I have been wanting to put together groupings of figures to fit a B/X or other old-school D&D game for a while now, sort of like the old Grenadier figure boxes you could buy in the early 80's. One of their boxes was "Female Adventurers" so I decided to round out my collection of female adventures that I have done so far with a female dwarf and female halfling, giving me one each of all the possible B/X classes. Unlike more modern games, where the halfling is almost always an achetypal thief, in B/X D&D the halfling wears the same heavy armor (or could wear) as a fighter or cleric. I put mine in chainmail with leather shoulder pieces just for fun, and decided to go with a spear as this seems to make the most logical sense of melee weapon choice for one who is going to be shorter and have poorer reach than almost all the enemies she would face. Of course for the dwarf, I had to go with an axe, but she is no dummy and wanted the benefit of a shield for defense, so I went with a one-handed axe.
Nothing too new construction wise. The dwarf is made with a flat tapered plug and a split long bead as shoulders. The head is a small bead, arms, feet, armor plates, and axe are tile spacers, shield is the small precut round wooden craft piece. Halfling has a body made from a long bead, everything else is the same as the dwarf except no shoulder piece, the arms are tile spacers and so are the shoulder armor plates. Both have paper skirts that flare out a bit representing the bottom of the chainmail shirts they are wearing.
I'm really happy with both figure's hair, though, especially the dwarf. I wanted it to be more "flowing" like she was in mid swing, and I'm pretty happy with the results. The paper can be hard to "tame," but like anything else, the more I work with it the better the results get. There is a slight variation on the halfling figure for the feet. If I left the tile spacer full thickness, it made the halfling too tall; she would have been as tall as the dwarf. So I split the feet in half (which wasn't easy, but it wasn't too bad) to make her a little shorter. This is actually easier to see in the last picture below.
The back of the figures is usually boring and this is no exception, but I wanted to show the figures from both sides.
And here are the three possible B/X female adventurers, a dwarf, elf, and halfling, ready for adventure! When I get another female fighter done, I'll post a picture of the "boxed set" 8-figure version of these female adventurers, with one of each B/X class except for the fighter which will have two figures ... because you can't have too many fighter figures!
Wow! Those characters are fantastic. Posted to DM Scotty's.
ReplyDeleteWould love to see what beads you used.
ReplyDeleteThanks very much Dale, I appreciate it!
ReplyDeleteHi Lovitticus, all three of these miniatures at least for the head use a 1/2" round bead. For the halfling (on the right) her body is a oval bead, I think about 3/4" in length (I need to measure it to be sure but I think that's right). The dwarf (on the left) I can't remember what her body is, I think it's two tapered flat head plugs, probably a larger 1/2" one, and then for "legs" a smaller 1/4" one. It's hard to see because she has a paper "skirt" covering up where the two plugs join together. For the elf (middle) her entire body is a 7/8" shaker peg with the bottom cut off (the part that would plug into a hole in furniture). All of them have tile spacer arms and feet. The shoulder armor pieces, as well as the breast pieces for the dwarf, are all tile spacers I cut to the shapes I wanted. Hair, cloaks, skirts, etc. are all regular printer paper that I cut to shape and glued on with white glue. Honestly, most of the "illusion" of these figures is done with the sharp contrasting colors for the paint job. I forgot to add eyebrows to the female dwarf, but I actually think she looks better and more vicious without them.