A short announcement here as it’s not relevant to Chaos Dwarfs (yet), but I’ve recently launched bogwyrm miniatures with a friend! We’re US based and sell our own oldhammer-inspired lines, as well as importing European microbrands and dungeonsynth! Here’s a few of my favorite shots 
Check us out!
Around the time I first announced my venture (in patron chat some months ago) @cubesight asked me what the process looked like. I would have asked the same when I was starting as there’s vanishingly little information out there for it, so I’ll use this space to document the process a bit.
I’m a sucker for old shit - I always have been. I’m out there buying books for dead games I’ll probably never play but still don’t own TOW’s rules, despite ostensibly trying to play that. It’s probably a result of growing up with a mom and two grandparents who were antique dealers. I also like throwbacks though, and most of my RPG time is spent with Lamentations of the Flame Princess or other OSR. And in that light I suppose it’s not surprising I ended up falling for the NewOldies community.
My first exposure to that was from here actually, with Admiralty Miniatures, and then OldSchoolMiniatures and Macrocosm not long after. It turns out that it’s a pretty busy space - but until you dig you don’t realize just how busy. Folks like Satanic Panic Miniatures who only sold occasionally through Kickstarter, 4A Miniatures who’s on eBay, Hybrid Miniatures who only sells on facebook, and the list goes on.
Collecting from, or even just following, these micro-creators was a real joy. You got all the excitement of discovery, the thrill of getting in on limited releases, the hipster cred of metal models no one else has seen before (and god knows I love my hipster cred), and all of it with largely reasonable prices and knowing the profits are going right back into the passion project.
So when Satanic Panic announced they were selling off a number of lines, including a set of orcs I’d been waiting on for close to a year, I got busy. Obviously the first thing I’d need was a caster. I’m quite lucky, Minnesota has a big gaming scene, and not just players. Asmodee/FFG, Dark Sword Miniatures, and, known more to the historicals community, GHQ Models, to name a few. Unfortunately for us though, these are all larger companies and none of them can take time out of their production schedule for orders at the volumes we were looking at (but huge props to the owner of GHQ for calling us back himself and talking to us about everything).
While there are a few hobby casters in the US it’s far less than the UK and ultimately it was to the oldhammer idol of the US that we went to for help, Mr. Satyr Studios himself, Drew Day Williams, who pointed us to his caster, Andrew Barlow of Dark Platypus Studio. Since signing on with him (ie mailing him all my molds) I’ve learned he’s pretty much the go-to guy for the vanishingly small micro-casting market in North America, and I can see why. The guys is incredibly helpful, trading dozens of emails with me over the weeks and months before I’d even ordered anything, and his work is absolutely superb. Here’s the production mold for the face shields we sell as an example:
So what did I learn over the course of all those emails?
Well, it’s already bedtime. Stay tuned for part 2!
