I also stumbled across this while cleaning up one of my web dumps: My most successful experiment with sculpting and casting a game piece.

The original “little dude.”

It’s, you know, pretty terrible.  The simplicity could actually work well, but the sculpt wasn’t smoothed over and evened out enough so he’s kind of lumpy and rippled. He was actually made out of Sculpey clay rather than green stuff, for no real reason than that I had a ton of it. He stands about 3/4″ tall, the biggest problem with the Sculpey being that it shrinks a bit in baking. A small plastic army man stood in for the original armature, deeply buried in the final shape.

Still, though, he actually looks awesome.  He’s wearing a cool little backpack you can’t see that came out pretty well. Most importantly, he worked great as a game piece looked at from table height and wound up the player piece in Relic Hunter.  The small, cartoonish shape to him worked great for its atmosphere and became one of its defining symbols.

Cast pieces. The guy on the right is in a vaguely Imperial Stormtrooper inspired paint job…

To support that I wound up casting dozens and dozens in Alumilite.  Eventually a bunch of the copies were cleaned up and themselves made into a 5-piece mold so I could cast them like gangbusters. At one point we had so many of them, Daryl and I could fight over design decisions by throwing fistfuls at each other.  I cast them up in 5 different colors, one for each possible player, and they drifted around into the corners of my apartment like confetti.  Some of them got some minimal paint jobs and were inevitably fought over in playtesting.

The mold from the original piece.

I forgot to put release powder on the first half of the mold before pouring the second, so it had to be cut and ripped apart and hence looks like a mess. Still worked well though for what felt like a long run of casts.