Ah, the Colossal Red Dragon “miniature.”

A bit of personal history. I love the idea of miniatures, but never had many and didn’t use them over much in my games, preferring to use a white board as the tactical map. I never really painted miniatures – I don’t have the temperament for it. But when Wizards of the Coast started releasing their own pre-painted miniature line, boy, was I hooked. There was some sort of miniature war band skirmish game you could play, but I never did and I have no idea how it worked. I just appreciated the minis on their own merits and eventually used them in my games for a while. And then I stopped, because the blind boxes were expensive and minis in general made our combat drag.

In the context of a D&D game, I can’t imagine using this dragon. I should have used a regular scale mini in one of the shots for scale, because it hard to read, but this thing is two feet tall on an eight inch square base. Regular character miniatures would be hacking at its ankles. This is how you annihilate a party, even a min/maxed high level 3.5E party. The thought of such a beautiful massacre brings a tear to my, if I am being honest.  

I am guessing there was a way for this to be used in the war bands game? Lemme know if that is the case. Mostly, I think this, and the other giant minis, were intended as shelf pieces. And what a shelf piece. It is a gorgeous sculpt based on Todd Lockwood’s dragon designs (you can scroll back in my feed to see his red dragon on the cover of the Draconomicon if you like, a few months back). It has a fantastic silhouette at any angle – the thing is just gorgeously terrifying, which is saying something about a miniature.