For Christmas this year, I somehow convinced my wife that we should give her cousin and his kids the Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition starter set... and further that I should buy and paint up a set of miniatures to use with it.
Now, this new D&D set is a "theater of the mind" sort of thing (also known as cheap), so no fold out maps, no tokens or stands. It barely has dice. So I really wanted to juice it up for them and make it seem more exciting. Thus the miniatures, and I also made a whole map pack of the Sword Coast for the cousin, who will be the DM of the group. (and that is why I made the
Faerûn t
ravel distances matrix). I went a bit deep with the maps and such, and got about 20 pages of material, including a DM screen that I found somewhere online when looking for travel distances, and I also bought a set of dice for each of the kids.
Anyway, as the kids range from 3 to 8 years old, I knew that I wanted to use Bones miniatures, and began by reading the pre-generated character sheets, which happily are gender neutral. After a few lunch times worth of trawling through the Reaper online catalog, I ordered some miniatures from a seller on Ebay, and set to work. I made a few conversions, mostly to remove the more egregiously bendy weapons, but also to shift them more in the direction of the starting equipment.
Here is the starting group.
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| Two humans, elf, dwarf, and halfling |
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| Converted staff |
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| Converted warhammer |
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| Sculpted on detail removed, painted on heraldry |
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| Replaced sword with great axe, removed dragon head, replaced with sculpted tree stump |
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| No changes! |
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| Replaced bendy sword with plastic |
Now, I figured that my own kids might want to play too, and so they needed their own figures (and character sheets, which I wrote up). So I added a barbarian and a Gnome fighter to the group.
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| Thankfully no changes |
And I also painted up a henchman/torch bearer and a donkey, because every D&D group needs someone to do the dangerous work for them, and I hope that having miniatures for them will help the group to remember this important fact.
I had a pretty good time painting these, although as always it was a bit of a rush at the end to get them done in time. The wilderness type bases were a lot of fun to do, and if you look closely, you can see there is quite a bit going on there.
Anyway, so there is most of my hobby work for the month. What about you, did you make any miniatures to gift?
8 comments:
Holy Crap
You are the coolest Uncle/1st Cousin Once Removed, EVAR!!!
Very cool, I briefly thought about buying the starter set for my son. We already had too many boxes to bring home. :( Nice job on the Reaper figures. I had a gander at all the Nolzur's stuff at Great Escape Games. You might take a look at those. When I saw them I thought to myself "My 12 year old self would have totally bought and gamed with these."
Love this - a great way to get the kids fighting over who gets the magical treasures.
The first thing that grabbed my attention was those bases. Very natural looking mate.
My son and his pals want me to GM a game for them... Might do it. So much unbridled fresh teenage energy though. -__-
What a wonderful gift!
Very nice gift to some young ones. I hope they’ll appreciate it.
Less activity than normal, hope all is good here
Yes, Ben, I am fine, just have been busy with home projects. I hope to wind that project up next week, and then get back to painting and other hobby soon!
Nice :) As for me, I have my work cut out to convince the missus to somehow let me get even more model kits/figurines even though loads of them are still in their boxes untouched XD
Looking at your D&D miniatures makes me wish I had the chance to play D&D regularly. Only managed a few sessions as once a school classmate was into D&D but I never ever got to play again since that time oh so long ago.
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