Mind flayer? Were-octopus? Creepy mutant? Half-melted chaos cultist? It works for any of these. Nice sculpt, decent paint job, and easy enough to repaint if you want to customize a group of them.
How can you go wrong with a stereotypical muscular, horned demon! It has great detail and a really mean expression. I like to use this mini to teach my "mini-painting for beginners" workshops because you can paint it a base color, drybrush a lighter color on that, then touch up small details like the mouth, horns, and loincloth, and you have a finished mini in one hour. And it's all one piece, so there's no assembly required!
I have small, medium, and large fire markers from Litko Aero. They're great for marking the location of campfires, bonfires, fire elementals, flaming spheres, and so on. I glued mine together with super glue and it worked just fine.
These Small minis have a lot of details that make them easy to paint--just apply a base color, then drybrush them with a lighter color, and you're done. And because most 3rd-level casters have access to summon monster II (the spell that lets you summon a Small elemental), you'll find a use for them.
Great pose, great attitude, great details. The guitar is a little anachronistic for a fantasy campaign but you can make it work. I painted this mini for James Jacobs' demon-possessed bard character in my drow game, you can see the paint job here: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=31708760&l=ab1012dd39&id=1508 097303
Slightly bigger than human-sized, lots of bulky muscles for easy drybrushing, crazy angry face. You could paint this reddish like clay, gray like stone, or even greenish or flesh-colored to make it a flesh golem. No assembly required is always a plus.
Maybe it's a mind flayer mutation, maybe it's a grell, maybe it's a mi-go. No matter what you use it for, it's going to creep out our players. The only drawback to this mini is that a couple of the tentacles are a separate piece, but you could leave those off if you didn't feel like gluing or pinning and this would still look cool. (The brain and upper jaw is a separate piece, too, but that's easy to glue on.)
If you're just getting started painting, this is an easy choice for a beginner—clear lines, good detail, no hard-to-reach places. I did a tutorial on how to paint a bunch of these quickly on my website: http://seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/miniatures/speedpainting_skeleton/
It's not often you need a wereshark, but this one definitely cuts the mustard. It's a dynamic pose, only two pieces (the tail is a separate piece), and there's plenty of detail to make painting it a snap.
I got a set of the white non-mini skulls. Almost exactly 1" from crown to teeth, you can put a mini on top of them without worrying it'll topple over. The detail is good and they're clearly visible on the tabletop even at a distance. Because they're cheap and sturdy, you can buy a batch of 10 and throw them into your dice bag—perfect if you play or run games at cons and don't want to haul around a ton of minis. I use them for corpses or animate skeletons.
I love these things. Whether I'm marking actual acid, or a creature that's been hit by acid arrow, or a cloud effect, or the last known location of an invisible creature, these transparent acrylic markers are durable and a nice, vivid green. They're big enough that you can stand a mini on them, but still fit within a 1" grid.
It's a nice sculpt, the pale white goes well with the deep red of the cap, and it's a nice stand-in for any Medium plant monster. And it's cheap! I bought four. :)
The color of this transparent mini is dark enough, and the sculpt is ambiguous enough, that you could use this mini for a spectral creature, some kind of ooze, or any amorphous thing. It's Large size gives it more visual "oomph" on the tabletop compared to humanoid-ghosts and mostly-flat oozes.
This is a great mini, well-sculpted, good paint job, and it has a nice use of the transparent blue plastic on the wings. If you run a high-level game, you're likely to need a lillend mini because a conjure-oriented character can get a lot of use out of this monster (charms, cures, flight, and bardic performance gives a caster a lot of options for just one spell).
I don't play Star Wars, but this big mini is inexpensive and has a great sculpt. You could easily use it is a demon, a weird mutant, or a stand-in for a giant. It has a large surface area, and if you had more than one it's a simple matter to draw on its arms, head, or back with paint or a colored marker to give it tattoos or scars and help you tell them apart on the battlefield--you can see an example of what I did in the Paizo blog here: http://paizo.com/paizo/blog/2010/august/v5748dyo5lbep
I'll probably never use this mini as an actual cerebrilith, but it works nicely as a weird demon, eidolon, or mutated monster. It's big, detailed, and looms over Medium minis on the battlemat. The paint job is simple (brown body with a wash, white skull-spine with a wash) but the figure has plenty of detail and looks good.
This foam is precisely cut into a 1/4" grid so you can pull out exactly the grid-chunks you need to fit even your weirdly-shaped minis. I made mostly generic shapes to accommodate most 28-32mm minis in use today, but made one larger space for a bigger mini like an ogre. The 1.5" in the product name refers to the overall height of the tray, which includes a 1/4" thick base, so if you have a mini taller than 1", you'll need to rest it on its side (like the picture shows). Just be sure to set aside some time to actually pull out the foam and create the spaces... they're held in really tight (which is deliberate, as the un-pulled parts are the walls between the minis and you wouldn't want them to be lose).
I prefer painting my own minis, but you can't really paint pewter to look like a transparent creature, so for something like a water elemental you really can't beat a transparent plastic mini. This one is big, and though it initially just looks like a wave, when you take a closer look you can see a watery face and arms. The blue is strong enough to be distinct but not so vivid that it looks like a fruit drink instead of water.
I prefer painting my own minis, but you can't really paint pewter to look like a transparent creature, so for something like a fire elemental you really can't beat a transparent plastic mini. It's big and impressive and stands out on the tabletop. The sculpt is dynamic and the color is vivid.
I bought 8 of these for an upcoming encounter because I didn't feel like painting 8 nearly-identical gnome NPCs. Figure has good detail. The armor is bronze with a black wash. The shield is black with wood trim (and the inner and outer surfaces had plenty of open space to paint the 8 of them individual colors to easily tell them apart on the tabletop). Sword is sturdy, with a bronze hilt. The gnome is a female, and has long brown hair. It doesn't have any bendable bits that extend too far and are likely to get bent from rough handling. Could just as easily be used as a female halfling fighter.
These are great. Just a tiny dot of superglue and they stay together. They're inexpensive and each is different enough that you can tell them apart when more than one are on the table--and they're dry-erase and wet-erase just in case you want to color them to help them stand out a little bit better.
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