Well, I hope that the new year is treating you all well, and that you enjoyed your festivities. I’m back with another Grim’s Dungeons of Doom article/tutorial this time dealing with some rickety old wooden stairs to connect your upper levels and platform risers to the rest of your other components we’ve already dealt with. Continue reading
Ok, Ok, so I am quite a tad late with this weeks zomtober entry. Real life gets in the way of any hobbyist persuit and while I have had ample chance to get access to my computer, I’m currently dosed with the flu, a damaged knee and aching bones.
Never the less, I did manage to get a couple of likkle zomers done (excuse the pics, they are just ok, not great)
As usual, I’m working through the old glory/blue moon manufacturing 15mm zombies I got a while back.
This time, we have the first crawler type I have in the horde, which I’ve made a bit more bloodied and gruesome, and the bare chested one which I adopted an easy brown/pale flesh gradient with minimal highlights. Easy and effective (plus saves messing around with tons of different pots of colour open etc)
I will be back with the last entry, all being well, on time on Sunday.
Later!
I’m going to be honest now, I do watch a lot of cartoons. Always have, always will, and with the fact of having four kids under the age of 13, it’s no surprise that in our house, they tend to hijack the TV mostly and watch what they want (You have to let them to save arguments!) So its a good job that I do enjoy cartoons or I’d be going mad.
My youngest two are kind of on a Scooby-Doo vibe, and watch a ton of anything to do with the franchise and I end up getting to watch all the episodes over and over, and to stop me from insanity, I get them additional material to see. All in all, I’m pretty well versed in Scooby Doo mythos.
With that in mind, lets dust of Velma’s reading glasses and take a look at some of the monsters from the vaults of Mystery Inc, and see if we can get any inspiration and ideas for 15mm miniatures, and let me present my wishlist of ten of the better spooky monsters from the series.
Kooky Space Kook:
I wouldn’t ever think that the monsters in the series are scary in any way (Bar one, see next entry) but this one I could imagine as a race of skeletal spacemen, very much in keeping up with the Dr Who monster in “Silence in the Library“, so there would be potential there. Even though he’s got a shit name, Stick a gun on him and maybe a side weapon, and you’d have some great looking 15mm baddies. I’ll admit, he’s not that detailed, but hey, space suit and skull gets my vote.
Charlie the funland robot
This one used to scare the shit out of me as a child, it’s really freaky this one, but I reckon I’d make these an inspiration on large sentinel type robots like in the X-men. They’d be easy to do, again there’s not that much detail (I’m starting to notice a pattern here…) They would be good if done in normal human sizes too, you can never have too many creepy robots. Weapons would be cool, but not essential as they would make great servants and dogsbodies too.
Gator Ghoul
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Gator ghoul is just screaming out for me to create a sub race of lesser draxx, all based around the croc genus. Nasty looking cartoon Croc humanoids, heavy armour and bristling with guns. I have seen plenty of fantasy clones in 28mm, but as ever we are talking 15mm here, so there’s not much in the way of gator ghoul inspired minis in the scale. Would it be worth me doing a lesser draxx version? Let me know.
Tar Monster
This one is proper B-movie fodder, and if you’ve seen the live action movies, it was reimagined as a more disney-esque blobby monster rather like the one from Monsters Vs Aliens. I like both designs, and woudn’t mind doing a spacemonster version for my range. Obviously I’d rethink it and use it as a starting point, but they’d be cool for all sorts of pulp 15mm gaming, or depending on the size, would fit 28mm too.
The Snow Beast
A big critter, kind of like a shaggy T-rex, would be either a great fantasy or scifi monster for cold races or planets. I would imagine it being better as an polar T-rex, with more emphasis on the hair being more of a shaggy down (No, i don’t mean Shaggy is having a bad buzz on his mary jane, downy feathers!) You could have it as a wild beast, or a riding animal in your forces. I can bet there’d be nothing else out there like it, not too many that mix up dino/cold with their monsters! It’d be certainly unique!
Star Creature
This one is a WTF monster, but again it’s certainly unique, you couldn’t be accused of not thinking outside the box with these. I can’t think of any stuff like it. You could have plenty of varieties of troops, everything about them would be made of crystal. Maybe a good plan would be attempting to use the clear or translucent resins, and you be able to do almost any gemstone colour. I’m starting to think the creators of the series might have been dabbling in shaggy’s stash….
The Creepy Heap from the deep
Awfully stupid name, trippy monster! the name reminds me of “A tramp in the damp, with a little bit of cramp” or ” a judge with a grudge, and a little bit O’ fudge” from Reeves and Mortimer, but I think this one is my kind of monster. I’d like a load of them with lazers and a bit of armour, maybe borrow from lobsters or prawns with the plates. They’d have to be larger than humans, but a race of these would be great as alien mercs. If someone doesn’t make something like this soon for 15mm, I will!
The Future Monster
You might remember this episode, the one about the fake time machine, and the dissapearance of the scientist etc etc… An army of these in 15mm would be a good addition to players who long to have a truly insectoid force. The eyes on this one look shite, but for a moment imagine swapping the eyes for a more evil set, stick some weaponry on it and give it a repaint and these guys would look fine. Very retro looking too, which isn’t a bad thing. I’d buy em!
Skeleton men
These remind me of humanoid Kize from my range, they sure do share a bit of a look, which is purely coincidental, but I think I’ll be taking some inspiration from them as i develop the Kize as a force. I’ve already got many types of Kize troops pinned down, but humanoid ones were never on the cards, until I looked at these. I’d rework the design as Kize hybrid soldiers, elongate the neck and give them a proper kize head too, and the skelly detail would be adapted to chitinous armour plating. Give them some weapons and I would be happy. Lots of creepy hybrids = good fodder!!
Space ape
While there’s plenty of grey aliens available, another type isn’t going to hurt. These could be a great add on for that side, a more dominant and nastier type or caste. Give them guns and equipment, and they’d be away! Not keen on the colour of this one, but the beauty of miniatures is you can paint them how you like!
Well, there’s my round up with Doo monsters. I’d like to add, before anyone would accuse me of ripping off Hanna-Barbera, all my suggestions are in a inspirational way of thinking. Sure it would be bad to just rip off whatever, but there’s nothing wrong with a starting point to generate some new ideas in the world of 15mm. I find a lot of people just won’t think outside the box, or find it distasteful if someone does, but these days it’s getting harder and harder to find something that hasn’t been done before, so folks like to play safe with the tried and tested. I’m sure it sells better than the off the wall stuff, but you can only reinvent the wheel so many times before people realise the trick.
Feel free to let me know your top ten!!
Scooby-Doo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
These days the humble 15mm miniature has seen something of a revival within the gaming world, I myself have always been a fan since I was a kid (My dad bought me my first mini at about the age of 7 or so) What stopped me from getting the 15mm bug full on, was the fact that the 15’s I could easily get were of the historical kind, and soon enough, I was converted to the whole 25mm scale (Because of all the monsters I think!)
For years I played through the various incarnations of Warhammer Fantasy Battle (2nd edition and up), 40K, and countless spawned GW classics, as well as a plethora of TSR games and other varied RPGs and strategy games, utilising my growing collection of 25/28mm figures. Then came a time that I just stopped playing and collecting all together, my heart wasn’t in it and times were a changing!
After I had my first kid, my interest was sparked again to the hobby, but this was where my real love affair started with 15mm, I found a new form of entertainment in ancient and medieval wargaming, and sure enough I got the bug again, but this time the 15mm scale became my fave scale, it’s smaller size was quicker to paint, cheaper on my pocket, and easier to store compared with 28mm.
My love of all things fantastical and horrific would lead me to look for more strange and unusual figures in the scale, and remains with me today. However, this love of the strange has accelerated more and more as I have grown older, and with the internet, the great 15mm revival seems to grow each day in syc with my love of this great scale.
The event of mass world wide communications and such things like Kickstarter, are allowing the 15mm gamer to have more choice and creative vision to expand upon days gone by, and start to bring 15’s up to the diversity found up till now in the 25/28mm ranges.
So, with this in mind, I would like to to present some of my weird ideas that I’d like to see made flesh in “god’s true scale”!
So, there you have it. Some good, some probably not so good ideas, but ideas none the less. I would love to hear your own top 10 ideas for 15mm ranges, however off the wall they are. Maybe industry people actually listen to us plebs, maybe they don’t.
One thing is sure, 15mm is still a valid miniature scale for those of us with taste and sense.
LONG LIVE THE 15’S!!
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