Unboxing Armillus Dynat

Context
I was a bit naughty. When I saw that Armillus Dynat of the Alpha Legion had become available for pre-order on Forge World, I put my order in almost straight away. I may not survive the wrath of my wife, so I hope that this won't be my last post to Warpstone Flux, ever!!! (only half kidding, of course. But she was making lists of other things that money should be / should have been spent on. So maybe I'm in trouble this time. Please send any spare luck my way….).

Today, my model of Dynat finally arrived -- and I am certainly not disappointed! Fundamentally, it is a much better quality miniature than the conversion that I had done for my own version of Armillus Dynat earlier on. Details of that conversion can be found here. In brief, I combined a lot of different parts together from a range of sources such as space marines, chaos space marines, Dark Angels, grey knights and Anvil Industry. With a few arm and wrist rotations, I managed to create a miniature that was ideal for what I wanted out of the miniature -- and one that had a dynamic pose to boot. 

The Box

The box that the Forge World miniature came in is a high quality one. Being the first time that I have ordered anything from the Horus Heresy Character Series, I was impressed by the presentation. The first image shows the box in its shrink wrap. The anticipation built as I took off the shrink wrapping!

The next image displays what greeted me when I first opened the box. A small printed slip that pictured the miniature full assembled and painted on the front, and on the back of the image, a view of the fully assembled and painted miniature from the back! I kind of like that as it gives me some good queues about how to paint it when I get around to it. Also visible in the box is something that I've not had the pleasure of seeing in a long while in citadel miniatures: small rectangles of foam! I guess one has to be an old-timer to fully appreciate the small bundle of joy that these rectangles gave me! Or maybe I was just over excited.

The Base
Anyway, moving swiftly on to the bits themselves now. The next image shows the larger display base that comes with the miniature. Physically, it is a scene of destruction in what appears to be the remains of an urban city. My thinking here is that it must be a representation of Paramar as that is when Armillus Dynat first came to "fame", so to speak. Equally, Dynat must have been famous before then, but probably in a very different way within only the Alpha Legion as his prosecution of warfare left few to survive I'd guess. The image shows that the display base comes in two parts and has a honeycomb hexagon like arrangement where they join together. It looks simple to assemble at this stage. I think I might have preferred something more like Typhus' display base -- something a bit more industrial feeling, rather than just amongst the ruins of a city scape. But I understand why its been modelled this way if it is meant to be during the invasion of Paramar. 

Accessories
The next two images show the accessories, arms, power pack and playing base that Armillus Dynat comes with. The sculpting of these is really high quality. I'm very pleased. Although there are flashes and minor things to clean up, these parts are great overall. The only criticism I could make is some flexure of the ariel on the backpack has happened, so I'll need to soak some parts in hot water to bend them back. That said, I'm going to have to clean up the parts anyway as the feel of the parts tells me immediately there's still plenty of release agent on the bits that needs to be removed prior to assembling and painting. One interesting aspect here is that the playing base is not the regular size -- its a 32mm base and hence obviously larger than the marines Dynat will command. I like this, as a champion like Armillus Dynat totally should be made to stand out more. The arms and pose of the miniature is an interesting one: somewhere between arrogance and exceptional confidence in my opinion.

Torso
The final two images show the detail of the main body of Dynat himself. I'm totally delighted with the level of detail on them and I'm not sure my images do them justice. Particularly pleasing are the diamond shaped scales on the legs of the marine armour (artificer armour, naturally), as well as the detail on the chest plate. I'm not totally sold on the dragon head in the centre of the chest -- it looks a bit Salamanders to some extent to my eye (I would have preferred more heads!). The shoulder pad showing the legion symbol is also interesting - multiple heads coiled around a world. In some ways reminiscent of the World Eaters iconography and unusual to see perhaps. But I like it!

Final Thoughts
Overall, I'm very impressed with the quality of the miniature, and even the display box. I'll certainly be assembling this one as soon as I get some spare moments. …..and escape the potential consequences of my impulse purchase(!) Well, maybe impulse purchase is the wrong term - its certainly a well considered purchase as this guys will be my HQ choice of preference for my growing Alpha Legion army. I'm looking forward to Alpharius Omegon being released later on, but suspect that's going to quite a significant chunk of time away yet. Plus, even if I do purchase Alpharius, he's not going to get much play due to the typical points levels that I will be mostly likely to be playing at. He's more of a several thousand points cost army HQ or Apocalypse even. So, Armillus Dynat is my man of choice at this point in time and I'm certainly going to try to build an army around his army buffing abilities.