Minatare Madness

 

Here I am at work trying to mind my own business and I have already had two members of staff pop in to show me photos of their favorite body parts. Now I stress that this has context and the body parts concerned are plastic and thoroughly attached to a number of other plastic body parts that comprise their roleplaying characters for physical representation during games. Oddly enough on the rare occasions that I have had to use token placeholders myself I have dug out some handy StarWars lego pieces that function very well for a spontaneous bit of game mechanics, but it is worth noting those for whom its a passion.

Akin to wood carving, there is something very relaxing about physically rendering ones own character in painstakingly glorious technicolor. In fact there is a burgeoning tech backed industry now with Heroforge offering full digital rendering from which your design can be printed and if your happy for them to do so they will print, paint and package as an all in one service. Its also worth noting that they can provide digital tokens for Roll20 like environments based on your design also but for those craving the personal touch, traditions have remained and as daylight fades into candle light, players hand detail their models as the hours slip away into the midnight oil and there would be a lot of midnight oils where entire armies are concerned.

Other than the physical need for counters and the haptic satisfaction of touching your own creation, psychologically its another route that the mind takes in order to manifest its imagination as well as a little escapism - akin to larping its about bringing someone you know into the real word and I suspect at the root of it may be a compulsion to create life. I haven't as yet met a roleplayer that has tried to reanimate a real cadaver either by using traditional lightening or more updated methods but it wouldn't surprise me if someone dragged one into the club. It also would surprise me if at least one of our members has already been through the reanimation process a several times already.