Every year, my good friend Hank organizes 3-D Roleplay Con, the Pacific Northwest’s premier Oldhammer gaming convention. This will be the fifth year of the event! I’m very excited – brand new location this year, too. It’ll be going on May 3-4 at Peninsula Odd Fellows Lodge in the St. Johns neighborhood of Portland, OR, USA. I can’t wait. You should come! Click the link earlier in this paragraph to learn more. Even though the events are filled up, there will be an ongoing Mordheim tournament all weekend and some opportunity for open play and pick-up games!

In anticipation of the event, a couple friends and I coordinated efforts to commission a sculpt from the legendary Bob Naismith. If you don’t know the name, I promise you know his work – besides sculpting for Games Workshop during what I consider to be the company’s golden years, he is a pioneer of manufacturing processes for injection-molded plastic miniatures and a veteran of the miniatures industry. He has sculpted for Grenadier, Hasbro (all those classic pre-painted HeroScape figures you may remember from the hazy days of your youth? Yeah, most of those were his work), West Wind Productions, Mantic, Fireforge Games, Gripping Beast, Victrix, and many, many more. The importance and notability of his work cannot be overstated. He still sculpts today, both digitally and traditionally (by hand with tools and putty!). Check out his current work here if you’d like.

So for the 3-D Roleplay Con V event miniature, I prompted Bob to sculpt a version of Hank that would look at home alongside some classic Citadel Miniatures, specifically the Rogue Trader Adventurers range (RT601) from March 1988, first shown in White Dwarf issue number 99. Bob sculpted a fair number of the miniatures in that range so it seemed like a perfect choice to me.

I sent Bob the above image along with a reference image of Hank, our Esteemed Emperor and Evangelist of Oldhammer, and told him to go wild. I let him know what we planned to do with the miniature and Bob was more than happy to be a part of the plan.

It wasn’t long before I received an e-mail containing an image of the “green” (the master miniature, called a “green” due to the use of “green stuff” epoxy putty), and soon after that the small parcel arrived in my apartment mailbox. It’s quite something to receive and handle the master sculpt of a figure.

My friend Chase has the mold-making process for resin casting down pat, and he was kind enough to volunteer his time and resources to making some copies, which will both be 3-D scanned (thanks to Kevin for that!) and used as resin masters for the creation of a mold capable of handling pewter casting. That’s all in the works but should be finished very soon – the goal is to have miniatures ready to sell at the con in less than two weeks!

I have a confession to make – I’m not a huge fan of Imperial Guard in Warhammer 40,000. I do enjoy the “everyman” type soldier in sci-fi, certainly, and the Rogue Trader Imperial Guard miniatures are spectacular, but in recent years they’ve become somewhat dull to me. That, combined with the expense of collecting an out-of-production “horde” army, plus the notion of painting lots of figures for yet another army (I’m okay, thanks!) has led to me feeling pretty lukewarm about the humble guardsmen. So when it came time to paint my resin cast of the figure, I knew I couldn’t just settle for a bog-standard MILITARY KHAKI or MILITARY GREEN color scheme. My mind immediately jumped to the collection of 2nd edition Talisman board game/expansions that a friend gifted to me, and I knew what had to be done.

In the Talisman: Timescape expansion, there are multiple character cards for sci-fi figures (I do enjoy a bit of blending between fantasy and sci-fi!), and the Chainsaw Warrior seemed the obvious choice for reference.

So here he is, SPACE BOSS HENRY, the exclusive 3-D ROLEPLAY CON V miniature! Huge thanks to Bob Naismith for his legendary work and for taking our commission, to Chase and Kevin for the continuing labor to bring SPACE BOSS HENRY to all of us 3-D Roleplay-Heads, and to Hank – our fearless leader and champion of Oldhammer.

He’ll get his own little image post later, but I wanted to do a proper write-up for the miniature, too!

Get your own SPACE BOSS HENRY by attending 3-D Roleplay Con V in Portland, OR, USA, May 3-4! He won’t be free with admission, and we’re not sure if the metal casts will be ready in time but we’re doing everything we can to make it happen!

Hope you enjoyed the read. Stay safe out there – the world’s a crazy place!