Gathering the Dwarfs of the Bronze Kingdom for Legends of Signum

The rank and file of the faction are the warriors of the bronze kingdom. These sturdy little fellows (well, as “little” as any of the dwarfs in this range can be) are a bit of an odd bunch with a rather irregular habit of making things explode around them.

While they don’t have any ranged attacks of their own (despite the blunderbuss arm and the bomb arm) they do get a chance to inflict damage to something nearby them during their turn (although there’s also a chance the “something” might be themselves). This is one of the first hints that these are clearly inspired by Rackham’s dwarfs from Confrontation in that they don’t feel like playing dwarfs but rather more like playing orcs and goblins where you’re relying too heavy on random rolls that won’t work out but are likely to be spectacular when they – or to spectacularly fail. A theme that carries out across the faction.

Here I’ve aimed for their jackets to have a similar colour theme to give the impression of some kind of workmen’s overalls rather than implying any kind of military uniform. These are a rag tag bunch of tinkers and experimenters who lack the more coherent look of many of the other faction members.

And finally I’ve managed to get three more to paint up some time soon. The warriors are one of the more unique profiles in that you’re allowed multiple members on the tabletop (up to 6 in a single warband). Everything else is named characters. The middle one with the smoking helmet is going to be getting a shield arm. It’s left off for painting purposes as there’s a visible gap that’s easy to look into but hard to get a brush in if the arm’s attached for now.

Overall these are a nice little multipart kit. You get 4 heads, 3 bodies (1’s flipped but otherwise identical to the other two) and 8 arm options. Enough to stick together 3 of these little fellows in interesting combinations.

When first I received these miniatures one thing obviously stood out immediately. They are very large dwarfs. They are very big. In fact, these are some of the first dwarf miniatures I’ve ever come across that I have difficulty calling dwarfs due to their sheer size. I mean scale creep is one thing but when your dwarfs are almost as tall as your humans, you probably feel a bit awkward using them in the same game together and stick to figures of a similar vintage.

As such there are going to be some players who would baulk at using these particular miniatures in other games.

Here they are next to some classic dwarfs you might recognise. Obviously scale creep has come a long way since the 1980’s (and, in the Warhammer Quest dwarf’s case, the early 90’s) so let’s try comparing these dwarfs to miniatures of their own kind. Obviously Signum Games is heavily inspired by the old Rackham miniatures so let’s put some of them next to a Signum dwarf.

As you can see, even next to the Rackham dwarfs, our little miner towers above them. Ignoring the height added by his helmet he’s still a good half a head taller than they are. This scale increase is probably to allow for all the added detail that’s on the figures.

Obviously the best way to check the scale of a figure is to compare it to other models from the same range so here’s our little dwarven miner next to two humans from the Legends of Signum range.

As you can clearly see, he’s massive! He’s approximately shoulder high if not a little taller. From this we can gather that the dwarfs of Signum are meant to be really large with their added width and bulk making them possibly larger than many of the taller races in terms of overall body mass. This may be because they sculpted the chaos dwarfs first quite some time before their normal dwarfs and they might have wanted to make them the same size.

Whatever you feel about their stature, love it or hate it, it’s probably worth making sure you’re aware of just how large these dwarfs miniatures are before embarking on painting them. Many are around 38mm to the top of the figure. At our local club we’ve joked about them being 54mm dwarfs, 40mm dwarfs or even (occasionally) 75mm dwarfs! They’re large and proud of it but they do paint up really easily and have lots of fun details to draw the eye so I don’t mind the size too much. It is a bit of a niche size for dwarfs ‘though so I probably won’t be using them in any other games.

It all began long ago in the far off reaches of the dark past in some subterranean cavern or other.  Overall I enjoy the Legends of Signum model range and, while the game isn’t particularly popular in my area, the figures are whimsical and quite fun to paint. As a backer of the original kickstarter I had the big starter box with two factions in it but then Signum Games really found their way to my heart when they released the dwarf faction.

Slowly I began to collect and paint them and, in time, I conceived the scheme to paint and collect the whole faction (especially as it seems to be of a finite size and hasn’t had any new models added recently).

So it was that I began to receive packages and parcels in the post. For long hours I would huddle over whatever painting space I could fine and slave away over these gorgeous figures. I should probably have started this project on here long ago to chart my progress as, by now, I’ve achieved a fair amount already. Here’s what I’ve managed to complete so far.

Obviously by this point I’ve got quite a bit of work done. I tend to paint really slowly so it’s probable that the next few entries in this project will chronicle the backlog of work that was already been done. I did upload some video updates on this project to youtube so I might see if I can include them in the upcoming updated as well.