A brace of Grenadier orcs

When I was a kid, Grenadier was an intriguing alternative to Citadel. Grenadier miniatures were fairly cheap (£1.50 and later £1.95 a blister, if I remember correctly, for typically three infantry or one or two surprisingly large monsters) and they offered a huge amount of variety.

The downside was that there wasn't a great deal of each type. If you wanted orcs, for example, you were faced with small numbers of various visually distinct types - at least until Nick Lund joined from Citadel and created the Fantasy Warriors range. Meanwhile, Citadel produced scores of their main humanoid creatures. So the bigger Grenadier monsters tended to be the main attraction.

But many of the Grenadier humanoids were nice miniatures and often rather distinctive: an orc leader mounted on a hefty warhorse, for example, or kobolds riding large reptiles. They also did orc skeletons.

Here are a couple of their orcs, from two very different boxes in the Dragon Lords range: a lesser orc with war axe from the Monsters box; and the chieftain of the Orcs of the Severed Hand. I think the latter would make a decent RuneQuest dark troll. The former, on the other hand, is a much more Tolkienish orc: short stature, big head, big hands, long arms and short, thick legs.