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.

Metal Beards - Anvilborn Warrior Model Review

The recent Metal Beards kickstarter from Titan Forge has just ended with great success, achieving just under £31,000 and funding two new ranges, the metal beards and their evil cousins, the sons of Kashan Vra. Once these fellows are released, it will be possible to build an entirely mechanical dwarf army, not to mention the wonderful new models that are on the way for those of us with chaos dwarf armies.

I can only rub my hands together in anticipation, though I did get a little sneak preview of what we might come to expect on release.Titan Forge were kind enough to send me some of their anvilborn warriors to take a look at for the Mumblings, so here's the low-down on these diminutive mechanical dwarves.

The five metal beards in the pack came with a choice of two heads, two bodies and two hammers. There are four head options in the final release, as well as hand weapons and shields and two ranged options. As you can see, there are seven elements to each model, which may take a little longer to assemble than some models, but opens the way for huge conversion potential.Those heads would make fantastic helmets for regular dwarves, for example.

Two of the four head variants

Front and back of one or the bodies

These miniatures are obviously pre-production. The parts are extremely crisp, with a lot of detail to keep the model interesting while painting it. If the final production versions are this good there will be negligible clean-up before assembly. The pieces are quite robust, nothing is overly thin, so breakage should not be an issue.

As to assembly itself, they go together very easily due to the ball and socket fit for the joins. The two-handed hammer requires a little consideration to attach to the arms, but a dry fit before glueing will avoid any problems. Once the model is together you can either attach it to the scenic base the final models will come with or go your own way. As to scale, the model below is on a 20x20mm base, so they are essentially equivalent to current Games Workshop dwarves.

For painters, these models will be a chance to go to town on metals. There are elements like the head that can be painted like lacquered armour, but the boilers, valves, dials, cogs and exhausts will reward some research on different metal surfaces, as well as some OSL effects coming from eyes and boilers. You can see on the back of the model above there are a lot of details there to go to crazy on. It might be worth attaching the arms after painting to let your brush into the various areas on the body. The exhaust on the top begs for some models to have smoke effects added. This would look pretty superb in a unit. That said, they would paint up very well with two or three colours and some washing and dry brushing too.

I can see a lot of dwarf players adding a unit of these to their army, or even going full metal. They will definitely be a show stopper army on the tabletop. Titan Forge have a history of producing amazing themed ranges and this one looks to be another winner. The kickstarter release is in April, so full release will probably be sometime this Summer.