Archive for the ‘Dinosaurs’ Category

Some bad news about Dazed Miniatures – the range is being withdrawn from sale. The silver lining is a 30% off sale to clear the remaining stock.

All that the story on the RLBPS web site says is:

Dazed Miniatures was a partnership and it has been been ended by one partner (the Sculpter) withdrawing the licence to produce any of the figures we made. RLBPS still owns the molds but can not run them.

I wonder what it is with Richard Deasey’s lines? He sculpted the second half of the the HLBS prehistoric line and then took it away to found DZ Miniatures, which vanished soon afterwards. The mammals, but not the dinosaurs, reappearing years later from Strategem/Trent Miniatures whose own tribulations made getting hold of them sometimes frustrating (but they are currently available via North Star). And now this. Is there any chance that some of the best prehistoric miniatures will be available from a stable supplier (one with a working e-commerce facility would be really nice)?

In the mean time I need to work out how much I splurge on miniature mammoths, etc., taking Christmas, moving house and exchange rates into consideration. Couldn’t be a worse time for a closing down sale.


Wargames Foundry Terror Bird

I’ve been updating my Dinosaurs in Miniature pages. The main differences have been the addition of the MegaMiniatures megafauna that I posted about previously, the continuing expansion of the Dazed Miniatures range and some new miniatures from Wargames Foundry, including the Terror Bird shown here.

BTW, Foundry have a 20% off sale until the 10th November 2009. So now’s a very good time to pick up these new goodies.

At SELWG last month I picked up a “new” Smilodon from the “old” DZ range sold by Trent Miniatures. It’s in a walking pose rather than the leaping pose that’s been available for a while. This range is now available over the web from North Star though this additional Smilodon isn’t listed.

There have also been a few additions to the 10mm DinoMight range form Magister Militum.

MY Miniatures ice age range seems to have melted away from the web with the close of Geocities. Does anyone know if they have a new web site elsewhere?

And finally, the Tusk rules are available as PDF via Wessex Games/Wargame Vault. You can still buy the paper version from Irregular but the new version has full colour photos throughout.

I am currently growing a moustache as all big game hunters should.

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Chalicotherium from Mega MiniaturesMega Miniatures have enhanced their extensive range of animal miniatures with some prehistoric mammals – a Doedicurus, a Diprotodon and best of all a Chalicotherium.

I’ve been fascinated by Chalicotheres ever since I saw them on Walking with Beasts but up to now the only miniature representation has been the 1/72 scale David Krentz version, which whilst a better sculpt is small and pricey. So big kudos to Mega for bringing one of my favourite animals to life.


Last night I went to the opening London performance of Walking with Dinosaurs, you can read my write up on the Visit London Blog.

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At work, we’ve been doing Desert Island Discs and this week is my turn. I’ll be buggered if I’m writing all this lot up and not turning it into a blog post.

I win. No seriously, I win this game because I have had a theme tune written for me. Well, technically it was written for my blog, oh okay, it was inspired by the name of my blog. What? This isn’t a contest and I can’t win? Oh. Sorry.

According to my mother my first musical experience was dancing (or being danced, as I was baby at the time) round the room to T Rex. Was I too young to be influenced by this? Or did it somehow generate an interest in dinosaurs rather than glam rock? Lucky escape.

Adam and the Ants – Stand and Deliver

I was torn between a classic Ants track or something from his later albums. In the end memories of Saturday morning’s spent watching this video on Multi-Coloured Swap Shop won the day (but if you’ve only heard his old material check out the 1995 album “Wonderful”).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPgHbt0ODr4

Drill Queen – Born Depressed

Justin is an information architect with whom I worked on several projects; he also played guitar for Drill Queen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRrq6zp2_M8

Traveling Wilburys – Tweeter and the Monkey Man

Just about the only bits of vinyl from my dad’s music collection that I copied to tape, and one of the few bands that Lettice and I both love. It looks like the record label have been at YouTube so we’re lucky to find this animation:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2cb4t_tweeter-and-the-monkey-man_creation

Moxy Früvous – My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors

Moxy Früvous were a cool, funny, somewhat cheesey Canadian band who I was introduced to via two friends at university. If you saw the groaning bookshelves in our flat you’d know why this song always makes me smile.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9F_XHb81N0

Cerys Matthews – Oxygen

I can’t sing. I really can’t sing. Neither can my brother, though as churchgoer he makes up with gusto for what he lacks in aptitude. Clearly we got our singing genes from the English or Swedish parts of our family not the Welsh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPqaPHTlhdg

Pulp – Mis-shapes

The end of the summer of 1995. On the news it’s Blur vs Oasis. But, before Blair, there was a much better third way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7rxAeF1wmQ

Aziza Mustafa Zadeh – Ay Dilber
Stiff Little Fingers – Tin Soldiers

Hands up who wanted (or even expected) to hear some Azerbaijani Jazz today? Well, you’re out of luck as I can’t find it anywhere on the web. So have some classic punk instead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl5V26oXHUI

Tanita Tikaram – And I Think Of You

The reason I’m here. Sort of. I created my first home page in 1995 (personal home pages, remember them? Like Facebook profiles but you had to do all the work yourself) and wanted to do a bit more. So looking around the nascent web for the various artists I liked I spotted that Tanita didn’t have any fan pages dedicated to her. The resulting site helped to get me my first job at a web design agency.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9bphQpCLNA

Book

Assuming I’m going to be here for a while then I want something fairly long. An old favourite or something I’ve never gotten around to? I think I’ll go for the latter and take Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography to remind myself of home.

Luxury Item

A brewing kit. Let’s see which of the fruit on the island makes the best booze.


Look what my wife made me for (indeed, on) St Valentine’s day.


Who says you can’t polish a turd?

With apologies to aecurtis on Frothers for nicking his gag

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Hey kids, the latest craze is to stack your (toy) animals. Well it keeps us off the streets…


Starting in 15mm, Splintered Light Miniatures have a range of animals including terror birds, wolves, boars, komodo dragons and others. Oh, and Giant Weasels.

Gary Hunt Miniatures Feathered RaptorIn 28mm, the beastie featured here is one of two packs available from Gary Hunt Miniatures in New Zealand (but priced in US Dollars). Very drool worthy.

Moving onto cavemen. No web site yet for Forge of Ice, but see TMP for details of their Primitive Tents.

And finally, if dino fans put their money where their mouth is then Wargames Fcatory may create some plastic figures for us, on the suggestions list so far are Tyrannosaurus Rex and Small Carnivorous Dinosaurs. I think I may do a little research and suggest a small herbivores pack to give those meat eaters something to chase other than foolhardy time travellers.


I promised you some dinosaurs, so here we go. For quite a long time my Dinosaurs in Miniature page has contained the line Rules (coming soon) so I figure why not do something about that? As this blogging every day thing is very taxing, I’m presenting a skeleton list here and asking you good people to help me flesh it out. What am I missing? What have I got wrong? I’m only after more or less professionally published rules here.

Wargames focussed mainly on prehistorics

Wargames that feature prehistorics

RPGs focussed mainly on prehistorics

RPGs that feature prehistorics

  • Over the years various Monster Manuals for various games have included all sorts of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts.
  • Volume III of Marcus Rowland’s3 Forgotten Futures concentrates on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger novels including The Lost World.
  • One of the best known scenarios of all time, The Isle of Dread for D&D featured prehistoric creatures heavily.
  • Blackdirge Publishing produce a series of D20 system PDFs under the banner Animal Archives: Prehistoric Animals
  • Phoenix Command – the favourite game of gun crazy maths nerds features stats for Dinosaurs in its Phoenix Command Expansion expansion.
  • Dark Continent – a few cryptids like the Nandi Bear make an appearance and there may be something much bigger lurking as well…

[1][2][3] Tooth & Claw is a miniatures from Chris Peers, a prehistoric RPG from Memento Mori Theatricks and a dragon based RPG from Marcus Rowland.


And look what I picked up on eBay a little while ago. It was advertised as being from HLBS and by a process of elimination (i.e. what I don’t already own) must be their Utahraptor figure.