Magnificent Miniatures - A to Z Blogging Challenge Week Three!

 It's time for week three of the A to Z Blogging Challenge! Today's post is for the letter M, and after this we're halfway through the alphabet, and the month! I'm featuring Magnificent Miniatures today, little figurines we assemble and paint for gaming!

I really love miniatures, they've become almost my new Barbies since I started gaming. They come in all different styles, and you can make modifications to them, and paint them however you want! Usually, my miniatures are for individual characters in our roleplaying games. Sometimes, though, they're just for fun! (They can also make great dice bag props!) I love collecting miniatures and painting them, my husband loves them too, as you can see from the following photos!

 

These five (and wolf) are for our current roleplaying game, the two on black bases aren't mine, they belong to two of our players, but the rest I already had before the game. And look one is already painted! Our games are often like this, mostly unpainted, because it takes me a while to actually paint miniatures, with all the other stuff going on. The painted armored guy in the middle has brass balls too, I added those since we started playing, since he got them during a game. Beads and miniatures, yay!

These are some of my favorite female miniatures, not all characters, but most of them were at one point. You can see the strawberry blonde wizardess on the bottom is not fully painted, I have a lot like that!

Star Wars has a roleplaying game too! The miniature on the far left was my pilot, nothing fancy done to her (other than painting striped pants!), and the droid on the far right is a licensed pre-painted miniature. But the two in the middle with lightsabers we modified, the lightsabers are from Clone Wars toys, removed and cut to size, then glued to the hilt of the weapons that were on the miniatures originally. I painted all of the humans here too!

My husband's miniatures, on the other hand, are for table top war games, specifically Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000.

This scary spider is part of the goblin army, he won this in a raffle at a special tournament, assembled and painted by one of the best at the store.

This is a manticore, for his beastmen army, and I'm in the process of painting him. Rawr, I'm a monster!

 Here's another of his beasties I've been painting, he's pretty much finished.

These guys are also for his beastmen army, two special customizations I helped him make - the green parts are called 'green stuff', it's a molding compound you make to put different things together where glue won't work, or add to a miniature - or make it from scratch if you're ambitious! The scary guy on the left is a Ghorgon, I added extra horns to him, changed out the weapons on his right arms - oh and added in an extra right arm! The one-eyed monster on the right is a Cyghor, like a cyclops but more monstrous. I made his eye, gave him extra horns, and molded that rock he's holding. My husband painted these guys.

This was our painting station at our last home, until I needed it more for my sewing machine - now we use a paint tray on tray tables - traylicious! Most of those paints you see are Citadel Paints, from Games Workshop. The paint is perfect for miniatures.

Here are some favorites - the two big miniatures are creations of my husband's, painted by a master from Milwaukee. The girl on the hill is one of mine, painted by me.

Here on the top you can see another miniature with customization: special sword, fan I made with brass! I don't know where she is in the cases or I'd take a better picture, maybe in another post. On the bottom, there are two girls I painted, and one silly miniature we got from a friend of ours.

These girls are some of my favorites. All painted by me! And all former characters, the angel was a winged elf, the catgirl was a half cheetah, the girl with the red cloak was a half dragon - red of course!

And here, we present my husband's grand army collection! There are five armies here, I think. Chaos warriors, chaos daemons, beastmen, dark eldar, space wolves, high elves, and some deathwatch. Okay, seven armies! As you can see, he has a lot of painting to do! This was when he was taking inventory last fall. He hasn't gotten too many new models since. No, we don't have a problem, we have a hobby =)

Thank you for joining me again for the A to Z Blogging Challenge, come back tomorrow for something that starts with N!

Dice and Dungeons & Dragons

 Welcome to day 4 of the A to Z Blogging Challenge! This entry is brought to you by the letter D, for Dice and Dungeons and Dragons.

Dice are great, I love dice! And they come in so many different colors and types. As I have said before, I am a gamer, as is my husband, and our daughter dreams of being one also. I don't play video games (except the occasional Peggle, and My Little Pony on my kindle) but I love watching my husband play games with good stories. What I do play are role playing games, and most of those use dice for determining different actions and events in the games.

Since Dungeons and Dragons also starts with D, how about a twofer today? D&D is one of the most widely known role playing games, don't judge it by the headlines though. It's one we play the most, because there are so many different settings within the same game system, giving dungeon masters and players a lot of different flavors to try of the same system - like flavors of cake, they're all cake, but a lot of different varieties and flavors to choose from.

I happen to have a lot of dice. These are the pretties that sit by my laptop. But that's not all.

These organized machines of probability grace our table every Friday night during our weekly Dungeons and Dragons game. There are your common six sided dice, along with twenty sided, ten sided, twelve sided, eight sided, four sided, and even pairs to make one hundred sided results! Our family has been collecting dice for a while, just like I have been collecting beads for a while! My daughter even has her own dice collection, and my husband, our dungeon master and story teller, has his personal set also.

A selection of six sided dice is presented above, with standard pips (the dots) and also ones with engraved numbers. Aren't all the colors pretty? Many games are centered around these dice alone, in other systems they use them along with other dice. Dungeons and Dragons uses these for ability score rolls and some damage rolls, like short swords, and in multiples, for spells like fireball.

For other polyhedrals, I would like to share the following:

 Four sided dice, a pain to roll because they don't roll, they just drop. Also the most dangerous when dropped on the floor and stepped on! We gamers sometimes call them caltrops, small sharp weapons thrown on the floor to prick feet and trip enemies. In D&D, these are commonly used for dagger damage rolls, and small spells.

 Eight siders, better to roll than four sided, fun to stack in dice towers. Dice are like more complicated bricks sometimes, it's fun to stack them in walls and towers between actions in game. Dungeons and Dragons uses eight sided dice for different weapon damage rolls, especially long swords.

 These are called percentile dice, you roll a matched pair, one looks like a normal ten sided die, the other has the tens place. Rolled together, you get the ten place and the single place, making up a whole two digit number. You can use this set for getting a random number between 1 and 100, sometimes used to get a percentage, sometimes just whole numbers. A pair of ten sided dice of different colors can also be used, if you declare before the roll which is high and which is low. This set of dice is rarely used by players in Dungeons and Dragons, but dungeon masters might use them to determine random encounters, or whether your almost dieing character stabilizes or slides closer to death.

Here we have ten sided dice, also another type of dice some role playing games use exclusively (like Exalted, which the character for my Scarlet Empress costume is from). For Dungeons and Dragons, these are used for weapon damage rolls most commonly.

 Twelve sided dice are fun - you have a powerful weapon if your damage uses this die! There isn't much more to say about this die, other than they roll like a ball almost as good as twenty sided dice.

And here are the most commonly used dice in Dungeons and Dragons - it is a D20 system. Twenty sided dice are rolled to determine the outcome of many actions: attacks, spells,  skills. They also spin pretty nicely!

Dice can also make great jewelry and accessories! These items and more available in my etsy shop, Lizzy's Fancies

These are made with beads in the shape of dice, but soon I will be making jewelry with real dice!

Dice aren't only for math geeks, they're also for gamer geeks! I hope you enjoyed this entry in my A to Z Blogging Challenge, join me again tomorrow for the letter E! It won't be as photo-heavy as the other posts this week.