Death Saves is Hollywood star Joe Manganiello’s Dungeons and Dragons related brand. War of Dragon’s is the campaign that he runs which sounds like an epic mish mash of all the cool D&D campaign ideas thrown into a witch’s brew of epic, action fuelled moments. Of course being a famous LA geek, Joe’s players are something unusual; regular gamers include the likes of Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello, Vince Vaughan, wrestling champion Big Show and apparently many more as people drop in and out of Joe’s famous campaign, all ran from Joes luxury gaming man-cave.
And of course, if there’s a cool D&D related thing happening somewhere in the world, Wizkids are producing the models. The Death Saves: War of Dragons range comes in two boxed sets so far.
All of these are pre-painted models scaled for table top roleplaying. They’re meant to be used with battle-maps and the like, or simply as a token to inspire gamers. Box One features an armoured polar bear called Braga. The bear has lovely green scale style barding, and his middle can be popped out so you can equip him with his dwarf rider, Kimathi Stormhollow. The Dwarf also has his own legs, in case you want him to stand-alone. It’s nice bear, and the dwarf carries a wicked looking spear and is so well done he could have walked out of a Larry Elmore painting.
We get bare-chested blue chap wielding a magical axe made of ice and some sort of water/ice themed staff. Apparently he’s called Lapp and he has a familiar, a seagull charmingly called Christoper Squakin. Lapp would be a great choice for anyone playing a Genasi, and who doesn’t want a sea-gull miniature?
Next up is Maeglin, a moody looking sculpt of a ‘dark magic’ using mage who looks like he’s casting some sort of shadow spell. He’s assisted by a cool little raven called Poe. The paint-job on this piece is very well done; Wizkids could have sprayed it black, added white for the hair and called it quits but they’ve been careful with the shading here and the result is something nicely gothic.
The optimistically named Nerruk The Unkillable appears to be dressed in armour that reminds us of a frost dragon, has skin made of stone and wields a flaming blade. He looks pretty angry, presumably because his sword is one fire. Rounding of box one is the human ranger Phann Nailo, who has impressive hair, a cool cloak and wields the same sort of magic bow Hank used in the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon.
Box Two doesn’t have a polar bear in It, but it does have flying carpet. It’s well done and looks like it’s in mid flight. The design is cool and the carpet is just flat enough to make balancing normal sized minis on it fairly easy. Not that the model Jericho Blackwing needs to. He’s some sort of dead Knight, with glowing eyes and massive raven-wings. He looks like a great bad-guy model to use in a pinch. He’s accompanied by Oriax, a lady tiefling with pale skin, a big hammer and bat-wings.
The wizardly Kasin looks a lot like a cult leader in flowing white robes and fabulous hair. He’s assisted by a half-naked, heavily tattooed half-orc wielding a spear, who’s called Kalatuur MinMax. (One of the fun things about this range are the names. This is exactly how people name their D&D characters.
Marrat Occisor is a serious looking elf-like hero, with pale skin, face paint and a big black sword. Pretty much perfect for many D&D players. Hugo Ledbetter is black cloak wearing, ranged weapon wielding rogue. Against, cool but also generic enough to appeal to many a D&D player. Finally we get Ullac Jottunn, who as the name suggests, his giant-kin. This big model has Ullac Wirld both a massive axe, a huge fireball in the palm of his hand a surely look on his face. His body his half-burned and it looks both amazing and grisly.
The Death Saves range is an interesting selection of models. We’ve no idea if there’s a big market in models based on D&D characters played by celebrities, but even without that element to them, these are just a lot of fun.
