I've always had somewhat of an off-and-on passion when it comes to miniatures. I've never really used them for my games - collecting and painting miniatures is an awful lot of setup, especially when you factor terrain and scenery into the equation, and (to riff on my last post) I fear that visual representations on the gaming table can influence the imaginations of my players more than I would like. Couple that with the fact that my regular gaming group is spread over multiple states and I handle everything over Skype chats anyway, I find it easier and more streamlined to just go with the theater of the mind.
At the same time, I've always liked the little bastards. Just to have them, and paint them, and to look at them for their own sake. Maybe even play a skirmish wargame once in a while. They aren't (or at least shouldn't be) necessary, but minis are fun.
Since moving into my new house, I've been getting everything unpacked and reassessing what I have. That includes going through my old, mostly unpainted collection of minis I've had for years, always hoping to do something with but never really getting there. I've been looking more into games like Planet 28 lately, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to sort through my collection and see what I could make of them.
What immediately struck me was that, when I was at my peak of miniature collecting, I was very much the kind of person who collected things I thought were cool, rather than trying to build a certain army.
There's a lot of Reaper fantasy monsters, mixed in with some Warhammer Fantasy monstrous types, and even a few packs of the old Chainmail range from when Wizards of the Coast briefly wanted to get into the metal miniature business. An ogre, a dire boar, plenty of lizardmen (of various sizes), a bunch of orcs, quite a few skeletons and ghosts, a handful of Skaven, some barbarians...
Wait a minute. I'm sensing a pattern here. Maybe I can't make a cohesive army, but I do have a pretty decent random encounter table. Let's throw some of those things together, and see if I can write a dungeon around it.
1d20:
1. Dire boar
2. 1d8 orcs
3. 1d8 kobolds
4. Ogre
5. 1d2 myconids
6. 1d2 Rat Men
7. 1d8 goblins
8. 1d6 mummies
9. 2d8 spiders
10. 1d4-1 (minimum 1) lizardmen
11. 1d8 skeletons
12. 1d4 specters
13. Vampire
14. 1d4 wolves
15. Werewolf
16. 1d4 berserkers
17. Dragon (I haven't painted it yet. Let's say a red one)
18. 1d2 trolls
19. Death knight
20. Earth elemental
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| I also think the reason I like the myconids in Dark Souls so much is because they remind me of these old Reaper ones. |
Yeah, it probably looks pretty funhouse-ish right now, doesn't it? And quite unbalanced, but remember: not all random encounters need to lead to immediate combat. But that's where we start thinking about how we could make everything fit. And as we do, the seed of an entire dungeon starts to emerge.
Right now, there's two big themes I'm starting to realize with the monsters we're using. There's a lot of undead, and a lot of reptilian creatures (with the dragon, lizardmen, and kobolds). These could easily be grouped into their own factions. The vampire and the dragon sound like natural leaders for the two groups (the death knight could be a second in command to the vampire, or vice versa), and that raises the question of what they're doing in the same dungeon.
Maybe the vampire has set up a lair for his necromantic experiments, and it just so happened to be in a cavern already inhabited by the dragon. Perhaps he's trying to manipulate the dragon and his lizardman servants to his own ends, and to serve as extra muscle to keep out those pesky intruders who are getting suspicious as to who's taking all the dead bodies. Maybe he has some magic artifact or other precious treasure that he's bribing the dragon with, knowing the creature's greed. This way, smart players could exploit the factions by pitting them against each other - maybe they'll need to steal the treasure from the vampire to sway the dragon to their side! After all, those lizardmen could be useful allies, to say nothing of the dragon himself!
There's some other entries we could group into smaller factions too. The orcs, goblins, and maybe the ogre all seem like they could be allies. Maybe it's an independent tribe of Trollkin, or maybe it's more hired muscle being used by the vampire (which could make them jealous of the lizardmen if they feel they're being replaced - something that the players could win their allegiance over if they don't side with the dragon, since they probably will have a harder time doing that with skeletons). The dire boar could be a pet of the orcs, or just an independent monster. The myconids, spiders, Rat Men, trolls, and earth elemental would all most likely be random denizens of the dungeon. As for the berserkers, wolves, and werewolf, they could be independent too - but what sounds more fun to me is the thought that maybe this is a clan of wolf-worshiping barbarians, led by a werewolf! Maybe they're visiting a shrine somewhere in the dungeon, or raiding it for its riches or as a sort of initation ritual!
As you can see, there's a ton of ways that this seemingly random collection of creatures and characters can be made into something more cohesive. And like many instances of working within constraints, it can get the creative juices flowing to be given a set of incoherent, mismatched elements and to be forced to make them work. Already, I have the start of a dungeon that could last me plenty of sessions to come. And if I was the kind of person to use minis, I wouldn't even need to buy anything new for it!
I'd love to see other people try this exercise out. It's a great way to come up with dungeons and other scenarios that you might never have considered otherwise. Do you have a bunch of random miniatures laying around? Try making a random encounter table out of them, and let me know what you come up with!
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