05.03
Lately I have been thinking about running another campaign of Testament, the Biblical-era D&D 3.0 setting published by Green Ronin. (A philosophy blog recently remarked on it here.) In search of miniatures, I found an excellent site, The Foundry, which specializes in oldschool lead/pewter miniatures from different historical eras!
Aahhh… Assyrians, Canaanites, Egyptians, all the superstars of the Ancient World! ^^ Frankly I have always been disappointed that D&D, particularly recent editions, doesn’t draw more from the Bronze Age and from non-European cultures for its visual style and tech level. In fact, the general trend seems to be towards the modern era, with Eberron, steampunk and the various Final Fantasy-influenced magic/tech admixtures… is this forward creep inevitable? In 300 years, will we really all be playing RPGs set in the exciting, rollicking days of the early 21st century? Personally, I am trying to address these issues with the Bronze Age campaign setting I’m working on now, Neo-Pegana.
Anyway, I just put down a bunch of money on metal miniatures, so hopefully everything will work out. The only problem is painting them. Gray, leaden miniatures will clash with the colorful plastic WotC miniatures on my gaming table when the Hittites end up fighting lizard men and troglodytes. And although I know my way around a miniatures brush, I don’t want to spend the time to paint 1,000 minis when I could be using that time coming up with encounters and statting out NPCs. Luckily there are several miniatures painting services in the third world (is it possible that the Assyrian minis could be painted by… an actual Assyrian!?!?!?) which have very reasonable prices (even after the exorbitant air-mail shipping costs :/ ), so I am planning to use one and we’ll see how it goes. I’ll post more when the minis come back!
If you don’t want to paint them, you might consider a painting service. I don’t do anything with miniatures, but a podcast I listen to, The D6 Generation (thed6generation.com), runs the gambit of gaming from war games to RPGs to board games. One of their sponsors is Painted Figs (paintedfigs.com).
While they specialize in stuff like War Machine and Warhammer, they will do custom jobs and they have a dipping service that is supposedly a lot cheaper (if a bit more generic). You might drop them a line and see what they could do for you.
Just a thought.
I am trying out a painting service, actually! ^^ I’ll post about how it turns out.