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Caesar Fantasy: First Impressions

My modeling & gaming activities are still on the backburner with the yearly monsoon rains putting my workbench and gaming table constructions on hold. With very little workspace in my garage and the high humidity, proceeding might cause wood warps and uneven painting. Nevertheless, I'm determined to have everything done by July.

The first boxes of Caesar Miniatures have arrived. I ordered a box each of the Caesar Dwarves and Orcs as well as a box of Hat Industrie's Sea Peoples. I haven't had time to take pictures of the figures but I've added pictures taken from Caesar's site.
I'm only moderately pleased with the dwarves because I found the model designs too disparate from each other. Some of the dwarves bear a resemblance to the LOTR designs from Peter Jackson's movie-- albeit without armor and with freaky oversized hammers-- while the others look to have been inspired by the look of the Dwarves from Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Two even look very much like Slayers with an arquebuser and crossbow pose. The orcs look very much like an amalgam of the Warhammer orcs and the Warcraft orcs, making them veritable hulks with mac truck jaws, huge tusks and long, outward spreading ears -- not exactly what I hoped for. Add to the fact that the figures depict roughly two kind of orcs -- one group seems very tribal and primitive ( one even has a bone as a head decor -- talk about cliche...) while the other seems to have a more fantasy "medieval" flavor with spiked paldrons, shields and bladed weapons. LOTR's orcs are more to my liking but only the GW Moria goblins set seems compatible with 1/72 scale.

It would have been nice if Caesar took the time to sit down and properly design the figures instead of just ripping off concepts from more established companies/settings and putting them all in a blender. I'm sure they could do it -- their previous historical sets have been praised for their well-done poses and sculpts. That said though, I'm ordering a few more boxes of each, if only to make 1/72 armies of dwarves and orcs. As for the elves, it looks like I'm going to go ahead and use other historical sets to make this fantasy army rather than Caesar's offering. I'll be giving my impressions on the Hat Industrie Sea Peoples set soon.

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