I like to play D&D, and we have always used miniatures for our games. I do like to see nicely painted figures on the table, and so I have decided to start a collection of player characters. In the D&D core rules, there are seven races (dwarf, elf, gnome, halfling, half-elf, half-orc and human) and eleven classes (barbarian, bard, cleric, druid, fighter, monk, paladin, ranger, rogue, sorcerer and wizard). Together with two genders, this means I need to collect and paint 154 figures to represent every possible permutation... at my painting rate that will be about 5 years!

After thinking about it, I have decided to cheat a little bit - I don't like elves and half-elves particularly, so I am going to count them as one category together. This would leave me a bit short of figures, so I will be doing two sets of humans - one for the typically euro-centric D&D character and another for some alternative character concepts.

At first I thought this would be easy, given the number of figure manufacturers out there, but now I’m beginning to worry - 14 druids? 14 bards? 22 different gnomes? Well, we will see. A friend of mine has commented 'It's never too early to start looking for gnomes - especially female gnomes'. Which isn't something I would want to say, and certainly nothing I would want my wife to hear me say...

On top of the 154 characters, there are also about two dozen animal companions and familiars to collect, so I don’t think I’ll be getting bored too quickly. I'm not the world's greatest painter, so this is going to be an interesting journey for me. I hope you enjoy it too. At the same time, let's hope my photography is up to it - I now have a decent enough 5mpx camera, so once I sort out lighting issues, I think there will be a great improvement.

My thanks to Neil Shuck who has done a lot of work on the current photos to make them close to presentable, particularly to stop them being quite so under-exposed. His site is here.