Why bother with a mastiff miniature?
Mastiffs are not a bad mount if your character is small, but they can’t carry any creatures which are medium sized or larger. These beasts aren’t just for riding though, since they have good senses of smell and hearing and have a decent attack as well. Expect to see these as guard dogs, tracking dogs, and pets. It’s a safe bet that you will need a dog miniature at some point, if not for one of the aforementioned options, then for when your druid goes undercover as a dog.
What about this mini?
This unpainted mini pack consists of the mastiff miniature and a shadow mastiff miniature, to cover all of your mastiff needs. Well, mostly; it doesn’t have an alpha mastiff in the pack. The fact that the mastiff mini is medium like it should be made me happy. This mini is made by WizKids as part of their Nolzur’s Marvelous Miniatures line, Mastiff & Shadow Mastiff #90017. It’s a nice enough sculpt and was fine to paint. I liked the saddle on it, but of course there are loads of reasons to have a mastiff besides riding, so it would have been nice to have a second, unsaddled mastiff in the pack instead of a shadow mastiff, but it’s not really a big issue for me, and hopefully is not for you either.
How useful is this mini, really?
Mastiffs are included in 15 published Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition books:
- Acquisitions Incorporated
- Baldur’s Gate: Descent Into Avernus
- Curse Of Strahd
- Deck Of Many Things
- Dragonlance: Shadow Of The Dragon Queen
- Explorer’s Guide To Wildemount
- Guildmaster’s Guide To Ravnica
- Keys From The Golden Vault
- Monster Manual
- Planescape: Adventures In The Multiverse
- Quests From The Infinite Staircase
- Storm King’s Thunder
- Tales From The Yawning Portal
- Waterdeep: Dragon Heist
- Xanathar’s Guide To Everything
That’s more than a third of the published materials- not bad for a utility creature with only minimal combat potential. Your PC’s will be using them all the time or very rarely, depending upon the group. Even if your group doesn’t use them much though, they pop up a lot, so you might as well pick one up at some point.
But why are you doing this?
As usual for these videos, my aim is to provide you with good views of all angles of the miniatures featured, along with accurate sizing information for them. As I already pointed out, the mastiff miniature is on a medium sized base as it is supposed to be. In addition I want to thank master wildlife artist Sherrie York, an incredibly skilled reduction linocut artist, for graciously allowing me to use one of her reduction linocuts, Shivano Sunset, as the backdrop for my miniatures in the video. Check out her other reduction linocuts; she is, in my opinion, the best linocut artist of our generation.