the budget bestiary is now available in print

A few years ago, I released The Budget Bestiary, a little zine dedicated to my love of making miniatures out of found objects.

I’ve always liked that aspect of the miniatures hobby; it’s one of the things that really appealed to me about early Warhammer. I like the creativity of using everyday things and I like it when using miniatures in games doesn’t feel exclusive. More expensive miniatures games are a hobby not everyone can afford to get into — heck, a lot of the people who do get into them can’t really afford to — and so to me this is a great intersection of fostering creativity and helping people save some money. Now the zine is out in print. It’s still Pay What You Want for the digital version, but if you want to spend a few bucks you can get a nice, full-colour print version.

A Knight of Ultraterra, made of a toy dinosaur and an army man, with some beads, cocktail sticks, wire, sequins, scrapbook embellishments, tissue paper and a thing I found on the ground.

I’ve written before about how much this means to me. I can’t really say why, but all my life I’ve loved the idea of bricolage, of making things out of discarded or commonplace materials. It’s a form of pre-play play that I like to encourage, and that’s what I’ve done in the Budget Bestiary. Every creature entry features a section on how I made the model and one in which I describe the monster, give its stat block and so on.

The Knight in action.

So yeah, get your Budget Bestiary here, digitally or in print, and if you feel like making some monsters, I think you should. I may have more to say about that coming up.