FATC Kickstarter

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/heresyminiatures/28mm-sci-fi-miniatures

Despite my pledge to buy no new minis this year, I've made two exceptions. The first was a Zel tractor from Strato Minis to support the Ukrainian government in their resistance to Putin's invasion and war crimes (which I'm now painting and will be available for auction very soon, with proceeds going to the same cause). The second is this one.

It's partly a practical thing. The light mech and military robot minis are perfect for Zero Dark and I'm gearing up to more photography for future releases. But it's mostly Andy Foster.

Andy is one of the business's long-term stalwarts who has deserved more and better than his relentless determination has brought him. As well as being responsible for a collection of brilliant sculpts of his own design and some of the highest quality metal casting in the UK, he has been a loud voice for the small, independent businesses in wargaming for decades, despite struggling with health issues that made a transition into salaried employment almost impossible.

This latest Kickstarter, though, is particularly poignant because it returns to the market not some of Andy's sculpts, but a set of designs originally sculpted, cast and sold by Antenociti's Workshop.

Jed at Antenociti's was another influential voice of independent entrepreneurship whose slow rise, sudden peak and equally sudden failure serve as a cautionary tale of hubris and the risk of over-promising without the resources to deliver - especially in a market as volatile as ours.

Antenociti's contraction and then inevitable closure can be linked directly to their attempts to leverage Kickstarter for capital to create innovative manufacturing for tabletop games. And those are good things. Jed over-promised and under-delivered, which is a bad thing but - technically - not a recipe for failure in the Kickstarter market (you'd be surprised how few guarantees there are for backers in the crowdfunding world). In many ways, if Jed had chosen to renege on his Kickstarter promises and just written the whole thing off as a failure followed by a gradual re-fund or partial re-fund of backers' money, Antenociti's might still be around today. But Jed did the honourable thing and, when the project went beyond the ability of the Kickstarter funds to fulfill it, made up the shortfalls with money from the rest of the business which ended up being a bottomless bucket.

None of the minis in Andy's Kickstarter has anything to do with that debacle. They were all designed, cast and sold long before that. And, it seems, Andy hasn't exactly bought them from Jed - which is no surprise because I don't think Andy has the money. Rather, the KS campaign is to raise the money to (1) pay Jed for the moulds, and (2) put the moulds back into production.

Anyway, it's only a 7-day campaign and it's already passed its £3k funding goal. So if you like cool sci-fi minis and want to support not one but two of the independent figures who have both made significant contributions to the evolution of our industry, then you should back it.