Plastic Miniatures on a budget - part 2: Humans

So many choices, so little time!

Oh boy. Where to start?

Obviously enough, you're spoilt rotten if you go raiding the wargames world for plastic humans. Half the fun here is deciding how your various cultures map to real-world cultures, if they do. I've restricted myself to Ancient through to Mediaeval figures for now.

It is also worth noting that a lot of the manufacturers listed below will sell you single sprues around the £5-7 mark. And if they don't, there is a thriving secondary market for them on eBay.

• Gripping Beast do a great range of historical figures for £22 a box
• for classic unarmoured types, there are Dark Age Warriors - 40 figures with tunic, leggings and bare (usually bearded) heads with a variety of weapons and shields. There's also a box of 30 Archers, similarly dressed, and some Dark Ages, Late Roman and Goth cavalry (12 to a box).
• if you're looking for chainmail-wearing types (I am, as plate is rare in Altrion) you're spoilt for choice, with boxes of Saxon, Viking and Late Roman/Byzantine figures, depending on what armour, helmets and shield shapes take your fancy. They also do a box of Late Roman heavy cavalry.
• if you want desert-dwelling types, there are three boxes of Crusades-era Arab troops, a combo box of spearmen and archers, and boxes of light and heavy cavalry.
• Northstar do six boxes for the Frostgrave game, Soldiers, female Soldiers (the Soldiers II

  

  Night's Watch foot. Frostgrave soldiers
  and barbarians, and some Fireforge foot
  Sergeants, and some resin cast cloaks a
  friend had kicking around. Lots of head
  and arm swaps - many heads are actually
  from Gripping Beast Dark Ages Warriors.

  box), Cultists and Barbarians,. as well as two boxes of Wizards (male and female). The non-wizards each contain 20 figures for around £20, the wizards 8 for £15, and in all cases contain way more arms, weapons and heads (and familiars!) than you'll need. Usefully, the heads and arms can be a direct swap with the Gripping Beast range, and several others.
• Conquest Games do a range of figures, including Norman foot and knights, and Mediaeval archers and knights. They're again £20 a box, and the cavalry are excellent value with 16 to the box. Same or similar head design as GB and Northstar, which bodes well for hacking. 
• Warlord Games. Where to start! Imperial Romans, Celts, Britons, Greeks, Saxons, Vikings.... most boxes are around £20. Warlord's heads are a mix - if the figures were originally from the Wargames Factory ranges (Celts, Caesar's Legions, Saxons, Vikings particularly) they bought, they're a different design, but I think anything sculpted by Warlord is the same head design (the dimple between the shoulders) as everyone else and you can mix and match to taste.
• Victrix Limited. Again, loads and loads of stuff from Greek to Saxon and Norman. Typically more expensive (£37.50), but with up to 60 figures in a box, if you happen to need a large army to go up against your PCs. Again, look for single sprue deals. Different head design to everyone else, I think.
• Perry Miniatures. Some of the nicest sculpts by far (the Perry twins are legends in the hobby): we're also moving into the later mediaeval, as their range of useful stuff is mostly of War of The Roses and Hundred Years War figures. They also do some Mahdist Sudanese, who would make excellent native tribesmen. Typically £20 a box, 40 figures for foot, 12 cavalry. Same head design as nearly everyone else.

  

  Night's Watch cavalry, made up from
  a mix of Fireforge mounted Sergeants,
  with arms from their mediaeval archers
  set and more GB heads.

• Fireforge Games. Lots of choice for the later mediaeval type - if you like classic knights in armour with surcoats etc their Templar and Teutonic Knights in their Mediaeval range, and the Knights of Albion in their Forgotten World range, are brilliant (they also do a box of four pegasus-mounted knights). Also in the Forgotten World are their Northern Kingdom range, sort of Vikings but wearing quilted armour. Same heads as Victrix, I think.
• Mantic Games. Again,. a lot of choice here - these are largely ranges for the Kings Of War game, and they have two notable 'human' races, the Basileans, who are very much 'fantasy knights' (including some female warriors, and cavalry riding panthers!) and the Northern Alliance, who are barbarian types wrapped up well in furs. Boxes are around £20 for 20 foot, but be aware that Mantic are a law unto themselves when it comes to figure design so a) you won't be able to interconvert with anyone else without some cutting and applying green stuff, and b) some of their figure sets are made of an odd resin/plastic combo which defies normal plastic glue :D
• Oathmark is a mass fantasy game by Osprey, with figures produced through Northstar, but it's a sufficiently separate range I thought I'd list it separately. The one human unit so far is £25 for thirty medium armoured quasi-mediaeval figures which do look different to most of the others: largely studded armour and square shields. Being Northstar, they have the standard dimple between the shoulders to accept the head, so swap away!
• Shieldwolf Miniatures ran a Kickstarter for a range of female shieldmaiden infantry/rangers and paladins in hard plastic a few years ago. They seem to be a bit hard to come by, but are available on eBay for around £25-30 for a box of 20. Marks for being predominantly sensibly armoured (like the Frostgrave soldiers, and despite what the original KS art showed), but they do have a somewhat different way of fitting together - it does look like you should be able to swap heads with the Frostgrave ones with a little bit of filing, which given the range has some brilliant helmetless heads with windblown hair, might be useful. Watch out if buying single sprues as the heads are all on one of the two different sprues for the shieldmaidens. I'm grabbing a box for my world's White Company right now.
• Games Workshop. Kind of the elephant in the room here: with the change to Age of Sigmar being a skirmish game, there are fewer unit boxes available, and they tend to be wince-inducingly pricey. Their Bretonnians from Warhammer Fantasy Battles are good fantasy humans, but even the eBay secondary market for sprues suffers from hugely inflated prices (£99 for 12 figures? C'mon!)
• Zvezda Ring of Rule series. Long out of print, but they used to do a box of nine female figures on pegasi, which I would love to get my hands on, if anyone has one! (Edit: Amazon.DE has some in stock for a not-unreasonable price (£26 including postage).
• HAT do a range of 28mm sets: most of what are useful to us are based on the El Cid era in Spain. They are, if I recall, soft polythene (like old Airfix figures) so take a bit of persuading to hold paint (I suggest brushing on a coat of PVA first and let it dry), and they are somewhat spindly and a little undersized compared to most of the above.
• CMON A Song Of Ice And Fire miniatures game. These are technically 32mm: a wide range of different looking fantasy human figures. Most useful for our purposes are the expansion boxes, which are £25-30, and contain 12 figures in two different poses, typically. Worth a look if they fill a needed gap, but on the pricey end. 

There you have it. Next up, humanoids - elves, dwarves, goblins. Probably a lot of the same manufacturers again, in fact :D

A side note - I am aware that quite a few of these manufacturers, and others, do metal miniatures. I'm going to cover the best of those in another series. 

Plastic miniatures on a budget - part 1: introduction

A very hastily painted set of just-about
tabletop standard (if you don't look too
 hard) Northstar Frostgrave cultists, as
acolytes of the cult of Bhelashara in
my campaign - I will be touching them
 up later, but in my defence they arrived
90 minutes before the session started!

I am, as I've mentioned in the past, a wargamer and also something of a railway modeller as well as a roleplayer. I do get a bit of a kick out of noticing the difference between the hobbies in various areas (wargamers' approach to scenery vs. how railway modellers do the same, for example - us wargamers have things to learn there!).

When it comes to figures, I find it fascinating how much people seem to be willing to pay, not just for 'hero' figures (which I can kind of understand, especially if you want something to represent a particular character) but also for the things you need bunches of, like town guards, cultists, orcs, skeletons etc. Now admittedly, some of the attraction for that is that (in the case of the Icons of The Realms and Pathfinder ranges that WizKids do) is that they're prepainted, but trust me when I tell you that you can do as well as the average WizKids paint job for not much effort bar a steady hand. That's another thread for later (my wargaming friends would laugh at me presuming to teach painting, as I freely admit to being rubbish, but): there are a lot of techniques around that side of the hobby that make 'tabletop standard' figures a piece of cake, even for near-sighted me. And as a friend of mine with whom I used to podcast often said, "It's just a token". Yes, people will look at them when you first pop them on the table, but as long as they look the part from 2' away. that's all that will really matter once people get stuck into the combat.

I dunno about you, but I find myself quite often throwing a bunch of various similar mooks at a party, and paying however much to WizKids to guarantee to get (say) five matching guards or picking them up on eBay gets pricey. With that in mind, what we're looking at in this series is ways of sidestepping to the wargames side of things to get a bunch of near identical figures on a budget. There are a considerable number of manufacturers out there who do boxed sets of 20-30 multi-pose/multi-part miniatures for around the £20/US$30 or less mark. Ranges are both historical and fantasy, but don't turn your nose up at the historical - lots of Dark Ages and Arab figures, as well as armoured knights and the like, will make great guards or bandits.

The other great advantage you will get is that not only are they multi-pose, but you can do head/arm swaps within (and sometimes outside of) a manufacturer's range. My Dark Ages British wargames force, for example, has warriors made up with arms and bodies from one box, heads from one of two depending on whether I want them helmeted, and shields from another. There are, actually, only about three ways of attaching a figure's head to its body, and there's quite a bit of commonality of design between manufacturers, especially if they use the same sculptor or duplication service (here in the UK, a lot of companies use Renedra, and that seems to make heads particularly very interchangeable).

One other note - scale. You'll see most wargames figures described as 28mm. This can be very variable, but technically that's from the top of the base to the eye (thus allowing for silly headgear). Now, some manufacturers do have interesting ideas of how big a millimetre is, but in general, 28mm wargames figures will match up to heroic minis: they might look a little small (my Tom Meier-scultped Jon Snow from Dark Sword's George RR Martin Masterworks range does tower 3 or 4 mm above the rest of my (Northstar and Fireforge) Night's Watch army), but they're going to be close enough. And yes, I know, you might not use all the box. But even so....

Next up: plastic humans of all kinds.