Creature Caster is a manufacturer of large scale resin monsters from Canada, specializing on demons, but also doing some dragons and elemental beeings. I backed their Kickstarter back in 2014 because I loved their original Treewalker. The quality of the mini I got was flawless, but their Boreal Treewalker, released after their Kickstarter was fulfilled, really caught my attention. This huge mini is nearly 200mm tall and I enjoyed building and painting it very much.
There are not many adventures available for the Iron Kingdoms RPG, so I tend to look at other RPGs for adventures and modify them for the IKRPG. One great source is the Penny Dreadful line from Wyrd Games. A highlight of their line is the adventure “The Ferryman”. We played through the fantastic first half without any changes, but I completely rewrote the second half. In September 2016 I painted some Wyrd miniatures for the adventure.
What started as a military sponsored program to improve the quality of prosthesis turned into a rogue program involving twisted minds, undead, and mechanika. The result were the “Enhanced”, a group of undead scientist and ex-military personnel with extreme mechanical body enhancements.
Private Ennis Mosley, one of the first subjects of the program and complete mad and homicidal, escaped into Corvis and became known as the mysterious “Waterfront Butcher”, killing dozens of people along the river. This lead to one of the largest manhunts in the city in recent history and in the end to the discovery of the “Enhanced” program.
The Waterfront Butcher:
Captain Vanessa Garrys, a brilliant engineer, was the mastermind behind the “Enhanced”. While the program started with nothing but the best intentions, a series of self-experiments conducted with the help of Professor Victor Halstead, twisted her mind and drove her to perform more and more extreme procedures on herself and her patients.
Captain Vanessa Garrys:
Professor Victor Halstead, a renowned surgeon teaching at Corvis University, completely fell to the charms of Captain placeholder and left his family and his academic career behind to help her with her project. Blinded by love, he never questioned her methods or her state of mind, until it was too late and he too ended up as one of the “Enhanced”
Professor Victor Halstead:
It’s really great to see how many fantastic new minis turn up on the net as printable 3D models almost daily. One good source for these minis is Patreon. More and more talented artists share their work on the site for mostly very reasonable monthly fees. I was thrilled to see a brand new Monster Mini Patreon last month by Rocket Pig Games. One of their first minis was a fantastic Bone Naga, which I immediately printed and painted.
About a month ago I started to experiment a bit with 3D modeling. There is an encounter in the Iron Kingdoms Witchfire Trilogy adventure “The Longest Night” featuring a sarcophagus of a high priest of menoth. I found a nice sarcophagus on Thingiverse, but it had the wrong symbol on the lid. So I sat down and created a 3D model of the symbol of Morrow and added it to the existing model. I also changed the base of the sarcophagus to sit at an angle.
To add even more elements to the encounter I also created a statue of the high priest. The statue itself is a Precursor Knight from Privateer Press, the socket is once again from Thingiverse.
Crypt of Morrow:
Symbol of Morrow 3D model:
Sarcophagus 3D model:
There are a lot of memorable iconic D&D monster, but for me the one embodying D&D more than any other is the Beholder. One of the best Beholder minis around is, without a question, the limited collector’s edition Beholder from Gale Force Nine. Sadly the mini is so rare nowadays that I could not get my hands on one after trying for more than one year. Then I found the “Shadow Beholder” from D&D Miniatures Rage of Demons set. This plastic mini is not as detailed as the GF9 resin one, but the sculpt itself is great.
Sadly the mini was a pain to work with. It was not glued together well and came with large mold lines. Had to cut it apart, glue it together again and resculpt a lot of scales. Also had a lot of problems to get the base coat to stick to the plastic and had a lot of problems with paint peeling off.
In the end it was all worth it. I’m very pleased with the result and the large mini has a great presence on the table.
Just finished another addition to my RPG monster set, a beautiful Basilisk found on Thingiverse. Due to all of the spikes the print was a little tricky, but it turned out great.
Elementals, beings formed directly from the forces of the elements are time-honored monsters and can be found in many Monster Manuals. I’ve painted three of them for my RPG campaign in the last two years, the classic Fire Elemental and the more exotic Blood and Smoke Elementals.
Fire Elemental:
Blood Elemental:
Smoke Elemental:
With the rising number of exceptional models for 3D printing available on the web I decided to invest into a 3D printer about two month ago. I went for an Anycubic Photon DLP resin printer and I am very happy with the printing results.
Managed to get my hands on a fantastic Umber Hulk 3D model from Greg Breault. His version of the iconic D&D monster is a mix between the bulkier AD&D version and the thinner current D&D version:
The model printed without any problems:
Finished model:
And the fifth and final player character of my RPG group, Alyssa Ferryl, a gifted Nyss refugee from the far north.
Our fourth player character – Horthol Moonclaw, a Trollkin Sniper who’s magic gift with the runelock rifle was discovered while serving in the cygnarian military.
