Firestorm Armada Relthoza Fleet Gallery

Firestorm Armada originally came out from Spartan Games around the end of 2009, had a fairly steady stream of new releases including a 2nd edition, lasting until about 2017 before the company shut down for good.  These days Warcradle owns the rights to most of the old Spartan games, but while they have an open playtest document for a 3rd edition there's really nothing been done with it since 2020 and none of the older minis are available through them at this point.  We recently had word that the new edition is back in development here in 2026, so we'll see what comes of that.  Certainly not holding my breath on new releases, and sadly I doubt the older figures (there have been at least two generations of these ships with quite different design aesthetics) will ever come back - except perhaps as STLs for home 3D printing.  

Anyway, I'll do my part to preserve some record of the early Firestorm Armada line, in this case with a gallery of some very old (well over ten years now) painted samples of some of the Relthoza ships.

This is my only surviving image of most of an original Relthoza fleet box (one battleship, three cruisers, and four frigates over on the left - the box came with six initially) plus a blister pack of escorts (on the right) and a heavy cruiser (the bigger horizontally-oriented ship).  All resin except for the three metal escorts.  They're quite large, with the battleship over 6" long.  All are resin except for the escorts.

Escorts again, this time with a pair of  destroyers and a dreadnought.

Took a lot of photos of that dread.

It is a nice model, very detailed but easily painted and a breeze to assemble, only four parts if memory serves.

Not the speediest of ships, as you might guess by the relatively dinky engines.

The two "side hull" pieces would almost work as cruiser-sized ships on their own.

Despite its size and vertical layout, being made of fairly light resin made it pretty stable, although I did cut down the flight post to further lower the center of gravity.

Destroyers again, another very vertical design.

Firestorm was weird in that destroyers were nearly as big as cruisers.

Escorts, in the older more yellow color scheme I first used.

Size comparison shot with a customized Phalon ship from Ground Zero Games' Full Thrust range.  Probably not a great deal of help, but the custom ship was built off a combine superdreadnought and battlecruiser hull.  Its also made of metal (with metal flight post as well) and weighs considerably more than the larger Relthoza resin figure.     

Another size comparison image, with a Full Thrust Japanese superdreadnought added.

And one last image, this time next to the two largest ESU ship classes in the Full Thrust range, with the superdreadnought on the left and the heavy carrier on the right.

I note that as of time of writing, you can turn up a few more images on Pinterest from back when these were on sale, or from old deleted blog posts of mine.  Not going to try dredging them out of the Wayback Machine though, so these will have to do.

Full Thrust Sa'Vasku Gallery

 

Not sure why these never got put up when I was doing painted galleries for the other Full Thrust factions years ago, but better late than never.  My Sa'Vasku collection was never very large, being restricted to a medium-sized raiding/interdiction fleet, so this gallery will be a less complete showcase for the range than the others with only five ship classes represented.  You can find the complete range here at Ground Zero Games' web store and their official stats in Fleet Book 2.

The complete force. 

Shyy'Tha'Varr-class heavy strikeships with their spines slightly re-positioned - roughly equivalent to human battlecruiser classes

Var'Thee'Sha-class strikeships, roughly equal in mass to human escort cruisers

Vra'Kiir'Sha-class strikeships with minor added detailing, again roughly equivalent to escort cruisers in terms of mass 

Fo'Vur'Ath-class destroyer equivalents

Custom battle damaged "drifting hulk" Shyy'Tha'Varr-class along with a Thy'Sa'Teth-class drone podship, roughly equivalent to a human escort carrier

Group shots for scale and relative sizes

Silent Death: Worm Pods

 

Found some more ten year old images, this time a squadron of Silent Death figs I'd forgotten about.

These are sold as Worm Pods.

In Silent Death they're fancy boarding pods, delivering bio-engineered crew-killers to enemy ships - which is how the Night Brood dealt with the much larger human warships.

Unsurprisingly, I mostly used them for Tyranid escorts in Battlefleet Gothic or as smaller astrofauna in Full Thrust and Starmada.

If I had them to do over again I'd probably go with a color scheme that makes them look less like the unholy spawn of Cthulhu and a cabbage, but a decade ago it seemed like a good idea.  

I've also added these images to my old Silent Death gallery for completeness.

Reaper Clown Miniatures

 

Some more figs from ten years ago, this time a pair of metal Reaper minis from their hodge-podge Chronoscape range.

This is sold as Bonzo the Killer Clown, but comes with spare parts that let you make a non-psychopathic versions as well.

Four-part model with separate hands, head and body, based on a 1" metal washer. 

IIRC you get two or three heads to choose from and maybe two each left and right hands, although Reaper can't be bothered to show the actual parts on their store any more.

There was a time when Reaper's catalogs (both in print and online) were excellent resources for a minis collector, but those days are long gone.

Their current online catalog is fairly dreadful, with far too many minis having only a single small image and only a few showing multi-angle shots or unassembled part layouts. 

Did an awful job on the liquid in the seltzer bottle there, my painting's improved quite a bit since 2013.

And this is Zonkers, this time assembled as a proper killer clown.

Pretty sure I mixed parts between the two kits to make these, but after a decade I can't swear to it.

The bodies are very similar to each other but do have minor differences in the details.

Reasonably happy with this one, especially since it was a quickie paint job for sale on ebay.

The local game store downsized their Reaper section years ago, first disposing of the metals at deep discounts and later selling down the Bones range when it became clear Kickstarter sales had effectively reduced demand to near zero.  

It's a sign of the times I suppose, but even five years before Bones first came along a store that didn't stock Reaper was cutting its own throat with all the lost sales. 

And here we are in 2023 and Reaper's been largely shoved out of retail, with Wizkids happily moving in to take their place.  Kind of sad really, but hardly the most surprising turn of events we've seen in the industry over the years.

Iron Wind Metals Spellcaster Miniatures

 

Todays post looks at a couple of 54mm miniatures, a scale I almost never painted owing to its relative rarity.  The figures come from Iron Wind Metals' rather obscure boardgame Spellcaster.  The game itself is nothing to write home about, but there are some nice sculpts in the range if you're looking for a painting project.

This gent is sold as a Gnome Conjurer with "Pet" Dragon, which probably spells out their relationship pretty well. 

Much like cats, you don't have a "pet" when you live with a dragon, you have a roommate.

If you're lucky you get along with each other, if not one or both of you are going to be miserable.

While 54mm scale, this is a gnome and therefore pretty short, although the dragon's head comes up to about 50mm in height.  The base is a 40mm diameter.

 

This grumpy fellow is supposedly a Barbary Mage, although I ignored that and went with a skin tone that isn't particularly North African.

 

I suppose the actual Barbary pirates were quite a varied lot anyway.

What a semi-historical reference is doing in an otherwise all-fantasy range is beyond me anyway.

His markings are sculpted on as raised detail, so I suppose they're meant to be ritual scars or something rather than tattoos. 

I've tried to paint them to suggest they're glowing slightly with a blue-white light.

Kind of wish they weren't sculpted on, or that they sold a "smooth" variant to make doing your own ink-work more viable.

As a 54mm human sized fig he's pretty big, as Mister 28mm Scale Figure shows.

If I were going to pick up more of the range, it'd probably be the lizardman and troll shamans, both of which are larger than human by a bit.  Back in the day they were more expensive than the rest (which kept me from buying them at Historicon), but now they're all the same price and they're by far my favorite remaining sculpts.