A little something from the OSA...

The Old School Archive is going live in a little over a week. While it's being built as a space for artists to sell their traditionally sculpted works in a digital format, there's also another purpose to this project: one of the restoration and preservation of "lost" figures. A little backstory:

When I was five years old, I got a playset for my birthday. It was full of knights, dragons, ogres, and other fantasy figures, and included some cardboard terrain and a giant battlefield mat. This was a pretty formative moment for me, as you might imagine. A lot of those figures stayed with me over the years (and many, many moves). They eventually slipped through my fingers before I reached adulthood, but the memories of those little plastic warriors never left, and when I saw Stu Horvath post about the Dragonriders of the Styx on his Vintage RPG Instagram feed a few years back, I finally had a name for these things. Better still, after striking up a conversation on the topic, Stu was kind enough to send a box full to me.

The Old School Archive was a seed of an idea at that point, and we had already attempted to scan miniatures with a model that wasn't up to the task. So, we bought a second model, and had some fair success scanning these figures. It wasn't quite there, and it took a few more years (and a third, far more expensive model of scanner) to get to where we are now. While the dream of the OSA is to ultimately catalogue and preserve miniatures in digital/3d printable format, it extends to old toy lines like this as well, especially designs that can be scaled to work with other miniature ranges. 

We've posted three of the Dragonriders of the Styx figures to reward folders ($5 levels +) in advance of the store release, and we'll post more as we get closer. Once the store is live, these designs will be available for free to everyone, and that's something we're doing with any models that don't have current rights holders to profit from sales. Because these particular designs are in the public domain, sale of printed versions is up to you, but we would appreciate attribution and links to the OSA if you do so. The versions here are scaled for standard miniature gaming (30mm-ish), but we included the original versions at the scale they were released (and with their integrated bases) as well.

- Dutchmogul