Nunae

Some people get really hung up on "realism" in D&D, but weirdly just as it relates to women and minority groups. Typical examples include: forcing female characters to have lower strength/be in a more traditional female role or persecuting characters for non-hetero relationships. Ofc, one can play a more realistic medieval game and hit those more mature themes. But such a game requires a lot of thought and discussion beforehand, "realism" shouldn't just be a thinly veiled excuse to live out your misogynistic tendencies. And for some people it might just be really unfun to play a female or LGBTQ+ character in a world in which you get constantly medievally opressed. Not all gamers are like that, most I've met were an awesome and inclusive bunch, but there are enough weird ones for all those RPG horror stories. When I listed my group as searching for additional players, I got a lot of requests particullarly from female players who either made bad experiences or had heard of enough horror stories to be vary. Official D&D books these days are quite good at representing a wide variety of skin tones and gender in their art. It's nice to see well-armored female knights or darker skinned charactes in the official art. There are also some LGBTQ+ characters in the background, like two men running a farm together and being clearly married. Women characters also come in all societal positions and not just "maiden in distress" or "wife of". I think stuff like this goes a long way in making players feel welcome. It's not about roleplaying graphic content, it's about having a normalized presence in your fantasy world and not having to feel like "freaks" or "outsiders" or constantly being reminded that "you're quite strong/clever/good at magic FOR A WOMAN".

"Let's see how much fun you'll have if I knock YOU over" I had one player who was used to going to 40k events as a child with his father. He was really good at just touching the rim of the bases of painted miniatures, as he had that behaviour sharply reinforced 😄 So maybe see it as preventing future generations of miniature painters from frustrations? To stop myself from being just mean and negative: My players are really good at finding non-dangerous foods. It's mostly vegetable sticks or these toothpicks with fruit/cheese/whatever. Might be because they don't want their own papers and tablets to become greasy either, but we didn't have any food-related incidents.

Personal pet peeves: - Players ramming their figure into the map to count steps, as if they're playing Mensch-ärger-dich-nicht (popular board game for all ages in Germany, with wooden gaming pieces). We've lost a few arms and weapons in that process. Ahhh, you're all adults. count your square, move there, don't hammer my miniatures down 12 times per turn. 🤬 - Knocking figures over to symbolize their death. I'm ok with the plastic speed paint figures being thrown around, stop it with they resins and metals YOU picked for your PC because they looked great. Also, battlemaps just become crowded af when some miniatures supposed to stand in one square suddenly lay across 3. - Building impromtu flight stands from stacked dice or the likes. Impressive act of dexterity, but nobody is laughing when the whole thing inevitably comes tumbling down. I even own flightstacker-things that work, but if someone just hopped or levitated or climbed for a round, we'll just use our imgatination and leave the miniature on the save ground of the battle map, thank you very much.

Love that thing. Would really like another box with dwarven ruins to go with it.

So, I want 6 sets (2 forest, 2 swamp, 1 giant, 1 creatures) but I do want a second set of SGs as well I think. Just more things I'd use multiples of as with the last KS. How does one go about that? I'm currently pledged for 4, just make a second account? Not familiar with Gamefound.

Those Bugbears really call out to me. The Drow are nice as well. Overall, very nice and solid gaming figures (and paint jobs).

I do think we're just seeing the limitations of written communication in action. Tone is very hard to convey in a forum and very easily misinterpreted, especially if you have a high variety in age ranges and nationalities. I've been quite happy with my stretch goals as I glue them together. It's a bit of a puzzle, but I like puzzles. Only critique would be that I'd like more of one monster group/theme instead of having so many different ones. Two to four of one type of monster are just not enough for my encounter building needs. That's why I love their City Watch though: plenty of cohesive figures, both male and female, in different poses for my games. Even if the players decide to assault members of the guard in the middle of a market and get tons of back-up thrown at them - again. 😄

The ones I've built so far don't need a lot of cleaning up. Some mold lines, sure, but those scrape right off with the back of a scalpel. So far I didn't have any in unfortunate places like faces. A lot of the miniatures need a lot of glueing though.

I got my order last week. I had a dragon lair pledge with 6 old dragons and an additional Ghost Dragon as my 7th. Got the first 6 with rapid delivery (they're all build up and ready to be painted) but got those 6 again. Possibly bc the dragon lair Add On wasn't marked as shipped bc I was still missing the 7th? Contacted customer support, am allowed to keep them. Anyway, everything is looking really nice, human sized minis are small but acceptable. Love my Lava and Goo Caves.

That's more like it! Though to me the Gamefound page still seems to imply there is a map in the sets. Biggest drop of price for the creature pack ofc, who apparently didn't even have a map to lose. For 99 $ that was rather pricy, for half that it's an auto include for me.

The number of sets I'd get would definetly increase if I could get them without the map. I'm pretty heavily invested in the Loke Map Books, and I'd like to use the terrain with all kinds of maps, not just their battlemat. Looking forward to seeing the Land of the Giants set, could be super interesting and unique. Woods and swamp are definetly common in most RPGs and would see a lot of use based on that, but people might have terrain for that already.

I really like that we will be able to prepay VAT and duties in check out. Makes stuff a lot easier and quicker.

They added the word "elven" my weakness. I really like what I own of their dungeon terrain. It might not be as pretty as some of the other stuff around, but it is super useable and very affordable.

Both these sets look rather useful, especially the Long Road for those impromptu travelling or camping encounters. On the dungeon side I've rarely used the maps with lots of tiny rooms pre-drawn. If I need something like this I'll draw it myself, but mostly we end up fighting in bigger rooms. But maybe the encounter descrition hand inspiration here. The Rooms book on the other hand looks useful with the banquet scene.

Ended up backing this. I have the stuff from Infinite Dimensions as well, but my current campaign is set in a harbor town. Plus the Bones V ship needs a home too I guess. Just need to figure out how to store those things.

Not sure if the order of things was meant to have more "big ticket items" in the middle to get through stretch goals after the initial run in the first few days had dried up. Having the expansion packs in five parts in the beginning definetly suggests they were going for that addictive "ding!" feeling more often (compared to just getting three or later two unlocks for the same amount of miniatures). I mean, noone of us thought they'd just not unlock a whole expansion, so that kinda felt meh. Maybe they miscalculated and couldn't just throw out more and more stuff? We definetly got some funding goals lowered, but you can't do that indefinitely. It's a good theory, to not shoot all your powder in the first three days and then struggle for more, but ofc you need to accurately guess how much you're gonna make for this to work out, or else you'd be stuck with a bunch of cool left-over sculpts. Or maybe it wasn't strategy and it was for real more important to their business to fund a bunch of orcs, gnolls and the likes than a dragon diorama. I kinda understand the disappointment. Reaper kickstarters are a big and very irregular event. You wait for them. You want "your" stuff. I felt kinda sad to not get fey creatures in Bones 5, since it funded so well and people in the thread liked the idea and I was hopeful based on that. Feeling like you'll have to wait two more years for "your" Bones to make an appearance isn't fun. Seeing stuff you would have loved while there was nothing for you in the kickstarter for you must be even less fun. Idk, other companies that jumped on the "affordable plastic" bandwagon don't make me feel this way. I look at their offerings, buy what I like and skip what I don't. Maybe it's the memory of the first Bones kickstarter high that keeps me going, maybe it's the community aspect, but it surely has an entertainment factor of looking at the teasers and updates other companies don't.

Ok, I love that dragon. Hopefully we'll get to see her as a Power Up. She can sit behind me whenever I DM. I mean, all the players get their own miniature as well.

I can see the PC frameworks for 12,99 Euro appealing to players who place a lot of emphasis on having the correct load out on their miniature. The spellcasters especially have some very flashy effects (who will definetly hang way over the base and make it difficult to push miniatures in neighboring squares, but that's another topic). The creatures are kinda priced outside my "gaming figure" pain tolerance, especially since all those creatures are widely available already, most of them from Wizkids themselves. I can buy a Night Hag framework for 21,49 or a Night Hag with a Dusk Hag for 4,49 or another Night Hag with a Green Hag friend that time for 4,49 as well. All Wizkids. That's kinda funny. Sure, the astral lollipops on the Frameworks one are cute. But to me that price for a human-sized figure goes out of "gaming figure" and into "display/painting project" territory. And in that territory I get a lot more choosy since there are so many pricy but gorgeous, high quality figures available. Idk, Wizkids figures have been far to inconsistent in their casting quality and overall detail for me to consider them a "premium product" and pay accordingly. I own a lot of Wizkids unpainted and I enjoy using & painting them, but in a similar way I enjoy painting and using my Bones (that is, not getting too concerned about mold lines and gaps, cut some apart for modding, slap paint on, go).

True. The miniatures in the female vampire encounter are also smaller than expected. They do have the typical "modern digital sculpting style" but are still tiny. It is a bit odd.

Has anything from the Bones V encounters been released to retail already? I'm wondering if they'll release those things as individual figures or in a boxed set like the Henchmen & Hirelings (didn't get the female Hirelings in the pledgemanager before they were out -.-). I kinda like being able to buy individual figures, but I get that selling whole sets might be more economical. But especially with the encounters in this kickstarter it might be nice to get some salamanders without getting an additional drake, your fourth carpet and the adventurers.

I'm fairly confident we'll see the wyvern and the nightmare at retail. If they'll stay in stock for longer than a hot second is a different question, but they don't seem to be the kinds of miniatures Reaper might run into trouble with. They're not so large as to need special packaging and they don't seem particularly fiddely/difficult to cast either.

Scalecreep isn't unique to Reaper, but it is annoying anyway. GW has a lot of their "standard" infantry people on 32mm these days. Dwarves seem especially prone to this, in some cases they just seem to have different proportions, instead of being noticeably smaller. We have one RBG dwarf and one GW dwarf in our D&D group and the difference is quite funny. Reaper has had some stylistic differences in their line for some time (the Werner Klocke elves look gaunt compared to the other elves and humanoids) since they seem to value artistic license over an uniform look (like an army for GW or the Wizkids line up) which I generally like. And ofc tastes change over time. Newer miniatures seem to be a bit ... softer, with bigger faces and eyes and generally more exaggerated features. And ofc, making the figure just a tiny bit bigger means you can get more facial expressions or details on there. In theorie, it should be easier with digital sculpting to get the correct scale. You can just reprint it a tad bit smaller, while it's difficult to do that with a physical sculpt. We see them previewing volumetric print to check out scale all the time. But maybe it's not a priority to keep the humanoids at 28 a more consistent scale?

Ok, with the dust being settled a bit my personal thoughts as someone who backed Bones IV, V and now VI. I'm a forever DM who has been playing online for two years, but is back to using real maps and miniatures for two sessions now (which is greatly increasing my miniature hype). - Coreset/Core Extras: I've pretty similar feelings towards all three coresets. Always some cool stretch goals, but the base offering here doesn't really grab me. The adventurers are nice, but I see them as conversion fodder or paint practice pieces. Gauth was big but not my style of dragon (will eventually become a statue I guess). I prefer the two smaller dragons in the Bones V core set, but Bones V was just dragon extravaganza. I do prefer the way they split up the new core. A lot of the old groups made no sense to me. Why would I want more generic Elf rangers, but group them with the Drow characters? Buy more of those heavily armored skeletons, but with the undead giant, some wolves and two reapers for good measure? Or I'd have liked more of the blight plant things from Bones V, but not in a set with trolls, a snakewoman, and 6 other unrelated things. Want a wolfdragon? Oh, here, also get two other dragons and a basilisk. Might double up on ants, mudmen, newts and the lancers. Great to see them in sensible groupings! - Expansions: I LOVE Briarwood. Been waiting for a fey expansion for all this time, and it always felt kinda bad to see a kickstarter close and be like "guess in two years there will be another shot". I prefered Dreadmere (Bones IV) and Brinewind (Bones V) over the Green Griffin, since those were more flavorful to me. I can get a lot of tavern furniture and patrons already, and none of them really grab me. I prefer Denizens of the Dungeon over Dungeon Dwellers (Bones V). Similar theme, but DotD has more unique creatures, while Dungeon Dwellers gave us a lot of stuff that were in the Core Set of the same kickstarter already. Shadows of Sullenhall is neat but I have a lot of undead. Hakir is similar to Greek Odyssey (Bones V) or Lost Valley (Bones IV) with the less-common-but-still-fantasy theme. Probably gonna get two Briarwoods, the Denizens of the Dungeon and Hakir, though Hakir is the one I'm unsure about. Sad we're not getting a Fan Favorite, but we weren't really getting into "exceeding expectations" territory with SGs, so maybe there wasn't space for one. - Options: Bones V kinda felt like "dragon revival" and we're ofc missing a lot of those this time. It's also hard to compare, since Bones V made over 3 Mio$ so no idea what else they had planned. They always had more "basic" creatures in options as well (the Townsfolk, Dragonfolk, Rune Wights, Demonic Temptation in Bones V) but the percentage this time was high and it took us long to get to "the good stuff", while Bones V had Valfuryx (a dragon) as the first SG. We also didn't really have a theme with the options like we did with "all chromatic dragons" and "warmachines" in Bones V or "giants and dinos" in Bones IV. - Encounters: We obviously got less of those in Bones VI. I'm a bit sad we get less terrain with them, but the creatures and themes I actually prefer over those from Bones V. The spiders, the skeletons, the not-dead-yet dwarves and the vampire women are all things I don't really see myself using independently of their encounter packs. I mean it was a great way to sell me miniatures I already have a lot of. The salamanders and their drake friend I'll probably double up on though, and the Rotstump Bog and Owlbear Encounter also have more interesting takes on the actual miniatures than the spiders or skeletons (but weaker on the terrain). Sad we didn't get to see the Deep Ones, those would have been a great addition to my collection as well. - Kickstarter Exclusives: With each kickstarter I've been a part of there have been things that didn't make it to retail. Bones III (which I narrowly missed) had the weapon packs which took years to arrive. Bones IV is still missing some of their bigger items (Barge? Argent? Nyarlathotep? Mossbeard? Dance of Death? Dungeon Tiles? Dragon Turtle? At least I can't find them in the webstore). We'll see if all of Bones V will be released, but I think I heard Ron say the pirate ship might not make it to retail. So while I DO NOT like Kickstarter Exclusives, I highly prefer them marking "non-sellers" as such so we know to get them now instead of hoping for retail. And I kinda get that some of the things they put in the kickstarter are more fanservice or flights of fancy (in a good way) and less things a traditional store is looking for.

Small rant about colors and cameras/screens: it is almost guaranteed those colors look slightly off from what they actually are. In fact, they probably look slightly different on your phone compared to your PC. I mean, we get a close enough impression like "it's a blueish light grey" or whatever, but we should probably not buy something bc it perfectly matches our favorite boots on the computer screen. It can become quite the problem with digital art, since the look can be so different from screen to screen. And yes I've done too much online clothes shopping with friends during the pandemic 😁

With all the people mentioning Briarwood as their favorite I'm hopeful we'll see more fey stuff in the future. There is a lot of untapped potential in that sphere of inspiration.