Figurine: Vintage Knight

As is my wont, every five figures or so I like to repaint an old figure from the collection (I've been painting these things since I was ten, so there are plenty of poorly painted figures to choose from).

This particular figure brought back a lot of pleasant memories. He is "The Fighter" figure from a game called "Crypt of the Sorceror." This game came out in 1980 and combined elements of a board game with fantasy roleplaying and hobbying. It came with eight unpainted miniatures that you got to paint yourself (when I was a kid this was considered a good thing). The game itself seems to have been out of print for a long time, and the only online reference I could find to it was here. The game rules begin with:

"You lead a band of daring adventurers through the dark portal, into the tomb of an ancient, evil Sorceror. Fighting past his horrid monsters, avoiding traps and pitfalls, you finally reach the crypt itself to battle the sorceror for this treasure and his magical secrets."

Not much of a pitch line, but I recall the standards for getting fantasy games published in 1980 were considerably lower.

Anyway, my brother Virgil bought me this game for my tenth birthday. Before that he had never painted these figures and neither had I, but the game came with about twelve paints and instructions on what to do. Besides, we had both built plastic models for years, and felt up to the challenge.

We played the hell out of this game for years afterward. Sitting around the house on the weekend in our pajamas, with Mom yelling at us to get dressed and go outside (n.b. weather and temperature were not mitigating factors for her).

Painting the metal figurines could have been nothing but a sidebar to the story, but as it happens both Virgil and I got hooked on that as well. The brand that the game was published under - Dungeon Dwellers - also sold a lot of blister packs of miniatures, and so began my collection. Later we learned other companies also made miniatures (Ral Partha, RAFM, Grenadier etc.) and we were off and running.

I'd save up for a year, and he'd take me on a Saturday trip to the hobby shop in Courtenay (an all day journey from our town). I'd usually bring as much as $60-$70 with me - a fortune for me that I had carefully hoarded over the past twelve months. I was always determined to spend it all, but once I arrived the enormity of spending that much money would be too much, and I'd chicken out and only spend half of it. Fortunately, the other half would be enough to purchase two or three box sets of miniatures and maybe a couple of blister packs if I were lucky.

Before too long, despite our constant tweaking of the rules, the Crypt of the Sorceror game board couldn't house all the new arrivals. My brother built a two story castle out of balsa wood, with the exterior walls removed so you could reach in and move pieces around. We made that the new crypt, and one of us would meticulously fill it with monsters to defend against the assault of the other person's heroes. What started as a game of 4 heroes and 4 monsters soon grew to ten times the size, taking an entire afternoon to play.

Eventually even that wasn't big enough, so Virgil found some large cardboard boxes and using a felt pen, he drew a complicate map with a 'crypt' at each end. Our armies would work their way through a forest between the crypts, meeting in the middle to do battle. This could take all day, or longer. Everything was based on the rules from the original game, although we tweaked them whenever we felt like it for greater enjoyment and amusement.

Over thirty years later, the balsa wood castle is gone, and the cardboard battle boards are lost in the mists of time, but I still own everything from the original game except the box that it came in. I cut that up and used it to decorate my painting table. (Hardcore collectors, you may now shriek in horror).

And of course the joy I got from painting these first eight figures resulted in my current collection; thousands of these damned miniatures populating display cases throughout our condo. Painting miniatures is a hobby that still settles my mind when I'm troubled and helps me concentrate, although I've outgrown the need to pit them in battle against one another (mostly). Sheila has also taken up painting them, and I am both proud and embarassed to note she is a damned site better at it than I am despite my fifteen year head start.

Anyway, the eight original hero figures the game came with were the Fighter, the Halfling, the Wizard, and the Dwarf. You also got the four villains, the Evil Sorceror, the Skeleton, the Orc and the the Troll.

Without further ado, here is the knight, according to the bad flavour text from the game, he is "strong of arm and enemy of all things foul and evil." First with my original paint job:
"But wait", you say, "there are two of the same figure!"

Very true, and a nice opportunity to quickly move away from discussing the quality of my early work. You see from the earliest days, companies have cheated a little on design costs by putting the same figure in two or more blister packs (Warhammer actually pretends this is a positive). I got the second guy from a four-pack called 'fighters' because I desperately wanted the other three.

Anyway I painted the second fighter gold, partly to differentiate him from the first one, and partly to indicate that he was wearing magic armour. This was a big deal under the expanded Calvinball rules of the game Virgil and I were playing at the time.

Here they are from the back. Originally, they only had blue shields, but a few years after getting them I "improved" my work by putting lightning bolts on their shields. At least I intended them to look like lightning bolts...
OK, now on to the actually improved version. I generally like to stick to the original colour schemes when I repaint old figures (call me sentimental) so they're both still wearing red, however you'll note I removed the 'magic armour' element. There is no way armour this poorly carved is magical and besides, there's no longer a need to tell them apart.
It was very hard to paint the eyes on these guys because of their low quality. I actually gave one of them an eyepatch because he didn't have discernible facial features on one side. No, I'm not providing a close up of that.

Here they are on the shield side. I kept the lightning bolt theme, and added a crescent moon, for reasons I'd rather keep to myself. In retrospect, I wish I'd painted the horizontal line of the cross a bit lower, but I'm not going back now - maybe in another thirty years or so.
So there he is, one of the figures that started it all. The hobby equivalent of Kiss' "Destroyer" in my music collection.

My next project is at the opposite end of the hobbying spectrum, as I help Sheila finish a large 'vampire church' diorama she's been working on for months. It is a complicated set piece many months in the making, but I'm not worried about my ability to contribute. I've learned a few things about hobbying since 1980.