Mad Max

For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel they were nothing. They'd built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked, but nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. Cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men. On the roads it was a white-line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed.

– The Road Warrior

I think that the Stranger and the dog Max (Warlands ABGWL021) produced by Aberant Game is the only expy of Max Rockatansky in the 20mm world.

The Stranger is true 20mm, while the dog is enormously oversized.

To bring Max up to size, I lengthened both his torso and his legs. I felt the torso (or perhaps the jacket) looked too short, and needed modification to look proportional.

While I was at it, I fixed his hair a bit, added a leg brace, and switched the boot knife on his left to the right.

The right sleeve of Max's jacket is missing in the movie, but it would have been too much effort to modify the miniature. I'll just say he's wearing a long sleeved shirt under the jacket like he did in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

I probably should have smoothed out the sculpted eyes of the figure, but since I didn't, I had to paint them. Because of this, he is somewhat bug-eyed in close-up.

Max accompanied by a 15mm dog from Peter Pig.

Blink Dogs

"These brown and yellowish creatures are as intelligent as normal humans and have a fairly complex language consisting of barks, yaps, whines, and growls. They are also able to use a limited form of teleportation (the blink)."

– Advanced D&D Monster Manual

The Blink Dog has often been described as a monster that is unique to D&D, but I know I'm not the only one who has observed the high degree of similarity between the Blink Dog and the Jeep.

The Jeep (despite its odd appearance), is described as a magical dog with the ability to disappear from one place and appear in another. Jeeps were yellowish with brown spots, intelligent, and spoke in a language consisting of "jeeps". Both the Blink Dog and the Jeep have been described as "African dogs".

I always pictured Blink Dogs as the terrier-like dogs from the Trampier illustration in the Dungeon Masters Guide, rather than the badger-headed Tom Wham Blink Dog from the Monster Manual, or the lynx-eared versions from D&D 3.5.

There have been a few Blink Dog miniatures, typically described as Wink Dogs (I'm guessing due to legal reasons), but the only ones that I have are Grenadier Blinc Dogs (Monster Manuscript Vol.I 1501, MM6).

Of the various miniatures, these are the ones that I think look closest to how I envision a Blink Dog, but even so, I saw Blink Dogs as being rather small, like Jeeps, rather than 3' at the shoulder.

Because of this, I decided to use 15mm dogs from Peter Pig as Blink Dogs. The first two dogs come from their PBI line (Range 8 #526), while the dog with handler is from The Men of Company B line (Range 1 #55).

I modified the tails, and made some other alterations so that the dogs would all be a little different from each other. I used Kneadatite to make the small tuft at the end of the tail for one of the dogs, but it was rather time consuming to get it to stick to the tail and look right, so on other dogs I just put a blob of CA glue on the end of the tail.

Here are some of the dogs painted up. They look a bit like dog-headed lion cubs because of the spots and the tail, but I think they turned out pretty nicely.

Gartenzwerg

Popularized in Germany during the 19th century, the garden gnome has become a common fixture in many gardens around the world. The gnomish lifestyle was revealed in Wil Huygen's 1977 New York Times bestseller Gnomes, while gnomish travelling habits were briefly touched upon in the 2001 movie Amélie. The garden gnome should not be confused with the typical D&D variety of gnome, who is more of a smaller (sometimes beardless) dwarf.

There are a handful of garden gnomes in various scales, but I get the feeling that most of them are too big for use in 1/72 fantasy. This leaves us with 15mm miniatures, and two companies make garden gnomes in this size - Peter Pig, and Splintered Light Miniatures.

Below is a comparison of 15mm gnomes. The first two gnomes are from the SLM Gnome Snail Battle Wagon set (GNOM06), while the next six are from the Peter Pig War in the Age of Magic line (Range 19). From left to right they are are a Gnome with Fishing Rod (WAM56), a Gnome Throwing a Rock (WAM57), and four figures from the Gnome Command set (WAM58). The final figure is a Gnome Baby from Lance & Laser (00156) now available from Armorcast.


The SLM gnomes are slightly taller than the Peter Pig gnomes, but they still match up very nicely. The gnome baby is about half the size of the other gnomes, and sits between two mushrooms (one with a frog perched on top). All of the gnomes will have to be glued onto washers, as the bases are rather small.