I impulse bought some miniatures yesterday. I've had my eye on some of Mortal Arrow's supersized arachnids for a while now, but there was a stretch where they were just out of stock. I saw on Facebook that Mortal Arrow was running a Kickstarter for some new fantasy monsters, and I checked the website...and bought some bugs and fungus.
I've always had a fascination with the natural world, and I'm perfectly comfortable with most invertebrates - spiders, wasps, slugs, scorpions, none of them bother me (Exception: I have a knee-jerk reaction to centipedes where I just get hit with an overwhelming urge to flee from them. I blame it on one falling off my bedroom ceiling onto my face when I was a kid). One of my favorites are a lesser-known family of arachnids known as Tailless or False Whip-Scorpions. Non-venomous and pretty much entirely harmless to humans, these flattened creatures have "arms" similar to a mantis and a pair of limbs lengthened into sensory "whips" that function like antennae. Mortal Arrow first caught my eye because they produce a couple different miniatures of oversized Tailless Whip-Scorpions to menace your D&D players with when giant spiders get boring. A vivid green one is visible on the cover of the classic AD&D module "Queen of the Demonweb Pits," so they certainly have a respectable pedigree in that regard!
Naturally, I ordered a pair of them, along with a "Corrupted Myconid Rasper" - a fungal centipede monster with a marvelously dour and alien face, which I'm eager to put into my games of Majestic 13 as an extraterrestrial threat.
Well, it turns out Mortal Arrow is pretty much local to me, because the miniatures arrived today, about 35 hours after I placed the order. This must be how wargamers around Nottingham feel.
Mike at Mortal Arrow was generous enough to throw in a resin 60mm base crusted with sculpted mushrooms and a nice note. And this right here is why I'm so fantastically loyal to indie miniatures companies. I don't buy from Games Workshop, and if I did, I wouldn't get extras and a nice note. But when I buy from someone working out of their garage or basement - someone like Mortal Arrow, or Forge of Ice, Crocodile Games, Wargames Foundry (on the bigger end of things for me but still fundamentally a family business), Bad Squiddo, Brigade Games - I know I matter as a customer, that my purchase makes a difference to them. There's no shareholders, no payola to influencers on social media to keep them shilling product, just one, two or maybe at most five or six people who are passionate about the hobby and eager to share that passion.
The figures I got from Mortal Arrow are all beautifully crisp casts with minimal clean-up necessary; it'll probably be ten minutes total with an X-acto and file for all three figures, at most. The assembly for each figure is straightforward, with well defined pegs and sockets to guide placement of pieces. The Rasper in particular is really well designed in how the pieces fit together; I was able to put the pieces together on my desk and the pegs and gravity held everything together. When I'm ready to go in with file and glue, it's going to be a snap to complete. And that's something I think deserves to be shouted out because not every company, big or small, does the same (I'm having flashbacks to gluing hands to wrists on too many figures over the years as I type that!)
Mortal Arrow is running a Kickstarter currently as previously mentioned, for those interested in such things, all themed around brain monsters - drawing inspiration from the Elder Brains, Mind Flayers and Intellect Devourers of D&D, but also spinning off in several new and exciting directions from that wellspring.
I've placed a small pledge which may get enlarged in the pledge manager when the time comes. I definitely want the "Intellect Constrictor" giant brain snake, but the flying brain octopus also tickles the Basil Wolverton comic fan in me.
On the topic of Kickstarters, my friend Joshua Slater is also running one at the moment, for a small set of Paul Muller-sculpted grotesqueries themed around the idea of "twins." I've backed this as well; Josh is one of the nicest and most generous people I've met in this hobby, and that's saying something given how eager so many hobbyists I've met are to help each other succeed with their projects. I have a (woefully half-painted) regiment of mid-90s Orcs, half of which Josh surprised me with just because he found them in his stash and thought of me. I've made a modest pledge to this one as well that again, may expand in the pledge manager. That two-faced creature with the tail is the sort of thing that I'll find plenty of uses for in my games.
So yeah, I expect I'm preaching to the choir to some degree here on my blog, but support small companies and passionate hobbyists working to bring their vision to life in resin and metal for the world to see.
Figures Acquired in 2025: 234
Figures Painted in 2025: 164
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