Renaissance Goblin and Halfling range on Kickstarter

For those of you who missed it, my former goblin and (slim) halfling range, as sculpted by Kevin Adams, is currently being kickstarted by the new owner for re-release under the Shortwars label.

Aside from bringing back the main range, the kickstarter includes several expansions of the range that I never got around to, such as archers, goblin cavalry and an all new range: renaissance beastlings! Renaissance trolls and ogres are also available. 

Only 6 days left and plenty of stretch goals to unlock, so get over there and pledge now!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/482044771/shortwars-halfling-and-goblin-tabletop-war-game-mi

Goblin and halfling archers:

Goblin cavalry on armoured warhounds:

Chaotic beastlings:

Ogres and trolls:

Note that I'm not affiliated with Shortwars and any questions should be asked on the kickstarter page or the Shortwars blog: http://www.shortwars.co.uk/

Some news and the future direction of the range

You may have noticed some of the ranges disappearing from the "Getting Some" section on the blog. 

As it is, the range has gotten too big for me to keep everything available and some moulds have indeed reached the end of their natural lifespan and need to be replaced. Now as I don't want them to go to the place that miniatures go to when they become OOP and since I'm not done adding to the range, I found another way, thanks to a throwaway comment from my trusted mouldmaker.

From this day forward, the production and  distribution of the Dwarf and Plump Halfling ranges will be taken care of by my friends at The Assault Group. Since they use the same mouldmaker, this means there will be no change in the quality of the castings.

The advantages of this arrangement are legion:

- faster turnaround on restocks as moulding and casting will be done in-house;

- online shopping facilities that mean you no longer have to search to the blog and copy-paste your wants list and personal info into an e-mail;

- online payment options shouldn't be limited to Paypal any longer;

- shipping will be straight from the source, no more middleman;

- I free up a lot more time to focus on expanding the range!

That's right, this is by no means the end of those ranges. I will keep adding new releases to both the dwarf and halfling range, we're far from done yet. I'll just have to worry less about moulding, casting, stocking and processing orders (even though the magnificent Svennn took a large share of the load on that one).

Downtime for the back-catalogue should be reduced to a minimum, while the good people at TAG sort through the mould and start adding the sets to their webstore (I'm told this has already begun). So normal service should be resumed before long, with a little more added comfort. Their aim is to have them up for pre-order shortly, for delivery in January.

Meanwhile, I'll be showing off some more additions to the range here in a couple of days.

Upcoming Price Hike

It's a bit of an odd title, given that this is still a personal hobby project, and "prices" are just what I charge for sharing limited surplus figures with the rest of you, but there's only so much space available for a title in this blog format.

Anyway, for a couple years now I've shared castings of my private figure ranges at a cost that, at the time, seemed fair to you and allowed me to keep going without this service adding to the financial weight of the project. However, back then, I didn't expect my project to expand like it has and it has gotten quite big indeed. So big that it's getting too big for my hobby budget to support it all AND keep the full range available on request.

Coupled to the fact that both moulding and metal costs have gone up quite a bit since this project started (we've often heard this from actual miniature companies, but it's true), I have to either slim down the project and retire parts of it, or adapt the pricing structure for the existing figures so that I can still share some with fellow miniature enthusiasts.

So, because I know the frustration of discovering a set of figures I like, only to find out that they were a limited edition and near impossible to get, I'm going to try and go with the second approach and work out the costs again.

Now there are two ways this could go (feel free to share your thoughts on this):
1) Upping the figure cost overall, while keeping the tiered discounts (these are largely based on the fact it's less hassle to sort and pack multiples of the same, than smaller batches)
2) Keeping the base prices largely the same (with possible exceptions) but scrapping the tiered discounts.

Changes will take effect from April 1st (2014).

Cheers
WK

New moulds

In general news, mastermoulds have been made for:
- the 2 dwarf ponyriders + head variants,
- the 2 dwarf wenches,
- the 4 dwarf infantry figures with separate right arms + head variants
- the 2 dwarf infantry with separate hands/weapons

A production mould is ready for the initial set of 4 figures (infantry with separate spear/halberd hands + head variants)

I have a few mastercastings in my possession for the ponyriders and wenches and John will start in a couple weeks with the conversions to round out the cavalry set.

Mastercastings of the new infantry will hopefully be with me shortly, as will productioncastings of the first infantry set, along with a little bonus surprise.

More on this later.