Roleplaying Miniatures – Paint all the Patreons • Noerdic Hobbys

It’s finally time to choose a patreon, fire up the printer, moisten the brushes and get some Minis done. Our first entry is a classic RPG-Mini-Patreon. Welcome at the gates of Roleplaying Miniatures.

Quickfacts „Roleplaying Miniatures“:

Team or Solo: Jacob releases only his own content
Supporters: 94 Patreons (May 2021)
Pledge-Level-Range: 3€ to 20€, 4 Minis per month, seller licence available
Without supports, presupported, supportless: supportless and presupported, no extra support work necessary.
Genre: classic fantasy
Category: roleplay miniatures, some busts and custom items
Community plattform: Discord
Distributor: MyMiniFactory
Typical Scale: around 32mm
Scalable: scalable for 28mm or smaller, a few for bigger
Long term benefits: 3 month reward & Community reward for sharing prints&paintjobs on social media
Modular Minis: only the more complex ones
Bases: No seperate bases, but options for baseless Minis; thematic bases are planned for future releases, matching the theme of each month

Pricing

The offer looks promising. Three main tiers for 4€, 7€ and 20€. You get four printable minis per month (both, supportless and pre-supported) at the lowest tier. The medium tier gives you some interaction options and you can also ask for items to be created. The highest tier gives you the license to sell the prints. For annual subscription there is a 10% save. For the lowest and highest tier there are still some cheaper early-bird options available.
I picked the Sorcerer tier for 7€, since i want to check out the quality of the minis in the first place. The option to ask for specific items, scenery prop and so on is surely a great gimmick for DMs, so I’ll keep this in mind for later.

Picked Minis

I started this series with the premise to paint five minis per month from a randomly selected Patreon. But Jacob only offers four Minis in the current release. For 4€ this is still a good deal. The actual month’s theme was „Plague“. The preview renderings made a good impression. As mentioned, you can stack up to ask for custom-made stuff and there’s also the Welcome-Pack, which contains six more minis. Since the March pledge was released mid-month (the February pledge released on the third of February), I decided to fill up my set of five minis with additions from the Welcome-Pack. That got me three human characters and two monsters.

The models from the February release all came supportless, in two variants; with an without base. I really liked the poses of the supportless minis. Since supportless modeling has some limitations, it often looks boring and is only good for background-characters, but not in this case. This is really a benefit for people who want to give resin or 3D-prints in general a chance, since they can skip the whole support-related work, like setting them up correctly and removing them without issues. Check out the small dots I missed to fill on the Beholder, if you want to see one of the issues with supports.
Big models come pre-hollowed, something that still doesn’t seem standard today.
I asked Jacob if all monthly-releases will be supportless. He answered „From time to time I’ll make supportless miniatures, but only when it doesn’t compromise the design of the model.“

Printing

I printed the minis with a layer height of 0.02mm and 8xAntiAliasing on my Elegoo Mars. This was the first time I tried water washable resin, which is sometimes hard to get at reasonable prices, but you can clean the prints with some simple cleaner in an ultrasonic bath. But remember to keep up the water after cleaning and give it to the right deposit. It is still hazardous waste.
There were only two issues. First were some wrinkles in the robes of the priest. Maybe it came from the film in my tank and I need to replace it. Second the ugly holes the supports of the Beholder left in his lower back area. I decided not to fill them up in lack of any filler fine enough. Need to get some for the next time.
The Beholder overall seems a tricky mini. There are a lot of hard to reach areas. To be honest, I’m no D&D player, so I know nothing about this monster. But since it’s fairly popular and many Patreons have it, I take him as a comparable benchmark.

Beside these two issues, everything else came out perfectly fine. The Gnoll Demon Lord came in two parts and it only needed a little sanding at the connection point. This is because resin tends to shrink a little bit when it’s curing. That means, multipart models can sometimes have problems with correctly fitting connection points. In this case a bit of sanding was the only necessary extra work.

The details on the minis were good, more than enough to make a good impression for roleplay and also as heroes in your Fantasy-Armies for some Tabletop-action. Their epxressions were detailed and looked good. The only thing i really missed were patterns or fabric structures in the clothes. The hammered shoulder armor from the Gnoll had some cool edges, but the leather and loin were flat. In this scale that is not a big issue. Some of the minis could work well in bigger scales. The Doctor carried a coffin with some nice wood-texture on his back, which was one of the finest structures on these Minis.
As there were no separate bases, I put the Monsters from the Welcome-Pack on simple plastic bases. The three plague-minis had structured bases and there are optional baseless files in the package too.

Preshading is really usefull to find small errors in your prints, beside that, it often helps painting all the details quickly.

Painting

To be clear; I’ve not been aiming for some competition-painting-standard here. Mainly I wanted to get a good level that most of you out there can reach too. This should be the most honest way to give you an Impression what’s possible to get out of the Minis. A Master-Painter can create great Art from nearly every kind of Mini.
To be a bit quicker I added some Airbrush-Work and Inks&Washes to my usual brushwork. I gave every mini a three color preshading (Black, Light Grey, PaleSand) with the airbrush. Then I spent a bit extra time on the Gnoll and the Beholder and worked in some basic colors to benefit from the smoother blends you can get with an Airbrush. Especially the Gnoll was really rewarding for this method, since his fur on his back is a natural divider. With a bit of paper and painting-tape you surely could mask of some more areas and totally go to town with the Airbrush. On the picture below you can see how it came out just right after the Airbrush-part.
The Beholder was way more difficult, since all his tentacles made it hard to avoid spraying other areas. Also I really should have sanded or filled the little holes from the supports. Messing up preparation always bites you in the…
Including priming, the whole Airbrush-work took me around two hours. It surely would be less if you are a bit more experienced.

The three plague minis got a first cover of brown, green and yellow washes plus some GW Contrast paints to give them an earthy based look. From there I started to work out more shadows and a few highlights. When you take a closer look you can see, that I didn’t paint fine highlights. I skipped these to save time and to focus more on the overall look of the group. Everyone got one brighter color for some contrast. The Priest and the Plague-Doctor were natural counterparts. For the Plague-Doctor I sadly hadn’t any good idea for some extra colors, except the lenses, while the Priest by profession had a bright and catching robe. I dusted it a bit down to match him to the other two guys who seem like they tried to make a living somehow in this plague-beaten village. The Villager with the swine at least was a lot of fun, since I threw a bunch of different washes onto him and worked this out to a start-to-rotten look.

Time for some Monsters

The most fun part on the Beholder where definitively his eyes. It was a good opportunity to try and learn a bit about painting eyes. The veins didn’t came out as clean as I hoped, but the effect overall was quite pleasing. Colorwise it was a simple Miniature, mixing some purple and green shades with the yellow eyes for a popping contrast between these two parts. On the green and purple-parts I only pushed the shades and highlights a bit more with the brush and fixed some parts where I sprayed other areas with the Airbrush. I definitively could have made him more slimy.

Resin is extremely brittle. So when you drop a mini, watch out for smallest details which may get damaged. Like his teeth here, due to my clumsiness.

The Gnoll Demon Lord was my personal highlight from this collection. Not only where the colors with the airbrush a good starting point, but also all his other areas like leather, metal (the chains were made with some great love for details!) were a joy to paint. In this scale and size, everything on this beast was well shaped and the contours really helped as a guide for your brush. You can quickly get some simple shades here, deepen it with washes and if you like, there’s also enough room to make some fancy freehands. Please ignore my attempt at tiger-striped loin. I need to train this more. And i must confess, that during painting, one time i dropped him and he burst into over half a dozen peaces. I was able to glue him back together, but a bit of his teeth and his fur were lost due to my clumsiness.

Scale Comparison with Miniatures from Games Workshop & Shieldwolf Miniatures

Perspective for the Patreon

Jacob was so free to tell me a bit about his further plans. Right at this point his Patreon was close to 100 subscribers, which would unlock Royal miniatures, as a Patreon exclusive part of the Welcome-Pack. Besides that, here’s what he worked on

„I’m planning on introducing miniature request (monsters, heroes, characters) for those who get the year subscription or support me for a full year.

I’m working on extending the welcome pack, also I’m working on the best way to deliver the miniature request I glanced earlier. I’m also going to make getting the full set of miniatures from each month on MMF available at a lower price, I’m also considering making a tier that gives access to the full collection of miniatures (Vault tier). I’m very excited for what it’s coming, there’s so many thing I want to do, but I’ve to settle all this ideas on paper first, many of these came from the patrons themselves that suggested me better ways to deliver RPM content. For that and their support I’m very grateful!“

Conclusion

Great Roleplaying Minis for a very fair price. The monthly themes made it easy to check if there’s something for you and the low prices are attractive to just stay as a patreon, even if you have no use for the coming month. Maybe there’s something in for you the follow-up month. In doubt you can also directly ask Jacob via his Discord-Channel. Due to his small amount of supporters, it was a more quiet place, but Jacob himself was eager to answer your questions and always had an open ear for suggestions.
The Proportions (for the human ones) seemed like typical hero scale, with a bit bigger heads and hands, what makes painting easier and if you choose the right scaling, they would fit quite nicely with lots of other available fantasy-miniatures out there.

I would recommend this Patreon especially for Fantasy-Roleplayers and people who want to make their first steps with Resin printing. For my personal taste I will keep an eye on the future releases and hope to see another fun beast-like Mini. The Gnoll has potential to become one of my favorite Minis for this year.

Do you also own a 3D printer? Do you have favourite creators for printable stuff? Post them in the comments. I’m always excited to explore new designers.

And that was the first entry for #PaintallthePatreons. If you paint Minis from a Patreon yourself, please feel free to use this hashtag on social media. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could build up a searchable community with this?
You can take a look at some HighRes-Pictures of the painted Miniatures below.