Saturday 10 September 2011

Cataloging Non-Military Humans in 15mm

Since these posts have proven to be extremely helpful to our readers, I thought I'd take a look at some of the options we have to field rogues, pirates, adventurers, and civilians in our 15mm games. 15mm Sci Fi is extremely popular in army-vs-army games right now, especially with this year seeing the release of Gruntz, 5150:Star Army, and Tomorrow's War. But 15mm also gives us a good variety of minis to use in narrative skirmish games. Rules like Salvage Crew, Mutants and Death Ray Guns, AE Bounty, and In The Emperor's Name favor a handful of characters instead of a uniformed army. These can be used to create bustling star ports, research and mining colonies, or any other setting that doesn't call for an attack by a platoon of mechanised infantry.

The largest variety can probably be found at 15mm.Co.Uk:

Ground Zero Games has a pretty sizeable catalog as well:

  • There are nine different packs available under the Civilians and Colonists range. Several more packs available if you're looking for humans in zero-gee suits.
  • Under the Human Characters category we find the extremely popular "Free Trader" crew packs A and B, as well as the excellent Ravager packs.

RAFM has a few interesting packs on the ex-Citadel Traveller page:

  • Space Vixens
  • Space Pirates
  • Guerillas
  • Crewmen
  • The Support Staff pack might also be worth a look for character minis, but these are mostly aliens and droids.

Rebel Minis has an eclectic mix of non-uniformed humans:

  • Titan Scouts
  • Gun Clerics
  • Black Widow Mercs
  • Under the Gangs, Gunmen, and More range you'll find Post-Apoc Riders, Motorcycle Gangs, Post-Apoc Gangers, Post Apoc Survivalists, and many more. While these aren't typical sci-fi minis, many will still work with the right paint job.
  • While you're at Rebel's website, check out the modern lines too. Again, the right paint scheme can make almost any mini work for 15mm sci fi.

Khurasan Minis normally has quite a few options in their post-apoc and Arkham Horror ranges, but those aren't available this summer. But we can still get:

Highlander Studios has some entertaining options in their Gideon's Dust range.

Kremlin Minis has a few great character minis, especially Commander Vortan and Commissar Kang.

Splintered Light Minis has their own version of a 15mm freighter crew. And don't forget... just because these minis are sculpted to resemble a certain popular sci-fi show and movie, a different paint scheme could yield entirely different characters.

Stan Johansen Miniatures offers an Adventurers pack.

I hope this catalog helps to inspire your games. Even if you are fighting platoon-vs-platoon, a handful of these minis would be great hostages, bystanders, or objectives. But if you're playing narrative games, you'll want to paint up as many of these as you can. There are quite a few unique alien minis out there too, and we may cover them in a follow up article. I've set a personal goal to do between 3 and 5 of these every week to support my 15mm In The Emperor's Name campaigns!

Cheers,
Chris

8 comments:

  1. I love these posts they are really helpful to me. My last order for GZG was in fact all the colonist, ravagers, crews etc and its unbelievable the level of detail on those. I have for a few euros got human miniatures to go for a full year.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, not too many of these sort of figures out there, but they're goodies. And we could always use more, devs, hint, hint! High society-types for example.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Nice article thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  4. These are very useful and informative posts, i hope this particular topic makes a few of the miniature companies listen and take some notes and start to produce more Characters and Civilians sculpts as there is a large demand for to see more of them.....

    ReplyDelete
  5. Do you have hand-made miniatures? Star Wars miniatures available?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Navrro's comment here is actually very useful - GZG does NOT have very good pics on their site (small!) and I had to wonder what the minis actually looked like. But if he vouches for them then I'd trust they're worth buying :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. @Allison If you want I will take pictures of each pack ? let me know and I will do it this week for you.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I love these posts too they are very helpful in finding ranges you didn't know about. I wish the pictures were better in this range, I know its very difficult even when things get as small as 28mm

    ReplyDelete