Raging Heroes

Sometime last year, while perusing the Internet for female witch hunters for use in Warhammer Quest, I inadvertently stumbled on a French company called Raging Heroes who made a range of models called The Toughest Girls in the Galaxy (TGITG). They had a couple of amazing looking female witch hunters, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. They had an entire range of what could only be called as "bad girls" in space - bubble gum chewin', gun-totin', take no prisoner types. There is an established literary subset of these character archetypes, most notably in comics, video games and movies - Lara Croft, Ripley and Vasquez from the Aliens franchise, and Imperator Furiousa from Mad Max: Fury Road all come to mind. I love Charlize Theron's Furiosa. She engendered the same type of reaction from me as Clint Eastwood did when I was younger. She's a fucking badass.

Looking for a Witch Hunter.

These miniatures tries to capture that "bad girl" aesthetic. The very first miniatures I bought (aside from the Milton Bradley games of HeroQuest and Space Crusade) were the boxed sets for the Knights Panther and White Wolves. This was a seminal event in my life that would induct me into wargaming. Similarly, stumbling onto the Raging Heroes website created a similar reaction - an irrational desire to acquire, paint and create a universe in miniature. This time it would no longer be swords and sorcery. This time it would be in space. At the time of writing Raging Heroes had produced three complete armies - the Iron Empire, the Kurnakova Shock Troops (KST), and the Jailbirds - with three more on the way (Sisters, Lust Elves and Void Elves). Despite the quality of their miniatures Raging Heroes didn't have a game system to house their miniatures in. Instead, they offered their entire range as proxies for pre-existing systems.

Coyote snipers. These chicks rock.

Ironically it was GW killing Warhammer that re-ignited my passion for miniatures. The end of Fantasy Battle freed me from the need to spend hours creating viable armies, and instead focus on smaller, skirmish-level games. In reality my miniatures are now just an extended pool of Warhammer Quest characters and NPCs, and I can just paint a selection rather than mass producing regiments. Even more ironic is the fact that now, freed from the tyranny of having to paint regiments, I am voluntarily doing it again to prepare for a Kings of War meet in June. I guess it's in the blood. When I go back to Australia in August I'm going to bring back Warhammer Quest plus a selection of miniatures from my old collection so that I can hold dungeon bashes for the people at the Japanese International Gamer's Guild (JIGG). I saw people playing the old Milton Bradley HeroQuest at a JIGG meeting last year and that immediately reminded me of the old stuff I have rattling around back home in Oz. I also began looking for non-GW miniatures to expand my Warhammer Quest range, which led me to stumbling onto the Raging Heroes website.

The Iron Empire combines WWI Prussian militarism with laser weapons and dark magic.

Having perused their range I am now consumed with an irrational desire to acquire a large number of their models. I just like their look and aesthetic, even if the objections about their hyper sexualized natures are warranted. I realize that by collecting these miniatures I am edging closer to the questionable realm of insular guys who collect manga dolls with big boobies, but if I'm going to have female miniatures then they will embrace the "bad girl" universe, with all the good and bad it entails. Barbarella, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Planet Terror and Sucker Punch, I welcome thee to the tabletop.

Lust Elves don't need clothes to fight. It is known.

The Raging Heroes range incorporates sci-fi and fantasy, but it was really their sci-fi stuff that caught my eye. Now that I had the models I needed a game system to ground them within, so I went all in on Deadzone, Mantic's sci-fi skirmish game. I did my homework, perusing Board Game Geek's top 28 mm skirmish games list (Deadzone came in at number one), as well as reading and watching reviews on YouTube before coming to a decision. So now, due to a convoluted series of events kicked off by the demise of Warhammer Fantasy I now play Deadzone, a sci-fi skirmish game. How bizarre is that.

Ideally this sudden avarice for new and shiny miniatures will just simply dry up. This is not a new phenomenon for me - I experienced this as a kid and a young adult when I first got into the hobby. I'm hoping it will just burn out and fade away. I have a ton of hobbies, but I'm a master of none of them, and time is something I don't have much of. I used to be so ashamed of my tabletop hobbies around non-gamers, but I guess I'm old enough not to care anymore. I still don't own any Raging Heroes' miniatures - I'm trying to complete my starting factions first, and get a feel for the game before building a proxy army. I'm quite happy with Deadzone - I'm waiting for Star Saga (Mantic's sci-fi dungeon crawler set in the same universe) to come out, and that will be the focal point of my sci-fi collection, much in the same way Warhammer Quest is for fantasy. But maybe this current obsession will fizz out and sputter to a halt before any of the "bad girls" hit the table top. We shall see.