Our friends at Blizzard sent us over an 8″ statuette of legendary Warcraft Pandaren Brewmaster Chen Stormstout, and let me just say: This thing is freaking badass. Oh, and we’ve got two to give away, too.
You know, I don’t like to brag about it too often, but I’ve got a pretty cool job. One of the more awesome parts about the job is that sometimes, companies will send us stuff, and it will be totally awesome. And then – arguably more awesome – we take pictures of it and put them up on the site for everyone else to see how badass it is.
The item in question here is a little statue of Chen Stormstout, the most famous Pandaren Brewmaster in the world of Warcraft. If you aren’t familiar with Warcraft, just imagine a race of panda-people, half samurai and half kung-fu monks, who love their liquor and whose celebrated Brewmasters wander the earth dispensing their magical drink with one hand and dispensing white-hot Drunken-Master-style ass-kicking with the other. Yeah, they’re a fan-favorite race for a reason, you know.
Appearing in the Orc campaign in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne but strangely absent (along with his entire race) from World of Warcraft despite a handful of references – and an in-game pet, Chen Stormstout can now hang out on your desk in limited-edition figure form, and it is – pardon my French – really, really, really freaking cool.
The pictures don’t really do it justice. This little guy clocks in at 8″ tall, and the detail here is really exquisite. The Brewmaster is hand-painted from his fur to his kung-fu outfit to the little design on the keg that he carries around with him (since, you know, Drunken Masters need some help on the “drunken” part), but what’s really cool is the actual materials used for some of this stuff. The ropes around the keg are actual ropes and his staff is actual bamboo – or at least some sort of very bamboo-esque wood.
But the surprising part is actually the price: You can pick up your very own Chen Stormstout (as a Limited Edition figure, it’s first-come-first-serve) from the Blizzard Store for only $50, which considering the quality of this thing seems like a pretty damn good deal. Or, you could take your luck and enter the random drawing – open for the next week – for the two Pandaren figures Blizzard has set aside for the Escapist and WarCry communities. There’s that, too!
Check below for some more pictures of Chen Stormstout the action figure, as well as how he looks proudly displayed on my desk here at the Escapist HQ (surrounded by my Gundam models, naturally – monk, meet mecha). Or, just go ahead and enter our contest!
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A clash of cultures and technology as drunken master monk meets giant fighting robots.
