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Oswald's miniature |
| 2020-11-15 |
Oswald's miniature
Oswald is the rogue in our Beers and Dragons. He is equipped with a short bow and a dagger, possibly a Seax.
I don't want to paint minis, I don't want to carry expensive and inflexible realistic "terrain" pieces. Professor Dungeonmaster's Ultimate Dungeon Terrain concept is very interesting, it reminds me of Ryuutama's battlefield sheet. But I am using a vinyl sheet and dry markers, staying two dimensional for the terrain.
I'll write about my battle mat choice in a future post.
Chess terrain is two dimensional, but chess pieces conquer the z-axis. I love the tactile feeling when moving a pawn to challenge the center, I love holding the king's cross and castling. Using counters and coins is fine but a bit flat. I have a 3D printer and I wanted to involve it to build stuff for my hobby.
I could buy STL models for my figurines but they tend to be too fancy. I've read about people using chess pieces to play DnD, it is a nice idea. Red or green pawns for goblins, rooks and knights the adventuring party. I wanted some of the symbolism of the Chess pieces, but I ended up modelling a human body and using that doll to generate my own STL models.
I use OpenSCAD to model in 3D. I am a programmer by trade so this goes well with me. I edit the model .scad in Vim and I use OpenSCAD's viewer to look at the result in a nice, tight, feedback loop.
The resulting miniatures are monochrome but I can print them at will and I don't mind having people breaking them, I can iterate and print new, sturdier, versions. Those miniatures are good enough for our skirmish visualization needs, and our theater of the mind is not a disused ruin.
Back to Oswald's miniature. It's sporting the seax in the back and it stands casually with the bow at its foot. It has a sling bag, that doesn't match the current session where the adventure happens just a few miles from home. I need to give that miniature a quiver and arrows.
One thing for which I am striving with these miniatures is to avoid to print supports. So they stand in relaxed pauses and are easy to print in 20 to 30 minutes. I use a Prusa i3 mk3s printer with PLA, I don't want to use a resin printer.
You can view Oswald's miniature on Github. The source is visible as well.
