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20 October 2025
Greetings, everyone, and welcome to another Miniature Monday. Let’s see what marvelous 3D-print “spoke to us” this week and what sort of new one-shot we can make for our latest misunderstood mini.
We love quirky, memorable characters in our DnD campaigns. Those kinds of NPCs and adversaries that the game group talks about years later. For us, the miniature itself is just as important as the sculpt itself. And boy howdy, do we have a gem for you guys today.
Our free STL comes courtesy of office-favorite, the mighty Schlossbauer. We can’t get enough of his overflowing 3D print library and have honestly lost count of how many we’ve printed and painted over the years. This tall, slim freakjob of a villain is called the Yulelad Spoon Licker. What an odd name, though – there must be more to the story here!
We didn’t even realize until press time that ol’ Schlossbauer is actually a European fella and that this wasn’t some twisted filament of his imagination. It turns out this mini’s name is from traditional folklore in Iceland, where these lads would leave their cave one by one during Yule time to steal from people. This one is the fourth Yule Lad who comes to town on the night before the 15th of December and departs for home on the 28th of December. Spoon-Licker was known for being tall, thin, and for stealing þvörur (long wooden spoons) to lick them, hoping to taste something sweet. Pure awesome.
We asked local mini painter Sunrise Sven to color this one up for us and talk about wanting to lick the spoon! We love it! We especially dig his choice of browns and the lighter complementary colors that complete the wild ensemble. That long tongue is especially creepy in all the right ways.
The backside is especially epic. Just all sorts of spoons in all sorts of sizes sprawled all over his back! Now, let’s talk about how we might utilize our new favorite NPC miniature in our DnD campaign:
That last one is our absolute favorite, and we think it will make a great one-shot encounter the next time they visit a new town (which in our campaign will be Phandalin).
We asked the Interwebs for some ideas and added our own personal touches. We like to break encounters into sub-categories, and this is where we landed.
The Challenge: The local town’s kitchens are going mad! Every morning, numerous large wooden stirring spoons are reported missing all over town, only to be found meticulously licked clean and discarded in strange places (on rooftops, in wells, inside an empty barrel). The players will immediately catch signs and clues of the brew-ha during their first day in town. Example: served some soup in the tavern but no spoon, discarded spoons in odd places, etc.
The Quest Hook: the party is hired by a frantic chef, who cooks for the town mayor, to solve the “Case of the Licked Ladles.”
The Revelation: They eventually locate a lanky, desperate figure (a malnourished human, cursed by a hag) who is driven by an obsessive, magical hunger for the residue of food, not the food itself.
The Twist: He is actually seeking a specific ingredient (the residue from an infamous healing broth) that he desperately needs to cure his long-term curse. The party might choose to help him, turning a criminal into a thankful quest-giver. The poor guy just wants his life back.
That local chef doesn’t want to lose his cushy gig for cooking for the mayor, so he hires the players to find out who is stealing all his spoons and set a trap. Our quirky cook will describe him like a fairytale legend and demand that his cookware reign of terror be put to an end once and for all. Most likely, the players will set a trap for him and, upon capture, realize he’s actually not this horrible monster myth but instead a guy who is just trying to get his life back.
As a reward for finding this special missing ingredient, he will agree to become the group’s cook at their newfound Bastion in the High Forest. Now, we’ll need a cook NPC, a kitchen gameboard, and some creative character cards.
Until next time!
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