdark, badazz thing, with little concern for any other factor. That latter type of dragon seems to be turning into the modern dragon trope: wherever I look, inside and outside gaming, too many artists just seem to plug the same old details together rather than do their own thing and do their own bit of research into RL animal anatomy that might possibly be adapted to give a representation of a mythical creature a twinge of verisimilitude.

So yeah, there's a bit of nostalgia for a time when mini sculptors actually did that. But fun fact: I got into wargaming long after their efforts were for the most part OOP. It doesn't come from some curmudgeonly desire to cling to the past, but a curmudgeonly desire to see something with a bit more thought, originality and naturalism behind it.

Finally getting to the topic of this specific dragon: I don't think Tom Meier, for all his fame and expertise, churned out the best dragons in the business, before or since. I'd look at folks Nick Bibby, John Dennett, and Julie Guthrie (who recently started sculpting dragons again for Reaper) first. (And if he hadn't sworn off dragons for life, I think Andy Foster would get up there in another two or three sculpts too) But this zombie dragon is definitely of the same 'school', so to speak. To me the overall shape conveys the look of a large reptile, like a monitor lizard or croc, in serious trouble, and looks a lot more like a sickly version of one of GW's current 'live' dragons than the barrel-chested pogo-stick-legged playmobil thing that VC players get now. The hanging neck and drooping stomach, with raised shoulders in between as the forelegs try to prop everything up, helps to say that this is a shambling, dragging, zombie dragon even without the prerequisite damage. And that doesn't look too shabby in places. The oesophagus/trachea dangling below the neck vertebrae, between two stretched flaps of flesh, is a great touch among the other holes and rotting bits. Beyond that, the bunching and wrinkling of the skin at the base of the neck looks very natural, and lookit that fine scale detail. That's not unheard of these days but is pretty rare, especially in GW dragons not lent by New Line Cinema.
What's goofy about it? One eye is big, but things have big eyes, especially when you strip the flesh from around it. The downturned mouth? Things have downturned mouths too. Helps it look more like a natural beast and not a cliche, IMO. I mentioned the dragging stomach. Again, it's meant to be a zombie, y'know, not Usain Bolt. The small wings I'll grant you, but they're not a dealbreaker in my eyes, and one of the separate parts that might be replaced. (Heck, I'll buy one and do you a tutorial on how to extend them, if you like) What else is there?

This figure is why Warhammer Fantasy has rules for undead dragons....

Scale creep has made the poor wee beasty look small, but at the time he was the only one of his kind.

The Auld Grump

I just think in comparison to this:



and this



and this:



or this:



The one at the top of this thread looks like poop. But then again I don't know who Tom Meier is and have no nostalgic connection to him.

 cincydooley wrote:
I just think in comparison to this:

Spoiler:

Why's it got man hands when it's obviously not bipedal and seemingly incapable of it?

and this

Spoiler:

Worst dragon you could possibly use. Prime example of, let's be blunt, the Trish Carden rut that GW dragons are in. She's been trying to pull off the look of old GW dragons sculpted by Nick Bibby and Tom Meier for some decades but doesn't know enough about distribution of weight, behaviour of skin, general anatomy of reptiles or anything else. (The frustrating thing is she knows enough about obscure animals to use a Helicoprion jaw on the kharibdyss, but in all this time never seemed to take in general anatomical conventions)
The pose on this looks like a cross between a cat held up by it's armpits and a grandad trying not to fall off a skateboard. The body looks like a sock filled with nuts - there's hints of calves and deltoids but everything else looks like stuffed tubes. The skin folds at the joints like nothing natural, more like a baggy rubber wetsuit. (look at the back of the knee for the luvva Mike)The scales look like gravel or crazy paving. The stubby little toes with long thin curved claws sticking out all directions just look ridiculous on this giant, heavy-set beast. The head has those weird squiggly wrinkles that she puts on every dragon or reptilian monster, that don't correspond with anything and seem to be there just to fill up space in lieu of having to think about it. Ditto with the fishy 'bleurgh' mouth with wibbly lips, snaggly toothpick teeth, and tongue flopping about worse than Gene Simmons in his heyday. Like I said a couple of times, she took that right off models like this very zombie dragon and cranked up the in-your-face attitude a bit, but just seems to repeat her version over and over without thinking about it.

and this:

Spoiler:

Do you remember that name I mentioned, Julie Guthrie? Guess who sculpted that. Not to mention it's based on art by a pretty well established and regarded illustrator, who also has some idea what he's doing.

or this:

Spoiler:

Look at that jaw! Is it related to Richard Kiel? Has it got a bit of a pituitary problem? Why does it have a hard, narrow, pointed beak on it's snout and a wide, fleshy lip below it? If it's jaws are pretty much parallel with it's mouth wide open, where do they hinge, and how does it looks with it's mouth closed? Is it making a 'blalalalala' noise as it waggles it's tongue? Does it waddle with those splayed out hips and duckoraptor feet? Is it stuck in that falling-back pose? 'Cos from the looks of those big, long, overlapping, arrow-shaped plates on it's belly, it can't bend forward. In fact, take a closer look. Do you think the sculptor intended to continue those titanic triangular trammels on the neck, as they've done along the rest of the underside? Looking at the overall pose and the pose of the individual parts, why do you think they didn't?

But then again I don't know who Tom Meier is and have no nostalgic connection to him.

You don't need to have a nostalgic connection to him or anyone else. As I've already said, I don't. It might be that you need less of a rose-coloured connection to some things.

Well, several sub genus of lizards (such as chameleons) have grasping hands despite being exclusively quadrupeds, snakes and several other reptiles can distend their jaws because of elasticity in their tendons and you're assuming bony plates would inhibit movement when it could simply be scaly, leathery skin, which would be inherently a lot more flexible.

Some of your other points hold water, but a lot of your objections based on biology actually have perfectly reasonable real world precedent.

I've never seen the fascination with those old sculpts.

Not to mention this one:





The lesson being, obviously, that...opinions will differ!

 Vermis wrote:


Why's it got man hands when it's obviously not bipedal and seemingly incapable of it?

Don't know, don't care. It's a great looking model that looks far better than the one this thread is based on.

Worst dragon you could possibly use. Prime example of, let's be blunt, the Trish Carden rut that GW dragons are in.

Is that the, "Look much better than the dragon this thread is based on" rut?

Do you remember that name I mentioned, Julie Guthrie? Guess who sculpted that. Not to mention it's based on art by a pretty well established and regarded illustrator, who also has some idea what he's doing.

No, because when you started name dropping, I honestly stopped caring. I know it looks better than the "classis tom meier" one.

Looking at the overall pose and the pose of the individual parts, why do you think they didn't?

Probably because they don't have as much hands on experience with dragon anatomy as you do. And they wanted to make dragons that looked demonstrably better than the "classis tom meier" one.

You don't need to have a nostalgic connection to him or anyone else. As I've already said, I don't. It might be that you need less of a rose-coloured connection to some things.

Not quite sure what "rose colored connection" you're talking about. I think the Meier one look like a hunk of metal poop compared to every one I posted.

And even more so when compared to the one Alpharius posted.

And even more so compared to this guy:



But then again, you clearly have more experience with dragon anatomy than the rest of us, so I shall defer to your expertise.

There are certainly lots of other awesome dragons out there! However, it's usually polite to not post at least too many competing products in a N&R thread... I think it's pretty clear there are other, completely amazing, modern dragons for people to choose from. I have found myself looking for an oldschool small dragon in the past, though, so this could hit the spot for some folks! Different strokes and all that

Edit: Actually, given the size and pose, it could make a pretty sweet "adolescent" (or even baby) dragon compared to some of the other huge undead dragons out there! I'm thinking of the Bones and GW undead offerings in particular.

 BrookM wrote:
And a pic, always helps:

Shame there isn't anything else I need or even want on the Ral Partha website or I would have bought one for my Undead Army. I'm too miserable to pay 30 percent of the models vale on postage.

As for the dragon measuring competition going on in the thread...

This is hilarious, I was given this model by my partner's mother as a gift last Xmas (she bought it back in the 80's when she played Warhammer), checked the price on eBay out of curiosity, and it was worth £60... no longer I guess!


It is a nice enough model, but definitely on the small side, will be painting mine up anyway and using it for KoW.

 Vermis wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:
I just think in comparison to this:

Spoiler:

Why's it got man hands when it's obviously not bipedal and seemingly incapable of it?

and this

Spoiler:

Worst dragon you could possibly use. Prime example of, let's be blunt, the Trish Carden rut that GW dragons are in. She's been trying to pull off the look of old GW dragons sculpted by Nick Bibby and Tom Meier for some decades but doesn't know enough about distribution of weight, behaviour of skin, general anatomy of reptiles or anything else. (The frustrating thing is she knows enough about obscure animals to use a Helicoprion jaw on the kharibdyss, but in all this time never seemed to take in general anatomical conventions)
The pose on this looks like a cross between a cat held up by it's armpits and a grandad trying not to fall off a skateboard. The body looks like a sock filled with nuts - there's hints of calves and deltoids but everything else looks like stuffed tubes. The skin folds at the joints like nothing natural, more like a baggy rubber wetsuit. (look at the back of the knee for the luvva Mike)The scales look like gravel or crazy paving. The stubby little toes with long thin curved claws sticking out all directions just look ridiculous on this giant, heavy-set beast. The head has those weird squiggly wrinkles that she puts on every dragon or reptilian monster, that don't correspond with anything and seem to be there just to fill up space in lieu of having to think about it. Ditto with the fishy 'bleurgh' mouth with wibbly lips, snaggly toothpick teeth, and tongue flopping about worse than Gene Simmons in his heyday. Like I said a couple of times, she took that right off models like this very zombie dragon and cranked up the in-your-face attitude a bit, but just seems to repeat her version over and over without thinking about it.

and this:

Spoiler:

Do you remember that name I mentioned, Julie Guthrie? Guess who sculpted that. Not to mention it's based on art by a pretty well established and regarded illustrator, who also has some idea what he's doing.

or this:

Spoiler:

Look at that jaw! Is it related to Richard Kiel? Has it got a bit of a pituitary problem? Why does it have a hard, narrow, pointed beak on it's snout and a wide, fleshy lip below it? If it's jaws are pretty much parallel with it's mouth wide open, where do they hinge, and how does it looks with it's mouth closed? Is it making a 'blalalalala' noise as it waggles it's tongue? Does it waddle with those splayed out hips and duckoraptor feet? Is it stuck in that falling-back pose? 'Cos from the looks of those big, long, overlapping, arrow-shaped plates on it's belly, it can't bend forward. In fact, take a closer look. Do you think the sculptor intended to continue those titanic triangular trammels on the neck, as they've done along the rest of the underside? Looking at the overall pose and the pose of the individual parts, why do you think they didn't?

But then again I don't know who Tom Meier is and have no nostalgic connection to him.

You don't need to have a nostalgic connection to him or anyone else. As I've already said, I don't. It might be that you need less of a rose-coloured connection to some things.

I greatly appreciate this kind of expertise.

Some of your criticisms, though, might be better informed by a short course on evolutionary biology.

Such as....

If an animal has hands, with opposable thumbs, this just means that at one point, it developed opposable digits, and it's environment was such that this gave it an advantage in having sex and reproducing .

Hands happen to be the one feature that rarely is lost once a species develops them, and in the instances of opposable digits we see today (Homonids, Pandas, and a very few lizards and birds), we see all of these species evolving toward a shorter Palm and thus a stronger grip (over the approximately 1,000,000 years we have been studying such fossils and existing animals.

Also, dragons, as Chimeric creatures (they combine the forms of raptor/bat - or bothlarge canine or feline, snake, and/or lizard - with many anthropomorphic traits or features) might very well have any number of anthropomorphic features that correspond to human features.

Dragons are said to be capable of speech. This would indicate the presence of either a larynx and labial features and an unattached tongue, or a fully formed syrinx (such as those giving mynas and parrots the ability to speak - or... Google "Lyrebird" if you want to see the range of a Syrinx compared to a voice box and tongue/lips).

But in the former case, the mouth is going to have extremely anthropomorphic features.

Also... In the case of Dragons that occupy anthropomorphic dwellings and then hoard things, they are very likely to have evolved hands (if they were not outright created with hands to begin with, as were Tolkien's Dragons) so as to be able to better move their hoards, and to operate the features of their dwelling, itself made by human like beings.

But the very nature of their chimeric existence means that they are going to have the options for just about any anatomical feature imaginable.

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also... A point about Dragon size.

Most of your modern dragons are sculpted to be roughly Kaiju size.

Which is to say:

An IMPOSSIBLE Size, as Kaiju are vastly above the size limit for any land animal of any kind.

Yet the older dragons were sculpted so as to be just within the realm of the possible, being roughly equivalent to dinosaurs in size.

There were a few exceptions to this, such as Citadel's/My Imperial Dragon from 1983/84, or Heritage's Great Dragon (which was an impressive Dragon for its time, but utterly horrid by even the standards of the mid-1980s).

I can understand why people want such monstrous beasts for a fantasy world.

But I still tend to prefer my fantasy to remain within the world's of physics and biology.

Which may confuse, or even outrage a few people, who might not understand that just because something is "fantasy" does not mean that there is unlimited license to do anything.

When you begin adding too many Kludges to a fantasy world, it ceases to be very compelling when compared to a world that operates by unified cosmological features.

MB

 Vermis wrote:
Worst dragon you could possibly use. Prime example of, let's be blunt, the Trish Carden rut that GW dragons are in. She's been trying to pull off the look of old GW dragons sculpted by Nick Bibby and Tom Meier for some decades but doesn't know enough about distribution of weight, behaviour of skin, general anatomy of reptiles or anything else. (The frustrating thing is she knows enough about obscure animals to use a Helicoprion jaw on the kharibdyss, but in all this time never seemed to take in general anatomical conventions)
The pose on this looks like a cross between a cat held up by it's armpits and a grandad trying not to fall off a skateboard. The body looks like a sock filled with nuts - there's hints of calves and deltoids but everything else looks like stuffed tubes. The skin folds at the joints like nothing natural, more like a baggy rubber wetsuit. (look at the back of the knee for the luvva Mike)The scales look like gravel or crazy paving. The stubby little toes with long thin curved claws sticking out all directions just look ridiculous on this giant, heavy-set beast. The head has those weird squiggly wrinkles that she puts on every dragon or reptilian monster, that don't correspond with anything and seem to be there just to fill up space in lieu of having to think about it. Ditto with the fishy 'bleurgh' mouth with wibbly lips, snaggly toothpick teeth, and tongue flopping about worse than Gene Simmons in his heyday. Like I said a couple of times, she took that right off models like this very zombie dragon and cranked up the in-your-face attitude a bit, but just seems to repeat her version over and over without thinking about it.

Look at that jaw! Is it related to Richard Kiel? Has it got a bit of a pituitary problem? Why does it have a hard, narrow, pointed beak on it's snout and a wide, fleshy lip below it? If it's jaws are pretty much parallel with it's mouth wide open, where do they hinge, and how does it looks with it's mouth closed? Is it making a 'blalalalala' noise as it waggles it's tongue? Does it waddle with those splayed out hips and duckoraptor feet? Is it stuck in that falling-back pose? 'Cos from the looks of those big, long, overlapping, arrow-shaped plates on it's belly, it can't bend forward. In fact, take a closer look. Do you think the sculptor intended to continue those titanic triangular trammels on the neck, as they've done along the rest of the underside? Looking at the overall pose and the pose of the individual parts, why do you think they didn't?

You're right, sculptors should be making dragons, a fantasy based creature, as realistic and homogenized as possible.

BeAfraid wrote:
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also... A point about Dragon size.

Most of your modern dragons are sculpted to be roughly Kaiju size.

Which is to say:

An IMPOSSIBLE Size, as Kaiju are vastly above the size limit for any land animal of any kind.

Yet the older dragons were sculpted so as to be just within the realm of the possible, being roughly equivalent to dinosaurs in size.

There were a few exceptions to this, such as Citadel's/My Imperial Dragon from 1983/84, or Heritage's Great Dragon (which was an impressive Dragon for its time, but utterly horrid by even the standards of the mid-1980s).

I can understand why people want such monstrous beasts for a fantasy world.

But I still tend to prefer my fantasy to remain within the world's of physics and biology.

Which may confuse, or even outrage a few people, who might not understand that just because something is "fantasy" does not mean that there is unlimited license to do anything.

When you begin adding too many Kludges to a fantasy world, it ceases to be very compelling when compared to a world that operates by unified cosmological features.

MB

None of the dragons posted in this thread(and frankly very few modern dragon miniatures) are anywhere near Kaiju size. The vast majority of modern dragon interpretations, at least in miniature form and compared to the models that they're designed to scale with, are easily the size(or smaller) of the larger Theropods or at the most in the size range of Sauropods. They are very much in the realm of possibility size wise.

As well as:

 Alpharius wrote:

The lesson being, obviously, that...opinions will differ!

But let's all be sure to differ...politely, please?

Thanks!

 scuzz_bucket wrote:


You're right, sculptors should be making dragons, a fantasy based creature, as realistic and homogenized as possible.

His point was that fantasy things, including dragons, need a certain level of verisimilitude which many lack, and in fact lack in mostly the same way, making them TOO homogenized. So really, you only grasped about half of what he is arguing. The parallel is if every comic artist mimicked Rob Liefeld; artists could do better anatomy while being more varied in the outcome, instead of bad anatomy that all looked bad in the same uniform way.