Finding the Perfect Miniature

Assuming that you’re playing in a game/campaign that uses miniatures and you’re at least a little bit like me, then a miniature that is a good visual representation of your character adds a nice touch to the game. Custom paint jobs are great (assuming the player doesn’t say something like, “My character stands out in a crowd but doesn’t draw attention to himself. Can you paint him all brown?”) but take time. Plus, as the optometrist noted at my last exam, I’m at that age now where the eyes start to go. Pre-painted minis are a great convenience but already have the appearance established (unless you paint them). Paper figures like from One Monk are great for the baddies but something a bit more three-dimensional is preferable (at least to me) for the main stars of the game, the PCs.

It gets even worse when a PC has Pta’s appearance. In particular, Pta’s buggy clothing and beetle mask don’t just pose a challenge to customization via painting but also even finding a figure that is buggy enough in appearance (aka the beetle mask) but isn’t so alien looking that it could never be confused for a human. What’s a GM to do?

Easy…wait until the player finds some figures that have bits and pieces which fit the description well enough and then perform some, um, plastic surgery. Jamie found the Thri Kreen Barbarian mini from Wizards to have enough of the facial appearance to represent Pta’s holy mask. However, as you can see from the image to the right, the four arms and backwards jointed legs simply don’t say human.

So…Jamie also found another figure with a more appropriate lower half (the one over to the left). He then plopped them down at our gaming table one session and basically said that he didn’t trust himself to do the appropriate modifications, letting me know that I needed to do it. So, on Halloween, I put on my best minisectionist costume, gathered up my scalpels (aka x-acto knives), sutures (aka zap-a-gap), and bandages (aka Zipkicker…a glue accelerator) and got to work (aka slicing and dicing). I didn’t take any “in progress” pictures (much too gruesome of a scene with all the mini parts and innards spread across the table) but here is a pic of the end result. Human looking enough but with the desired bugginess atop the shoulders.

The figure is a bit tall for the vertically challenged Pta but I’m not a miracle worker! 😉