Dire Wolves

Wow.  This past week was brutal for non-gaming.  I had a Necromunda game and a Lord Of The Rings game both of which I had to cancel/postpone, I've got to say when your games start falling through it really takes the wind of your sails to paint.  Having said that it looks like I'm back on for Necro in 2 weeks, and hopefully I can reschedule my LOTR game for next week.

In the meantime I was looking for a quick easy project to tackle to get me back into the swing of things and something truly fantastic got done.  I have always liked an element of horror in my fantasy gaming (Ravenloft for D&D, Vampire Counts for Warhammer, etc) and the one set of models in my collection I've never been 100% satisfied with are my choices of wolves (Dire Wolves specifically).  It seems that when most miniature companies design wolves for fantasy games their inspiration is either a real-world wolf; which look to me like they would last about 8 seconds against an armed and armoured warrior, or they go they crazy route of giant mutant dogs with spikes and things like that.  What I always wanted was a GIANT wolf, something that looks big enough to be a threat to a warhorse 1-on-1 where the size is really the only thing that coveys it's unnatural nature.

In my box of pre-painted D&D miniatures I found about a dozen Dire Wolves from one of their old blind pack sets.  They were an uncommon in whichever set had all the Ravenloft minis so I bought quite a few and ended up with a decent amount of these guys.  The funny thing is as much as I wanted GIANT wolves I had always thought these were far too big, they would never fit on a standard cavalry base so I could fit them into 1" squares for RPGs nor would they rank up if wanted them to double duty in my fantasy army...but when you're bored and the hobby knife is in your hand it's amazing what you can do.

I am super-excited about these figures because I will be able to use them in; D&D, Pathfinder, Warhammer and Chaos In Carpathia and they took me less than 2 hours to turn from scrap in my bitz box into a cool unit/encounter worth of models.

For the rest of this week it's back to the Enforcers and I believe I may just have started on an unexpected journey....

-Jay

The bases are 2" long and 1" wide so these are in fact HUGE wolves.

 

....but they do manage to rank up!