Tuesday, September 24, 2013

On Halloween toys and dollar stores

Welcome readers of Sean's Wargames Corner, and thanks to Sean for his kind endorsement! If you haven't noticed, there are some subscription widgets at the bottom of this page; take advantage of them if that's your thing, or just keep coming back for more on cheap fantasy miniature gaming.

It's Halloween season, at least as far as our retail stores are concerned, and for the cheap fantasy miniaturist, that means bags and bags of outstandingly cheap toy critters for use as fantasy miniatures. Lots of plastic bugs and other creepy beasties can be had for very little at all kinds of stores. The color figures are from a bag of bugs I bought at a Spirit Halloween store last year, while the black plastic ones I just bought at a Dollar Tree.

Beetles, and a grasshopper and mantis.

A huge bat.

A somewhat smaller but still pretty large rat.

A lizard, snake, and centipede.

A housefly, bee, dragonfly, and wasp.

Scorpions. The smaller white figure is a Reaper Bones figures. All the Reaper bugs are about this size.

Spiders and an ant. The green spider is from the World of Warcraft board game.
While at the Dollar Tree, I also picked up these cheap Marvel action figures that I had my eye on. indigo777's clever giant conversions at the DM's Craft forum pushed me into making the purchase.

Speaking of dollar store finds, in addition to indigo777's great work, I also dug these cool beastman conversions featured at Irrational Number Line Games, using cheap dollar store animal toys and some Warhammer bits. INL has lots of other nifty cheap mini projects in their Idea Archive.

2 comments:

  1. You're welcome 1Mac. Now I need to check out INL.

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  2. My friend Lawrence Schick, (who later worked for TSR) would spend a half hour at the various store gum machines getting rubber bugs and such to use in D&D campaigns. This was in the VERY early days. Things have really changed.

    ReplyDelete