Many toy collectors are familiar with plastic "toy solider"-style, fantasy-themed mini figures such as DFC's Dragonriders of the Styx and Arco's Dragons N Monsters, but Fantasy Fortress is a similar set that is much more obscure.
The Fantasy Fortress set was released by Durham Industries in 1983. It consists of a pretty awesome olive green-colored plastic mountain as well as a bunch of monochromatic mini figures. The mountain/fortress is reminiscent of Tim Mee's Battle Mountain, but includes more details and features like opening doors, an elevator and ladders. You can see a photo of this piece at the Fantasy Toy Soliders blog. The figure set is made up of six different sculpts in two different colors--orange and a slightly translucent blue.
Let's take a look at each of the figure sculpts:
Meet the neckless barbarian with the world's smallest shield. I believe this dude is supposed to be one of the three "good guys" of the set, ready to face the beastly baddies lurking in the fortress.
Mr. four-arms is the first of those baddies. I enjoy the insanely happy expression on this monster's face; either he's a rabid lunatic shouting "rawwr" as he springs out from the shadows, or he's doing jazz hands and is about to break out into song and dance. Either way, I dig him.
Here we have another hero, a female warrior in a running pose. Similar sets of the era never seemed to include female characters, so it's nice that one was included here.
The second monster is a bulky, beastly guy sort of looks like a lizard-gorilla hybrid. He would probably be the "boss" creature in the fortress.
Rounding out the villains is this fat, winged demon. If this were an NES game, there would probably be a bunch of these things guarding the entrance of the fortress and generally being pains in the ass.
Finally, we have this muscular caped hero who could be the leader of the good guys. He has sword in hand, ready to kick some demon tail.
There we have it--all the denizens of the Fantasy Fortress. More cheap, charming weirdos from an era gone by, and a nice complement to the better-known fantasy mini figures out there. What do you think of them?