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Bones in the Closet

No painting in this post, I am sorry to say. Just an update. I have been still having trouble with CF so the painting is slow going but it is still going. 

Anyway, Reaper's Bones 3 Kickstarter is finished & I spent all of my budget on it but managed not to go over it. I am very happy I backed it & I cant wait to get the miniatures next year.  When my husband first found out about Bones 3 his response was "Do we really need more bones?" but once the kickstarter got going he was just as excited as I was & made it harder to stay in budget. I was tease, just a little for that. 

One of my favourite parts of the KS is the comment section, Reaper have such a great community within their fan base. We talked on painting tips and conversion tips and so many other things. Some of the backers were new to the miniature hobby & had lots of questions, including storage & what people use the miniature for. It got me thinking and I thought I would share a post on what we do. Hopefully its interesting to people and maybe even give a few people some ideas.

What we do with our Miniatures

Obviously painting is a big part of the hobby for me, but I think I would find less motivation to really continue with the hobby if we didn't have a use for the miniatures once they were painted. However, both my husband & I enjoy roleplaying (RP) games - Pathfinder mostly, but we are hoping to give Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) 5th edition a try soon. 

Pathfinder Session
(using unpainted miniatures - the horror!)
With RP games like Pathfinder, you don't need to use miniatures. I have come across players who have felt that it hindered immersion. However I have found, in my experience, that it does the exact opposite. During combat, it allows everyone to see whats going on and envisage the same thing. It can give a sense of scale. So this is what we use our miniatures for - though people should not feel limited by what we do. 

While I am on the subject of using miniatures for RP & immersion, I am looking into making some modular terrain based on DMGinfo & DMsCraft's system. So you may start seeing some posts on that, if it happens.

Storing Miniatures

There are plenty of different storage options out there and everyone needs to figure out what works for them and their budget. This is just what I do because it works for us & its reasonably affordable & space efficient. 

The first thing I do with our miniatures is sort them into categories. Including, but not limited too;
  • Melee PCs
  • Caster PCs
  • Orcs
  • Undead
  • kobolds/Goblins
  • etc
I have a bunch of different categories, and sometimes I need to break categories down further. For example, I think I need more PC (playable Characters) categories, so I am thinking of making it 'Ranged Casters', 'Melee Casters', 'Heavy Melee', 'Light Melee' as well as a separate section for 'Gnomes, Halflings & Dwarves'.

A couple of the sorted miniatures.
Inside storage box

Once I have them sorted, I put each group in its own labeled ziplock bag. This works well for unpainted miniatures particularly since we have limited storage & funds. However, I do get these affordable storage boxes, with adjustable dividers. All my painted miniatures are stored in these boxes and at some point I would like to have enough boxes for all my categories/miniatures. 

Labeled storage boxes.


If its not obvious, I love my label maker! I like that everything is labeled & easy to read & find. It makes it easy for the rare occasions where we play at some else's place to just quickly grab the bags/boxes we need.

This system works well for small and medium miniatures and I have seen a couple of boxes that would work for some of the large miniatures. But I am still figuring out what to do with the huge & up miniatures. (I am using the pathfinder system to categorize miniature size.)

Eventually I would like to have display cabinets for the huge & up categories. But that gets expensive & I don't really have the space in our current home. That is more of a 'one day' dream. 

Hopefully this was interesting and maybe even helpful to people. I always like seeing how others store their miniatures. 

1 comment:

  1. I recognise those boxes! I agree that the minis add to the immersion, especially during combat, as it can be quite difficult to visualise what is happening without good references to where everyone is and wants to be. I think it would be too difficult without them.

    I don't think they're needed for RP purposes like exploring a town or something, though, but I don't know of anybody who would use them for that

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