Spelljammer Miniatures

I just received a few interesting pieces from last months release of Spelljammer miniatures in the mail today. These miniatures correspond to creatures found in the 5th edition rules for Spelljammer that were released back in August.

Alternate art edition

The first miniatures are some Chwinga, which I believe were first introduced in Tomb of Annihilation. They are described as shy forest spirits, but for some reason, they exist in space as well.

The origins of the Chwinga are unclear, but I'm pretty sure that they were modeled after the kodama from the Studio Ghibli film Mononoke-hime, which influenced the design of kodama in other franchises as well.

Ghibli kodama

Persona/Shin Megami Tensei kodama

A Chwinga (Adventures in Space #4), and a Chwinga & Space Guppy (Adventures in Space #17).

The Space Guppy is pretty much just another fish-like creature (among many) that seem to populate Wildspace.

Astral Menagerie cover art

The next miniature is a Void Scavver (Adventures in Space #33), which appeared in the original edition of Spelljammer. They are essentially one-eyed space sharks that fill the role of facultative scavengers.

I wish that the eye of the Void Scavver was stalked like on the cover art, but I guess the eye is retractable, since the miniature seems very faithful to the interior art.

The final miniatures are Murder Comets. They are offbeat monsters that I rather like despite the cringy name, which I take to be some sort of riff on "murder hornet" or "murder hobo".

In any event, the Murder Comet is described as a type of paraelemental created by combining the essence of earth elementals with the essence of fire elementals, to which a spellcaster has subsequently bound their spirit. I'm not sure why it wasn't a combination of earth and water, since comets are largely composed of rock and ice.

The Murder Comet has the ability to breathe fire, but I would personally add the ability to release a trail of poisonous gas, as an homage to the 1910 panic promoted by the press and other hucksters when spectroscopic analysis indicated that there were traces of cyanogen in the tail of Halley's Comet.

On the left is a Murder Comet (Adventures in Space #9), while on the right is a Swarm of Murder Comets (Threats from the Cosmos).

The regular Murder Comet is half the size of the ship scale (1:600) Swarm of Murder Comets, so both are undersized (especially if you consider that a really small comet might have a nucleus that is still ~½ mile in diameter).

The swarm looks as if it is made of multiple parts, so maybe it would be possible to separate off a couple of individual comets from the group if you wanted some larger single comets.

I also want to mention that the dragons from this set of miniatures are really nice, but I could not justify buying any of them.

There are two Solar Dragons that are roughly the same size, but I liked the sculpt and pose of the Adult Solar Dragon (right) a lot more than the much cheaper Young Solar Dragon (left). There is also a Young Lunar Dragon (center) that is exclusive to the prohibitively priced Collector's Edition Box.

A much cheaper ship scale Ancient Lunar Dragon comes with the Astral Elf Patrol set, but I think that it is probably too small for my needs despite the nice sculpt.