Pimp my Standees part 5: Dark Sun

[Cherno]

Main thread:

Pimp my Standees! Hub thread for my cardboard miniatures

This is the fifth and final part of my ongoing series of articles concerning the way I make and use paper standees.



Another one of those "I found something cool, so I wanna play it!" projects. Dark Sun, a popular campaign setting originally for AD&D and recently re-released for D&D 4E. Set on the desert world of Athas, a world were steel and water are as rare as heroes, and tyrannical sorcerer-kings rule over isolated city-states with their legions of templars.

Whatever, so the setting is basically Mad Max meets classic Fantasy, with leather-clad gladiators, cannibalistic halflings and insectoid Thri-Kreen twisting the traditional fantasy chlichés.

I first started this project with the aim of replicating the work I had done for All Things Zombie: Using photographs of painted miniatures for my standees. Unfortunately, the offical Dar kSun miniatures by Ral Partha have been OOP for close to 20 years and are consequentally rare and go for horrid prices on eBay. That being said, I actualy found a boxed set of "The people of the land" that contains 20 assorted miniatures from the series.







Of course, after receiving the box I immediately lost all interest in actually painting those miniatures  

Back to plan B: Scouring the web for all kinds of pictures that could be used. The official Wizards of the Coast forums were a great resource. Having to rely on "real art" as opposed to miniature photographs or videogame sprites meant that I would have no backside images, so I had to compromise and just put a glowing outline there.

Note also the new bases which I talk more about in the main thread.

[Dr.Falkenhayn]

what a great Idea  ,i totally missed this before  ::)Damn now i want my own Standees from Flashback,Shining Force,Rocket Knight Adventures,Mortal Kombat and and and  

[Cherno]

Well the idea is not really new, many RPG players just slap some official game art on a piece of paper and print it out as a standee, but those typically are not mounted to heavy cardstock and have lots of white space around the art and/or are just square box-type standees were the cutlines don't follow the character outlines. This is more than fine for an RPG, but I the article's name is "Pimp my standees" so I wanted to make them nicer

[Spooktalker]

Sometimes when I'm overwhelmed and my lead mountain feels like an albatross around my neck I think how much saner the standees approach is, and how great I could make them look. I think the popular style of paper "miniatures" out there gives standees a bad name and can't stand them, but in the hands of the right artist. 

In a parallel world I can see myself doing it. It seems like a small project in comparison to the one I'm in the midst of now even if I were to make five or six poses for each encounter type. For me uniformity, the style (old school a must, of course) and overall quality would all have to be just right. Most important of all though, is the managing of the line... getting everything that needs doing done, presenting the entire scope of the world, not just ad-hoc-follow-whatever-whim-catches-my-fancy-atm that pervades in this hobby of ours.

I'm surprised and the offerings out there, though, surprised a major manufacturer or talented amateur hasn't done this. The cardboard heroes line from Steve Jackson is the best I can recall seeing, but even in a range of hundreds of figures/creatures the choices of which they chose to draw makes no sense at all from the standpoint of sitting down and actually playing the game.

Pardon me, I'm off on a tangent, but yeah, what you're doing makes sense and good luck with it. Sense isn't why most of us are in this hobby, though, so it's back to the rush and the lead for me.