The first question that comes to mind upon seeing a stand-alone/box set/whatever product such as Artemis is if the game itself is worthwhile, or if it’s something that’s been slapped together as a means to push the models more than if they were sold by themselves for use in the existing larger game system. For now, I’ve got the fauna side of things completed, so questions of game quality will have to wait until the PHR side is done as well!
The models themselves I’m fairly happy with. I’ve always liked the existing fauna in Dropzone, and these are mostly solid models that I still do have a few complaints about. A good touch is that all of them are lacking eyes, which ties into the noise rules of the game as well as implying a shared evolutionary history given they’re all from the same moon.
I expected the Harpy to overlap a bit with the Vampire, but they fill somewhat different roles with the Dropzone rules and the wings are dissimilar enough to tell them apart at a glance, even if they’re fairly close in size. I fully expected Harpies to be feral Vampires when first shown off, anyway.
I would highly recommend snipping the flight rods to different heights, as it makes them look much more like an unruly swarm than otherwise.
The box only supplies you with eight bases that have holes for flight rods, and two they expect you to glue a Harpy to directly. The two ‘large’ Harpies have tails they can stand on and were pictured as such, as seen below. The problem here is that specific model was likely a 3D print test or something of the sort in their promotional photos that isn’t in the box, as all the Harpies have the circular slot for gluing onto flight rods:
You could either go through the hassle of filling and modeling that spot, or glue one of the other two variants to the base and have it look like it’s crawling. I didn’t like that, and luckily still had some small Dropzone flight bases around, which are the same size as the bases provided in the box.
Sphinxes are likely my favorite design of the three. They’ve got a great theropod-like body structure, and given dinosaurs are cool + good + sweet, so is the Sphinx.
I didn’t want to glue them onto the square clear base intended for Artemis, as I want them for use in Dropzone as well, and for the sake of consistency as the only models that use clear bases there are flyers. Luckily I had a bunch of spare infantry bases from the Shaltari starter box I got ages ago, as I already had metal Braves and tossed those plastic ones into storage to be forgotten, so just a matter of filling the gaps and putting them on those bases so they look similar to my existing Maulers/Daggers. Ideally I actually wouldn’t want them on a base at all, but they aren’t stable enough to stand without a base on two feet without toppling over from the slightest vibration, and obviously posing with a single foot on the ground would never work.
The big complaint I have with them is the box comes with two variants, both of which have their heads curving to the right. I tried to pose them in a way that would minimize the visual impact of that, but what makes it worse is the Minotaur, which comes with a single variant that also has it’s head turned to the right! I wish they had designed one of the Sphinx variants or the Minotaur to be a little different here.
The Minotaur somewhat steps on the toes of the Apex as the largest and meanest individual of the fauna, but I like the Apex more still as both a model and for the rules it has. What I would have loved is for a bit more pose-ability of the head in particular; just some way of at least angling it a bit up/down or left/right. Or perhaps a more ‘neutral’ head, in that it didn’t have the tongue sticking out like it does, which draws your eye to the front of the model and emphasizes how you’ve got two of the same thing? Not as big a deal on smaller models, but these are essentially the centerpieces of the fauna. In some of the promotional photos, they show a mirrored Minotaur which isn’t actually available, so it feels like they were aware of the issue themselves!
Same as the Sphinx, I didn’t glue them to the base, but they clearly don’t need a base for stability and I can simply rest them on top of the clear Artemis base for use in said game. Also, I get more upset at myself for not putting any effort into gap filling the limbs the more I look at them!
Finally, while it doesn’t come in the box, I did also finish up a Bullhorn which now not only exists after just a few fucking years since Reconquest was released, but even has rules to support use in both Dropzone and Artemis. It’s notable in being a 3D print as opposed to a resin cast model. It also had an ungodly number of supports I couldn’t quite get clean, which thankfully were at least on the bottom of the model. I do hope they improve in this style of production, as apparently they’re in the process of switching all their cast models to prints.
