For GMs who use miniatures and mapping paper in their campaigns, what kind of setup would you recommend for someone on a budget?
For instance, I was thinking I could hunt down some cheap plastic figurines of knights and goblins like you'd typically find in a Dollar General Store, or maybe just print paper tokens with character or monster graphics on them.
Just go with fucking Reaper Bones, don't go full jew-mode when you can buy a goddamn dragon for 6 dollarydoos, or ANY character for just 2.
Bones suuuuuuuck! I'd rather shove slivers of bamboo up my urethra than try to clean the flash off that rubbery crap plastic.
Tokens are a good way to go; go to your local crafting store and pick up a 1" paper punch (usually in scrap booking) and some precut 1" discs. Print a bunch of portraits, glue to the discs, and you've got some classy tokens.
Perry Miniatures has probably the cheapest Knights you're going to find.
Goblins are a hard one, but some people end up selling off their LotR Goblin boxes on eBay for cheap.
When all else fails, Reaper Bones for the cheapest large range you're likely to find for fantasy on the net at decent quality.
pathfinder pawns? they are a higher quality alternative to standing paper minis. i use reaper bones and select D&D mini singles. if i was to start over again, i'd consider the bestiary box as an alternative to buying a bunch of singles. i got lucky though as I was a backer on the first Reaper Bones KS, so I've got a shit ton of cheap minis.
LEGOs user, LEGOs
juniorgeneral.org
Or just use 1/72 plastic figs. They're like $10 for a box of 50
>legos
>budget
Lego Minifigs are at the same price level with GW minis at this point.
But as someone said: go for 1/72 (i.e. 20mm)
Check out Zvezda, they should have several sets with fantasy stuff in that scale.
But you get material for figs and landscape, and is basically completely customizable, and when you have children you don't need to buy more toys for them. Or just use your kid's Legos if you already have one.
Also, you don't even need to use mini fogs, you can just stick some 2x2s together to abstract entities
This, but instead of discs, get some 1" washers from a hardware store. Cheaper, and heftier.
Caesar has some great fantasy figures. Aside from goblins you have adventurers, orcs, dwarves, elves, undead, and lizardmen. Redbox has a bunch of not-LotR figures, and more undead.
I draw all the minis for my game, then print them and fold them into little upright triangles, and paste them on 1" squares of chipboard. Its cool to have full visualizations of characters
if you didn't have any talent, you could do the same thing with HeroMachine:
Bump
15mm wargaming sites. If you're paying more than a dollar per model you're doing it wrong.
I'm personally a fan of khurasanminiatures.tripod.com
There are lots and lots of options
Get bulk boxes from companies like Perry and Mantic. Both do theirs in hard plastic. I don't see your problem with Bones if you are fine with dollar store stuff. Otherwise smaller scale figures work well. 20mm and 15mm are common and large enough for RPG purposes.
I personally don't think that having miniatures for every single thing in the game is tenable. In my last session for example the party fought 8 stone giants at once. Not only would be expensive to actually get 8 stone giant figures, but they would all look exactly the same, and I would only ever need that many once. And not every monster or character imaginable has a miniature of course. Try using paper standees or pogs with art printed on them for some things.
bucket of army men + sharpie markings
Whatever minis are going cheap.
I got 30-odd plastic Numidian Skirmishers off Amazon for 13 or so quid - great general purpose swords and sandles mooks.
Then I whipped up some palisades and round houses out of match sticks, flock and plasticard - I'm going for an iron age setting and making scale wooden buildings out of matchsticks is so easy even I; a person with no discernible experience in the matter managed to do it.
I spent about a tenner of plasticard, matchsticks and flock all together; which would have bought me maybe one prefabricated round house.
With the resources I acquired for the same cost I can build like five.
Also I got the Pathfinder basic flip mat (I do not actually play Pathfinder), which is in essence just a big piece of one-inch graph paper that you can wipe down; maybe a bit pricey for what it is; but in the long term saves trees.
Throw in a bucket of plastic dinosaurs and an assortment of whatever other figures you and your friends have lying around and you're basically good to go.
>Not just crazy-gluing a bunch of pebbles into a vaguely humanoid shape and sticking googly-eyes on them
I guarantee it gets a laugh.
You can get knights and warriors on the cheap this way too. Amazon has a pack of 36 for under $10.
Boardgames like Descent come with a pile of figures. Some of the end up in bargain bins, like the Magic the gathering mini game.
THIS
Works perfect for your first couple of games until you can save up for actual minis + paint. This is how I played my first 4 games of Frostgrave.
A box of washers from home depot and rp tools token maker works wonders
As for miniatures look up grenadier minis or EM4, Forlorn hope hames has some cheap stuff too
>+ sharpie markings
>implying Burning Plastic isn't the best wargame on it's own
At a local Hobby Lobby, they sell buckets of plastic knights, skeletons, and wizards. They also sell Schliech figures and tubes of dinosaurs/monsters.
For about 20-ish bucks, I was covered for a year. Though, they are not scaled to one another, or down to 1 inch. So as long as you don't have an autist in your group, and everyone understands that, it'll work fine.
W2C non-autistic players?
>Coming here to recommend these.
>Already done so.
>My work is done.
Well, I'll still post this useful look at the Caesar stuff: plasticsoldierreview.com
IN THE GREAT BEYOND.
Come to think of it, I don't know why I said that, considering my group has a couple spergs. Spent two hours one night, trying to use a "Scroll of Binding" to try and catch and tame monsters like Pokemon, last week. It was the most painful thing to try to pull them away from...
