Actually, we have done something in my goup to "fix" this for now and give everyone a horse if they want one using D&D minis.
Bear with me and I'll explain it (and get some pics up here soon).
A buddy of mine came up with this while in a local toy store. He found a product there called a "tube of horses". You know those tubes full of various dice? d4, d6, d8, d10,d12,d20 etc?
Ok. Now imagine one of those except its bigger and filled with plastic horses. They come 10 to a tube. They are at about 28mm scale or so - just about the right size for miniature use. They are just plastic toy horses for kids to play with.
Including big kids, as it turns out.
Ok. So the horses are sculptured nicely enough and pre-painted, but the paint jobs are nothing special. In fact - on the cheesey side, if anything. They have no base on them, but will stand up on their own on the horse's legs.
Most of all - they ARE horses.
So my friend has this idea. He puts some bases on these horses for starters - so they have a proper base (you could use them without though if you like.)
Now he does the weird thing. Imagine looking side on at a plastic horse. He takes a Dremel and cuts a vertical notch right through the horse where the saddle will be. About 7 mm wide or so and 8 mm deep.
Underneath this vertical notch, he cuts a connected notch - this one horizontal. It's a thinner notch but longer. It perfectly fits a base on a medium D&D mini, snugly.
END RESULT: We can take any horse and slide the bottom of any medium base creature into it. For a normal human sized mini, the mini is "inside" the horse to about its knees /mid thigh or so. The ends of the base slightly bulges out of either side of the horse.
Now - I know what you are thinking: thinking the same thing I did when it was described to me: that's got to be butt ugly.
And close up? It is. It's clearly not the best kit bashing you could desire.
HOWEVER
If you are also like us, you don't play up close and personal with your miniatures most of the time. Instead, they are on a table before you and your eyes are sitting back anywhere from 3-6 feet away from where the mins are on the battlemat at any point in time.
And when used at THAT range the things look great! Mounted characters are clearly mounted and it gives a good sense of height and size on the battlemap. The horse looks good at that viewing distance and everyone has their own horse and their own "normal" minaiture. It just happens to be based partly inside of a horse when they are mounted, but at a normal range of 3-6 feet or so - it looks like their own miniature properly mounted on a horse.
To dismount in battle is easy and the horse remains on the battlemap to fight or be attacked or just "get in the way".
And it fits any medium figure snugly and properly.
Best of all - the horses are cheap. My friend Vidor bought about 50 of these horse for around 40 CDN. He dremmeled em out in an afternoon and based them on correctly size plastic bases with cyanocrylate.
We can have a LARGE group of bad guys knights on horseback on the battlefield as well as horses for the PCs. When we need different villains mounted - we just pop em into their horses. There is never a shortage.
I'll try and get you some pics of these in a few days - but while we were very skeptical of this at first, everyone agrees it is more than serviceable and we are all rather pleased at the innovation.
