Mega Miniatures and the future of metals

Over the years, I have picked up a few of Mega Miniature's models from ebay or the online store.  The nostalgia value of their line is high for me, reissuing many figures from my D & D days in the 80s.  While primarily catering to the role player, many of their townspeople and animals add character and possibilities to a skirmish scenario.

Sadly, the business will be no more by the end of the year.  As of May 31st, the molds are in the process of being sold off, and the store is set to close at the end of the year.  Hopefully most of the line will find homes elsewhere, but in how many different stores or sites?

Last year, I purchased a number of dancers and servants from Mega Mini's "Arabian Fantasy" line to use as background for my Spain campaigns.  I had the idea to build a small emir's palace for El Cid to lay siege.  All I have completed so far are the walls and this small plaza.  It is made from foam board, craft store tiles and Hirst Art blocks.

The dancers and serving girls below are typical of the Mega Mini's line.  On the short side of the 28mm scale, but not quite as small as a true 25mm, they also lack the sharp detail of most modern productions.

As a comparison, the dancer in green in the photo above is a metal Reaper figure.  The Reaper figure is excellent - sharp, nicely proportioned. It's not without its faults, though - look at those man hands!

Speaking of Reaper, the Reaper Bones Kickstarter may have been the writing on the wall for Mega Minis and other producers of inexpensive metals.  Converting a line of high quality metals into inexpensive plastics will dramatically change the RPG miniature market, if a $3 million dollar Kickstarter is any indication.  While it will probably have little effect on the historical wargaming market in the short term, the market will probably push many manufacturers to go plastic on even more of their lines and cancel models or whole periods that are not worth the conversion costs.

Norse Women and Gunnar's Daughter

  Painting civillians is fun, but their usefulness in gaming is limited.  I intend to build and photograph some diorama scenes but that keeps getting delayed behind a pile of unpainted metal and plastic.  Anyway, here's two of Gripping Beast's female civillians sculpted and painted in Norse style clothing, probably as wives of well-off farmers.

Mega Minatures on Ebay sells a line of fantasy townsfolk.  Here's two that are being drafted into service as female thralls on a Norse farm.

From Gripping Beast, a higher born Norse woman, perhaps the wife of a jarl:

And here she is with a servant tending to her child:

     Finding a story about women in the Viking age is difficult. To be sure, there are plenty of Viking romance novels to be found, but there is little in that market that seems to have much substance.  A rarity is Gunnar's Daughter, the first published work (1909) by the future nobel prize winner Sigrid Undset, who was then only 26 years old.

Gunnar's Daughter is a fictional companion piece to the Icelandic sagas. Those sagas in particular, show how minor insults and altercations could spin out of control and turn into bloody feuds.  The lives of farmers, important landowners and their servants are the focus rather than the kings and lords of the Norwegian sagas.  Written in a faux saga style, a enough common affectation now, but probably pioneering for its time, Undset's novel is a hauntingly simple story.  Set in early eleventh century Norway, the daughter of a well-off landowner is raped by a suitor, forever changing both of their lives.  A single violent act perpetuates further violence, culminating almost twenty years later.  

     Like the sagas it emulates, the prose is stark; the physical environment is not ponderously described, and the action and conflict progresses quickly. While it is stylistically similar to the sagas, the thematic differences outnumber the similarities.  Women feature prominently in a number of the Icelandic sagas, but the impact of violence against them is rarely a central concern as it is in Gunnar's Daughter.  Complex and  riveting, Undset illustrates the high cost of love, honor, revenge and faith.

Gripping Beast miniatures purchased from Architects of War.

Gunnar's Daughter at Amazon.com