Laruna's page

Lots of great tips.

Today I went out to try and find things I could purpose to the game, not necessarily officially minis.

I found army men, but they were too big. I found spiders, but they were very flat and about 2x3 squares on a mat big.

I found lots of dinosaurs and animals that were about 10x too big.

But I also found some neat stuff:
3 dragons (dollar store)
1 bag of moss (dollar store)
1 warhammer 40k citadel paint set (8 paint pots, a brush, and some minis that look like robots) (baseball card shop that got some things by accident and couldn't sell them, clearanced)

And I only spent $14.

Not bad I think.

Pic 1
Pic 2

Trying to build a collection of minis from the ground up. Unpainted preferred but painted are ok. US only please, to keep shipping costs down.

These are my bags, I do custom colors on request.

Click here to look at some bags I've already done.

Sent a pm :-)

Got it. Replied.

Many of the small companies doing fantasy and ancient world stuff are excellent and affordable. Avoid warhammer at all costs, others do it cheaper.

Can you suggest some small companies online?

Yeah, I'm happy to say that, for the moment anyway, if you type "D&D minis" into Ebay's search engine, my PC's listing comes up first, so it's not hard to find me. But I flatter myself that I offer one of the easiest and most reasonably priced opportunities to round out a minis collection that's around right now, and I also have a lot of higher value minis sitting around that I need to get listed on Ebay, so if there's something fancy you're interested in, I could probably help out with that too :-)

Maybe we could do a trade? One of my dice bags for some of your minis? My etsy shop

I do custom colors.

This is a trick question, because miniatures aren't a must have.

Now a portable white board and markers, that is really useful (and far cheaper than even a few miniatures).

I'll agree that they aren't necessary. They really help with the group I GM though. Half the group are women in their 40s and 50s with no gaming experience. One has a lot of trouble visualizing and the cues help. I'm borrowing a flip mat from a friend, he has a stack of them.

If you're looking for a cheap way to get yourself loads of minis cheaply, you might want to consider printable paper minis. One Monk Miniatures has loads of free stuff, some of which is really great. Particularly Dryw the Harper's Imperfect People, which give you all sorts of options for NPC's. Nice noncombatant NPC's tend to be hard to get enough of, and Dryw gives a wide variety.

And I'll go ahead and plug my own Ebay listings which make it really easy to build a collection. I've got lists of PC's and lists of monsters that you can build a set from:
For PC's: http://www.ebay.com/itm/251374939094?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid= p3984.m1555.l2649

For Monsters: http://www.ebay.com/itm/251374939211?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid= p3984.m1555.l2649

But if you're really enjoying painting your own, you should check out Reaper Miniatures' Bones line. All sorts of great and affordable minis there.

LOL wow, my friend was scoping out that listing last week. Small world.

The two plastic ones I have right now are bones series.

Pic of first mini I painted.

To get started, as dungeon master:

A half dozen medium humanoids, orcs will fill the role nicely.
A half dozen small humanoids, I recommend goblins or kobolds.
A half dozen medium quadrupeds, wolves.
A half dozen small quadrupeds, rats.
Two or three large figures, a brace of ogres and a giant worm for me.
And, one huge dragon.

Paint 'em, throw 'em in a bag (except for the dragon of course) and you're good to go. Later you can add more specific miniatures, but these will get you through most situations.

Great list. This is pretty much what I want. Some stuff that I will get a lot of use out of and can build on.

Dragons are probably one thing I don't need, though I'd love some. I also have some small unicorns. I've been scoping out gumball machines too. There's a yugi-oh one with a black dragon in it at the pizza place down the street that seems kinda cool. Might be a neat stand in for a small dragon.

Laruna, there is a miniatures" forum on these boards that you should check out.

To try to answer your question requires knowing a bit more about your intentions. When you ask about the "must have" minis, do you mean as a player, a GM or a casual collector? All have different needs.

As a player the "must have" miniatures I have are the ones that specifically and accurately depict my characters. For me that usually means sculpting and painting my own custom miniatures since I can almost never find a "perfect" miniature pre-made. If I didn't sculpt my own, I'd say that the "must have" minis would be those that best approached the vision I had for my player characters.

As a GM who uses miniatures extensively, where is what I recommend:

1. Your standard NPC minis, a warrior, mage, healer and sneaky-type character. In fact you usually need more martial minis than casters as a GM, and it is nice to have both melee and ranged miniatures if you want to approach any sort of tactical accuracy.

2. A decent variety of common monsters, particularly those that frequent dungeons such as goblins, kobolds and orcs. What a "decent variety" might mean is highly variable depending on your financial wherewithal and your desire to build a collection, but enough to provide some visual and tactical interest is nice. Back when I had a very limited budget and had not yet begun sculpting my own minis, I used to use a mixture of miniatures and plastic colored pawns for my encounters. I'd usually put down a miniature that represented something fairly well (a goblin with a bow, for example) and then put a few to several pawns down saying "and these are just like that one." That way a couple miniatures and several pawns could create a tactically useful battleground.

3. Undead. It's hard to have too many undead. You can buy them in hordes too, and I recommend you do so. Skeletons, zombies and ghouls are great not only for playing, but they are great at...

Thanks for the link, I tried to find a specific board. I guess I overlooked it.

All three really. I play in a game, I GM one at home, and I just like the look of them. I've collected dragons for years, and they look nice among my dragons.

Good suggestions in number 2. I was thinking about getting the "bag o zombies" for that reason, and #3.

For #4, unfortunately I live in a fairly small town. It's about a 2-3 hour drive to any store that sells minis or anything close. My purchases are online exclusive.

For #5, again, dragon collector. No shortage in that department. :P

For painting, I've found a lot of great resources for what to paint with. That seems to be the easy part.

Great response. Thanks.

If you haven't gotten started collecting yet, give serious consideration to the Pathfinder Pawns rather than plastic minis. You'll get a much larger collection for a much more reasonable price point, and the Pathfinder Pawns are basically self-indexing thanks to the cool numbered punch-out cardstock.

If you go this route, the Bestiary boxes are the place to start, plus the NPC Codex box (for a plentitude of NPCs).

I have 3 reaper minis right now, 2 plastic, one metal. I enjoyed painting them (used a friend's paints) and would like to continue the hobby.

I'm new to minis and want to build a collection. What are some that you feel will see a lot of use? Certain monsters? Race/Class combos? Any other suggestions?