Nanotechnology: storing D&D Miniatures
My recent post on storing WotC’s Dungeon Tiles garnered enough interest that I thought I’d follow up with a brief comment on how I store my miniatures. Since the advent of the D&D Miniatures game with its relatively affordable prepainted plastic miniatures, I’ve accumulated quite a number of the little figures.
Like many players, I store my small and medium (using DDM size categories) in fishing tackle organizers. Personally, I use Okochobee Fats boxes that I buy at Wal-Mart; I usually get the canvas bag that comes with eight clear plastic boxes. Currently, I have two of these for D&D Miniatures and one for HeroClix miniatures. Since I play D&D as an RPG much more often than I play the D&D MIniatures skirmish game, I sort the miniatures into groups that help me find figures easily for role-playing purposes. For example, I put all elves in one organizer, I have two organizers for undead, and so on.
Most large and all huge figures exceed the space available in the tackle organizers, so I use a plastic Sterilite multi-drawer organizer also purchaed at Wal-Mart. My current configuration consists of seven 13" x 13" 2.5" shallow drawers for large figures and four 12" x 18" x 5" deep drawers for huge figures. I line the bottoms of these drawers with a black grip liner from Wal-Mart’s kitchen aisles so that the minis don’t slip around when I open and close the drawers.
My sons gave my wife a Brother P-Touch label maker for Christmas 2008, and I borrowed it to label my miniatures organizers and drawers. Admittedly, this system is a bit “bulkly” (as one commenter noted about my Dungeon Tiles storage), but I can find any miniature I want very quickly.
One of my Okochobee Fats cases, pictured below, holds eight organizers filled primarily with PC races (though these most often come into my games as NPCs and villains, of course). The other holds eight organizers filled primarily with monsters.
Here’s a peek inside the dragonborn/tiefling/warforged organizer:
My “home office” is an Ikea corner unit. I store my large and huge miniatures in the big space beneath the pull-out keyboard drawer.
Finally, here’s a peek inside my huge dragon drawer:
4 Comments so far
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This is fantastic. If only I had the miniatures you have…
one tip i would like to offer, is take a ziplock bag, and when your working on your encounter put the miniatures in the bag before hand, then label the bag as encounter X
this way you can keep everything stored, and only use what you need.
That’s a great tip, Mike.
[...] titled Nanotechnology, covers a wide range of topics all dealing with D&D Minis. From storing D&D minis, to distingusing identical minis, to tracking conditions on your minis. They also have reviews of [...]