The plastic mountain grows....

The wife and I went out of town today on a brief excursion up state; Columbia, SC.  She wanted to go check something out and I didn't have anything else planned.  Unfortunately what she wanted to see turned out to be a big disappointment.  So she asked if I wanted to see anything else since we drove up all that way (2 hour trip one way).  I pulled out the handy smart phone, typed in game stores, and lo and behold, a Games Workshop was right down the street.  I have not been in a Games Workshop store since 1998, nor have I bought any Games Workshop miniatures in years.  A hop, skip, and a jump away we went.

The store wasn't very big, but they had all the latest and greatest in GW products.  As well, the manager/owner of the store was the friendliest, most knowledgeable, and enthusiastic fan of the hobby I've met yet.  You could tell he was passionate about the hobby as well as the products he was selling.  You'll say that's his job, like a used car salesman he wants to sell his products and as many as he can.  But I say, he was just being very helpful and wanted to encourage more people to enjoy the hobby, whether that is collecting and painting miniatures or in playing the game.

Anyways, I was immediately drawn to GW's new starter sets.  They were for fantasy (Age of Sigmar) and 40k, and each was $85.  They generally each contained a heavy unit, maybe a hero unit, some specialist types, and some troops.  In most cases the price of the individual heavy or hero unit by itself is the same cost as the starter set.  I was drawn to one particular box, mostly for the heavy unit.  As you can guess, that box would be mine....

I chose the Lizardmen (Seraphon?  I've been out of the loop).  But look at that carnosaur!  Besides, I have ZERO lizardmen in my entire collection.  This fills it out nicely.

Respectable amount of contents.  The carnosaur by itself is the same cost as this starter set.

Once I made it home, operation assembly began.  A few hours later, and now approaching 1 am, I have completed my mission.  

This is everything.

Carnosaur was first to be assembled, naturally.

Rawr!

A leader, musician, standard bearer, and five regular saurus knights.

A leader, musician, standard bearer, and nine regular saurus warriors.

There were quite a few spare bits remaining on the sprues.  And I LOVE doing conversions and making stuff up.  As I tend to play games that allow a more free-form approach to character customization (like Song of Blades & Heroes), I have no problem just slapping bits together to make something out of nothing essentially.

There were these sea snake accessories which I could have added to any of the lizardmen bases.  But it didn't seem right to me.  So on to a base they went.  Now I have a sea snake swarm.

Well, I think they are sea snakes.  Serpent swarm....viper swarm....whatever.

This guy was actually a replacement for the rider on the carnosaur.  Apparently there are three variants of the carnosaur you could choose from.  I opted for the one on the cover of the box.  So this guy would have wound up in a bag of random bits.

But here he is, assembled just as if he were on the carnosaur.  The only thing different is the thing in his left hand.  It was supposed to be holding the reins of the carnosaur, so I added some skull accessories to it and now it could be some sort of shaman's tool.

This is a Frankenstein's monster.  All of the bits you see on this guy were haphazardly placed to make some sort of semblance of a lizardman-type character.  All the bits were from this box set.

The majority of the bits were from the sprue for the carnosaur variants.  This guy almost has a Tyranid look to him.  I will consider him to be a saurus champion/hero type, a lizardman ogre.