Why bother with a snow golem miniature?
First of all, Merry Christmas! This miniature was chosen for today because of the holiday connection, and I readily admit to pandering to the holiday. That said, this Construct was one of the ones I have been planning to feature anyhow, for a really good reason: the miniature which WizKids sells (and which I bought) is the wrong size. That sort of behaviour is part of why I started this series on the blog. The other reason being that it can be difficult or impossible to know what size a miniature is before ordering it online. Or even what it looks like. It irritated me, so I started this series to add a little information out there, as I was always grateful when someone had posted a miniature that I was looking to buy which gave me the information about it which I needed. So, to get back on track: Why bother with a snow golem mini? It depends. If you’re running Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, you’ll want one. If you run Xmas sessions like I do, you will also want one. If you have adventures in frozen wastelands, you will want one. If you are playing in a desert setting, you might want to rethink your plans to spend limited funds in getting one.
What about these minis?
Yep, these minis instead of this mini, because while we will discuss the WizKids official miniature, I also have some other miniature options, since the official mini is the wrong size. But let’s start with the official one. This pre-painted miniature comes from one of WizKids‘ sets of blind booster boxes (explained here), one of the Icons of the Realms lines, Snowbound, Snow golem #28/46. It’s not a particularly beautiful miniature, but that never bothers me all that much. In fact, it’s pretty ugly, as minis go. The thing that really annoys me though is that according to the official Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition rules, snow golems are meant to be medium size. Yet, when WizKids made snow golem minis for their blind booster boxes, they made the miniatures large sized on large bases. I don’t know why they keep doing this with minis from their blind booster boxes, but it is incredibly annoying. They have one job, to make minis which are used in tabletop gaming for battle maps, but they keep screwing up with the sizing in their blind booster boxes. I suspect that this keeps happening because they need to have a certain number of each size mini to fit the needs of a booster box, but if that’s true, I wish they would figure out some better way to deal with the issue than by making miniatures which are the wrong size. The boxes aren’t cheap, so every mini which you pay for out of a booster box that can’t be used ends up really making my blood boil. Check out the video at the end of the blog to see what this and the other snow golem minis that I discuss here look like and their sizing. So yeah, very frustrating.
Fortunately for me, I found some other options for snow golems, and those options both look MUCH better than the official one, and are also the size which the official D&D 5E rules say they should be. Alternative Armies sells a set of three snowmen, armed with various weapons, called Fantasy Snowmen #SN07, and they are beautiful. These unpainted resin and metal minis are great sculpts which are full of personality. They don’t look much like the amorphous blobs of snow pictured in the official D&D 5E books, but then why wouldn’t a snow golem look like a snowman? Earth golems look like earth men, clay golems look like clay men, and people regularly make snowmen when it snows because it is so easy to do. Makes sense, really. We even have songs and holiday specials featuring them, so mine are now snowmen, since the official miniature is such a total dumpster fire of a mini in every way. I only saw two issues with using these miniatures as my snow golems. First, two of the snowmen have shields, which would increase their armor class by 2. Second, the snow golem’s official stats do not account for weapons. I deal with that by adding 2 to the AC of the appropriate snow golems, and I have made stats for my new snow golems that adds weapon attacks, depending upon the particular mini attacking. This was a no-brainer, since the normal attack by an unarmed snow golem is much more damaging than a weapon attack, so they realistically will rarely use their weapons anyhow. The weapons sure do make them look cool though. Oh, and while we are discussing the shields of the snowmen, one of them has some cool heraldry on their shield. While I would love to take credit for painting that on, it is actually a transfer from a company called Carthage Must Be Destroyed, and they sell sheets of transfers of designs and heraldry for shields, banners, and the like. If you paint a lot of this sort of thing, check them out- it is a huge time saver and they look great.
OK, so if I found some miniatures which will work for my snow golem, then we’re done here, right? Well, not quite. It turns out that while I was going through the Alternative Armies website, I found some teeny tiny little snowmen for sale as well, designed for 15 mm games versus the 28 mm minis which D&D 5E uses. It got me thinking that I now have a snow golem, but also a snow golem mini which is too big. What if I also got some which were too small, and statted up the lot of them to make a snow golem army of varying sizes? So that is what I did. I bought a set of Alternative Armies’ Evil Snowmen #SN01 and painted up the one in that set of five unpainted metal minis which worked best with my Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Since I run a holiday session each year, they fit well with that theme, so it seemed like an obvious purchase for me. I statted up the incorrectly sized WizKids mini as a giant snow golem, and the tiny ones as miniature snow golems, along with the normal snow golems with the weapon stats added, and if you would like I have added stats links to my entire snowman army.
How useful is this mini, really?
It depends, really. Snow golems are only included in 1 official published Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition book, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t use them in your own stuff. Since I run a homebrew world, I can pop them into play any time the party gets into a frozen environment, or if it’s Winter. There are a very limited number of options for creatures living in snowy climes, so every option counts. Plus, once a year I run a holiday special session, so they will get some use with that. If you only run official published D&D stuff and aren’t planning to run Icewind Dale, then you probably don’t want to worry about getting a snow golem, and that’s fair enough. But be sure not to get the WizKids mini if you’re looking for a mini for Icewind Dale, because it is the wrong size. Grrr.
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 official WizKids snow golem miniature is on a large sized base even though it is meant to be on a medium base, so don’t buy it unless you are looking for one on a large base. The Alternative Armies Fantasy Snowmen however, are on a medium base, and are the ones which I use for my snow golems. In addition I would like to thank legendary wildlife artist Sherrie York, a reduction linocut master, 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. If you know a better reduction linocut artist, let me know as I would love to see their work.