Skaven (Wererats)

 

Some time in the 1990s I bought a pack of GW metal Warhammer Skaven. I didn't have any interest in Warhammer, but I did want something I could use as wererats for my AD&D game.

The skaven are a bit more heavily equipped than your standard AD&D wererat, but they looked ratty enough for my purposes. 

Old Character Minis

 

I took some photos of some of my old character minis with my iPhone, just to see how they'd turn out. Meh. The lighting is pretty crap, but then it was all pretty ad-hoc.

From left to right: Fnord, Smirnoff, and Aedan Comarren. 

 Here's another attempt. Also pretty meh. Somehow I kept activating the iPhone's focus lock, which was annoying, and the tonal range is quite compressed. It's certainly a convenient camera to use, but I think a proper SLR is going to be more useful for this sort of thing.

And here we go with a photo taken with my Nikon D3500 on my lighting stage. The tonal range is wider, though the details are not as sharp — I can set the camera to do some pre-sharpening, but I prefer to do that sort of thing in a proper photo editing app. I don't have a macro lens for this camera, so I have to stand off a metre or so. One day, when I win Lotto, I'll get a macro lens, but until that happy day it's not a high fiscal priority.

Cheap and Easy Improvised Lighting Stage

Lighting stage setup #1

Raw camera result, no editing

For most people's needs, an expensive lighting stage setup is not necessary for model photography.

Here I'm using a cheap $20 rechargeable batwing LED light as a diffuse overhead light source, balanced on a pair of wooden bookends. The background is a texture I printed on my desktop printer — it's held in place by a pair of 3d-printed clamps, but it could be easily arranged and held in place against a book or something with a couple of binder clips.

In this first photo, the light is directly above the subjects, so there are some very dark shadows below. These could be mitigated with the use of a strategically placed reflector, but a simpler method is just to move the light a bit.

Raw camera result, no editing

Lighting stage setup #2

In this second photo I've just moved the light forward a bit, so it fills more of the lower areas of the models. They could still benefit from the use of a reflector, but the results are a lot better. 

You could tinker with the exact light position and height, and adding reflectors and what-not. You could swap in a textured or plain background sheet of your choice. Once you have the setup exactly to your liking, it's the work of a couple of minutes to get set up again, and you can photograph to your heart's content. 

Total cost of this setup was the twenty bucks or so I paid for the batwing LED torch, which has a multitude of uses aside from miniature photography. Everything else I had lying around, or could produce by my own efforts. The LEDs produce a very white light, close to daylight in wavelength, so there's little need for colour correction in the photo editing app of your choice (I use Affinity Photo).

The models are a pair of giants by Duncan Louca, printed in FDM on my elderly Creality Ender 3. 

Inheritance

 

I inherited some minis from my friend Belle.

They're mostly GW medievalish types: peasants, artisans, criminals, and a bishop (who might well be classed with the criminals).

There are two sets of three Grenadier figures: one of prisoners, and one of royal court types. They're smaller than the GW figures, being from the 25mm days. They're dated 1987-88.

There are a few 15mm figures from Tabletop Games (who I think are now defunct, though their ranges may still be available from other manufacturers). One is a mounted Mongol/Hun standard bearer, there are four medieval 100-Years-War types, and a bunch of others in long robes that I cannot make out without high magnification.

And last (and also least) there are a bunch of toy soldiers, cast in Zamak or similar, that I vaguely recall came in Kinder Surprise eggs. I think. They're very stiffly sculpted and not much use for anything except as game markers. 

Very Old Wizards

 These are all very old 25mm figures that I painted some time in the late 1980s, mostly using Maimeri gouache acrylics. They all came, as far as I can recall, from two three-figure sets from Ral Partha, and I think they were designed by Tom Meier and/or Julie Guthrie.

Printable Heroes

Click once for a two-sided fold-and-trim figure without background
Click again to get the same figure in black & white line work (colour your own!)
Click on the little silhouette figure above the standee to add or remove a heavy black outline

I have a personal preference for 3d painted miniatures when it comes to tabletop gaming, but they do have their disadvantages. They can be expensive, quite heavy en masse if cast in metal, and troublesome to store or transport. Also, they take quite a bit of work to prepare to a standard that satisfies me — pre-painted miniatures are available, but they're either phenomenally (and justifiably) expensive, or they're pretty crap.

There have been flat card playing tokens around for decades, but they've generally not been of great quality. They used to be called standees, among other things, and I first encountered them as tokens included in board games.

What I'm looking at here are much nicer than those old tokens, though they're essentially the same thing. They come from a site called Printable Heroes, and the person who runs it has a Patreon through which they release new standees on a regular basis.

I have only seen some of the PDFs released for free, so my comments are based mainly on those. The example I present here is the Banderhobb.

There is some information presented on the website about the creature, including in which book, and on what page, you can find the D&D5e stats for it.

On the right are download links. There are multiple options, depending on at what level you're donating to the artist on Patreon. As I mentioned above, I've only seen the free one.

The PDF is a single sheet, on which are five layered standees to be printed and trimmed. There are several configurable output options:

• Click once on the figure to get a double-sided standee that can be printed and trimmed.
• Click again on it to get the same layout, but this time in black & white line art, which you could colour yourself if you were so inclined
• Above each miniature is a small silhouette figure: click on that to add or remove a heavy black outline — useful, as it means you don't have to be absolutely accurate with your folding and trimming.

Basing blanks are also provided on the sheet, and they too are configurable — you can choose one of several different coloured rings, to ease differentiation of individual monsters on the battlefield I assume.

Now, although the standee is double-sided, it isn't two-sided — there's no front and back, just two three-quarter front views.

This isn't really an issue for D&D3e onwards, as figures on a tabletop grid have no facing, but it could be an issue if you actually need to be able to easily distinguish a back and front. You could get around the issue by saying that its "front" is the edge of the standee it's more or less looking towards, and its back would thus be the opposite edge. That's a solution, but it's not ideal to me.

Obviously, having to also draw a back view for every standee would double the workload on the artist, but it would make for a better product, in my view.

It's possible that this is not the situation for the paid products, I don't know.

As far as the art work is concerned — I like it. It hits a good line between detail and simplicity, and it prints well. Much more detail would be largely wasted for the purpose of the figures, and less would start looking a bit too sparse and cartoonish.

These card cut-out standees have many advantages. They're cheap, easy to store and to transport, and they don't need to be painted (unless you want to). I like them a lot.

Later on....

Here's some in the flesh, as it were. My laser printer won't handle card, so they were printed on copy paper and then had a sheet of card sandwiched in the fold when I glued them up. The edges were blackened with a Sharpie marker.

I got steadily slacker and slacker at following the outline of the creature when I was cutting them out, but I don't think it will really matter that much when they're in use.

The 20mm standee stands I just designed in Blender and printed; they have a shallow S-bend so they grip the base of the card figure by tension, and they're glued to 22mm fender washers for stability. I printed them at a pretty low resolution (0.24mm layer height), not only because they print faster that way, but the ridges of the layers also help to grip the standee.

The STL for the base can be downloaded from Thingiverse at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3453434

Tabletop Game Paraphernalia

That gaping abyss was not there when we started this fight, but we have a character who can cause earthquakes and things,

and he does so love to do that even when it might not be the wisest course of action.

You will note that one of our party is right there in the middle of the gaping abyss.

We have no idea yet how deep it gapes, or whether she survived.

Like I said, not the wisest course of action.

I have about a bajillion fantasy and sci-fi roleplaying miniatures.

I have bits and pieces of scatter terrain — pillars, evil altars, furniture — out the wazoo.

I have a 3d printer, and the 3d modeling skills to be able to make pretty much any sort of tabletop gaming stuff we could ever want.

Nevertheless, this is what we almost invariably end up using, because it is fast and easy and effective. It's a cheap steel whiteboard that I got for a few bucks years ago. It's not huge, about 400 x 500 mm, but it's large enough for most scenarios. Most often, we use chessmen and the like to represent the Bad Guys, because again, they're fast and convenient, and imagination serves perfectly well to project whatever shape is required on to the generic markers.

I've written before about the two-edged sword that is the use of miniatures in tabletop roleplaying — they make the tactical situation more explicit than in pure theatre-of-the-mind, but they also impose a bit of an imagination straitjacket, especially problematic when one miniature is being used to stand in for another creature. People tend to trust their eyes rather than their minds, and if they can see something they know is a cow they'll think of it as a cow, and not as a Ravening Bugblatter Beast of Thrarll.

When we first started roleplaying, many decades ago, we had very limited access to fantasy miniatures, and even less money, so we tended not to use them at all. They weren't completely foreign to us, because several of our group were wargamers and had small collections of figures for various wargaming periods. However, when it came to roleplaying, the nearest we came to using miniatures was when I made a bunch of cardboard tokens with our characters names on them.

My pixie character

Mine was a pixie called Raisenbred Thimblecup. She didn't last very long at all; she was lured off into a swamp and electrocuted to death by a will-'o-wisp.

These little chits were only about 15x12mm, and made from some shitty scrap cardboard I had lying around. They served pretty well for the purpose really.

Many years later, when Wizards of the Coast took over the D&D IP, for a while they were putting out collections of 2d cut-out tokens illustrated with various critters and characters. Like pogs I think, though I've never actually seen a pog in the flesh. Anyway, they work quite well as tactical markers, but again they suffer from the "what you see is what you think you see" problem, and though it's pretty easy to amass a giant, varied collection of the things, there's still the problem of having to sort through them all to find the exact ones you need for any given encounter.

I'd use them for character tokens, and maybe for important NPCs or pre-prepared encounters, but for setting up a fight on the fly, they'd still be a bit of a pain to organise.

1980s Essex Medieval Heavy Foot Soldier

Here's an old Medieval wargaming miniature from the 1980s, produced by Essex Miniatures.

Essex were among the first to start producing larger scale 28mm miniatures, although they actually advertised them as 25mm. Up until then, 25mm had been the standard, and Essex armies towered over their opponents on the wargames table. Basing systems had been designed for 25mm figures too, so Essex figures tended to be very crowded on bases designed for the smaller scale.

They tended towards rather caricatured, cartoonish features, but I always rather liked them, except for their horses which looked a bit small and spindly underneath their gigantic riders. Eventually they also started producing 15mm miniatures which were excellent as well, and a lot more affordable than larger scale armies.

Tim the Enchanter

77174: Leisynn, Mercenary Mage ($2.49) by Tim Prow

Reaper calls this guy Leisynn. Mercenary Mage.

There are some, however, who call him..... Tim!

Urn Critter

I have no memory of who manufactured this little guy, nor where or when I got him, only that it was a long, long time ago. About thirty years, I think. This is a re-paint, to improve on a much older and crappier paint job.

I've glued the original urn to a steel washer to provide a bit of stability, which it did not have much of to begin with.

The image on the far right is for scale, photographed next to Sergeant Measureby with his +2 Spear of Measuring (5mm increments)

Deadeye Slim

Here's another figure from the last Reaper  Bones Kickstarter — 80002: Deadeye Slim, by Patrick Keith.

I wanted a "spaghetti Western" gunfighter, so he's very very dusty and sweaty and almost monochromatic. I also wanted to get him painted very quickly because I didn't want to have to expend too much effort on him, so this is about a 15 minute paint job.

Strong Independent Woman

This lady is part of the Townsfolk set from the last Reaper Bones kickstarter. She seems very friendly. Possibly one of the Hot Singles in Your Area Keen to Meet You.

This is not one of my better paint-jobs; the subtleties of nice smooth skin defeat me. Nevertheless, now she's done.

The figure SKU is 77086: Townsfolk: Strumpet by Bobby Jackson, and she's currently selling for $2.49.

Freebooter

This is a very old miniature, from Games Workshop I think, which I've had sitting on my desk undercoated for years and years. It came in a blister of two versions: this one, and a mounted figure. It was actually the mounted figure I was looking for when I came to finally get around to painting it, but I couldn't find it, so this guy finally got the treatment.

It's designed for a plastic slotta-base, which I hate, so I've mounted him on a 22mm washer and built up the ground with GreenStuff. I briefly considered adding some foliage, but that stuff catches the dust like you wouldn't believe, and is impossible to clean properly. So, he gets to stand on bare rock.

Shiny Toy Soldiers

These are some 54mm (1:32 scale) plastic toy soldiers from Armies in Plastic WW1 range. They do quite an extensive range of figures in this style; they're clearly toy soldiers, not diorama-quality collectors' items, and I rather like them for that. Though stylized in form, they're generally pretty accurate as far as uniform and equipment goes.

I've block-painted them quite quickly, and then given them a shiny coat of Army Painters' QickShade varnish which instantly provides the shading effects. Well, when I say "instantly" I mean "when it eventually dries in my freezing cold workroom". I've used their Heavy Shade on these, which is maybe a little dark, but I don't really fancy paying another $45 to get a tin of a lighter shade.

Ankheg

Another burrowing beastie, this time an Ankheg (Reaper Bones 77230, not in the online store yet).

It's a bit of an uninspiring paint-job, though the mini itself is OK.

Remorhaz

Next up, Reaper's 77183: Frost Wyrm by Kevin Williams.

Or, as pretty much everybody else in the RPG world knows it, a Remorhaz.

From memory, I think remorhaz are supposed to be more of a light ice-blue, but I got a bit carried away, so this one has more of a tropical look about it than an arctic one. Never mind.

Not a Bulette™, Honest It's Not

Next up on the painting table from Reaper's Kickstarter II is this critter, which they call 77372: Burrowing Horror and I will go out on a limb to call a Bulette.

Hail Hydra!

This is yet another of Reaper's Bones plastic figures, 77191 Hydra by Sandra Garrity. I like Garrity's work, and this is no exception, though I feel that it would be more useful as a gaming miniature if its pose were more compact, more curled around on itself. That would probably require that it be moulded with one or two more pieces, but it's already a multi-piece model so that wouldn't be a big problem — at least, not from the end-user's point of view.

Gorgon

This is Reaper Bones 77256: Brass Bull, from their Bones II Kickstarter. It's not in their store as yet, apparently it's due for release in June.

I wanted a Gorgon, not a Brass Bull, so I painted it in rusty iron colours.

Note, that's a D&D Gorgon, not a mythological Gorgon.

Mashaaf - finished at last

I finally finished painting old maggot-breath, Reaper's Bones 77375: Mashaaf. It's a big figure, which made it a bit tricky to handle while painting.

In the first photo, I've included a figure of your friendly neighbourhood psycho-killer and vivisectionist for scale.

Just in case you haven't already seen it, I kept a work-in-progress blog here.