D&D Duergar enlarged ability miniature
Problem: duergar, or dark dwarves if you like, are great footsoldiers-slash-henchmen for bigger, cleverer, badder baddies like drow and mindflayers, but how does the maps-and-minis obsessed DM represent their enlarge ability, which causes the duergar to become, in the technical, D&D sense, large? Giant dwarves? Where else are you going to look?
That's right, mother hubbards, the solution for this one comes from Mother Russia herself. At the time I wrote this, a bag of these Technolog dwarves was still available on eBay, shipping and all, for £6.17, or USD8.00 if you prefer. Being suited to 54mm scale, they're almost exactly twice the size of their 28mm counterparts, making them perfect for enlarged duergar.
Technolog's range also includes these orcs, which make great ogres and these werewolves which, at double the normal size, can be passed off as dire werewolves.
Unbagged, this is what you get. Five characterful, double-sized minis, which to me is great value for little over £6.17. In fact, that's amazing value.
The minis aren't going to be stable on their own but luckily I had these MDF bases kicking around. I don't trust super glue to be strong enough on its own, so I'm going to drill and pin the feet to the base with the pin vice and some paper clips.
Before I do anything else, though, I need to address a problem specific to Technolog minis - and this goes for all the others I've bought from them, too - is that the plastic the firm uses does not take paint as well as that used by their western counterparts. Before priming, I'm going to clean the hell out of these dwarves with soapy water. Even this will only be so helpful, so the paint jobs will be more prone than usual to chipping and wear. However, once I'm done, a a few coats of varnish will hold everything together, as long as I follow the received wisdom. More on that later.
Here's one of the five models with pins in both feet. The trick is to make the pins long enough to grant extra stability but not so long so that they poke through the underside of the base.
By lining the model up on the base and using a slight bit of pressure, I can leave an indent where I'm going to need to drill.
Pinned AND super-glued to the base, these guys should be very sturdy.
I used neat PVA glue on the bare bases, then sprinkled sand and grit on top. I don't recommend submerging minis in grit and sand when basing as the glue can gather and crease against the motion, which shows in the basing medium as the glue dries. I sealed the grit-sand base covering with a 50/50 mix of PVA and water.
Once the sealing coat had dried, I black bombed with spray primer, had to go back over with some brush-on black to get those niggling unpainted pockets where the spray missed, then drybrushed with increasingly light shades of grey until I got up to pure white. This will act as an under-painted highlight over which I can slap a few layers of wash to give colour to the contrast.
I'm comparing the finished, enlarged duergar here with some sea elves whose paint job was laid over a white primer. You're never going to get the sheer brightness and vibrancy of colour as is possible over a pure white base. However, working up from black is so much easier, particularly when a model has a lot of nooks and crannies into which to get a paintbrush.
I used green, purple and dark tone washes over the pre-done highlights. I shot myself in the foot a little with the purple wash, using super-concentrated ink instead of Army Painter's dedicated purple wash, thinking it would save me having to go over with a second coat. It worked in that sense, but the colour is too dark for my liking, on what is an already dark mini.
This gives you a sense of what the Technolog scale looks like in contrast with normal sized dwarf or duergar.
And this shows how well enlarged duergar integrate into a drow force, the dark dwarves acting here as underlings of the dark elves. I wouldn't use the grey-scale under-painting with washes on top method for everything, because it lends to a gloomy colour scheme, but for these nether-dwellers it's ideal and the integrated colour scheme makes them seem like a unified force.
Crucially, I recommend Luke's APS video on varnishing, which does a fantastic job of stabilising any paint job you choose to put on a Technolog mini, or any mini for that matter, but particularly these. A link should pop up top right.
Hope you enjoyed this video and at least something in it was new and useful to you. Check out the Callathiforay series if you'd like to know more about the world in which I've used the duergar, both standard and big.
Until next time, insert snappy sign-off here.
