Metal Beards - Kashan Vra Chosen Review

When the Titan Forge Kickstarter for the Metal Beards kicked off I was interested, but when the Kashan Vra, or chaos dwarves to you and me appeared, I was all in. I'd seen some of their other ranges, Drakskull's Menace being a firm favourite. Undead greenskins? You bet. These guys do snazzy miniatures.

My own particular take on the chaos dwarves features the original spiky stunties, and the Kashan Vra fit very nicely with that look. The Chosen are essentially fireborn, and the steampunk, gears and evil approach Titan Forge were taking suited me a lot better than the chained fire elemental look Forge World have gone with. I don't dislike the Forge World fireborn as such, but I do like these lads a lot better. The kickstarter wasn't that cheap, three Chosen costing about £23 at KS prices, so God knows what they'll cost at retail. It should be noted though, that you do get a resin scenic base for that too. So, let's see what you get.

As you can see, these models require a fair bit of assembly. Even the troopers come in a huge amount of parts, so these models do require a bit of hobby mojo to put together. The resin is crisp, though there are some bubbles and the odd bit of thick flash, but generally they are great quality. The resin isn't brittle, though I did see a phenomenal amount of mold bits in the scenic bases. The mold attrition rate must be pretty high. The only issue I saw with the parts are the shoulders do not fit that flush with the main body. There may be some minor gap filling required for the arms to fit snugly.There is also a huge gate at the top of the shoulder pad which will take some patience to trim. Small potatoes really.

Here's is our boy hastily blu-tacked together.

There's a shed-load of detail on this guy. Pipes, gears, pistons, a Victorian engineers worst nightmare. Get that metal-painting-fu ready.He just about sits on a 40mm x 40mm base. I'd reckon painting the arms and head separately and then pinning them on would be a good idea, hence the concern over the arms not fitting flush. Once I've hacked off the gates (you cans see one jutting out of the right shoulder pad on the second picture) I'll get a better idea of the fit.

With some minor conversion, this guy and the 'good dwarf' version would make superb squat armoured suits. There are two heads for this particular version, the head you see above, and the burning skull head, below, which looks pretty great. OSL FTW.

I'll be building a unit of eight fireborn, so six of these lads and two groovy unit fillers should do the trick. The basing theme is an abandoned and ruined city, so plenty of scope for nice filler pieces.

Along with the chosen I got some of the Kashan Vra war machines, which oddly enough fit in nicely with the chaos dwarf machines. I'll pop up a review of those next, once I figure out where all the bits go.

You can see an earlier review on the Metal Beards basic trooper here.