Hello and welcome back to the Gallant Goblin!
I'm Grady, and as always, this video is brought to you
by The Deck of Many and Humblewood.Net
Today we have a preview of six minis from
the upcoming Wave 11 of the unpainted
Nolzur’s Marvelous Miniatures
line for Dungeons & Dragons.
For a full list of everything in Wave 11, check
the link in the video description below
for the press release at phdgames.com.
We’d like to thank WizKids for
sending us these preview figures,
and you can click the “i” in the corner
of the screen to see our unboxing video
and find out what other sneak peeks we got.
For now, this set is a mix of brand new
sculpts and unpainted versions of figures
that previously appeared in the prepainted
line for D&D, Icons of the Realms.
And as always, if you want to skip ahead, check
our video description below for timestamps
to all the minis we show.
Let’s get to it!
First let’s look at the brand new sculpts,
starting with the young red dragon.
Everyone likes dragons, right?
Dragons have four life stages:
wyrmling, young, adult, and ancient.
The ones we have today are the second, or young,
life stage of gold, silver, and red dragons.
This is the culmination of a new set of young
dragon sculpts for all ten dragon types
that began with copper, green, blue,
and black dragons in Wave 8
and white, brass, and bronze dragons in Wave 9.
Of course there will be more dragon types coming
later this year when Wizards of the Coast
releases the gem dragons, but for now we just have
five chromatic and five metallic dragon types.
Now the packaging for the Nolzur’s figures is usually
pretty good at preventing damage or warping,
but you may notice this red dragon’s
wings are a bit close together.
You may need to use hot water
to bend the wings out a bit
to paint the figure properly and take
advantage of its nice wingspan.
I was really excited for these because
if you’ve watched our full set reviews
for Icons of the Realms, you’ll
know that for the most part,
the dragon sizes of the minis in
those sets don't really correlate
with the life stage they were supposed to represent.
They tended to be a size too small,
as the adult dragons are supposed to be
huge sized but were released as large.
This new set of Nolzur’s figures course
corrects a bit far in the other direction.
You may notice the back of the box has
a disclaimer saying the base sizes
are for stability of the figure and
not representative of game scale.
Young dragons are supposed to be large sized
and these come with huge bases, one step up,
and they are scaled at about huge size as well,
making them more suited as adult dragons.
The obvious solution is to ignore the text
and use the Icons dragons as the young
dragons and the Nolzur’s as the adults.
Here’s an example of the Nolzur’s young gold dragon
next to a large sized gold dragon
from Tyranny of Dragons.
The painted gold dragon is noticeably smaller
than the unpainted young gold dragon.
Two other notable features of these Nolzur’s dragons:
First, some of the sculpts are the first grounded
dragons we’ve gotten for 5th edition.
While older lines for D&D and
the Pathfinder Battles lines
have featured many dragons
standing on their bases or rocks,
most of the dragons we’ve gotten in the Icons
of the Realms line have been flying and on pegs.
The gold dragon here is standing on the ground.
Meanwhile, the ones that fly are on the new pegs
that WizKids has been using for over a year now.
While these new pegs have been fantastic
in the Icons and Pathfinder Battles lines,
mainly because the figure comes preglued to the
peg, the Nolzur’s dragons do not come preglued.
Whether the dragon stays on the peg without
needing to be glued is hit or miss still.
The red dragon barely stays on while
the silver dragon slots in fine.
How well it fits is mainly based on the pose.
So while these pegs are great if you
plan to glue your mini to the peg,
they are not much improved over the old pegs if you
want to keep the dragon separate for ease of storage.
Now if you’re not picky about details,
the nice thing about unpainted dragons
is that you can actually paint them any
color you want, so you’re not limited
to them being the color or metal they’re listed as.
However each dragon type have distinguishing physical
characteristics that identify them even without color,
so you do want to pay attention to the details
if you’re wanting to be lore accurate.
As examples, if you own the Tyranny of Dragons
five year anniversary edition of Rise of Tiamat,
or if you’ve bought Rise of Tiamat on D&D Beyond,
you can find in Appendix E: Concept Gallery
art and descriptions of the key identifying
features of all five chromatic dragon types.
I haven’t found nearly as good
illustrations for metallic dragons,
but the Monster Manual does describe the
distinguishing features of all ten dragon types.
The key places to look are mainly the
wing shape and the facial features.
The gold dragon has a very distinctive silhouette
with its wings running down the length of its tail
and tendrils or whiskers coming out of its face.
Silver dragons have a mohawk-like frill atop
their head that runs down to their tail
and chin spikes that resemble a neatly trimmed beard.
Red dragons have long horns that
make them look like Maleficent
as well as a beak-like snout and the
widest chromatic dragon wingspan.
Now onto the figures that are unpainted versions
of figures from previous Icons of the Realms sets.
Here is the balor.
This originally appeared in the Dungeon of the
Mad Mage set, which released March 2019.
You can click the “i” in the corner of the
screen to see all the figures in that set.
The balor was a rare huge-sized figure,
meaning it’s in decent demand and
relatively expensive on the aftermarket.
The great thing about the Nolzur’s figures is that
they are usually much more reasonably priced
compared to prepainted singles,
and the balors are incredibly powerful challenge
rating 19 demons from the Basic Rules.
They primarily feature in the charity adventure module
Infernal Machine Rebuild for levels five to ten
which can be slotted into any campaign but is a
thematic fit for Baldur’s Gate: Descent Into Avernus.
Next is a beholder zombie which is another figure from
the March 2019 Dungeon of the Mad Mage set.
Since it’s technically not a proper beholder,
it may be easier to get a hold of
than other beholder figures, painted or unpainted,
which tend to be in very high demand.
The main difference between the beholder zombie
and the regular beholder from the Nolzur's line
is that the beholder zombie is a little bit smaller.
It's also intended to be painted such that the
eyes are white and glazed over with no pupils,
while the beholder would actually have regular eyes,
but with the proper paint job, this is a
great alternative option for a beholder
if you just painted it like one,
and the smaller size is not a huge deal either as there
is a lot of variation in size among beholder minis.
This figure has ten eye stalks, just
like the standard beholder mini,
and comes with four eye stalks shooting
transparent spell effects out of the eyes
that you can swap in when the
beholder zombie is attacking.
Beholder zombies are challenge rating 5
creatures from the Monster Manual,
and they are weaker, with fewer
eye rays, than regular beholders.
They appear in Dragon Heist
and Dungeon of the Mad Mage.
Finally we have a behir, which is also from the
March 2019 Dungeon of the Mad Mage set.
Behirs are huge sized creatures, occupying
a 3x3 space on a battlemap.
They’re kind of like boa constrictors if boa constrictors
had legs and could shoot lightning out of their mouths.
Naturally, such a terrifying creature
has a challenge rating of 11.
It can be found in the Basic Rules.
They show up in Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Tales
from the Yawning Portal, and Out of the Abyss.
Overall this is an exciting wave!
Dungeon of the Mad Mage is a
great set to be pulling minis from.
It had sculpts of many classic monsters,
including huge sized creatures,
and there’s also a lot of new sculpts coming
in Wave 11 that we haven’t previewed
which I really hope show up prepainted in Icons soon.
There’s a firbolg mini, which are pretty rare still.
Theo loves werecreatures so the
wererat and weretiger pack is exciting.
There’s an ultroloth as well as a pack
containing a lich and a mummy lord.
We’re also getting the green and blue slaadi, which
should yield a lot of mayhem in your games.
This set is coming some time in March
2020 with no exact date set yet.
If you want to stay on top of it,
we’ve included a link in the video description below
to WizKids’ catalog of upcoming releases.
All the figures we’ve previewed today have
a suggested price of $14.99 US Dollars
except the beholder zombie, which
will be priced at $4.99 US Dollars.
I want to thank Wizkids again for
sending us this early review set.
I also want to thank our sponsor
for this video, the Deck of Many.
I have not been poring over our copy of Humblewood
because Theo is the DM and very protective of spoilers.
So all I’m going to point out is that crows have
not been getting nearly enough love from us
out of the five new birdfolk
races included in this setting.
Look at this animation of a corvum from Humblewood!
Have you seen it before?
I don’t think so.
I don’t remember editing it into any of our other videos.
It’s been like six months and the corvum get no love.
It’s because you assume they’re
all necromancers, isn’t it?
Just because it’s a murder of crows,
but crows are smart, and wholesome,
and capable of chasing down and killing lambs?
What?
Oh, that explains why lambs are not
a playable race in Humblewood.
Learn more and pick up your copy
today at Humblewood.net
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I hope you’re doing well, and I’ll see
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