Hello backers,

Chris Pramas here to tell you more about The Expanse miniatures that we’re funding in this campaign alongside the Transport Union Edition. If you follow me at all on social media, you know that I love miniatures and minis gaming. I started using them in RPGs in 1980 and got into minis games in 1985. No surprise then that I took on the Expanse miniatures project myself. 

I had two goals when I started the process. First, make minis suitable for PCs and other characters. Second, make spaceships! Picking a scale for the character minis was easy enough. 28mm is by far the most popular scale for RPG minis and my personal favorite so that was the plan from the get go. The spaceship miniatures took a lot more research and thinking. The size difference between a rock hopper and a battleship is enormous. If I picked a scale that allowed a Donnager mini, ships like the Rocinante would be tiny on the table. I ultimately decided to focus on the sorts of ships most used in RPG campaigns and make them in 1/1000 scale. That makes the Rocinante and similarly sized ships about 5 cm (2 inches) long. A destroyer at that scale would be about 15cm (6 inches) long. 1/1000 scale is also quite useful for the sculptors, who can easily calculate the size of the minis. 

Getting back to the character minis, I wanted players to have a lot of choice when picking their minis. As a wargamer, my mind immediately went to the multipart hard plastic sets that have become so popular in minis gaming. RPG minis these days tend to be fixed posed, but I wanted ours to be customizable. If we could provide different bodies, heads, arms, and equipment options, players could build their characters the way they want. If you don’t have a lot of experience with minis, you may find the prospect of gluing all those pieces together a little daunting. Don’t worry, it’s quite straightforward and all you need is model glue, which is easy to find. Those of you who have held metal minis parts together while 5-minute epoxy sets know how much harder such things used to be! 

The next step was crucially important: finding the right partner. Green Ronin does not have the infrastructure to handle manufacturing on our own. In our 24 years in business, we’ve never even had an office. Our team is spread out in many cities coast to coast, so it’s never been desirable or practical. Better then to find an experienced partner with the knowhow and facilities to manufacture miniatures. 

Long story short, we’re working with a terrific partner in Wargames Atlantic. I already had several of their kits and knew they did good work. When I contacted their president, Hudson Adams, he was enthusiastic about the project. Since then, he and I have worked together closely to make Expanse miniatures a reality. Huge thanks to Hudson and Wargames Atlantic for all their hard work. 

As for what you can expect, each set will consist of three identical frames (AKA sprues). The Spaceship Crew set can make 18 characters, and the Ships of the Expanse set at least 27 spaceships. The latter will mostly be one- or two-piece minis because we are modelling specific ship types, all of which have statistics in the RPG. One great thing about getting three of each ship is that you can set up a lot of different scenarios. There are enough small freighters in the box that you could create a convoy, for example.

Designing the frames for injection mold tooling is the most important (and expensive!) part of making hard plastic miniatures. Accompanying this update are pictures of the front and back of the Spaceship Crew pieces sculpted so far. The important thing to note is the engineering of the frames will happen many months from now, and it is only then that we’ll be certain exactly what we can fit on one sprue. We may or may not be able to get all the sculpted pieces on there, so just keep that in mind. It’s also likely that there will be some new pieces designed after the campaign so we can make the sets as useful as possible. 

I’m sure you are wondering if there will be more miniatures sets in this campaign. It is definitely something we want to do, but we need to make enough money to do so. If you have miniatures loving friends, tell them about the campaign! I think we’d all like to see more ships and up to destroyer size is practical. I’d like to do a Mercs & Marines set for well-armored (including power armor) PCs, soldiers, and security types. Belters deserve their own set as well. The size of the Spaceship Crew minis is consistent because all the different parts need to be usable with each other. It’d be great to do a set in which we could better display Belter physiques and rep the OPA. 

Many of you, I’m sure, realized this instantly, but these minis are useful in many other games as well. There are many miniatures rulesets out there that Expanse minis would be great for. Games like Stargrave, Xenos Rampant, and Five Parsecs from Home can be played with whatever minis you like. Spaceship combat games too.