The Rotten Eye is a three piece miniature that resembles a D&D beholder, a large creature that’s in the shape of a sphere with a giant eye in the center of it’s body atop a huge row of razor sharp teeth whose crown ends in eyestalks that use different magical abilities. It’s not just any beholder though, but rather, one whose either in the middle of dying due to some flesh eating disease, or better yet, an eye tyrant whose come back as an undead eye tyrant.
Let me get the negatives out of the way. The base is too small. If this is really going to represent the typical eye tyrant, it’s a large creature, so the base should basically be double the size. Heck, looking at the figure, I’d like the base to be double the size just for some more stability.
The other bad thing, is that there are some gabs when putting the other two pieces, the front and back, of the rotten eye together. Nothing big and nothing some putty can’t fix, but some figures I’ve used, even large ones like dragons, have had almost perfect fits. Perhaps there should be more slots connecting the halves rather then just the one guiding bulb and the recess it goes into at the top of the creature?
The good news is that in terms of flack and mold lines, either they’re so minimum that I didn’t notice them, or the creature’s wrinkled and shattered flesh hides them so well, that the effect is the same.
In addition, because the creature is large, it’s more in tune to the size of the D&D version. While Reaper has it’s own versions, they’re smaller than this one and don’t have the same “shock and awe” value this unique take does as they generally are in the guide of the D&D monster but don’t capture quite all the elements.
More good news is that the creature has some great details on it. The back of the skull for instance, has several spots where the flesh has sloughed off revealing bone. Several of the tentacles about the creature’s body are missing the end part with the dangerous eyes. The teeth and guts falling out of the creature’s front have excellent attention to detail.
The eye is large enough so that the painter has some options when painting it. It could be painted as some glowing light fueling the undead monster or as a human eye with enough sentience to know what has happened to it.
For me, I’ll be painting this sucker up to represent one of the foes from the Shackled City path. While I have a plastic D&D miniature that I’m going to use for the before fight, there are some elements that allow the creature I’m thinking of to come back, and instead of just breaking out the same miniature again, I can pull out this bad boy and have something to represent the changes that the monster has gone through.
