What Color Should I Paint the Mind Flayer?

My husband and I stood open-mouthed in the hobby shop. We gaped at the sheer enormity of choices before us. Human paladins, half-elf bards, dwarf fighters, and half-orc barbarians looked down at us. Each one looked cooler than the last. I knew we only had so much money, but I felt I could easily drop a thousand dollars in my friendly local game shop.

“Here’s a tabaxi!” my husband cried. He pulled out the gray cat-person miniature from the shelf. “This will be perfect for Mike.”

“And here’s a pre-painted halfling for Steve.” I held up the colorful miniature of a Hobbit-looking creature.

“Are you sure you want a pre-painted one? Don’t you want to paint Steve’s too?” he asked.

“Nah.” I held out the miniature of a toothy, leafy monster. “I have to paint this Shambling Mound, after all.”

****

Let me clear one thing up. Dungeons & Dragons isn’t a weird demonic sex cult. Nothing could be further from the truth. D&D is a role-playing game. You take on the role of brave adventurers exploring a magical world as narrated and orchestrated by the Dungeon Master. You have free reign to do anything, but you have to roll dice to see how well you actually do that ridiculous thing you are attempting.

But it’s really just a bunch of nerds sitting around a dining table, yelling at dice that didn’t give them a good enough number. All you need is the Player’s Handbook, the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and maybe a Monster Manual so the players have something to fight. It’s a game of imagination, so you don’t really need anything fancy or expensive to play. Some people like to play with miniatures, tiny figures representing the players’ characters and the monsters they battle.

Or you could use that same imagination and use a computer mouse as the vile gorgon. Or a squeaky toy for the ancient red dragon. That’s what we did for a long time until our buddy opened up a game store. He mostly catered to the Magic: The Gathering crowd, but he also carried D&D rulebooks and plenty of miniatures.

We didn’t want to have to use Monopoly pieces to represent our characters anymore. But since there were so many miniatures to choose from, we didn’t want to spend a fortune. We would only buy minis for each player, a few monsters, and call it a day.

We took our loot home and laid out everything we needed to paint the minis. We could have purchased expensive hobby paints, but I read that cheap acrylics would do the trick. We lay down newspaper on the table, lined up our bottles of paint, filled our cups with water, arranged our brushes, and prepared to paint.

After a few minutes, we realized it wasn’t going to be a quick process. We put on a YouTube playlist to listen to as we worked, but soon we really weren’t hearing it. The soundtrack of our focused, grim-faced painting was just us softly cursing as we tried to paint the tiny figures as best we could.

"Why does this damn cat thing have so many belts?” my husband asked.

“This Shambling Mound is stupid. Layers upon layers of vines. It’s awful,” I said. And then, “Would you pass the green?”

“My guy’s eyes are lopsided. He looks so dumb.”

“F*@#. I got brown in my green!”

Before we knew it, the sun had set. The playlist had long ago reached its end. Entire hours had passed without us knowing it. And our first set of minis lay before us, magnificent but untouchable since they still had to dry.

“That was...nice,” my husband said.

“Very chill,” I agreed. We were both relaxed after focusing so intently on tiny details. We were proud of the end result, but mostly we had managed to get lost in the moment for a good long time. No social media, no phones, no television. For just a little bit, there was only the minis.

Then the big day came. We got snacks ready and laid out the miniatures where the players usually sat. They came over to play, eager for the session, but they were only mildly impressed by the work we had done.

“Oh, that’s cool,” was all we got from them. We may as well have given them Monopoly pieces.

After the session, my husband and I looked at each other. I could tell he was disappointed. I was about to launch into an overly-articulate rant about how ungrateful they were. Didn’t they understand the sheer amount of work that went into the character pieces? Didn’t they admire the precision? The mastery of the color wheel?

“Wanna paint some dragons with me?” he asked before I could start complaining.

“We don’t have dragons,” I said.

“We can get some,” he said. “Do you wanna?”

I did. I really did.

And after we dropped entirely too much money, we came home with three different dragons, a cloud giant, a whole bunch of goblins, and a couple of mind flayers. And we painted without a care in the world.