The original Reaper Bones Kickstarter included four fantastic Fire Giant miniatures. I used them for an underground mining raid on the dwarven stronghold of Gauntlgrym while my players were visiting there during my Tyranny of Dragons D&D campaign. I’m going to post them in pairs, starting with the Fire Giant Bodyguard and Fire Giant Warrior!

The Fire Giants released during the first Reaper Bones Kickstarter are more fitting for Pathfinder, as the Fire Giants are not as large there as in the D&D lore. That’s also the reason why Reaper released the same miniatures again as larger figures in a later Kickstarter. However, back then I only had the original giants. And the sculpting by Jason Wiebe is really fantastic!

The Fire Giant Warrior (77178) is holding a huge sword in a dynamic pose with flying hair and has a terrific armor that looks dwarfish and gives off a wonderful fire giant vibe. The Fire Giant Bodyguard (77179) features a massive two-handed sword and a fighting stance.

The artworks depicting the design and color themes of these fire giants from Reaper’s designers is very inspiring, and I tried to base my painted versions on the colors used here.

Basing and Priming

Fire Giants live more or less similar to dwarves in the underground. So they should have a base matching to underground enviroments. The figures were too big for 2-inch (large) bases, but also too small for 3-inch (huge) bases, so I settled for 60 mm flagstone bases. These bases are great for dungeon floors! However, this was a compromise to make the miniatures look good – for proper battle map usage, bases should optimally be 1, 2, 3, or 4 inches in diameter.

As usual, I primed the miniatures by airbrushing them in black and white.

Painting

Like I said, I took my inspiration from Reaper’s artworks for the color scheme and used a stone gray for the skin and black metal combined with gold for the armor.

I even tried to match the effect of the hot glowing swords. This took me several tries and quite some time to get right. I left out a red gradient, and when I look at the miniatures now, it should have been included for a more realistic effect. It still looks cool, though 🙂

The picture below shows the relative size of these giants compared to a 28 mm miniature, in this case the player character Alester. Not THAT giant, right?

Here are both finished fire giants from various angles: