Welcome to I Am Your Target Demographic. Today we’re continuing our journey into miniatures
and wargaming and tabletop roleplaying. I love miniatures and I spent a lot of the
pandemic buying and painting these models so I’m hoping to make a handy video for folks looking
to get into this hobby. This is definitely introductory level. Today we’re covering the
models themselves. Where do you find them and what sort of options might you have?
On the screen as we showcase some of these models, I’ll include the company or designer,
or YouTube channel, on the screen so that you can also check them out.
In video one, I talked about the biggest games that include miniatures.
This is the place that a lot of folks enter this hobby. They sell starter boxes for some
of these games at a lot of comic book and hobby shops and even bookstores like Barnes & Noble.
The miniatures created intentionally for these games are likely the most expensive.
Starting an army in game like Warhammer can be incredibly expensive but you absolutely get what
you pay for. Games Workshop models are intricate and detailed. They do require a lot of assembly,
so you’ll want to invest in a kit with things like a hobby knife, small clippers, and a file. You’ll
often open the box and get what’re called ‘sprues’ and you’ll be responsible for cutting out,
filing down, and then assembling and gluing your miniatures. The more intricate sets often
have options, so you can assemble your troops how you want, in various poses and different weapons.
In terms of buying models in other lines, I can tell you a few things I’ve learned.
Warhammer: Age of Sigmar models might be great but are definitely larger than typical 25mm models.
So if you’re buying miniatures for Dungeons and Dragons, things like orcs are going to be too big
in the Warhammer scale. However, Games Workshop’s Lord of the Rings game is a little truer to 25mm,
so a box of orcs from that franchise works perfectly for D&D. Likewise I’ve purchased
sets of Frostgrave, such as their excellent Gnoll models as an easy way to get a lot
of models at once for Dungeons and Dragons. They also sell models specifically for D&D,
typically through the company WizKids, who has a D&D line with popular creatures and characters.
You can usually find both pre-painted and unpainted models, though pre-painted can be
fairly horrible, but definitely solid if you’re not planning on painting them yourself anyways.
If scale itself isn’t important and you’re trying to use things like Warhammer for your D&D games,
you just need to worry about the base size. A monster might come with a rectangular base or
an oval base, but for D&D it should be on a 3 in or 75mm circular base, you’d want to keep that in
mind. I tend to buy bases separately so that I can use the circular bases instead of the ones that
might come with the Warhammer models or Frostgrave or whatever board game you get them from.
A good idea for D&D is to look for old Dungeons and Dragons prepackaged games
because they’ll come with a boatload of monsters, typically in the right scale you need.
It’s not impossible to find them used or cheap. Now, there are folks out there that create
miniatures for games like D&D and other roleplaying games
but don’t have a game system of their own. One of the largest is a company called Reaper Miniatures,
that has a long of miniatures that often align with the scale you’d need for roleplaying games.
Reaper is incredibly affordable and often high
quality. They also sell a variety of materials, so you can purchase metal miniatures, or their
light plastic line called Bones. They’ve also expanded to what’s called Bones Black,
which is a much firmer and high quality plastic, and a much newer Bones USA which is a firm plastic
and those models are created here in the states, versus international factories. Reaper Miniatures
is known for large Kickstarter projects where you can prepay
for hundreds of models for just dollars each. Now, a recent addition to the market is the
rise and accessibility of 3D printing. This means that if there’s a monster you’d like a model for,
there are creators out there creating these models. If you have a 3D printer,
you can purchase these files so that you print them yourselves when the need arises.
You’ll see the option to purchase what are called STL files, which is short for stereolithography.
You purchase the file, print on your own. Now, if you’re like me, you don’t have a printer,
so you can also find what are called merchants, which are people who are running a business
printing and selling these files for you. I use Etsy primarily and there are a lot
of excellent shops you can find. So if you head to Etsy, you can search for things like
“Dragon Miniature” and see a whole lot of results. These shops also should give you scale options,
so you can say if you need one scaled to 25mm for D&D for example, or an oversized model to
32mm for Warhammer. Now, when the vendor sends you the print, you’ll likely still
have to assemble the pieces yourself, so that they don’t break during shipment. You can find people
creating models for all sorts of games here. So those are your best options for finding
and purchasing miniatures, either by the game designer themselves or from third parties.
Next week, we’re going to cover the basics to start painting them, including the necessities
you’ll need to buy and terms you’ll need to know on your painting journey. See you next week!