There's your new character miniature, sitting on the table, looking awesome, for all to see. Except, there's nothing else on the table. While everyone picks up your miniature to admire its good looks, somehow it just doesn't look that great on the table. Sure, some of your friends have their own miniatures, but they're... well... bare metal. Even if you got the rest of them painted, the table would still look pretty bare. Sure, you have a battle map of sorts on the table and your buddies legos to construct a few quick things to represent some stuff, but as a whole... its really kind of disappointing. Your one lone miniature is the one diamond in the rough. Well, we're going to change that. First things first, though, let's start with the other miniatures.
Helping your Friends Catch Up
Well, there are a few ways to go about this, but let's cover the two basic options first: paint them yourself, or teach your friends to paint. You have already made the leap by buying some basic brushes, primer, paint, varnish, and tools.
Painting miniatures for your friends can be a very nice deal. It gives you a chance to practice on more miniatures that you didn't have to pay for and it lets you try new things. Your friends will appreciate it, and the table will look the better for it. There's a good number of up-sides to this, but the down-side is that now you are the official painter of the group, and all subsequent games will require your services. While it may be fun for quite some time, you may get tired of it eventually. It just really depends. Personally, I kind of enjoy it, and not too many others at the table are all that interested in doing it. The nice part is that they go out and buy miniatures for me and are always patient in letting me get to them in my own way. When they finally get their character miniature, they enjoy them immensely, and I get to keep them in any case. Its a pretty good deal, really. One more person in the group also paints miniatures, and he takes care of some of them as well.
Teaching your friends to paint is a nice option, because the burden of getting the work done is now spread out some, and thus the work can get done more quickly. It just means you have to spend some time teaching someone what you've learned. The other nice thing about having fellow painters at the table is that it will create some friendly competition to improve, and people will try new things. If they discover something really neat, they can share, thus improving the ability of everyone who is painting. This is usually the best set up, as it gets more people involved and spreads the wealth a little.
How you deal with how the miniatures get done is up to you, but be sure to spread the burden somehow or some bad feelings can be involved. If you're the one buying, prepping, painting, and fixing all the miniatures all the time, it will get old. On the other hand, if the group pitches in, it will lighten your burden quite a bit, and its just fair to do so. At the very least, have people be involved by picking their own miniatures and picking up any parts you may need to make whatever conversion they might be asking for. If you feel the need, charge them for your service, but be wary... that can result in your just having no other painted miniatures in your group.
Now that we've started talking about money...
Its one thing to decide you want your character miniatures to look good. Its another to make the decision to do a lot of miniature presentation at the table. Some people just aren't interested in it. In that situation, its just polite to stick with the wishes of the group, but then we have nowhere to go, do we? So, let's assume your group is actually in with the whole miniatures thing. Of course, with lives and expenses of their own, no one wants to drop too much cash on it. You should come to an agreement with your group about how the whole thing is going to work and exactly how involved everyone wants to get. Its an easy investment to just do character miniatures and leave the rest to gummy bears and drawing on the map, that should be an easy sell. What about actually populating the table?
Well, that's where things can get a bit rough. How much detail do you want to go into? How many pieces will you need? Where do you get the stuff and how much is it going to cost? Whose going to make it all? There are a lot of questions besides these that need to be considered. Its all going to depend on what kind of a group you have as to whether or not this is a viable thing to do.
If you're mostly playing one genre, then it is a very simple matter of getting a large variety of things for that one genre. If you're the type of group that plays multiple genres, well, then, its a bit tougher. Part of the process can be very easy and cost effective, and other parts are going to be less so just because of the sheer volume you could be dealing with. To mitigate this, and maximize cost-effectiveness, we'll start by defining what we mean by populating the table and then breaking down the various items from most common amongst multiple genres to the more specific kind.
When I say populate the table, I really just mean setting up the scene: people, buildings, trees, mailboxes, and anything else that may be part of the particular scene you are trying to show. As a whole, groups tend to only do this when they're in combat rather than at every turn of the road, but those scenes are usually of the same types of environments anyway. To be able to do this, we're going to start with people as the most common from all genres.
There are always people. Civilians, player characters, villains, monsters, and so on and so forth. You could either find and paint miniatures for all of these if you wanted to, or even purchase pre-painted versions if they're available. There are a few companies doing pre-painted miniatures nowadays, the largest one being Wizards of the Coast with their various Clix lines of miniatures for fantasy, superheroes, star wars, etc. If you're more into the science fiction part of things, Rackham Miniatures has their AT-43 line of pre-painted miniatures as well. Those are the major ones I'm aware of, but there are more out there. Obviously, painting your own is a bit of fun we've already experienced, and the pre-painted ones can be re-painted to better suit your tastes.
On a more economic front, Interactive Design has a product line called Stand-Ins that are printable characters for a couple of genres, including various types of generic figures, as does Steve jackson Games. These make for a nice and simple purchase to fulfill people needs. I'm sure there are more out there, but I haven't found them in my brief searches, as I'm more of a fan of the actual miniatures, myself. These cardboard pieces are nice, though, and are great to represent a lot of stuff for fairly cheap. If you can draw or even use graphics of your own, I'm sure it isn't too hard to make your own as well. All you need is a printer.
With all the people and monsters and such fit in, the next level of populating the table would be what I would call "incidentals," or various filler items likes crates, trees, rocks, tables and the like. Just putting in this sort of thing can make a combat seem much more lively. The best thing to do for this is to simply make them yourself, but we'll cover that in a future article. For now, there are a lot of great books out there on how to make that sort of thing. Games Workshop produces a couple of terrain making books like How to Make Wargames Terrain and a few others. If you look around on amazon or otherwise for Wargames Terrain, you'll find other books as well. Its a pretty common subject for wargames and for model trains. Take a look around. Also, websites like Terragenesis has some examples and explanations on it as well.
The final thing you would put together for a complete scenery set would be the actual buildings, streets, and larger set pieces. You can source various toys and what-not, of course, but there are also two other alternatives that I'm aware of that will fulfill your need for these and your incidentals: card and resin. Card terrain has a wide variety of items that you can print right on your printer or take to a local print shop. They come in color or black & white if you feel the need to color them yourself. Some kits are actual physical products that are already printed and put on card stock, which is nice when you'd like to keep it as simple as possible. Resin pieces usually come as a single piece that requires painting. Using the same techniques to paint a figure, it is a simple task to paint these terrain pieces. Drybrushing and washing are your friend in this case, typically.
Shopping Time Again...
Here follows a list of various resources for your incidentals and scenery parts. I'll include a brief description of what I found there. This is by no means comprehensive, but the result of sifting through some of my stuff and searching the web. Another good source is your local shop, who probably has some of this stuff if they sell any wargames. Following this list will be a few "tricks" to pick up some suitable stuff from some more unlikely places.
For trees, bushes, and other natural structures I recommend checking out Woodland Scenics which can usually be found in any hobby shop, especially those selling model trains.
Miniature Games has a lot of cardboard models for terrain and set pieces that are actually pretty impressive. They also have some generic figures. I am particularly impressed with the look of their trees. It looks to be some very nice stuff.
Steve jackson Games has cardboard people and playing surfaces. Its a bit limited, but it looks pretty good.
Wizards of the Coast has a nice free archive ofcardboard buildings and accessories that looked very impressive. Check it out. How can you beat free?
I believe this is a personal website, but it offers several free printouts for various things. Its called Billy's Shed and it has some stuff that is worth downloading. Again, its free.
How to make a World Works Games is a truly impressive site, its pretty amazing what these guys have come up with just using a printer, and its cheap to buy the downloads to print over and over again. Even if you think paper models are dumb, check this out, it may change your mind.
Model Castles for your fantasy or medieval games. Looks to be based on real castles.
RPGnow.com and drivethroughrpg.com have a multitude of cardboard downloads.
Forgeworld for a lot of resin stuff. Prices vary all over the place depending on size and complexity, but there is definitely some nice stuff.
Armorcast, a resin maker for quite some time has some nice pieces. It looks to be changing ownership, which should probably be done by the time this is read.
Arrow Miniatures is another maker of resin terrain, at a reasonable price. A multi-genre source of pieces.
Battlefield Terrain has more historical pieces, but they are usable and reasonably priced.
War Zone has foam hills, rock formations and the like.
Grendel has quite a bit of resin stuff, not bad.
Kobblestones has some accessories at a reasonable price, but they are more set up for diorama style setups and thus can be a bit pricey. However, they do have some nice accessory pieces at a reasonable price.
Show me the MONEY!
All right, back to the money thing... obviously, there's a LOT of stuff out there. I've tried to list mostly the kinds of items you can pick up for cheap. Obviously, its easy to get carried away and spend way over your head. Keep to a budget. Get your group to pitch in. Probably best if you coordinate something with the whoever is running your game to have a set piece that will be part of the next session. Get it, make it nice or print it up and fold it nicely, and bring it in and use it. Impress them with how neat that was, and set them up with the plan... everyone pitches in a few dollars a week/month/year and pretty quickly a nice group of pieces can accumulate that can be used in games over and over again in different configurations, colors, and otherwise. The group owns it, cherishes it, and enjoys it. To sound like one of those commercials for helping the children in [fill in the blank], it just takes a few cents a day to provide so much... or just buy it yourself, keep it for yourself, and whip it out for your own.
I can't really tell you how to spend your money or how to deal with the dynamics of your group in doing all this... but I can say this: if your group is committed to the idea of making your gaming table look nicer, to having a little something to spice it up a bit, this is a nice and simple way that costs very little money to get going. Just a little effort can go a long way. Use that as a way of convincing them to help. It shouldn't be too hard to solicit a dollar or two at a decent interval.
The most efficient way to make your scene look better without spending a ton of cash is to simply use pieces that show up just about anywhere in the worlds you play. Trees and hills are always good, as are most natural things, as they nearly always show up in most any genre. If playing an urban game, use trash cans, dumpsters, toy cars, benches, road signs, little crumpled scraps of paper or small pieces of candy wrapper for trash. Even cutting up cardboard and taping/gluing a brick pattern onto it adds a lot. Use a drawing program and have a grey background (black takes a lot of ink for us inkjet users). Now draw on the yellow and/or white lines of a street. Print them and lay them down for roads. For a more fantasy setting: rock walls, carts, simple cardboard buildings, dead dry grass strewn about and the like.
A good source of various basic accouterments of life is a store that caters to the model train hobby. They have lots of stuff, you'd really be amazed at some of it. Even more surprisingly, find a store like "Frank's" where they sell those village sets. When they go on sale, you can get some great bargains. I once bought a working stone fountain for like $15, some street lamps that worked, rolls of cobbled paths, street signs, and all sorts of stuff for somewhere around $50 for the whole shebang and I came away with a couple of bags full of the stuff. Great stuff for fantasy or even a rustic setting.
What's the other option?
In the next article, I'll cover a bit about making your own set pieces. That will take us from buying items to making items, which just adds to the whole hobby aspect of it all. So, until then, I look forward to hearing any comments and will address any questions you may have in the forums. Just remember that there is a lot of stuff out there, so go ahead and search on your own. Since writing this article, I've found several more sources. Have fun, enjoy it; I hope your table looks really nice and inspires your play.
