Shipping update, casting info, new minis

First of all, for those of you who are still waiting for their orders to arrive, you’ll be happy to know that all the 28mm December orders will have been shipped by next Monday and that our foundry is working around the clock to clear the backlog of pre-orders. We should have another update concerning the 54mm Asharah and Eleriel & Alaniel very soon.

Regarding the fabrication of the Eleriel & Alaniel banner, we wanted to share with you the latest developments. This element has been a challenge from the start since, for some reason, our sculptor had a really hard time translating the original 2D concept in 3D. Then, we had to 3D print it three separate times because of size and thickness issues. Then, the master caster had such a hard time finding the right way to cast it, he eventually had to resplit the miniature in a totally different way to make it work. And then, he had to combine several different resins to find the correct mix of thickness and curability so that the flag wouldn’t break when getting out of the mould without taking forever to cure!

But at last, it’s here and it’s looking very nice indeed! After all these complications, we decided to have additional moulds made for the flag to speed up production. This should help cut on your waiting time…

We had a long conversation with our foundry about the complexity of our miniatures and the impact this has on production. Asharah with all of her accessories is a 14-part kit. It is probably the footman mini with the most separate parts ever produced! What we did not realize when we created it is that each of those part is a potential problem waiting to happen at casting time. Problems can always be resolved, but the more parts, the longer it takes. Even deceptively simple parts like swords can become a challenge. One of the solution to that is to make simpler minis that break up in 2 to 5 parts. But that would not work for us, since our intention is to keep providing you with rich kits full of options. Therefore, while our know-how increases with time and we shall apply those lessons for the next production batch, we shall at any rate allow for longer production periods before providing an availability date for our minis.

With all those problem solved, we are now turning our attention back to the current sculpts in progress so that they can be rapidly finalized and sent to the 3D printer. We are also working on our lineup for the next months’ releases…

The information gathered through our work with Raging Heroes along with your feedback has slightly altered our initial plans for our upcoming minis. We still plan to produce a Sci-Fi version of Asharah and her companions as well, but we also definitely want to release a big mean evil war machine soon, and so we will probably push back a few months the High Elf Command Group and the Sisters of the Orphanage unit we’ve been talking about.

On the other hand, the concept of our Spirits has moved forward quite a bit, and we will definitely release several of this kind of minis pretty soon. We’re now also working on a game that would revolve around these Spirit minis… It’s still early days, but it looks promising and quite different from traditional miniatures games… Stay tuned for more on this later on…