Fimir ranges and size comparison

Finally got around to photographing some fimir that I finally got around to painting last month. Two of the classic citadel fimir sculpted by Nick Bibby, along with the more recent sculpt from Diego Serrate, now available from Krakon Games.

As I was pondering the size disparity, I thought I'd try and do something relatively useful, and photograph the different styles of 40mm based fimir I possessed together so you can see how they line up along one another.

From left to right: Demonomaniac from Krakon Games sculpted by Ross Whitehorn; Citadel 'ogre sized' fimir sculpted by Nick Bibby; Fomorian King from sculpted by Diego Serrate; another Citadel fimir from Nick Bibby; and finally a Forgeworld fimir, sculpted by Steve Whitehead.

What conclusions can we draw from this? Well, not much really; other than that the Nick Bibby fimir are somewhat squatter than many of their more recent counterparts (though Krakon games does have a variety of shapes and sizes of fimir; see below) - and that Steve Whitehead's forgeworld fimir, while atmospheric, has armour that isn't particularly in keeping with the classic feel. All of which is a bit banal. So I thought I'd take it a step further and go for a complete cataloguing of all the different kinds of fimir I have.

Because, famously, the fimir aren't all of a size to be stuck onto 40mm bases. The well known tale (technically apocryphal, though endorsed by some in the studio at the time) runs as follows (Graeme Davis, quoted on the Terminally Incoherent blog:)

"The popularisation of Fimir wasn’t helped by a communications foul-up when Nick Bibby took over making the miniatures from Jes – Nick made them all Ogre-sized, compared to Jes’ and my idea that they should be Orc sized. So we had big, expensive miniatures with low game stats, and nobody bought them."

This issue is reflected in the 3rd edition rules. The rulebook specifies rank and file fimir are on 25 x 25mm; only character models are on 40 x 40mm bases. But by the the time the Fimir list was written for Warhammer Armies, all fimir are on 40 x 40mm bases.

This creates a kind of strange redundancy around the smaller models citadel made - including the most ubiquitous and famous of all fimir.

So on the left we have the Citadel LE fimir sculpted by Jes Goodwin; and on the right the HeroQuest fimir (with a scibor shield). You can see here the size disparty with the Nick Bibby models - and in my view these models would look all at sea mounted on 40mm bases, rules lawyers be damned!

So what other fimir are there that can be mounted on 25mm bases?

Blood Moon Miniatures

These 'bog raiders', sculpted by Nicolas Genovese, only seem to be on sale very intermittently from Blood Moon Miniatures' website, but they come with a variety of weapons and are very clearly inspired by the HeroQuest fimir, while having a certain reptilian quality of their own. I do like them, but they are very... taut, I think would be the word. In fact, they look as though they've been doing a cross-fit programme; whereas I kind of imagine most fimir to have a bit of a paunch. Also, if you look at this picture of one alongside the HQ fimir and a Nick Bibby fimir, you'll see that they're quite tall - taller than the 'ogre sized' fimir!

But still (to my eye) with more of a 25mm footprint. All in all, these are models that are very hard to 'mix in' to a unit, and need to be treated very much in a stand-alone way.


Oakbound Studio
Oakbound produce Myeri for their game The Woods - and indeed it was Geoff Solomon-Sims' desire to produce one-eyed swamp monsters that launched the miniatures range which gave rise to the game. I bought the first set that he cast (now oop), and they're still among my favourites:

Geoff takes very clear inspiration from The Dark Crystal here. Hunched over and wide-eyed, their faces have more pathos than most fimir - less easy to pin down simply as comic-book villains - and they look great as a unit. As you'd expect from the first models commercially released, the casting raised a few logistical issues. He's since sculpted and released another range of Myeri, inspired by - and with permission to use - Alan Lee's painting of the fomorion which was indeed the initial creative impetus for the Citadel studio.

As a result, given this common conceptual origin you can see how the recent range converges with the Jes Goodwin fimir sculpt.