Ever since Ertl bought Britains then divested it to Tomy and First Gear, they have abandoned the nursery room level toy figure market and reached for the connoisseur level, though not in the King and Country or St. Petersburg league... kind of a low end everyman range of good quality figures. The sculpts are great, but more properly "model" than "toy" soldiers.
A great source of paper figures, old victorian paper theaters are popular craft objects online. In a way tangential to RPGs, performances were usually ad libed to a scenario rather than fully scripted, and could be as surreal as the performers imagination, combining characters and character archetypes from multiple sources, made easy by the popular newspaper and family magazines that from 1870-1914 printed thousands of scenic tableaux and characters, though only a small portion of such ephemera survives.
