RPG-a-Day 2024 - Desirable Dice and Marvellous Miniatures Redux

I’d initially started thinking about this last month during RPG-a-Day but didn’t quite get to coalescing my thoughts into writing until just now... 

I didn’t post a lot of content here on the blog about RPG-a-Day this year. I had, for ONCE, remembered it was coming BEFORE August and had set up a page in Notes and transcribed all the dates and prompts and was going to be READY to post every day with thoughtful comments… but then... didn’t. I only had comments for the first few and… nothing for most of the rest. I did post each of the questions every day in a Facebook group for role-players in Saskatoon, for everyone to respond to… and I tried to respond to a few of them… but just missed a whole bunch. 

But two of the days near the end of the month got me thinking about some things. 

25th and 27th - Desirable Dice and Marvellous Miniature

Buckle in, this is a bit of a ramble… 

My dad was the first person I played Dungeons and Dragons with - which is where this whole hobby started - as one of the main things that drew me to Dungeons and Dragons was the MINIATURES! 

I think I was aware of the game’s existence because of advertisements in comic books and it being mentioned in a few movies I saw in the early 80s (Taps? E.T.?). I didn’t initially have any friends that played it, because, at that time, I did not have any friends. 

I’m absolutely sure it wasn’t HIS idea to play. At some point I must have articulated an interest in playing the game to my parents, and my mom probably browbeat him into going out and getting the game and playing it with his son. 

That’s not to say he did not want to or had any resentment about doing so. It’s just that, later in life, having observed the dynamic of my parents relationship and my dad’s relationship with the world, I don’t think it would have been thing my dad would have thought of or initiated on his own and definitely would have taken “encouragement” from my mother. But once he committed to a thing, he tried, in his own way, to make the best of it.  

I'd seen a display in the back of a toy store at a nearby mall. They had the red box Basic Dungeons & Dragons set and (I think..?) a handful of Ral Partha miniatures. He picked it up (and maybe a few of the miniatures) and we sat down one evening to try reading the rules. I had a hard time paying attention, I just wanted to PLAY… I’m sure by the second session, I’d taken over as Dungeon Master, with only the faintest grasp of the actual rules. I did NOT read through adventures before hand, just looked at the maps, drew those out and the Caverns were explored, and read the description of each room as they were entered… So I did not get much of the overarching story behind it all.

At some point, I found two fellows at the school that I went to in grade five. We must have played a few games…? But the next year one went to a different school for a special academic program, and the other moved away because his dad (a university professor) moved away for a sabbatical. I did not find anyone else to play D&D with until I changed schools in grade seven. 

I’m pretty sure it was from one of those two, however, that I learned of the Wizard’s Corner - Saskatoon’s first game store. It was on Broadway Avenue which was a LONG way from where we lived. I’m sure my dad must have taken me there the first few times, but later I must have figured out the bus route to get there (25¢ each way!), because I’m certain I spent many hours alone in there just marvelling at all the wonders in the store… later I would ride my bicycle there, which felt like an epic journey in itself - much like the ones my adventuring heroes went on. 

At one point, they had a wicker bowl near the till filled with a wild assortment of loose individual miniatures for $1. I think a lot of them came from multi-figure packs that weren’t selling, so they opened them up and dumped them into this bowl. I bought a LOT of those. Having done some searching recently (big shout out to Lost Minis Wiki!) and have figured out that a lot of them were Dungeon Adventurers from Asgard Miniatures and assorted miniatures from Heritage Miniatures. 

Around that time, my dad had bought two of them for miniatures he played in our games. 

Zadoc and Runka

I know they were painted at some point. I can’t remember if it was me or him that did it. Probably me… but who knows. I’m not sure about the colours. I feel like a lot of it might have been the bare paint-on, rust-coloured primer…? I think this was after I stopped using Testors enamel model paints…? 

Zadoc was a Cleric and Runka was a Thief. I know we played through adventure module B1 “In Search of the Unknown” and cleared out the Caverns of Quasqueton. Instead of wanting to move on to the next adventure, Zadoc and Runka wanted to rebuild the stronghold and use it as a base of operations for themselves?! I feel like there were maybe rules for this in AD&D, for higher level characters… but definitely not in Basic… so I had no idea how to deal with that, I think I basically said, “sure you do that… let’s move on to this next adventure now…” He wanted them to do a lot of things that weren’t covered in the rules, which kind of irritated ten-year-old-Tim. Later he made up a whole narrative of things they did - not played out in our games - which also irritated me. 

He later bought two other miniatures and made characters for them… but never used them in a game we played. One was a Ral Partha Elf archer he named Beowulf, I have zero recollection of that one… I just knew there was one… This was part of that whole narrative he was making up on his own!? 

So irritated by all of this, I had ninjas show up as we started to play the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, and tried to assassinate Runka… Pretty sure that was the last game we played. This was about when I was in grade seven and I’d met a new friend that played D&D and I just started playing with him and never played with my dad again. 

Shortly after we’d started playing, my dad also bought a fancy set of dice for himself. Not going to lie, I coveted those dice for MANY years… they were sharp edged translucent dice that LOOKED like the sorts of gemstones that were often found as TREASURE!!! 

My dad’s Gemstone Dice…. As I remember them…. 

I don’t really remember the actual colours. I know they were all different. There was clear and green and red and blue ones… I’m not at all sure what the others were or which dice where which colours. 

Somehow he had those… and I had to use those gross orange dice from the box set like some kind of fucking peasant…. Ha-ha! 

I still have the d20 from that set… 

For years after we stopped playing he kept Zadoc and Runka sitting on the desk in his study. The dice were also kept in the desk drawer, I think in the plastic shell packaging they’d come in!? 

Today my dad would have been 79 years old. He died earlier this year. It wasn’t a huge shock - he’d had medical problems for years. Just over a year ago he ended up in hospital in the summer, and remained there for months… instead of going home, he was moved into a long-term care facility at which point my mother purged most of his belongings. 

(Before everyone starts in with the "I'm sorry for your loss..." comments, I did not feel a great loss or void in my life at his passing. We never really had all that close of a bond, for a variety of reasons (and that's a whole other looooong story...). I hadn’t spoken to him in months. Never visited him at the long-term care facility. I'm absolutely not saying that I didn't like him or he was a bad person or a terrible father. Not at all. He was a kind human that cared a lot about a lot of things. We just did not have a very strong connection)

Zadoc and Runka and the dice were not amongst those belongings that were so brutally disposed of a year ago during the PURGE, nor did I see them among the affects that were to go to the new place he was living at. There was a further discarding of the last few things he owned when he died because the facility he was in insisted that all of his things be removed THAT DAY and my mother and sister got over there before me and just threw everything out (don't... just... don't EVEN get me started...)…  

My parents moved around a LOT within the city over the last few decades. Seriously, I think they lived in over a dozen different places over the last three decades - all within Saskatoon. A few times were attempts to downsize. My father was terrible about getting rid of things, which irritated my mother to no end. They may have been discarded during one of those moves. I’ve been wondering at what point did he get rid of those dice and miniatures. 

I had kind of thought, since he’d held onto them for so long, he’d still have them and that they’d eventually have been passed on to me. Or maybe to Finnegan…? 

At what point WERE they discarded!? Where they purposefully discarded? If so, what was it that changed and shifted them from things to be held onto to things no longer needed?  

Or where they simply forgotten in the bottom of a box that was hastily filled during one of their moves and later thrown out  after opening it at looking at the contents at the top and deciding it was all stuff not needed anymore? 

So much of what they did discard was offered to me first - like EVERYTHING - boxes and boxes of decades old magazines and empty file folders (after the original contents were shredded). He’d kept a lot of odd little knick-nacks. I have a box full of assorted pocket knives (WTF am I going to do with those!? I just couldn’t throw them in the garbage as my mother was instructing, in the moment last summer!?). I have a few of his childhood toys… but not Zadoc and Runka or the dice…? 

Just to be clear... because I have posted things in the past that other people seemed to think I was deeply depressed about... I'm not really all that sad about this. I'm mostly just curious about what happened to them!? (I DO have my moments of DEEP DESPAIR... but this is not one of them!) 

They WERE Marvellous Miniature and Desirable Dice!