RPGaDAY 2024: Day 27: Marvellous Miniature

Day 27: Marvellous Miniature

 

This is a tricky one, I own a lot of minis (seriously A LOT) and it's hard to choose. I invested heavily in the old WotC prepainted minis for D&D, so as to get just the right mini. Prior to that I had a lovely mix of different fantasy and historical minis. In fact I'd been collecting minis, especially the old Minifigs Mythical Earth range, long before I'd even heard of roleplaying.

More recently, I've gradually been replacing a lot of the early stuff with Reaper Bones minis. They are great for detail, relatively cheap and the soft plastic actually makes them more resistant to knocks and damage.

Of course, a lot of these are unpainted. I periodically have a blitz on them, as I'm sure you can see if you look elsewhere on my blog, and it's my ultimate goal to have a set of minis to provide adventurers and adversaries for roleplay games.

I'm ignoring minis that I use primarily for wargames, though there's some cross over, especially with the minis I use in skirmish games. 

It's would be even more difficult if I included minis that I've seen but don't own, so I'll ignore those too.

So now the rambling bit. I know I don't actually need minis for RPGs. I've certainly run sessions without them, and it's my default when running games like Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green. 

But minis have always been a part of Dungeons and Dragons for me. Right back to the first game I ever played, we used minis, though they were only used in a very general sense to show who was fighting who,  floorplans came a lot later.

Now there are so many options that both players and GMs are spoilt for choice. Indeed, with 3D printing and online services that let you customise a mini, a GM or player should be able to get exactly what they want.

And that idea of custom minis sort of brings me to a conclusion.

The Marvellous Miniature has to be a character mini, villains and monsters just don't get enough table time. 

There may be a 'Wow' moment when a particularly awesome gribbly monster mini is placed on the table, especially if the players haven't seen it before, and as a GM I try and find stuff to impress. 

I remember a Volcanic Dragon and a Dracolich being particularly admired.

So a character. 

And the customisation has to be a feature; the player has to feel that it represents their character.

I've converted and painted quite a few minis over the years, and I could have chosen many of these, from Flosi, my first ever character (an old Asgard Miniatures dwarf thief, no real customisation here, we were just glad to find fantasy minis) to Citronella (a Reaper Miniatures Bonsium dwarf). 

But out of these, Keith's character Francis gets the nomination.

Keith was new to D&D, though he had played in my Delta Green campaign, in fact he started off roleplaying in 'Music of the Night', the Call of Cthulhu scenario I ran with my daughter.

Francis was his first character, a fighter, and he used an axe rather than a sword and carried a crossbow for ranged capability.

I converted a WotC prepainted mini, adding a backpack and swapping the head from Frostgrave sprues, I thought the kettle helmet matched his soldier background. I painted him as the player suggested. It's a simple mini, but it does everything that it needs to.

It's not my best conversion or my best painting, but what makes it really special is that the player passed away during that awful hiatus we all suffered in 2020, and its a way of remembering him.

#RPGaDAY24