advertisement
8 January 2026
Greetings, sand dwellers! Who’s ready for our first Tomb Thursday installment of 2026?! We sure are, and we’ve got the muscle to prove it. Let’s press forward down that spooky corridor, but tread carefully around every corner.
There is just something about sneaking around underground hallways in search of treasure and knowing you’re undoubtedly going to run into a bunch of guards sooner rather than later. That must be why we adore dungeon and tomb crawls so darn much! Well, DM Ben wanted way more enemy combatant options for our Aether Studios 3D-printed tomb gameboard, so we have plenty of work still to do.
Let’s start with some desert tomb classics: the infamous undead skeleton soldiers. Pollygrimm makes these slick Arabian Skeleton Warriors, and the sculpt is legit. Now, admittedly, we need more skeleton miniatures in our RPG library like we need a hole in the head, but these are quality STLs. Besides, that Arabian garb makes us giggle.
DM Ben colored these undead guards because, in general, skeletons can be very forgiving models. Notice our snapped-spear-carrying staff member in the back? It’s almost inevitable that we’ll break something when we delete a completed print. We’ll often use that damaged mini to test our desired paint scheme, and if that 3D print is still on solid footing, we’ll even use him (as we hate wasting prints).
We liked this desert-skeleton style so much that we even bought a few more versions, since MMF was running a winter sale promo through mid-January. Here are the paints DM Ben utilized:
We’re torn about whether to change the hats and paint colors on the other Arabian STLs. Meaning, do we give the archers a lighter blue pant color? Or is it better if all their clothing is the same, so it looks more like a soldier’s uniform across their whole army of soldiers?
Next up, we have this truly terrifying Sand Golem by Loot Studios. This massive menace is from their amazing Buried Tomb set. One of the coolest things about this little ol’ DnD blog is that it always reminds us to circle back on 3D Print Creators collections because it’s very easy to overlook or even forget to 3D-print a particular STL. We’re really looking forward to sharing more of the sandy RPG pieces from this set!
Since our desert paint scheme is so darn good, DM Ben painted this one as well. We’re thrilled with how this one came out! The players at the table are almost certain to let out a “what the frack?” reaction.
For some additional splashes of color, he added the following:
And then for the base, we added some static grass turf, a big ol’ stone, and sand flock to finish it off! If we make more of these monsters, though, we’ll adjust that taiterred loincloth to be a more discernible color from the rest of the model.
Every dungeon crawl has a staple of go-to monsters, and these freaks definitely made the list for our tomb setting. In terms of stats, we already have an alternate Sand Golem version from EC3D Designs, so we’ll either stick with those numbers (AC 12, HP 75, multi-attack: +5/2d6+3 or make this particular lumbering monster a bit tougher. We found this Sand Elemental 5e version, and it’s a thumper: AC 16, HP 157, multi-attack: +8/2d8+5, reach 10.
The Skeleton Warriors was a trickier decision as we found one on 5esrd.com, but it was pretty hefty: AC 18, HP 85, multi-attack: +7/2d6+4. Instead, we’re going to go with this version from World Anvil as we consider these to be more like average soldiers and to fight in squads: AC 16, HP 39, attack: +4/1d6+2.
Until next time!
advertisement
sponsored
