Stargrave Preparations

Recently, Justin, Peter, Denis and I played a round of Stargrave. If you don't know, Stargrave is the sci-fi themed cousin to the tactical minis board game Frostgrave. 

In it, teams of sci-fi marauders fight each other and try to collect loot boxes from the field. It can be played as a one-shot (as we did), or as a campaign. In campaign mode, the loot you collect helps you power up your team. 

Justin is thinking of trying to get a campaign going, and suggested that we might all want to get our own custom minis to use for our teams. 

Well, it doesn't take much to get me wanting to buy and paint more minis! 

After a few quick searches, I found a 3D printing outfit in the UK called Ott's Workshop that sells via Etsy. Nice looking sculpts, reasonable prices, and reasonable shipping to South Korea. 

So, I bought two related sets to get myself a team. I've got them all painted up already. 

Two snipers (Crowe and Frost?) plus kneeling Dietrich

Hicks in the center, and Apone on the right. Maybe Wierzbowski kneeling?

On the left is actually Future War John Conner from one of the Terminator movies. Plus Drake and Hudson.

 

Frost and Vasquez flank what seems to be a cross between Ripley and a Future War Sarah Conner.

 

 Ott's Workshop threw in some extra figures for free. There's a goblin wizard that I haven't painted up yet, but also these guys: 

 

This guy needs no introduction.

The exposed endoskeleton didn't turn out quite the way I wanted, but good enough.

Gave Ripley a bit more melanin, since the group was pretty pale overall. Plus, there's the Ripley (Sarah Connor?) mini above. Dallas, Brett and Parker looking relaxed. 

 

I'm pretty happy with how the figures turned out. I didn't do much fancy work on them. Most of the detail is from the sculpts and the clean printing. Good enough for a Stargrave campaign!

 

While you're here, why not get yourself a gift?

 My blog traffic has been up, by a LOT lately. I'm getting four to eight times the hits I usually get on my posts. Fingers crossed it's not just Russian or Chinese bots. 

If my new readers are actual flesh and blood humans (get those Voight-Kampff tests ready), and you haven't yet, why not check out my RPG store on DriveThruRPG? 

Here's a handy link! 

That's where you can find Chanbara, my OSR RPG of fantasy feudal Japan. 

And Treasures, Serpents, & Ruins, my OSR fantasy heartbreaker. 

It contains the Ruby Players Rules (classes, equipment, spells for Euro-fantasy), Jade Players Rules (the same for Asio-fantasy), Ruby and Jade Bestiary & Treasury (monsters and treasure for both Euro and Asian fantasy campaigns), the Game Master Guidebook (rules to run games for either Ruby or Jade), Ruby and Jade Rules Reference books (handy table lookup books for the two sets). 

And then there are my printable paper minis! I've got character types and lots of monster types, covering the Basic and Expert (BX/BE of BECMI) monsters, including all the dinosaurs and weirdos from the Isle of Dread. 

Chanbara is reasonably priced (digital or print), the paper minis are cheap (digital), and TS&R books are all pay what you want (digital only for now). 

So why not get a gift for yourself and help a brother out? Let's see if I get a small sales spike, or if these really are just bots.  

Happy Little Accidents

Back in early January, I posted about painting minis from my 1/72 collection. Over the course of January and February, I did end up painting quite a bit. I hadn't posted about them because I hadn't taken many pictures. But today, I did take some pictures for the TTRPG in Korea Discord group I'm in, and I figured I'd share these little rascals here as well.

I painted one set of Cyclopes and a set of Minotaurs, both from Red Box Dark Alliance. I didn't take a picture of them today, so that will have to wait. 

Then I finally painted the Caesar Goblins that I bought I'm not sure how many years ago. Maybe 10? These goblins look cool, but they're only wearing loin clouts, so I think I do need more goblins with armor on them. The easy way to distinguish these guys are the color coding on their loin clouts.

Then, I got some more of the Red Box historical Russian War Monk Artillery, and some figures from Strelets' Vikings and Scotish Army of Wallace sets that I bought way back around the time I got the Caesar goblins. The war monks make good magic-users/clerics, and the others became a mix of possible clerics (mace/club/war hammer in hand) and fighter-types. A few of the war monks were painted and shown in that post linked above from back in January. 

The Fighters

The Clerics

The Magic-Users

 

No, I don't have enough Thief types. I have an order pending with Michigan Toy Soldier Company, which includes the Red Box Dark Alliance "Southern Kingdom Rangers" (based on Faramir's Rangers of Ithillien) and some more goblins with armor.

Just at the end of the winter break, I but a base coat on my Red Box DA Half-Orcs (based on Saruman's uruk-hai from the movies), but I haven't had time to paint any more than that the past two months. 

For the Discord, I also posted a couple of reference pictures to show the scale of these guys. If you're using Reaper, WotC/Wizkids, or other similar scale minis, these guys can be halfings or gnomes. Here's the WotC Warduke mini next to a goblin and the Macho Man wizard (The resemblance was not intentional, it was the happy little accident of all this painting!).

 

 

Painting Again

 This morning, I finally got around to painting a set of the Red Hat Russian War Monk Artillery figures that I picked up a year ago. 

I'm going to teach at the usual elementary school English Camp over the winter break (starting on Monday), and one of the board games I use is Dungeon!

This year, I plan to use some of my 1/72 scale minis (20-22mm) instead of the cheap cardboard standees in the new WotC edition of Dungeon! that I use for the camp. [I don't want to risk damage/loss to my old 80s edition.] 

These were quick paint jobs, with all five done in around 2 hours. I probably could have done it faster, or better quality, if they were a larger scale or my eyes weren't as bad as they are. But still, I think these look pretty good all told. 

Maybe I'll get around to painting some of the minotaur and cyclops minis after the camp. Winter seems to put me in the mood to paint the past few years.

More Monsters and Wizards!

It's been a few years since I added to my 1/72 scale miniatures collection, despite getting many of them painted up. I actually need to re-paint quite a few of them, as the summer heat, and possibly the clear top coat I used, caused a lot of the paint to melt/blend, and the figures don't look anywhere near as good as they did when I finished painting them. Looking back through old blog posts, I don't think I posted pictures of the finished products, just a work in progress post and this one from two years ago when I finally painted the lizard men. 

Well, I had a set of Caesar Adventurers which covered a lot of LotR types, plus a few Conan style barbarian types. I had Caesar Elves, Dwarves, and Goblins as well. 

And I had Red Hat Dark Alliance Cimmerians, Amazons, Half-Orcs, regular Orcs...

One problem, and a reason why I still hesitate to switch to 1/72 scale minis instead of standard 28mm minis (not that I'm using minis at all for D&D these days...) is that there just aren't enough spell-caster types. 

I have a few from the Caesar Adventurers and Elves. I had a set of historical Vikings and one of Robin Hood characters (forget who made both of them) that had a few poses that could be a spell-caster. There's one Dark Alliance Cimmerian shaman. Definitely not enough cleric/druid/magic-user types. 

Well, I ordered some more Red Hat/Dark Alliance figures for my birthday. They arrived today. And I'm pleased to say that the Red Hat historical Russian War Monk Artillery make for good spell-caster types! They're all male, but at least I've now got a bunch of robed, bearded little dudes that could be PC or NPC spellcaster types. The tamping rods and fuse-sticks look like magic staves.

I also ordered the Dark Alliance Minotaur and Cyclops sets. I wanted to get their Southern Kingdoms Rangers set (based on Faramir's company in the LotR movies), which obviously are ranger/thief types, but my supplier was out (Michigan Toy Soldier Company -- I always get great customer service from these guys on my international orders!).

Here they are, with a few of the not so nice looking anymore Caesar Adventurers. The cyclopes are nice and big, and the minotaurs look fairly hefty next to them. 

Red Hat figures tend to come with a lot of flash that needs cleaning off, but the cyclops figures are really clean. The minotaurs and war monks not so much.

I compared these guys to a TSR (Dragonstrike board game) figure and a Reaper metal figure. The minotaurs look pretty wimpy next to them, but the cyclops set is still decently big by comparison.

With either scale, I think these will make good additions to the Gauntlet-inspired tactical board game rules I'm working on. 

Time to get these guys off their sprues!

Painting Update

Last week, I got called away to cover for a sick teacher at an English camp, so I didn't get much painting done, and didn't post about it. Before I went to the camp, I did finish up my paint job for the League of Malevolence figures. I posted Warduke the other day. Here are the rest of the figures. 

Zarak the Half-Orc Assassin

Kelek the Sorcerer

Zargash the Cleric

Scylla the Warlock

We're getting the band back together! 

 Painting on the Valor's Call figures will commence tomorrow. 

Warduke!

I picked up the Official D&D League of Malevolence and Valor's Call miniature sets a year ago. 

I assembled them pretty soon after, but then put them aside. Last summer, I gave them base coats (black for the baddies, white for the goodies, obviously). Then put them away again. 

Today, I finally started painting.  Here's the first one, the classic villain Warduke. Turned out pretty well, I think. 

What was I thinking? Am I still thinking it? Really?

I mentioned previously that I inherited Pat's 4E books. I tried 4E when it came out, and it wasn't for me. But then Dean ran a pretty fun game using it (before he converted the campaign to 5E), and I had a pretty good time with it...the way Dean ran the game. But honestly, I showed up to more of his games once he converted to 5E, which I like a lot more. 

So we've been playing this campaign style dungeon crawl board game. I mentioned that as well. And I was looking at the 4E books the other day, having played some Heroclix with my younger son last weekend (heavily simplified, because I don't really remember the rules for all the powers that well anymore), and thought, "Why don't I try to use these rules to just run some miniatures skirmish games? That's what these rules really do best, after all."

Then I started looking at the Monster Manual. And I'm not so sure I want to do this after all. 

The monster stat blocks are so complex, with so many fiddly little powers. I understand letting the players have a selection of powers to choose from, but the monsters just seem so...over done. 

I do think a lot of the powers are fairly standardized, so after a bit of experience with it, it will probably get better. But do I really want to spend a bunch of time on this? I could set up some fantasy tactical battles with Chainmail, instead, and that would be a lot simpler. 

Anyway, that's a maybe. The idea is still appealing, but I've probably got better things to do with my time.

____________

Oh, and if anyone's wondering, in the Heroclix game...I was playing with my figures from the 00's. Steven had his figures that he picked up in the US 3 years ago. I had Dr. Doom, Magneto, Kang, Hobgoblin, and Doc Oc. He had Captain America, Iron Man, Thor (Sakkar arena version with swords), Terror, and Hawkeye. I was way over points with my squad, but the newer versions are a lot cheaper for more power. Anyway, he smoked me. Magneto was my only figure to survive, and that's because I had him run away after everyone else went down. I was only able to damage Hawkeye. The game really doesn't work with mixed older and newer figures.

Down Time

I've been meaning to get some posts out here on the blog, but I've just been busy. Still meaning to return to Prince of Nothing's anti-artpunk stuff. More posts about Rouse's game design ideas. Oh, and stuff about the games I'm running and designing, too. 

But this week I finally caught covid-19. It's been pretty crazy here in South Korea. The government stopped caring about social distancing a while back, just before omicron hit. And now that cases have blown up, they've given up on contact tracing. People are still masking, but I picked it up somewhere. Started feeling a sore throat on Monday evening. Tested negative. Felt the cough coming on on Tuesday, stayed home from work, but still tested negative. Fever and muscle aches hit me on Wednesday, finally tested positive. Luckily, whatever's in the mixture of drugs the doctor gave me, it knocks the symptoms right out. Well, mostly. I've got an earache and still a sore throat, and an occasional cough, but that's it.

My older son is still OK (although he's got a throat tickle) but my wife and younger son tested positive today. Son #2 had a pretty high fever, but no other symptoms. My wife has a sore throat, a bit of a cough, and a bad headache. Fun stuff. 

Well, in addition to watching lots of Star Trek (TNG and TOS) on Netflix, I took the opportunity yesterday to finally paint my Caesar Miniatures lizard men. These are 1/72 (22mm) scale, so smaller than Reaper or WotC figures, but they have some pretty cool sculpts, and 34 lizard men for about $15. Not bad.

First step was to give them a green acrylic base coat. Son #2 helped with three of them. He really laid the paint on thick, but I was able to get some of the excess off after they dried a bit. 

Next (after a nap and some lunch), I went through and painted all the wooden clubs, spears, bows, etc. with a dark brown. Then added red and blue for shields and quivers/fletching. Used some yellow ochre for the leader's shield, and a bit of yellow dry brushing for spines and highlights. 

In the evening, I did a few touch-ups of green where I'd missed a few spots, and then added white dots for eyes and a bit of white on the spikes on the clubs to make them resemble teeth. 

This morning, I gave them all a black wash to accentuate the mold lines. After the wash dried this afternoon, I gave them a clear acrylic varnish top coat. This picture is from before I added the top coat. They're a bit shinier now that they're done, but I forgot to take a picture of them and my wife wanted her dresser top back now that I don't need to isolate in the bedroom anymore. 

Anyway, game related posts coming soon. No gaming for me this weekend, but assuming I'm recovered enough, the plan is to run some WEG d6 Star Wars again next weekend.

Coronacation Benefits

My university's semester started on Monday, two weeks late. We're teaching online only for the first month, maybe more. It depends on the COVID-19 epidemic. Korea seems to be getting it under control, but there could be more flare-ups. For the last two days, I've been working from home. And since I have this week's online lessons done, that means a bit of planning for next week's lessons, some paperwork, and answering student emails/checking assignments as they come in.

In the meantime, I've been doing some mini painting. I started up again at the end of last year. Since I've been back I've gotten a fair amount done. In fact, on Sunday I finished up the last of the minis I'd primed back in November. So yesterday I primed a bunch more.

These are all 22mm minis from Caesar. It's a mix of three of their sets, Adventurers, Elves, and Dwarves. I've already painted two of them, the fully armored knight and the most Legolas of the elves. Painted both to look more feminine, since I have plenty of females in my West Marches game, and never enough female minis (one of the other packs, of which half the figures were painted in round 1, is Amazons for this reason). I'll probably paint one or two more this evening.

In addition, my son has been doing an online learning program (since before the coronavirus outbreak hit the US) and started in on the high school science program. Learning about space, we've been talking a lot (the Big Bang, the size of the universe, Fermi's Paradox). While discussing Fermi's Paradox, I mentioned the Prime Directive. And that got him...both boys, actually...curious about Star Trek. I sent them to Netflix to start watching TOS.

That also got ME watching TOS again! I've watched three episodes today. It's curious to me how few of the 1st season episodes I remember. When I was in jr. high and high school, one of the local channels syndicated The Next Generation and aired it 10:30 on Saturday nights (and yes, there were often arguments about watching Trek or SNL!), and then the original series after it at 11:30. And for a while, the Friday the 13th The Series after that at 12:30. Unless the syndication system left out some episodes, I'm sure I've seen every one of them. But quite a few just don't jog my memory. I just watched "Miri" and I couldn't remember seeing that one before at all. Maybe I'm just getting old.

And I guess I should be watching some Star Wars, not Star Trek, because I plan to run d6 Star Wars again on Friday. :D

Checking My Achievements

I was looking over my posts from last year. I was surprised that I'd put out seven whole posts in February last year, since I spent almost all of February in the US with my family. But in that last week, I managed to crank out those seven posts.

One of them had this list of goals for 2019:

Now, here are my potential RPG related projects for this year:

1. Converting my West Marches 5E game to Labyrinth Lord. Some players won't like it, but I'm ready to get back to basics. Fewer classes, fewer spells (but often more powerful in effect), and a lower power level; but hopefully more action/interaction.
2. Starting an online Chanbara campaign. Probably with the usual Hangouts/Roll20 gang (Busan Gaming Group plus any of Dean's 5E gamers I can lure into it). If any blog readers are willing to make time on Saturday evenings East Asia/Australia time (Saturday morning North America, midday Europe/Africa), let me know.
3. Finishing up my next set of paper minis (just need to format the book then get it online). It has the Isle of Dread module monsters plus the creatures in BX that aren't in BECMI's Basic and Expert books. 
4. Moving on to the Mentzer Companion Set for the next set of paper minis? Or making a set for OA/Flying Swordsman/Chanbara? Or AD&D monsters? Or AD&D/later edition character types? 
5. Releasing the dungeons/locations of the Chanbara game, plus some for more standard D&D type play, as cheap modules for sale through Hidden Treasure Books.

Overall, I did pretty well with this.

1. I did, sort of. I converted to my house rules Treasures, Serpents, and Ruins, which is BECMI with the serial numbers filed off and some more content inspired by AD&D and 5E. And I couldn't be happier with the game now. Why did I wait so long to convert?

2. I did start the Online Chanbara campaign. Snow Pine Island. I made a map. I made several dungeons. The players made characters. They explored one dungeon. And honestly, I lost interest. I realized later that I'd tried to set up too many factions on this tiny island full of monsters. The players picked the factions they thought would suit their characters, and they were all over the place. Trying to figure out all these conflicting motivations, and goals for each PC that were at cross purposes to every other PC, was just too much work.

Next time, I'll mandate ONE faction that all PCs must have allegiance to, and then let them choose a second one of their choice for some conflict. That way, I can use the shared liege to give them adventure hooks, but let them decide whether to support that goal or try to subvert things for their secondary liege's goals. Make the players do the work on that.

3 and 4. I not only finished the BX Extras/Isle of Dread minis, I also put out a Chanbara minis book. More paper minis this year? Probably not. They're fun to make, but time consuming, and don't really sell that well. What I should do is finally get around to reformatting the Basic Monsters pdfs to match the Expert books, with multiples of monsters usually found in groups to save people the effort of having to print multiple pages to get more than one figure.

5. This is the only one I didn't get done. But I did start in on East Marches, which will likely have recycled content from my earlier Flying Swordsmen and Chanbara campaigns. Hell, even from my old AD&D OA game from 1997, and my 3E OA game from 2006-7. Because as I posted before, there's a lot of stuff that needs to go into this thing. Might as well save myself a bit of effort and self-plagiarize, when things fit.

It's like a mini Christmas!

Came home from work late (grading papers) and skipping the board game meet-up, but there was a package waiting at my door.

A week or so ago, I used some of my Chanbara/paper minis earnings to order some new miniatures. I hadn't ordered any in a long time (several years), and browsing, I saw that a company I've ordered from before, Red Box, had some new sets of fantasy minis in a line called Dark Alliance. Lots of them! (Other sets only labelled Red Box are historicals.)

I'm not actually using minis in my West Marches game, but if I start, I thought it would be good to have some more female adventuring types. And some of the new sets were Amazons. There were also some Cimmerians that looked cool. So I ordered them. Shipping to Korea was a minimum $35, so I figured what the heck! I got those two, plus some "half-orcs" that look nothing at all like Saruman's uruk-hai from the LotR films...no, nothing at all! Just coincidence! ;) And I saw they have some "fire demons" which again, any resemblance to balrogs, living or dead, is purely coincidental! And another company I've also ordered from before, Caesar, has some lizard man (sorry, lizard folk in these non-gender-specific times) figures as well. Didn't up the shipping cost, so I got them all.

 When I opened the boxes, here's what I got. The Caesar lizard-people were not on sprues, although a few had bits of sprue still attached. And their shields, and two poses' arms, were on sprues to be detached and attached to the minis. I'll get around to that some other day. All the Red Box minis were on sprues.

Obviously the two big guys are the (can't be called) balrogs. The blue are the Modern Amazons (looked the coolest of the various Amazon sets). Brown are the half-orcs. White (the color really resembles the old glow-in-the-dark plastic toys you'd get in cereal boxes back in the 80's) are the Cimmerians (Set 2, which I chose mostly because they have a wizard/shaman pose - farthest back in the picture below). The lizard-personages are still in the bag, in gray.

Now, Red Box doesn't have the crispest sculpts. I've ordered from them before (orcs for sure, maybe some others). I'm fine with that. When I'm gaming, I want figures that can represent PCs and monsters. They don't need to be works of art. But the first sprue of Cimmerians that I pulled out was so covered in flash. It looks pretty bad. Luckily, it was only that one sprue. And I think this must be a mis-labeling not just a bit of luck on my part. The Cimmerican box says "33 figures in 11 poses" and shows 11 poses on the back, but each sprue has only 10 poses. But, and here's where maybe I was lucky, there were 4 sprues. So I got 40 figures in 10 poses. 7 figures ahead, even though I'm one pose short.

I took one set of figures from each set off of the sprues this evening. Since I'm planning to use these for RPG gaming rather than war-gaming, and I'm not using minis at the moment, I figure there's no rush to get them all off the sprues. It's not like I've bothered to pain the Caesar "Adventurers" or the other sets (goblins, dwarves, elves) I'd bought from them, or the orcs and whatever else I'd gotten from Red Box a few years back. They're all still unpainted. One of these days...

Oh, and I should note -- if you're thinking about getting these, be warned. They're true 25mm scale. They're tiny next to a Reaper heroic scale mini. If you have lots of Halfling, Gnome, and Dwarf characters, you could use them together and they'd be fine. Those balrogs will still tower over a Reaper, though.

Chanbara Paper Player Character minis

Right now, you can get a set of 44 Chanbara themed adventurers from my Fold-Up Paper Models series. It's available on DriveThruRPG at my Hidden Treasure Books store.


The ebook contains 4 each of the playable types in the game. And I don't just mean 4 for each class. No, it's 4 for each profile. You get Abarenbo, Kensei, Samurai, Onmyoji, Sohei, Kagemusha, Ninja, Soryo, , and Yamabushi.

And all for the low low price of $1.50.


Edit: ever have one of those nights when you're starting to doze off while writing and something nonsensical makes it out? Yeah, had one of those when writing this post last night. :D Trust me, the paper minis were completed before I started nodding off. They're fine! Sleepy me just thought it would be a good idea to write a post to promote them before going to bed.

1E OA has a surprising amount of character options

I am making plans to continue my paper miniatures line with characters for Oriental Adventures.

I made lists of all the race and class combinations. And man, the way the Hengeyokai work, I'm going to have to create a LOT of minis to cover every option!

There are 12 or so animals that are the base form of a hengeyokai, and they have normal human, hybrid and animal forms. I figure for marking their position on a battle mat, the hybrid or animal forms are enough.

There are four classes that Hengeyokai can choose, luckily. Only four. And a few animal types must be evil so can't be Shukenja, and a few must be chaotic, so can't be kensei. None must be lawful, so any Hengeyokai can be a Wu Jen. And Bushi have no alignment restrictions.

I usually do male and female versions of each (the animal form will just get one and you can hand wave any sexual dimorphism in the species). So that's 12 regular animals.

Hybrid forms, however, will require:

24 Bushi (12 male, 12 female)
20 Kensei (10 male, 10 female)
18 Shukenja (9 male, 9 female)
24 Wu Jen (12 male, 12 female)

That's an awful lot of hengeyokai. Especially since for many of them I will need to modify a picture of a human with an animal's head to make it work. There are some public domain pictures of Japanese anthropomorphic animals, but not enough.  Even if I only did one hybrid form of each class for each animal type, it's still 55 total pictures including the animal forms.

And for humans, I was planning to have two of each sex for each of the ten classes. One of each sex for Korobokuru for each of their five classes. And Spirit Folk - luckily I don't think there's that much difference between the three types visually, so just one of each sex for each of their four classes. If I did one for each type of Spirit Folk, that would triple that number.

So if I went whole hog (1 male and female of each class for Hengeyokai hybrids plus animal forms, 2 male and female of each class for Humans, 1 male and female of each class for Korobokuru, and 1 male and female of each class for each type of Spirit Folk), this book would have 172 miniatures in it.

That's a bit of work there. Might take a while. Even if I limit the Hengyeyokai and Spirit Folk, and only provide one male and female each of the human classes, it's still 93 miniature images I need to create.

In the mean time, I listed out the class options of Flying Swordsmen and Chanbara. That's easier to do since everyone's human. A lot of these can do double duty when I get around to the OA set, although I may mix it up a bit to give people more value for their money spent if they buy both. Especially for classes like the samurai where I have tons of pictures that work. Spell-casters and martial artists may get recycled out of necessity, however. We'll see.

I've got all the pictures selected for the Chanbara set. Some are pictures I used in the book, but not all of the book pictures make for a good miniature image. There are two male and two female images for each class/profile in Chanbara. So I should be able to get this book out soon. And I should be looking at the monster lists, too...

New Title for Sale: Expert Monsters Set 3

For those who've been purchasing my full color fold-up paper minis made with public domain art for Classic D&D, I've got my newest set available. Expert Monsters 3 covers all the creatures that were in BX but left out of the Mentzer revision. The Acolyte, Medium and Veteran round out the Bandit as NPC versions of PC classes, there is a sea dragon, whales, woolly rhinoceros...plus all the cool dinosaurs and monsters from Isle of Dread!

Allosaurus (favorite dinosaur of mine!), aranea, natives with lots of leader types including the zombie master, phanaton and rakasta, etc.! The kopru is a favorite of mine in this set. It took some kit-bashing of various public domain images, and a bit of retouching, but I think it looks suitably Lovecraftian and disturbing (for a small image anyway).

If you run BX instead of BECMI, you're missing a few monsters from my previous sets. Now you can get them. And if you want to run Isle of Dread in any rule set, this has those special IoD monsters you need.

As usual, every page uses layers, so if you want to only print certain monsters, you can switch off the ones you don't want to print and save ink.

You can purchase it here for the low, low price of $3.

When I start working on the next set, I think I'm going to go with some Flying Swordsmen/Chanbara/OA type characters. I'll probably start working on the Companion Set monsters too, since quite a few in this set are in the Companion.

More Paper Minis!

I've just completed another set of paper minis, available from my Hidden Treasure Books storefront on DriveThruRPG.

Linkage!

This set is Expert Monsters Set 2, covering all the creatures from the Mentzer Expert Set that weren't covered in Set 1.

For a refresher, Set 1 contains all the creatures from Animal Herd to Griffon. Set 2 contains all the creatures from Hellhound to Wyvern. This is the bigger set, 24 pages plus cover, mostly because the "Men" entry in the book contains so many types of men, with varying armaments. And I've got figures to cover them, including leader types. Also, most leader types get a male/female version to be more inclusive.

$3 per set, so for $6 you can get all your Mentzer Expert monster love going!

As usual, each image on a page is on its own layer, so you can turn off images you don't need to print. And unlike my Basic Monsters sets (which I'm thinking of revising to match the Expert style), there are multiple copies of most of the creatures that would be encountered in groups. This will save paper if you need to print a bunch of one type of creature.

If you're a BX fan (or a fan of a retro-clone of BX), there are a few monsters in the Moldvay Basic and Cook Expert that aren't in BECMI. I've got the list, and will be starting in on those monsters soon. Plus, I'm going to cover the Isle of Dread creatures as well. Because more dinosaurs is always better!

Paper Minis Expert Monsters Set 1 for sale

You may remember (and a few of you purchased - Thank You!) my fold-up paper minis based on the monsters from the Basic Set D&D. They're still for sale over at my DriveThruRPG page, Hidden Treasure Books.

And now, the first of three sets covering monsters from the Expert Set is up for sale!

Direct Link right here!

It's got all the monsters from the Mentzer Expert Set from Animal Herd to Griffon.

If you purchased my Basic Monsters sets, you may have been less than satisfied that there was only one image of each monster. I've reformatted this set, so there are multiple monsters of creatures you might encounter in groups, like the giants, herd animals, blink dogs, etc. Creatures that are normally encountered solo, like elementals, devil swine, and golems just get one picture each (but I have different sized elementals for each summoning method).

$5 for 20 pages full of Expert Monsters, in full color. Not bad, I think.

Set 2 should be coming out in a few months. Need to finish the images for each monster. Layout shouldn't take too long once the images are ready.

Set 3 will cover the 20 or so monsters in the Cook Expert Set that aren't in BECMI, and if I get ambitious also the Isle of Dread monsters. Who doesn't love more dinosaurs?

Gaming as an Ex-Pat Part 2 Addendum

I originally was going to post both this and the main "part 2" post together, then decided not to. Somehow, I just saw, Blogger posted the draft backdated. So if you've already read this, apologies.

Gaming in Japan Addendum: Miniatures

I forgot to mention this part, which was one of the cool things about living in Japan. I mentioned that in my first location, there weren't a lot of places to get gaming material. In the second place I lived, Yamanashi, I was able to amass a sizeable miniature collection in interesting ways.

As I mentioned, Yellow Submarine in Tokyo had Reaper Minis, so I did buy a small number of minis there. But Japan has so many other ways to get fantasy/sci-fi minis that work for gaming.

First of all, there are random collectible miniatures that you can buy in many stores, including most convenience stores. In the years I was there, they had several series of mythological creatures, both Western and Eastern. So I have rubberized plastic minis of dragons, griffons, chimera, unicorns, pegasi, and Greek/Norse gods that work well for giants from the Western mythology series, and bakemono, tengu, oni, and so on from the Eastern series.

There are also series of figures based on games like Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy and Pokemon, comics like Devilman, and things like that that I picked up over the years. You can find them here in Busan, in limited numbers, at places like Art Box.

Then, there are the cola promotion figures. Every now and then, there are promotions to sell Coke or Pepsi, where they have a randomized figure in an opaque cellophane package around the neck of 500ml bottles of soda. Back when the Star Wars prequels were coming out, I collected lots of Star Wars bottle toppers. The ones in the stores were from the Prequels, of course, but if you collected enough of the inserts and payed a small fee, you could send away for sets from the original trilogy (which I did, although I wasn't able to get all of those sets). In other years, there were Final Fantasy VII and VIII figures, Lupin the Third figures, Dragonball characters, and even Lego minifigs. I collected many.

If that weren't enough, in my town there was this resale shop. They'd buy just about anything for pennies and then sell it for dollars. Clothes, books, CDs, sports equipment, toys, games, and of course they had a section devoted to all of these sorts of little collectible minis I've been describing. I'd go there fairly often and add to my gaming collection.

I also got into HeroClix, and would buy lots when I was home on vacations, so if I ever want to run a Marvel or DC supers game, I've got the figures for it!

Oh, and one more thing! Daiso (those of you in Busan are familiar with the chain, it's from Japan) in Japan sells (or sold, at least) little green army men, and also similar sets of pirates, knights, cowboys & Indians, ninja, construction workers, police/fire/rescue figures. Have sets of all of them, as well. They work great as NPC figures.

So while I don't feel like minis are a necessity for RPGs, I do enjoy using them, and Japan was a great place for collecting a variety of minis for gaming.

Got Orcs?

I've just put my newest fold-up paper minis set on DriveThruRPG.com, and it's all about them orcs.

Lair Pack 1: Orcs features all the orcs you need to fill up your battle mat when running adventures like the Caves of Chaos or your own orc lair dungeon. It features three orc "grunts" with sword, spear and bow respectively (14 figures each), a quartet of orc chieftains, an ogre, a troll, and a trio of wild boars.

Each mini is in its own layer on the page, with all text and formatting features in the background to save you printer ink when you only need to print a few figures.

Full disclosure, the orc with sword, orc chieftain, ogre and boar appear in my Basic Monsters series. The orc spearman, archer and troll are new. The ogre was modified, since the original in Basic Monsters printed too dark to see the details.

The best part about it? It's only $2. That's right, you can have all this orcish fun just for a mere $2. That's half the price of that Starbucks drink you've got.

Price reduction?

Sales have been sluggish for my printable paper minis available on DrivethruRPG.

I know part of it is that I just haven't had time to promote them. Part is that I haven't had time to make more sets. But could part of it also be the price is just a little too high? I mean, I'd think $5 for nearly 40 monsters wouldn't be a big deal. But maybe it is.

So, I'm reducing the price on the monster books to $3 each.

I mean, really, since these are ebooks, there's no stock to keep, no printing costs (other than the consumer's), and no labor involved other than my own. So I think I'll try a price reduction and see if I can sell a few more sets that way.

Thanks, by the way, to all the people who did decide they were worth spending $5 each. I appreciate your business. And once I get my dissertation out of the way, I plan to get more sets covering AD&D classes not in Basic D&D, as well as monsters from the Expert Set.

Eventually...