Saturday, June 30, 2018

D&D NPC Borderlanders

Here are some rustic folk of the sort the players in my D&D campaign are encountering in the borderlands. They'd also work for historical or even Oldhammer, in a pinch.

Denizens of the Borderlands
The children are Citadel sculpted by the Perry brothers, and I think the rest are Soldiers & Swords, but I didn't see them listed in the Lost Minis Wiki. Any help tracking them down?

Peasant Laborers
Slow-witted Villagers

No village is complete without a halfwit or three. Perhaps the guy on the right is merely eccentric, his habits including carrying around rats by the tail.

Perry Citadel Girl and Boy

When the party was mobbed by unkempt children outside Fort Aderath, the party won initiative and the thief snatched away the slingshot as the ranger, no doubt recalling past experience as wilderness camp counselor, clipped off firm, authoritative instructions that had them lined up and marching ahead back to the fort before they could regather their wits.

I'm trying out a new picture setting and a new base style. The bases are meant be as neutral as possible and work inside or outside a village or town setting, or anywhere. I guess I could have made up a town setting for the pics, but already had this one to hand for some other pics I was taking. These figures a good demonstration of why I wouldn't consider any scale but 25mm for D&D. In what other scale can you bring your games to life with ordinary-yet-individual figures like these suitable for any situation, had for a buck each or so?

Old Glory Peasants Carrying Boar



The first of a hundred or more Old Glory peasants. I no longer save the best for last. This duo perhaps best represents the character of my borderlands folk. This is from a wonderful set in the Wars of the Roses range, WOR-24 Civilians with Ox Cart.

Here are the other figures in the set. Ox-carts not shown. I've moved these forward a bit since this pic was taken, and most now have some paint on them.

Old Glory WOR-24 Civilians with Ox Carts (carts not shown)
Also slipping in a few Grenadier AD&D Solid Gold Line adventurers as they seemed to fit the setting. I'm going to rebase the thief here, and I decided not to use static grass or turf on the old figures going forward, I just don't like the look (and the reason there is foliage on the base and it's not painted in the dungeon green-gray like the rest of the adventurers is it had sculpted foliage I didn't feel like carving off or explaining away as dungeon debris). I replaced the bow on the ranger with a plastic one from Eccentric Miniatures.

Grenadier Thief from the 2007 Females Box Set

Grenadier Ranger, also from the 2007 Females Set

And lastly, here are a few more pics with the cavern backdrop for comparison. I realized afterward I had forgotten to include the old guy with the rat. The second pic includes some other NPC types I painted earlier that also seem like borderlands denizens, along with a newly painted blacksmith. I'm  particularly fond of the Perry Citadel citizen in the light blue tunic for being brilliantly non-descript, a true any-man with a in-game utility value outweighing all the rest by an easy margin. what scene of town or country folk would this guy not be at home in, and how many different NPCs could he represent in the course of a campaign? We need more figures like this, please.

Denizens of the Borderlands




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