Duke Zalto is one of the main antagonists the players face in the Storm King’s Thunder campaign. He is the leader of the Fire Giants, and he has a devious plan to raise the station of the Fire Giants. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get my hands on the official WizKids Minature of Duke Zalto. But the new version of Reaper’s Skorg Ironskull, the Fire Giant King, shares some similarities with Zalto. So I was happy to use the Reaper miniature for the Duke.

The miniature of Skorg Ironskull, Fire Giant King (Huge) (77614) was sculpted by Chris Lewis. It is a very cool reinterpretation of the previous (large) version of Skorg Ironskull, Fire Giant King (77101) by Ben Siens. The new version has a more upright posture, and he is pointing with one hand instead of clenching his fist. Both versions feature an impressive greatsword full of runes, a jewelry-adorned armor and a very cool dragon-scale cloak.

Below you can see Zalto without his armor as depicted in the adventure book (left) and the Fire Giant miniature from WizKids based on his depiction in the book (right). Not quite the same as Reaper’s Skorg Ironskull, but close enough for me!

Basing and Priming

As with the other Fire Giants, I did nothing too special with the miniature or base. I pinned the Fire Giant King on a 3-inch flagstone base and then airbrushed it with black and white Vallejo primer.

Painting

Skorg Ironskull literally is royalty! So no holding back with adornments, jewelry and gold on this Fire Giant. I used the same color recipes for the gray skin tone and the black metallic armor as with the other Fire Giants. Other than that, the figure has many small parts and opportunities to use saturated golds and red for precious gems. To make the details visible, I used brown wash on the gold, which also made the color tone a bit warmer.

The cloak seems to be made of dragon scales, which is totally fitting for a king. In my mind, this would of course be a cloak made of red dragon scales. Red dragons are the mightiest of the chromatic dragons, they embody the fire aspect and also see themselves as rulers of all. To paint the cloak, I added glossy medium to bright red and did a bit wet-blending with black color. Finally, I washed it with black ink and then added the gold/ruby adornment on the cloak.

For the sword, I applied the same heat-glow effect I did earlier with the Fire Giant Bodyguard. I also tried to simulate bright glowing runes on the sword, but decided to not paint a real OSL glow effect. Instead, I wanted to keep the high contrast of the runes and black metal of the sword.

Overall, the huge Fire Giant King came out way better than my previous paint job with the large version. Now, I am happy to use it on the table and really like how it turned out.

Here is a comparison of the new (huge) and the old (large) Reaper Fire Giant King: