It’s the third installment of Mythic Legions Wednesdays here on FFZ and today I’m busting out one of the skeletons in the line, the awesomely named Skapular The Cryptbreaker and I’m going to on on record right now by saying this will likely end up as one of my favorite figures in the entire line.

I’ve got nothing new to say about the packaging. It’s simple, attractive, and collector friendly. The card is generic, but you get a bubble insert with a blurb about the character. I’m probably not going to tap too deeply into the fiction for this line, but I think it’s great that T4H supplied stories and background for the people who want it.

As we’ll continue to see with this line, Skapular comes out of the package without his shoulders, and looks totally complete without them. The design on this guy is absolutely killer. He looks like he just stepped out of the pages of a TSR manual, and I’m sure that in the distant days of my role-playing game youth, I painted some AD&D miniatures that looked exactly like this guy. Simply fantastic! There’s a lot of parts recycled from the two figures I’ve already looked at (Sir Gideon and Gorgo), but it’s done so splendidly well that it’s not something that jumps out and the figure still feels totally fresh to me. The gauntlets and lower legs are the same used for those two figures, the torso and hanging tabard are pulled from Sir Gideon, and the neck guard is from Gorgo. Obviously the skeleton bits are new and the upper arms have some segmented armor plates.

The shoulder armor is the same pair worn by Gorgo and they peg in to the back in the same fashion. Again, you get some nice customization options here as to whether or not to leave them off, just give him a right or a left, or load him up with both. The paint on this figure is as exquisite as what we saw on the first two. The armor has a nice steel finish to it with rivets and fringe all meticulously done up in a coppery gold paint and the crimson tabard features a bit of wash and looks great. The bone parts are yellowed to show a little wear and rot.

The head sculpt gives us a grim skull face with vacant, blackened out eye sockets and a rictus grin. I love the definition of the bones in the sculpt, particularly the cheeks, and there’s just the right amount of cracks and wear. Skapular’s face is colored with the same yellowed finish to match his arms and legs and there’s some nice black wash to bring out the detail in the teeth. The skull is nestled in a a crimson hood, which matches the tabard and the skull is capped off with an armored cap that ends in a deadly point. For a skull face, Skapular’s portrait packs plenty of personality.

Despite being a skeleton, Skapular’s articulation is identical to the figures we saw on the two earlier figures. There are rotating hinges in the shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, and ankles, and satisfying lateral rockers in the ankles. There’s a ball joint in the waist as well as the neck. The neck guard is soft plastic and doesn’t inhibit the neck movement at all. As always, the figure is designed to be disassembled at pretty much any articulation point so if you like to swap parts, you can go nuts!

Moving on to accessories, Skapular comes with a belt, which is a standard for most figures in this line. It has a loop to hold a sword, or in this case the dagger he comes with. The belt is long enough so that it can be worn as a cross strap, which really only works well when using just one of the pieces of shoulder armor, otherwise it can just hang loose around his waist. The dagger is pretty simple, with a uniform silver paint.

The spear is a piece that we didn’t see included with Gideon or Gorgo, but will be seen again in several upcoming figures. Like the dagger, it’s all done up in silver with no additional paint apps. It has a simple shaft with a barbed tip and he looks great holding it. I’ll confess, I would have liked to see the spear shaft painted brown, especially since the unpainted weapons were supposed to be relegated to the Legion Builders, but it’s not a terribly big deal to me.

The shield is the same mold we saw both Gideon and Gorgo carry only with yet another new coat of arms painted on the front. This is my favorite of the three shields, partly because the weathering on the white half of the deco is done so well, and partly because it’s just an interesting design that looks quite distinct from the other two. Once again, the shield features a clip that goes around the wrist and allows for rotation of the shield so you can orientate it however you want, no matter what position the figure’s arm is posed in.

There’s no doubt about it, this is my favorite figure so far, and that’s an incredible statement considering how great Gideon and Gorgo are. Granted, a lot of that has to do with my unending love for armored up skeleton warriors and T4H really nailed every aspect of this commonly used AD&D trope with this figure. He just feels so iconic to me and just the sort of figure I would have loved to have had in with my old LJN AD&D figures. Hell, even though I’m six months away from compiling my list of Favorites for 2016, I find it difficult to believe that this guy isn’t going to score a high spot on that list. Then again, I do still have 14 more of these figures to open up! Next week, we’ll sample some Orc flesh!