Pack Dinosaurs

My youngest daughter is kind enough to pretend to like dinosaurs, which gives me an excuse to fill up her bedroom with the beautiful Papo models.  Can't have them in my bedroom you see, as I am currently mascarading as an adult.

So, obviously, there comes a time when I not only want to look at the dinosaurs, I want to push them around too.  If you are here reading this, also mascarading as adults, you know what I mean.

When the two of us decided a couple of years back to play "Rangers of Shadow Deep", three ideas popped up.  First of all, I would paint anthropomorphs for it, 'cos my youngest loves animals.  Second, it would be set in the jungle, one of the reasons being that we wanted to make some terrain together, and I didn't have any jungle terrain.  Third of all, the idea popped into my head : hey, there could be dinosaurs !  The Jungle Deep (our version of the Shadow Deep) is slowly yielding its mysteries, but there is some sort of time distortion involved in it.  So as the Jungle Deep advances, so does strange flora and fauna.  Dinosaurs often decorate our gaming tables, and sometimes fill in for some monsters.  Hence whenever a Troll is required, our (um sorry, my daughter's) Allosauraus roars onto the games table.

Anyway, in the run up to the summer holidays, we cracked out the official RoSD "Across the Wastes" adventure which was to be our next undertaking, to read the fluff.  Very atmospheric.  We got to the list of additional companions, and there is a camel handler and two pack camels.  "Well", I said "I do have a couple of unpainted camels somewhere, I can get them ready in a couple of days, just..."

Suddenly a neuron storm sets my brain on fire.  My daughter stands by patiently until I get the hand-shaking and the eye-rolling under control, and I splurt out "hey instead of pack camels we can use pack dinosaurs ! This animal handler guy has learnt how to domesticate some of them !"

"Yay", said my daughter, because she really is the best.

So off we went, and found a couple of plastic dinosaurs in a toy store.  After a quick and dirty paint job and a rummage through the bitz and terrain boxes...well here they are.  When I finished them and showed them to my eldest daughter, we both burst out laughing.  How wonderful it is to have turned 50, and have this great hobby that lets my imagination run riot !