Mini-Atures

Every Wednesday at noon The Comicshop has a “paint to play” workshop where Ryan sets up a table and people can glue and paint their gaming miniatures. Normally this time coincides with my weekly bike out to UBC where I volunteer, reading text books out loud into the computer for blind students, but I took this week and all of December off of that for a number of reasons (mostly because people who lose their sight probably deserve it but also so I can catch up on my comic book drawing). Geisel and I have been conspiring to get together to paint minis for months so we finally took this opportunity to go down there and get some work done.

And I gotta say, I must stop buying miniatures that don’t come fully assembled – no matter how cool they look – because I am ass at gluing minis together. There are certain minis that I just don’t think are ever going to see play on the battlemat, unless I need a quadriplegic ranger for some reason.

But I’ve been getting a lot of ‘dungeon decor’ lately – beds, tables, bookshelves, etc, which are really nice to be able to put on the battlemat for some set dressing, if you will.

Characters that stand out in a crowd but who are clearly not demons or 30th level paladins are a bit harder to find. The standard fare for ‘townsfolk‘ are usually the bartender and the barmaid or perhaps some kind of damsel. In my current Freeport campaign the town is 99% human and it’s hard to find run-of-the-mill citizens that aren’t brandishing a dagger. They should put a set of figures out that include:

The town guard (not hard to adapt from a typical mercenary fig, actually)
Two kids (one trying to sell you a melon?) & their portly mum
The street sweeper
The beekeeper
The courier
The rickshaw driver
The village idiot
The blacksmith
The beggar/the busker/the opium addict
The prostitute
The sage/preacher (not hard to adapt from a cleric if he’s not brandishing a mace)
The noble
The prisoner/slave
The town crier
The barber-surgeon
The merchant of…baskets? Fruit?

I did get these baggage yaks and started painting them today. What’s more exciting than three yaks? Not four yaks, that’s just silly.

It’s both happy and sad that The Comicshop is right next to The Candy Aisle as I couldn’t resist getting some licorice treats, as well as some candy coated peanuts and candy corn. Just a small sampling, luckily.