Hi,
I'm somewhat confused... This morning I finally received my favorite e-bay purchase yet : The Ral Partha Limited Edition 01-507, Golden Dragon Of Chaos.
I got an excellent deal on this beautiful Dragon, and I'm proud to add it to my collection. I immediately planned a full diorama setting for the beast, and realised that I would have to locate The three Chaos Riders in the foreground of the origional Larry Elmore painting, (released as Ral Partha packs 02-800, and 02-801). Needless to say, I searched e-bay in vain for these items. then I remembered Dark Sword... Joy of Joy, they were available...
Not only were they available, but the Golden Dragon of Chaos is also available... Now I think it's great that this item should be available to enthusiasts the world over, but I understood that it was a limited edition, with only 5000 of these splendid beasts to be sold worldwide by Ral Partha. Whilst I'm still proud of my beautiful version of this dragon, It seems strange that this limited edition should now be on general sale again, after all the years since the sad demise of the Ral Partha miniatures company. What was the deal here? I recall that when Wizards of the Coast took over TSR, and decided to create their own figure line, they insisted that Ral Partha destroy all the moulds of their AD&D figures. I understood that a similar situation applied to the moulds of the ral partha Limited Edition Line (01-500 - 01-507) in so much as when the full total of the limited edition run of these dragons had been produced, The moulds were going to be destroyed to prevent any further copies being released and de-valuing the collectors item value of these limited runs.
Did the mould for the Golden Dragon of Chaos escape this fate, or has this lovely dragon been re-sculpted?

Hi Charles -

This is the same exact miniature/sculpt/molds as the old Partha - Golden Dragon of Chaos. The masters/molds were never destroyed as Partha did not release 5,000 of them.

Dark Sword secured all rights to this miniature along with many other old Partha sculpts based on Larry Elmore artwork (and some other generic Partha sculpts) to boot.

Ral Partha did not even get 2,500 of them released before they went out of business back in the late 1990's.

So technically, we could have released another 2,500 limited edition versions (which we would never sell out of in a hundred years as the market for large pewter dragons is so small these days with all of the pre-painted plastic stuff out there). We decided to have the front part of the base resculpted where the number plate would go to keep the limited edition versions seperate from our general release version. Most people covered up the plate space anyways (I was never a big fan of this and I own a couple limited edition versions myself) when they painted the miniature.

If you paid over $79.99 for the dragon on Ebay, you could have picked up from us and saved on shipping with the rest of your order. This set retailed for $75.00 back in the mid-1990's when pewter was dirt cheap. The cost of pewter over tripled in the past couple years and we are still selling this big ol' beast for $79.99 - so he is a really good deal.

We have a couple other massive Dragons in his size range - DSM6004 and DSM6005. They are very impressive and actually have far superior wings to DSM6003 as we did the wings just like the artwork on DSM6004 and DSM6005. DSM6003 - made a compromise on the wings. It is still an amazing sculpt though.

Regards,

Jim
www.DarkSwordMiniatures.com

Well Jim, It could have been worse... I picked it up for $85.00 so on the one hand, I guess I'm out $11.00.
On the flip side, If I hadn't bought it on e-bay, I probably wouldn't have ordered the three Chaos riders from you guys today... so it's an ill wind...
I'm happy enough with the Dragon, and I suppose it has some cachet as being one of the Ral Partha limited editions... Of which I have four now... (Assuming my Dracolich arrives sometime soon), The others being The Great Red, and Takhisis. I'd love to lay my hands on their old Imperial Dragon again... (Had one and sold it back in the early 90's,), and I'd also like one of the Bronze dragons of Pern...
It could have been a lot worse. Thanks very much for clearing the situation up for me... It's nice to know that such a great model is still obtainable... I really like Larry's artwork, and the sculpting on this one was great.