For the last of my "Wizkids boxes I bought in the Black Friday sales" reviews, here's a review of some Spelljammer "ship scale" miniatures. The first one I picked up is the "Astral Elf Patrol", which consists of two dragons and two ships - a Star Moth and a Dragonfly.
The dragons are fine, meant to represent Ancient Dragons in the ship game. Ironically, their base sizes are quite reasonably sized for a normal Adult Dragon in normal miniature scale, with the miniatures only a little too small. Miniature scale creep has gotten ridiculous of late, and they may end up being useful gaming pieces for normal D&D.
The Dragonfly (the smaller ship) is fine and does OK for what it is. I'm less fond of the Star Moth. The huge plastic wings don't fit particularly snugly, so will come out if you so much as breathe near them. This leaves you with the dilemma of gluing them in, which makes the whole thing an absolute nightmare to store - there's a reason they were packed separately in the box.
The Star Moth also feels a little bit "plastic toy", as well? The big see through plastic doesn't help with that, but the bold, blocky colours go on to make it worse rather than better. If you compare it to either of the dragons, they don't necessarily feel like they come from the same line? With there not being many other options for the classic Spelljammer ships, it's a bit of a disappointment.
The next box, "Threats from the Cosmos" is a monster box with four creatures. First up, we have the Cosmic Horror and the Tyrant Ship. The Cosmic Horror is excellent. It's a spooky Far Realm monster that has been painted up all gribbly. I don't see it's normal state line will see much play - a CR18 space gribbly isn't one for regular play - but in 28mm scale, some summoned horror could easily be represented by this.
A Tyrant Ship is a Beholder ship, carved out of rock with disintegration rays. The paint job is deeply disappointing - while it's canonically carved out of stone, the colours they've chosen to represent that look more like the model has been roughly undercoated rather than a good stone texture. It's a swing and a miss, really.
We then have an ancient red dragon, which is fine, and a murder comet swarm. And here's where there's a little bit of a rant coming. A murder comet is a medium creature - so the scale of the murder comets here is completely wrong. There's no stat block for a murder comet swarm, so you're left having to come up with something. And by having a non standard stat block, it's not much use for a 28mm scaled encounter either. At least if they'd had a "giant murder comet" miniature with a normal base, it could then be used as a normal murder comet at normal scale. The paint job is dire, too, using metallic silver to try and approximate the art of a glowing gas ball, where the whole thing would have been much better undercoated blue then an airbrushing of white over the top to get a simple but good effect. Just a catastrophic miss on every level.
Last up, we have "Attacks from Deep Space", starting with an Astral Dreadnought. This thing is huge and heavy. I dropped it on a metal miniature and the metal miniature broke. Lets get an idea of scale.
So yes, this is a Big Chunky Monster. The painting is great, the sculpt is great. Just excellent. It's another high CR monster (CR 21 in this case), so it's much more likely to be encountered as some kind of puzzle encounter rather than a straight up fight. You might be trying to escape it, or trying to trick it into swallowing you so you can recover something from it's magical stomach - donjon. You can definitely make some memorable encounters out of this.
The rest of the box consists of a giant gelatinous cube (again, lacking a published stat block for the current edition, but a nice concept for an encounter), and three smaller ships - a turtle and two lampreys. The sculpts of these are fine, but both of the lampreys fall victim to the "bold bright colour" paint job issue, making them look like children's toys again.
Spelljammer ships and creatures are always going to be incredibly niche purchases, and these boxes vary from "key to populating a basic ship table" to "forgettable", with unfortunate mixes of ships and monsters when you're most likely to want duplicates of the ships (if, you know, you're made of money). All in all, these are such a missed opportunity - some better choices with the paint jobs and different combinations of boxes could have made this a far more appealing product.
