Atavist or ancestor?

 Here's a wee conversion I did a few years ago - just got round to finishing off the paintwork.

I'll probably make a few more of these: enough for a little skirmish band. 

But what are they? Primitive ancestor types? Or mysteriously devolved creatures of a familiar type?

Essex lizardmen

I bought these Essex lizardmen on a nostalgic whim. They used to be advertised in White Dwarf, along with the entire Essex fantasy range. They're crude but rather charming, I think. And they're certainly lizardmen, which has caused the kids no end of amusement.

Ungirded loins aside, they're clearly based on the Monster Manual illustration, as are Citadel's much smaller Fiend Factory reptile man and some of the big lizardmen that Grenadier made (now in production as Mabuyan lizardmen at Mirliton). Those would fit well with these Essex fellows - and would also explain why the slightly more civilised-looking Mabuyans are bothering with loincloths!

I painted these very simply, using just two shades of green and a wash. I didn't bother with paler underbellies; quite a lot of reptiles seem to be largely the same shade all over, and I wanted these creatures to look simple and bold.

Troglodytes

I knocked these troglodytes out this morning in case they were needed for this afternoon's D&D game (they weren't). They were very quickly painted and suffer from all the usual Reaper Bones problems (chiefly undetectable or unremovable mouldlines), but I'm quite pleased with them - especially the colours, which I think are about right for subterranean reptile-people.

Alas, I can't get a decent picture of them for love nor money. Here they are anyway!

Chameleon-men

Our big discovery of the holidays was Daniel Mersey's The Men Who Would Be Kings. It's similar to the same author's Lion Rampant and Dragon Rampant games, but it also differs in some interesting ways that go beyond period flavour. The rules are designed for nineteenth-century colonial warfare, but we played them using red-armoured sci-fi orcs as colonialists and pallid fantasy orcs as 'natives'. 

Those games went well enough, and the colonial orcs have since been equipped with a field gun. But I thought we could do with some more interesting tribal types for the high-tech orcs to fight. 

'Tribals' in The Men Who Would Be Kings are typically fielded in units of 16, and a normal force might conceivably have eight such units. So the numbers point to recruitment from the ranks of the owned but unpainted rather than new purchases. Looming largest in those ranks are various reptile and amphibian humanoids. I have quite a lot of the old Citadel Slann - perhaps enough for three or four units - and lots of lizardmen of various sorts.

Among those are these chameleon men, which I bought second hand a couple of years ago. They're from an out-of-production boxed wargame called Carnage, and came with some lizard-mounted cavalry (whose amphibian riders might work as Slann) and some crocodilian swordsmen. I think there are about eight of each infantry type and ten of the cavalry. The Men Who Would Be Kings has an option for playing half-size units ('Skirmish Kings'), so the two sorts of infantry would give me either a combined unit of 16 or two cut-down groups for the abbreviated version. Or they could just mix in with the many heterogenous reptilians I've amassed over the years: reptilian auxiliaries of the amphibious Slann.

I painted the first couple up very quickly last night. They're undercoated in black gesso, painted Vallejo silver-grey all over, then drybrushed white. All the rest is Citadel contrast paint, followed by some black lining and highlights only on the eyes, teeth and horns. If the rest prove as quick, I shoudl have that first unit of tribals done very shortly.

Enter 1:72 - and a protocol for miniature use in RPGs

Converted lizardman from Caesar; hoplites from Zvezda

Miniatures are a bit of a double-edged sword in RPGs. On the one hand, they provide focus for the players and create lots of tactical options in combat situations. On the other, they can erode the 'theatre of the mind' that's such an attractive feature of the game.

Most of the miniatures I own are the standard 28mm sort. A couple of years ago, though, I ran a Whitehack campaign using 15mm miniatures based on pennies. The smaller scale has lots of advantages: the dinner table becomes a much bigger space, and there's less of a sense of identification about the miniatures. So you hear less of "We killed that goblin last time!", because your 15mm goblin tribe probably has various duplicates on the table at the same time.

But there were disadvantages too. Painting 15mm isn't that much faster than painting 28mm, and the miniatures aren't that much cheaper - especially as you have to buy in batches, often of the same figure. And the best stuff for fantasy RPGs - Khurasan and Splintered Light - isn't readily available in the UK.

On top of that, "15mm" miniatures vary radically in compatibility with each other. I'm not a huge stickler for scale consistency, but the difference in size between "small" and "big" 15mm stuff can be enormous. That can spoil one of the main attractions of the scale: using the huge range of historical figures with fantasy ones. Alas, dwarfs and goblins from some manufacturers tower above men-at-arms and knights from others.

Also, the smaller figures don't take up much room even on a penny - so that 'crowding' is no more achievable than with 28s based on the standard 25mm round base.

And because the figures are metal, they're heavy and fragile. With reasonable success, I constructed a travel set of 15mm miniatures in a box lined with magnetic card, so that the kids and I could play skirmish games on holiday. The only problem with it was that the magnetism wasn't sufficient to keep the miniatures from rattling around in a rucksack - so that they needed a fair bit of retouching afterwards.

I'll probably rebase the lizardmen on twopence pieces

The allure of an intermediate scale
Enter 1/72. I've dabbled in this scale before, but only in monsters that are somewhat scale-agnostic, such as the Caesar lizardmen, which I've used in both 28s and 15s. But I've started to see the attractions of RPG gaming in 1/72 scale entirely.

First, 1/72 figures tend to be a lot more compatible with each other than 15mm. Yes, there are scale discrepancies between manufacturers. But they're slight. One viking or hoplite won't be twice as tall as another. That opens up a huge range of historical soldiers and civilians (1/72 ranges offer a nice array of ancient and medieval civilians). Populating a crowded marketplace or court is far more achievable.

The second attraction is cost. For between six quid and a tenner, you can get 40 or more miniatures. Yes, there'll be some repetition, but there's also a lot of variety within boxes. I bought some Italieri crusaders yesterday; the box included nine mounted knights along with multiples of eight different foot-soldiers.

And those multiples offer a further attraction: anonymous 'extras' for town guards, the local baron's men-at-arms or whatever. Compared with the characterfulness of 28mm miniatures, the unassuming nature of 1/72 figures takes some of the emphasis off the miniatures on the gaming table and back into the players' minds.

At the same time, the compatibility of the figure and their anatomically correct scaling (as opposed to the 28mm emphasis on faces and hands) adds an extra dimension of realism. And the miniatures occupy a penny base just about perfectly - allowing for a reasonable amount of crowding while still providing stability and weight. And they'll travel unscathed in my magnetised box.

Swords, sorcery and soft plastic
But the biggest attraction, for me, is 1/72's suitability for sword and sorcery. I don't much like Robert E Howard's Conan stories, which I find poorly written and heavy on the sublimated wish-fulfilment. But I do like the Hyborian blueprint of a world including lots of thinly veiled proxies for historical cultures, all thrown together with anachronistic glee. Fritz Leiber does it rather better, and so too does Howard's contemporary and correspondent Clark Ashton Smith.

The best way of representing that sort of mish-mash - ripe for games involving travelling adventurers - is to have different cultures visually represented. And 1/72 opens up a whole wealth of intriguing possibilities. Imagine these as town guards in one northern city. Or these as invaders threatening a coastal civilisation far to the south. If you want a human-centric game - or one that's set in or nodding to Glorantha or Tekumel - this is the scale to do it.

Fantasy creatures, of course, are less well represented. But Dark Alliance/Red Box and Caesar do quite a few fantasy sets: orcs and goblins of various stripes, lizardmen, ratmen, trolls, hyena-riders, fantastical barbarians and undead. And, of course, 28mm monsters will generally work fine in 1/72: they'll just be bigger (and nastier).

It's also worth noting that some of the official D&D miniatures from Wizkids are a nice fit with 1/72 stuff, because they are similarly (i..e more naturally) proportioned. This snakeman is much bigger in 1/72, but the proportions of his human elements make him a better fit in 1/72 than in 28mm.

Also, some 15mm goblins work pretty well at this scale. I reckon the little chap below is perfect for a small Middle Earth orc or a D&D goblin:

The same's true of these (rather large) 15mm frog-men:

And I'll be stripping down these Ral Partha dwarfs (painted by a friend when we were teenagers) and repainting them. They're tiny by 28mm standards, but just right for short but strong mine-dwellers in 1/72:

These old Chronicle kobolds and orcs work too (as larger and fiercer monsters at this scale - gnolls and ogres, perhaps):

I can also see lots of potential for using these in Dragon Rampant. The reduction in unit 'footprint' makes a 3'-wide dinner table a better battlefield - and assembling and painting up cavalry is much quicker. And then there's Hordes of the Things. A box of 48 miniatures (like the Dark Alliance fantasy sets, with four identical sprues of 12 figures) could be used for a couple of different factions of individually based models for RPG and skirmish games and a few elements of multi-based troops for massed-battle wargames like HotT. 

Then there's painting. I found the Caesar lizardmen exceptionally easy and quick to paint. The softness of detail is actually an advantage when it comes to painting 1/72 for RPGs, as you can blast through them without worrying too much about precision.

A protocol for miniature use in RPGs

These considerations of scale and "anonymity" have got me thinking about how miniatures are best used in RPGs. Nicely painted 28s and precise floorplans are great for dungeon crawls and one-shots, but take a lot of time to prepare. And there's the problem I brought up at the start: the way in which the tabletop props can detract from the imagined scene. That doesn't much matter in the typical dungeon crawl, but it causes problems in more sophisticated games - not least because if everything's set out in detail and represented with miniatures, everything looks like a fight.

So here's how I'm planning a forthcoming session with some old friends. I'll almost certainly use The Fantasy Trip for the game, because of its simplicity and speed of character generation and its tremendous tactical combat. That entails a hex grid, so I'll get one of the Chessex dry-erase maps. The smaller scale of the 1/72 miniatures will compensate for a grid size that's smaller than the TFT standard. 

Now, what I want from an RPG session is plenty of roleplaying. But if there's to be fighting, I want that to be intense and tactical - essentially a mini-wargame for players and GM alike, with both sides aiming to win. Of course, I'll allow and encourage any convincing stratagem that interrupts the normal flow of combat. 

To balance that with role-playing and 'theatre of the mind', I won't use the dry-erase markers until swords are drawn. The players will know they're in a large audience chamber or a cramped tomb or whatever, but until they have a fight on their hands, I won't sketch it on the grid or place miniatures to represent NPCs. 

That should have two important effects. First, the players will process the monsters and NPCs as they're described before they see how they're represented on the table - if they see that at all. And second, rather than every encounter looking like a fight, as it does in a floor-plan-assisted dungeon crawl, every encounter will appear a role-playing opportunity. Only if that leads to fighting will I quickly sketch in the scene, place a few props and - finally - plonk the baddies down on the table.

An alien

Requiring some mutants and aliens for a big game of Mutants and Death Ray Guns this weekend, I tried to get this fellow done in exactly an hour. I see from the podcast I was listening to that he took about an hour and a quarter.

I used a very simple recipe: base colours, a quick drybrush in silver-grey, then a wash over each area.

I might give him some more attention tomorrow, but I suspect that a good dollop of gloss varnish will obscure his shortcomings sufficiently.

Out of the toybox ...

A project that my children and I have been planning for a while is to repurpose some of their old toys for gaming. This ceratosaur is the first fruit of that endeavour.

My son has had it since he was two or three; I think my wife bought it in a batch of second-hand dinosaurs in a charity shop. It's by no means a high-end toy (like those made by Schleich or Papo), and it came with a flat, blotchy orange factory paint job. But it's quite a nicely posed beastie, and it's the perfect size for a Hordes of the Things behemoth element. It fills the 60mm frontage nicely, with enough height to clear a typical infantry or cavalry element to its front. And because it fills the base nicely, it'll work well for RPGs and skirmish games too.

The ceratosaur's first role, however, will be as behemoth element in a HotT slann army. I have quite a few of Citadel's slann miniatures, some acquired when I was a child and a few more - especially cold-one riders - accumulated since. 

My plan for the slann is to base the slotta-based ones individually and the solid-based ones, which are  a little smaller, on HotT element bases. The palace guards and armoured warriors will form blade or spear elements. The tribal warriors, who have blowpipes and throwing axes, could be shooters or warbands - and might also see service as lurkers, water lurkers or even sneakers. Cold-one riders could be beasts, riders or knights. And then I'll add dragon-man flyers, a magician on a palanquin and probably some more dinosaur behemoths.

Skaven and Lizardmen

Heirs of the lizardmen?

I was reading Joseph Manola's absorbing posts on the history of Warhammer when a thought struck me about that the Skaven. They weren't the first species to scuttle under the surface of the Old World. No - that was the lizardmen. Here's what the Battle Bestiary for the second edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle has to say about them:

Lizardmen are curious in that they appear all over the world, wherever there are mountain ranges with deep caverns. Perhaps these are all linked up far below the earth.

By the third edition, lizardmen were still associated with deep caverns and still attacked the underground dwellings of orcs and dwarves from below. But the notion of the global linkage of their lairs had gone. That had now been transferred to the Skaven (introduced to second-edition Warhammer in the Citadel Journal of spring 1986). The third-edition rulebook has this to say:

Skaven are widespread throughout the entire world, but their presence is rarely felt. A web of tunnels crosses from continent to continent, leading to burrowings far below the cities of men, and eventually into the sewers and drains of the cities themselves. 

In the 1986 Citadel Journal, the Skaven's origins are linked to the Slann: they are the descendants of giant rats that gnawed on warpstone in the ruins of Slann civilisation. Their global presence is there from the start, but the idea that their tunnels connect the continents isn't explicitly stated. As far as I know, none of the early material posits the idea that Skaven and lizardmen tunnels might intersect. I suspect one had to be repositioned in the background to make room for the other.

From the third-edition Warhammer Armies book onwards, the lizardmen were reduced from independent subterranean raiders to slaves of the Slann (in those army lists, they appeared only as auxiliaries of the Slann armies). In later editions, they became the Slann armies as the latter went from amphibian warriors to bloated, solitary magicians. And their globe-spanning tunnel network was no more - or was left to the rats.

The original subterranean globe-trotter?

Alone in the lair of the troglodytes ...

A very rough photo - but I think it shows how these 1/72 soft-plastic models can look quite at home with 'proper' miniatures:

Discount dungeon-stocking with 1/72 miniatures

In a fit of displacement activity when I should have been working on the kids' Halloween costumes, I painted up some Caesar 1/72 lizardmen over the weekend. I bought these two or three years ago, but did little with them other than paint up three as 15mm giant lizardmen and allow the kids to paint a few more. As the box contained 34 for £7, the rest had been merely cluttering my miniature boxes.

These are cast in soft plastic and have all the attendant problems: a lack of detail, rubbery flash and bendy weapons. But they're also nicely posed and varied, and a decent size too. They're meant to be hulking brutes in 1/72 scale, so come up just a little short of man-height in 28mm - but with a sinuous reptilian brawn to make up for it. So they're definitely "medium" creatures in D&D terms. As, of course, are D&D troglodytes. Given the coxcomb-like crests on these fellows, I decided that that's what they'll be. 

Roughly man-sized

Painting them was surprisingly enjoyable. You can't hope to treat them as you would "proper" miniatures: the surface is too rubbery and the detail too soft. On the other hand, you can rope in smaller helpers in the knowledge that there's nothing much for them to mess up; my seven-year-old daughter painted in the base colours on a few and did a perfectly good job.

I also have some of the Caesar ratmen, which I initially used as very small 28mm ratmen, but then rebased on pennies for use as large, gnoll-like creatures in 15mm. They still work in 28mm, of course: I don't mind my small vermin being closer to the ground:

Anyway, I managed to get 15 of the troglodytes done over the weekend, along with converting another five for painting later. I've run out of bases for now, but hope to have a good few more painted up this week - certainly enough to make PCs' lives uncomfortable underground. 

The troglodyte first XV

It strikes me that someone starting to run fantasy RPGs with miniatures could stock a dungeon very cheaply by buying some 1/72 monsters to use with 28mm PCs and 'specials'. The lack of detail and individuality has attractions of its own: they're much quicker to paint, and it means that your players are less prone to saying "Hang on - we killed this guy in the last fight!". Also, I suspect that players find it easier to accept generic miniatures as proxies - so that these troglodytes could stand in happily for kua-toa or sahuagin or other cold-blooded types. The slightly smaller scale may help with that too.

And it's hard to argue with the cost: you can get 45 Dark Alliance 1/72 orcs (i.e. D&D goblins - and there are mounted versions on hyena-things too) for a tenner (including postage), 40 Caesar ratmen (i.e. kobolds or similar) for the same or less, and 34 of these lizardmen (troglodytes, lizardmen, and other reptilian, amphibian or fishy types) for the same. Throw in some EM4 orcs, which are hard plastic but similarly priced, for larger humanoids, and you've got a huge amount of generic dungeon monsters very cheaply.

Individuals can be distinguished by paintwork (I'm going to experiment with a couple of albino or striped trogs) and by conversions; the Caesar plastic takes superglue very well, and hands can be drilled out quickly to take hard-plastic weapons. And you can always use 28mm types as chieftains or bodyguards.

The only downside is the temptation to go the whole hog and do everything in 1/72; with all the historicals available, town guards and the evil baron's retainers would be very quick to assemble ...

A venerable lizardman

This old lizardman was one of Citadel's C26 range. I gave him a very quick paintjob, preshading a white undercoat in brown wash, drybrushing white and then tinting with washes. I gave the belly scales and teeth a few highlights, and that was that.

I like the simplicity of these old lizardmen, with their monitor-lizard heads and cross-hatched scales. They're extremely rare, though: I'd never seen one of them apart from Lasrack, who was included in a boxed set; I have two of him, one of which was among the first miniatures I painted on my return to such things a few years back:

I'll paint the other up in the same way as the spear-armed one above, and might add a few of Citadel's RuneQuest dragonewts to create a little warband or encounter group. The dragonewts have different physiques from the lizardmen (and each other), but they share their sculptors and scales.