40K Friday - Not a lot of 40K - It's mainly about D&D Mini's this week

 Not playing much 40K here right now so while I'm doing a little work here and there on the Tyranids, Orks, and Fists I am mostly sitting out the Pariah Nexus stuff for now. It may change but it's not like I don't have a backlog and other things to focus on as well.

Among both of those things are several Age of Sigmar armies and I do have some interest in getting the new rulebook but for now I will likely just use the free download edition starter packs if we get a chance to play. No strong opinions on it yet other than realizing I have too damn many armies for a game I play rarely these days. Ah well ... I at least figured a fast painting scheme that I like and think will work for the pile of Stormcasts I've built up. More on that down the road.

The main focus this week though has been D&D miniatures - mainly miniatures for the upcoming campaign.  It's weird how a lifetime of picking up miniatures for the game leaves some surprising gaps when I stop to take inventory. Some things that are fairly common D&D monsters - like Bugbears - turn out to be completely absent from my collection while I have 5+ Kenku of all things which I might have used once in the last 20 years.

Yeah like these

Back in the early days the main focus for a lot of us was getting some decent miniatures for our own characters and ones our friends might use too. The monsters were a secondary concern. I had a few, as did most of my friends, but they were rarely enough to run a full encounter. The monster stuff really took off when the plastic D&D miniatures came out around 2000 with the launch of 3E because they were numerous and fairly cheap with the bonus of being pre-painted so they didn't add to whatever backlog some of us might have had. WOTC has kept these things going through several generations now and Pathfinder has their own line as well and it is truly a glorious time for building up a stable of monsters for your fantasy game. 

Regardless of the picture up top I am pretty well stocked with elementals - those things turn up all the time as either opponents or summoned allies - so I am doing pretty well there. But there are some blind spots like the bugbears - also hobgoblins and human guard/soldier types. I often use my Warhammer minis in my RPG's (so never needed official D&D Orks) so my Chaos Marauders and Chaos Warriors appear regularly on the battlemat, my Daemons show up as needed,  and my Beastmen are what I use for Gnolls but sometimes you want a different look.  So I've been doing a lot of specific searches for the things that appear in the ToEE to try and fill out the missing elements - heh.

I did this a few years ago when I started running Odyssey of the Dragonlords and I realized I was missing a lot of the creatures from Greek Mythology so I went on a sustained acquisition campaign to pick up enough of everything to run the adventure. It was very satisfying to pull out whatever I needed for the campaign

For our Deadlands campaign I already have a pile of Deadlands and general old west miniatures from previous runs so I didn't really need anything else and for the weird stuff I tend to draw on the D&D and Warhammer miniature files anyway. Pretty sure I used ogres, lizardmen, flesh hounds, a skeletal dragon and a bloodthirster during that game - but I didn't need anything new. 

With MechWarrior I did buy some new mech miniatures but some of that was just getting into the new style plastic stuff. I did lay some groundwork for future battles but I didn't actually need anything new to run the game.

Then we get to the new Temple campaign ... 

I'm going through the Moathouse and the ruins of  the Temple and the various wandering encounters and I'm just stunned at how much of this stuff I do not have. I've been doing this for over 40 years and I don't have bugbears?! I just ran Keep on the Borderlands 5 years ago and there's a whole lair full of them - what did I use? Probably beastmen, but still - I should really be able to run the Keep at least with no missing units. So I resolved to fix that this time - pick up enough of whatever to run all of the encounters without having to get too crazy with substitutions. 

He's waiting to get some time on the table ...

I've made a lot of progress but I am not there yet. The gaps are still weird, like Gargoyles - how do I not have gargoyles? I think every 80's module TSR published had at least one gargoyle in it but somehow I never grabbed one. Now, oh look - here's a room with twelve of them waiting to defend the area ... great.  I'm thinking my old Dark Elf harpies may have to assist there because I can't see needing that many gargoyles for anything else, ever. 

So anyway - tips for anyone else who's thinking about this kind of thing:

• eBay is the go-to here for specific individual miniatures, especially the ones coming out of the random box thing like D&D minis tend to be sold. There are separate stores online that do this too but eBay will let you compare prices across multiple sellers.
• If you need a lot of something look at fantasy army stuff like Warhammer, Age of Sigmar, Kings of War, etc. if you need 20 Orcs it's likely going to be cheaper to pick up a regiment that way than buying D&D ones though you may have to decide how important a paint job is to you.
• Individual big monsters are worth a look like this also - dragons, giants, demons, chimeras, hydras - these get a lot of use in miniature wargames too. There are whole units of minotaurs in the various Warhammer games for example - you might a better deal on 3 or 6 that way if you need a few.
• Buying multiples makes the shipping very reasonable so if you know you need, say, 3 harpies, 5 satyrs, 5 centaurs, a hydra, and some giant scorpions it's worth tracking down a single seller that can cover as much of that as possible. That's an important trick to making this more economically reasonable.
• So if you get 3-4-5 of something odds are they will be identical - how do you tell them apart? Well, on traditional miniatures I paint them differently. On the pre-painted stuff I do this:
  
  
  
  You can pick up these colored dot stickers at an office supply store or on Amazon. They are not expensive and you just use the color to distinguish them - "47 points of damage to green and a Dex save or he's prone" - that kind of thing. 

One final note on storing these things once you have acquired them: the fancy hand-painted fragile stuff goes into the display case or a padded Chessex type case but the pre-painted ones go into a more utilitarian home:

The minis are pretty durable so utility drawers + a label-maker and you have decent enough storage that can be brought out of a closet whenever you need it. I have this kind of setup for the plastic Star Wars miniatures and one for my old west stuff as well and it has worked fine for me for years.  

So there's a bunch of mini talk that is -not- tied to 40K for a change!

Next week: let's talk about the rules.