Whilst racking my brain for a suitably themed exposition for the news­letter, it occurred to me that in a hobby that can boast of figures of Cossacks, Moon Men, Zebras, Dino­saurs, Chinese Coolies, Cowboys, Napoleonic mar­shals, and every variation of Civil War uniform, there are darned few miniatures of actual children out there. I personally possess maybe three or four figures of children: a couple of boys from the Dixon’s Wild West line (one running, one walking with his hands in his pockets); a little plastic newspaper boy, circa 1930s America, from the Lledo “Days gone By” line, and a little “Scamp” or street urchin, that was in­cluded in one of my Foundry complimentary figures packs.

I wonder at the reasons for the dearth of adolescent figures. True, war gaming is almost 100% about grown-ups trying to kill each other in novel ways. I still would think the RPG and fantasy tabletop gaming crowd would have come up with some more juvenile figures. Perhaps I can file the hair off of the toes of all those hobbit figures I have in my closet. One would think that a fantasy adventure (at least one that pays atten­tion to details) would have tons of children lurking around the edges of the great events being simulated. Otherwise, where would all those adult Elves, Orcs, Hobbits, Hu­mans and Dwarfs come from? To look at things pragmatically, I suspect the reason there aren’t many juvenile figures is twofold, touching upon the technical and the economic.

First of all, I suspect there isn’t a huge market for juvenile figures out there. RPGs, after all, are about wish fulfillment at their very core. Players like to feel empow­ered by the world they are creating, not helpless. Why play what will essen­tially be a smaller, weaker character with almost no legal or property rights in the society they are simu­lating? Children have very few civil rights in this day and age… imagine what their existence would be back in some pseudo-medie­val time! Naw, more fun to play Brak the Bar­barian (that’s a literary refer­ence, kiddies, go look it up).

Secondly, and this is even more conjectural on my part, I suspect that it’s hard to sculpt children’s figures. Sculptors often scale their creations based on the size and length of appendages like the head and feet, as torso sizes vary wildly in adult humans. A child’s head, hands and feet are not at their full size, but are in proportion to their body. I suspect that this creates some confusion, either resulting in a “smaller sized adult” type sculpture (the Dixon boys are like this), or a figure with a giant planetoid sized head that isn’t in pro­portion to its body (the Foundry freebie child figure is like this). I can see why sculptors might not bother with making children!

When I have ques­tions about figures, I in­variably ask my friend Chick Lewis, a consum­mate gentleman with a near-encyclopedic know-ledge of miniature figure output in North America and Europe in the last two decades. Not surpris­ingly, I was treated to a lengthy treatise about children figures over the last decade or so. He even scanned his personal collec­tion of children fig­ures, which grace this issue’s cover. So with thanks to Chick, if you need to find that perfect figure for little Amelia, take a look at the cover.