Convert or Be Darned to Heck
Last summer I had a revelation. I suffer from a sort of lazy perfectionism I think I often see in gamers. I had plenty of ideas but often wouldn't act on them. If they couldn't be done right, they wouldn't be done at all - which usually boiled down to just the latter.
On to outfitting a tiny little crossbow, as promised last time. In this case, I was lucky enough to have a nicely-sculpted hand crossbow to work with. However, an empty bow doesn't look quite as menacing as a loaded one, so I decided to give the little guy some ammo.
I'm a fiend for miniatures conversions. Very little passes over my painting desk without having been tweaked or outright twisted. I'd like to share a little of that magic with you.
It's high time we move on to some manmade and dungeon-style basing, since that's where the juicy stuff often happens. (Whatever my attractions towards a drawn-out storyline, full of excitement and plot twists, rich with characterization, and replete with a host of colorful places, sometimes I just want to pretend to kill shit.)
In Part 2 of our miniature painting series, we touch on forests and other exotic bases that can make your miniatures more vibrant. I've covered several dry outdoor terrains, but not some of the more important ones: muck and water. Muck adds appeal to any adventure, and the same handy rule of thumb applies to miniatures. We'll cover these and more in Part 2...
Difference. We cherish it. But just like playing one RPG doesn't make us sufficiently different - we've got to play different RPGs, and play them differently - sometimes garden-variety miniatures just seem too garden-variety, too vanilla, too much of some bland-meaning but inappropriate-sounding food metaphor. Just going ahead and painting the little guys is one good way to set yourself apart. (Remember: a well-painted figure or army is always a moral victory.) But a couple of relatively easy conversions or additions can jazz up a relatively ordinary mini even further.
There's conflict over the best way to prime a miniature, which goes to suggest that people will fight over any damn thing that has more than one option available. And while this perhaps doesn't have the broad, metaphysical qualities of a debate like Coke vs. Pepsi (vs. RC vs. Chek Cola vs. etc.) it's just the thing for the mini-gamer who's sick of the typical: a balanced approach.
