Halloween Skeleton Spider And Suspension Of Disbelief For Wargaming
I bought this spider at 'The Warehouse' (as opposed to 'The Wherehouse' which nobody can find). Last year they had skeleton scorpions, lizards and frogs. You might have observed the skeleton frog in my recent wargames. This year they also have an old favorite, the skeleton rat which is very large rat sized..
Unlike the vertebrates, of course, the invertebrates don't have backbones or any other bones; that's why they are called invertebrates. The spiders, scorpions and insects have exoskeletons so when they are dead they look like husky versions of their old selves. In fact they even shed their exoskeletons whilst living and growing new and bigger ones underneath.
So that makes these models kind of amusing and not the sort of things you would use to teach science. But for my purposes and possibly yours, dear reader, they might just serve well, at least if you are into fantasy wargaming. The ironic thing, which I read somewhere, is that a really big insect or spider, say bigger than a man could not support its weight without an internal skeleton. Apparently there is also something to do with the atmosphere which was different in very early prehistoric times which allowed such creatures to then grow bigger than today. I think there were some really big centipede and millipede creatures that might have been as long as a man.
Soooo...you can have a different type of planet or you can have a creature which looks like a spider but has a different internal structure. I mean that is if you want to bother with rationalisations for a fantasy scenario. You could equally just say magic holds it all together, just like with skeleton warriors and rotting zombies that somehow manage not to get eaten away by bacteria and maggots before they perform their evil deeds. The beauty of fantasy wargaming is it's your world with its own rules of nature, magic and everything else.
You could use the Warhammer rules for large spiders and add undead variants. the fun thing is you could put riders on them and have them scaling all sorts of obstacles before their mounts pounce on some unfortunate succulent victim. Of course, all those body juices would just drip right through the spider's skeleton.
Below you can see the plastic spider posed with my 54mm and 60mm zombies (well one of those is actually an MPC Frankenstein and the one holding his guts in is from a monster in a movie I don't recall).
Here she is (isn't she lovely and definitely not harmless) with one of my vampire conversions (copy of Timpo knight with new head from an old fantasy SF set).
What is really good about it is that it is a nice bone color and doesn't need painting. In 1/32 scale she makes a large skeleton spider and in 28mm (Warhammer scale) she could be almost a gigantic spider.
Unlike the vertebrates, of course, the invertebrates don't have backbones or any other bones; that's why they are called invertebrates. The spiders, scorpions and insects have exoskeletons so when they are dead they look like husky versions of their old selves. In fact they even shed their exoskeletons whilst living and growing new and bigger ones underneath.
So that makes these models kind of amusing and not the sort of things you would use to teach science. But for my purposes and possibly yours, dear reader, they might just serve well, at least if you are into fantasy wargaming. The ironic thing, which I read somewhere, is that a really big insect or spider, say bigger than a man could not support its weight without an internal skeleton. Apparently there is also something to do with the atmosphere which was different in very early prehistoric times which allowed such creatures to then grow bigger than today. I think there were some really big centipede and millipede creatures that might have been as long as a man.
Soooo...you can have a different type of planet or you can have a creature which looks like a spider but has a different internal structure. I mean that is if you want to bother with rationalisations for a fantasy scenario. You could equally just say magic holds it all together, just like with skeleton warriors and rotting zombies that somehow manage not to get eaten away by bacteria and maggots before they perform their evil deeds. The beauty of fantasy wargaming is it's your world with its own rules of nature, magic and everything else.
You could use the Warhammer rules for large spiders and add undead variants. the fun thing is you could put riders on them and have them scaling all sorts of obstacles before their mounts pounce on some unfortunate succulent victim. Of course, all those body juices would just drip right through the spider's skeleton.
Below you can see the plastic spider posed with my 54mm and 60mm zombies (well one of those is actually an MPC Frankenstein and the one holding his guts in is from a monster in a movie I don't recall).
What is really good about it is that it is a nice bone color and doesn't need painting. In 1/32 scale she makes a large skeleton spider and in 28mm (Warhammer scale) she could be almost a gigantic spider.
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