*audible sigh*
Monster Quest, part two - the Ebay Dungeon!So, having not had much luck in the vehicle-dominated bargain shops of Vienna, my next option was the bargain basement of the internet - that is to say, ebay. I discovered a LOT of things about plastic toys that I didn't know previously.
Firstly, volume and type. Lego was
considerably more dominant than I expected - some relevant searches were up to 80% lego items at the small end. Playmobil was also very common, though a bit less so. Unless you want that lego-specific look, this rather cuts down on options; it's pretty hard to make anything lego look like it might be a generic gaming miniature. The range of lego and knockoff variants thereof was vastly larger than I'd ever realised, too, with huge ranges of aliens, goblins, and other fantastical things, so that even on searches where I had zero expectation of seeing much lego, there was a lot of the stuff cropping up.
Second, cost. I wanted to try doing this competition without spending too much on it - that being kind of the point of a "take a cheap toy, make a monster" contest, I guess. The trouble is that once you take into account P&P, Ebay sellers (many of whom are actually medium sized companies from China) aren't actually a dead cheap option. The cost difference between plastic toys of the sort of scale I was after and actual literal gaming miniatures was pretty minimal. This probably again speaks to the different world we're in now compared to when Gygax found his owlbear; gaming minis have been produced enough that you do get some cheap plastic/metal turning up (even if only from folk who don't have a good handle on the price inflation miniatures have undergone), whereas generic toys, unless you have a collection of them already, are probably less common and tend to be more equivalent in cost.
Most of what I was finding related to large, well-known franchises, too, which makes it rather hard to find inspiration. Writing gaming rules for a renamed blastoise is fine, but... it's still a blastoise, at the end of the day, everyone recognises it, nothing to see here. Outside Pokemon, searching for monsters got a lot of Monsters, Inc., a lot of Monster High (which seemed to be some toy about accessorising dolls in fashionable clothing), and a lot of "moshi monsters" which I hadn't come across before but which turned out to be a popular UK-based franchise in their own right:
I found a few individual odds and ends which were definitely *different* - I've no idea what this slightly terrifying thing is meant to be, for example. It appears to be from a playmobil or similar type system, with clip-hands, except that it looks rather like tie-in toy for the villain of a c-list horror movie:
And then there were things that just appeared to have happened after a toy designer had a nightmare and decided to inflict it on the world - I'm not even going to speculate on this creature, other than to note that I decided not to write rules for it mainly because true horror isn't really my ideal genre:
Eventually, I started getting closer to what I wanted - in general, it seemed, looking for actual animals made badly was more promising than monsters made well. Dinosaurs definitely seemed a more promising starting point, and there are certainly a range of options there, though most of them are reasonable attempts at the creatures rather than anything truly strange.
Something like this could certainly be the basis for an idea though...
The best thing I found were from Chinese companies doing large bags of assorted plastics. As well as dinosaurs, they had some nicely woeful attempts at real-world animals, including a zodiac set (good for creating chimera-like mixes of the familiar and unfamiliar) and several sea-life sets (tentacles!). There was even this set of bizarre dragon variants which included some really rather fun options, though it was by far the most expensive of their offerings at well over a tenner for the set:
But, once again, there was a problem - most of the cheaper/quirkier plastics I'd found were shipping from China only, meaning there was no way I could be sure of getting them in time for the end of the contest. I decided to give myself a little while to mull it over rather than racing to get something that I wasn't sure would come anyway, and decided that if I was going to get something, I'd need to get it from a European supplier. Those would get things on time, but I'd be restricted to much more realistic dinosaurids. I'm not sure where to go now, though I do have an idea with a very significant change of tack involved forming in my head...