All about the minis

My RPG buddy John has said more than once that I am "all about the minis." And I guess I can't deny it: I have amassed a pretty significant collection of miniature figures for use in D&D or Pathfinder or whatnot.  As a DM, I have been accused of (and have not denied) designing encounters just so I could use some cool new minis. As I player, I have been known to replace the random and/or inappropriate figs the DM has placed on the board with (IMHO) better representations of the non-player characters. What can I tell you? Minis are fun.

So, I was visiting a friend recently and she asked if I wanted some minis. Of course I did - how can you have too many minis? - but I was nonplussed. My friend was a civilian, not a gamer, and had only played in one D&D campaign - a game I ran for three couples, all noobs. How did she come into minis that she was willing to give over to me?

She explained that she and a friend had gotten together to paint some minis as a project. I usually buy mass-produced colored plastic minis, but the tradition of buying lead, pewter, or other metal figures and painting your own goes way back and crosses over into war-gamers and history buffs in general. She and her pal had been approaching this merely from the crafting angle, wanting a precision painting exercise to work through.

I said sure, bring the minis on. Here's what she produced with a smile:

 

Wow. Little mice, dressed in politically incorrect, historically inaccurate, stereotypical Pilgrim and Indian Thanksgiving figures. I was stunned. Take a close look.

 Boy pilgrim mouse with blunderbuss.

 Girl pilgrim mouse with pumpkins.

Boy (?) Indian mouse with acorn.

(Raising the question of scale: 

if these creatures are mouse-sized, what's up with the pumpkins, 

and if they are human-sized, is that a gigantic acorn?)

I had to admit, the painting was done very well; nonetheless, these were not exactly the minis I was expecting. D&D usually features orcs, goblins, skeletons, zombies, and the like, and I'm not sure how these... characters... would fit in. I am so giving them to my current DM and demand that they show up in his grim 'n' gritty gameworld.

Actually, my friend did have another mini that she had painted which will fit fight in:

 

This murder of crows is totally cool. Notwithstanding the skeletal remains at the bottom, I can easily see using this as a swarm moving across the battle board.

So, thanks, Kristen!

Oh, and while we're on the subject of minis, here's the swag that was given out at Geek Girl Con for playing a D&D encounter:

That's an Ogre Pulverizer, don't you know.  I think I know who his next victims might be...

Funny, animals

My mind rolled around today to a somewhat geeky subject that I have been pondering on and off for some time, and that is the question of how to anthropomorphize animals in fiction. I'm not talking about literary style or descriptive language but of rules of internal logic.

This isn't a fully-formed idea yet, but it seems to me that like, say, time-travel, you need to have your system down before you build your little furry cultures and the stories that happen in them. I mean, you can approach time travel in a couple of different ways: that the past already happened and any attempt to change it is doomed to failure, or that when you change the past you create a new time-stream and a new reality. There are different variations and nuances, of course, but these two schemes seems to comprise the main divisions of that trope.

So, for anthropomorphic animals, it seems to me that we are also faced with a choice between two main categories. In one, prey animals are the human-like protagonists and predators are more like monsters; in the other, predators are the human-like protagonists and prey animals are, well, still animals.

In a story about a brave and noble band of deer making their way through the forest to a new grazing area under the guidance of a stalwart leader and a sage elder, the wolves might be demonic pursuers providing a constant threat. In a story about a bold and heroic pack of wolves on a quest under the guidance of a courageous leader and a scarred elder, the deer would be... deer?  I guess it's just hard for me to see how to make both the deer and the wolves people, since the one group routinely gets eaten by the other in a totally amoral, course-of-nature way. How could our wolf-warriors meet deer, negotiate with them, ask directions from them, and then eat them, without destroying the anthropomorphism?

It seems much the same in a household situation. If the mice are my characters, with little mice families and mice mayors and mice police and whatnot, the cat must be like a beast that lurks outside of town. But if my character is a philosopher-cat commenting on life from his windowsill lyceum, I don't know how to make mice the students that she just happens to occasionally devour.

Of course, this might be more about my limitations as a writer than the demands of logic. Aesop and Rudyard Kipling, of course, had talking animals that were still animals, but those stories were deliberately fabulous. If I recall correctly, in The Secret of NIMH, the owl is both a source of ancient wisdom and a predator; but Mrs. Brisby's interactions with him echo more to me the typical interactions between a hero and a dragon than a conversation between two people. And Brian Vaughn has lions and monkeys and deer all talking to each other even as some are eating the others in the great Pride of Baghdad, but that wasn't so much about anthropomorphizing animals as it was about animamorphizing the reader, I think.

So maybe what I am really talking about is a restriction I see on the construction of conventional genre stories using animal protagonists - when heroic fantasy or science fiction or picaresque adventure happens to feature people-like critters instead of people. The sort of rules-making that preoccupies me would certainly make it easier to write those stories, although it wouldn't necessarily make the stories any better. But I guess it wouldnt becessarily make them worse, either.

Remember, the Fantastic Mr. Fox ate chickens.