Dunno what happened with the wrong text going out in the first post, but the corrected text is below. Apologies for the double email, hopefully that will never happen again!

I have slowly come to terms with the fact that miniatures are one of my favorite parts of this multifaceted hobby. For most folks, I think, minis supplement play or are entirely central to it. For me, though, I just like the little guys on their own terms.

There’s a complicated interweaving of things here for me. For starters, my parents weren’t keen on the LJN D&D toys, and by not letting me have them, I think they supercharged my love of small weird plastic creatures. Second was M.U.S.C.L.E.s, which showed up in the US in 1985. Third, in 1986, Britains’ Knights of the Sword line of knights in armor were the object of my affections in various museum gift shops (particularly the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but also Colonial Williamsburg?!).

And then there were, well, wargame/RPG miniatures. I know that’s what they are now, but due to context, I never really thought of them that way as a kid. These are the figures that would be in one small case in the sort of pewter shops that used to (still?) populate quaint tourist towns in New England. I could usually beg one out of my mom, and I got a few as gifts (there’s a Merlin somewhere in my house, and the Lady of the Lake’s arm holding up Excalibur). My very first came out of the gift shop at Medieval Times in Orlando, “On Foot Wraith” from Der Kriegspielers Fantastiques (took some doing to figure that out, lemme tell ya). He’s supposed to be a ringwraith, I guess, but circa 1985, to me, he was just a cool (if lumpy) hooded guy with a knife.

At some point in the early ’90s, there was something like a hobby shop in the Ocean County Mall, near where my grandparents lived. I went in one day looking for some new RPG book, but up front was a spinner rack full of Grenadier and Ral Partha blister packs. A small shelf nearby had box sets from the same. Prior to this, I don’t think I had ever seen fantasy miniatures in person (again, I had, but I didn’t realize it) or in commercial packaging. I had seen the photo spreads in Dragon magazine, of course, but never in the real. I don’t think I realized that they were sold unpainted!

Nevertheless, I was instantly obsessed. I remember trying so hard to remember what was on the rack so I could make a list when I got home, to keep the dizzying array of new monsters in my head. I worked extra hours for my dad at the garage for a month or so to accumulate enough dough to buy a big pile of lead the next time we were down the shore. I can still list off everything I bought that day, because I still have nearly all of them (and have replaced the handful that went missing over the years). I’ve even painted some! But even though I was super into RPGs by then, and had a regular group playing, the miniatures remained somewhat separate.

Just about all of the miniatures I got that day were Grenadier and I’ve had a special place for their work ever since. I own a couple catalogs from the same period and they’re catnip, but the real monument to the company and its miniatures is Terrence Gunn’s The Fantastic Worlds of Grenadier (2006) and its companion Supplement. Both are self-published tomes produced through crowdfunding campaigns. I got the latter almost accidentally and despaired at ever finding the former, but that, too, has finally found its way to me. It’s wonderful. A chronological history of the company, packed with photos, interviews and a massive product list. If you love Grenadier, get to hunting.

By 1992, I had some Grenadier miniatures that included two orc champions on foot and one on wolfback. I also had a handful of Ral Partha’s chaos champions and a few RAFM models from their Call of Cthulhu line, painted badly with Testors enamel. As I mentioned in the previous post, they existed somewhere between toys and display pieces for me. I wouldn’t incorporate minis into an RPG for another couple years.

Sometime in the fall of 1992, my pal Ed (who wrote the Paranoia chapter for Experience Points) bought Fantasy Warriors (1990) from Infinity Comics, our local nerd haven. I don’t think either of us knows how that came to happen; it isn’t the sort of thing that Infinity would normally stock, and I can’t imagine Ed special ordering it. My memory of the purchase was one of impulse on Ed’s part, so maybe it was a special order someone later balked on. Regardless, it caught Ed’s eye and went home with him. I remember pouring over the contents in his kitchen, trying to make sense of it. 102 plastic orcs and dwarves, in three varieties each, on plastic sprues, accompanied by a myriad of cardboard tokens and a rulebook printed on paper one step up from newsprint, full of incomprehensible rules. I look at the rules now and they are entirely unfamiliar to me. I am sure we were baffled by them that afternoon. But somehow, we wound up bringing it to the table. Er, floor.

Ed’s bedroom at the time was the attic of his house, which was one big room with ample floor space. We used whatever was at hand to build fortresses (encyclopedias and other books) and we pressed HeroQuest into service and we incorporated the metal miniatures I had. We definitely did not play the rules as written. Rather, I think we cobbled together something like Risk, where each unit in a band contributed a d6 to a dice pool (extra dice for special units, maybe, or terrain advantage?) and high dice beat low dice, with a unit removed for each loss? Something like that. Then we kept bolting on rules for reinforcements and magic and so on to keep the game going. It took up the better part of a weekend, for sure, and at least a couple days of the following week. I remember taking breaks to watch The Wraith and I’m Gonna Git you Sucka when they came on the TV. It was the first, and last, time I played a miniature wargame and, really, it was probably the last time I did something that boiled down to “playing with toys” in the mode of children, at least in the way the point of the game was mostly to keep the game going rather than winning or playing in the framework of the rules.

Looking at the game now, it seems like an attempt by Grenadier to put up some competition with Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Despite having lots of cool miniatures in the line, though, that battle was already lost, I think (the first Realm of Chaos book hit shelves in 1988 and I mark that as the death knell for everyone else, even if they didn’t know it yet). It’s kind of wild to look at this box and remember a time when this sort of direct competition with Games Workshop was even remotely possible with this level of production value.

Nick Lund designed the rules, which I have no business evaluating. I have no real context for them. Lund sculpted so many figures for the line, including nearly all the orcs, whom I love unconditionally. Surprisingly, both the orcs and dwarves in this box, though, are the work of Mark Copplestone. His orcs have a rounder jawline which makes their tusks a big more Nosferatu-y. Ian Smith did the cover painting, which is pretty dope. Love that orc getting non-lethally bonked (in general, one of the aesthetic appeals of the line is how much I get the vibe that the rank-and-file orcs want to be doing literally anything other than going to war while the dwarves seem like absolute lunatics).

Oh, I bought this box for Ed as a thank you for his help with Monsters, Aliens and Holes in the Ground (I think, or maybe it was just a random present, I can’t recall) and it was kind of a crummy gift, because he had just had a kid and it was not the sort of thing that could go home with him and survive, so it has stayed in the club house. The original set we played with is presumed deceased, though it might surface someday. Until then, it seemed important to have a copy of it around. Not that we’d play it, but just to have.

This cough won't quit. I'm basically better, but, well, still coughing and rather tired. Shoveling over a foot of snow over the course of a 24-hour period didn't help, nor do the single-digit temperatures we've had since the storm, which means we have just as much snow now as we did at the beginning of the week. It's just harder now. Also [gestures at the ongoing rise of American fascism]. All of that to say: nothing much of note here still, unless you count me slowly unraveling from cabin fever.