When Dice Were Made of Flint #12

Actually, it was a mixture of lead, tin, antimony, and bismuth, as I found out when I started at Games Workshop. But it was mostly lead. And that was okay because roleplaying gamers were mostly college age in the late 70s and early 80s.

The first miniatures I ever bought came from the Skytrex shop near Victoria station. Like the Games Centre on Hanway Street where I went for dice and rulebooks (see column #1), it was reachable by Tube within my lunch hour. Some of my gaming group were using miniatures, and I wanted some of my own.

I recall a rather narrow shop, somewhat more salubrious-looking than the Games Centre but lined with glass cases that were packed with miniatures. A lot were historical, because most miniatures were used for wargames and most wargames were historical in those pre-Warhammer days, but there was the Minifigs Valley of the Four Winds collection – based on serialized fiction that I was already reading in White Dwarf – as well as a selection of adventurer types. I bought some Valley of the Four Winds skeletons – that Ray Harryhausen influence again – and a couple of dwarves. I think I bought the dwarves just because I liked them, since I remember that I was mainly playing elves and half-elves at that time.

I don’t recall going to the Skytrex shop more than that one time, though. Thanks to mail-order ads in White Dwarf, I built my miniatures collection from a variety of sources, including Ral Partha (still unbeatable for fine detail, in my opinion), Wargames Publications Scotland (excellent elves and lizardmen; the colour text in their ad began my habit of describing elven eyes as pewter-coloured), Asgard Miniatures (my first Chaos warriors, among others), and Asgard’s successor Citadel Miniatures (their Fiend Factory series complemented the White Dwarf monster department quite nicely). Some companies, Asgard in particular, cast miniatures with open hands at that time, allowing you to give them weapons of your choice with just a dab of superglue and a gentle bend of their fingers.

Painting miniatures was different then, too. There were no Citadel paints – no acrylics at all, as far as I remember – but happily I still had a few tiny cans of Humbrol enamels left over from my model aircraft days. They were smelly, messy, and took forever to dry, but they were what I had so they were what I used. It’s safe to say that I would not have won any awards, but I liked to make sure that the player character miniatures had some kind of paint on them. The monsters I mostly left unpainted.

The miniatures lived in a small drawer unit that I had bought at a local hardware shop. At my peak I don’t think I had more than 40 or so, and I’m pretty sure some of them never saw use in an actual game. But having a few miniatures was as much a part of being a gamer as having a bunch of funny-shaped dice, so I felt I needed them.

A few years later, Warhammer came along and changed everything.