Miniature Monday: Prickly Treasure

Greetings, fellow treasure hunters! Hope you had a wonderful RPG weekend. We’re ushering in a few gems in a follow-up post, so let’s see what we can do to brighten up your Miniature Monday!

In a previous Hey, Hey It’s Game Day post, we teased a 3D-printed DnD miniature that DM Ben planned to use in a future wilderness encounter. On the surface, this mysterious prickly monster seems like no big deal. However, he has unexpected benefits for both the Dungeon Master and the players.

To briefly recap, this small but mighty creature is called the Porcupo and is a free download by the immensely talented Schlossbauer. DM Ben loves a big herd of monsters, and this sharp scowler is the perfect pick to print out as a pack. The trick is creating the right encounter narrative to make the scenario as memorable as possible.

The second part of this monster encounter also harkens back to an earlier post from last year and was a popular pick in our 2025 Holiday Gift Guide. Some delightful Etsy DnD artisans run a wonderful online store called Aurora Athenaeum. We showcased a selection of their adventurous, potent potables and sought another immersion opportunity beyond the traditional town-store restock or treasure-chest pull.

We teased the idea here last time, but we had a chance to kick around a bit more around the 3DRPG Studios watercooler. We would paint their bodies the same skin tone, but differentiate the quills based on the corresponding resistance potion. So, for these two Porcupos, one quill can be used to create a Potion of Cold Resistance, and the black quilled creature could be used to create a potion of Acid Resistance. And with Aurora Athenaeum’s ten different potions of resistance, you end up with a ton of options here.

Notice the one brown skin tone here? Whenever we 3D-print a lot of something, we always like to have one experimental miniature to see if we like certain color choices. In this case, we tried a more traditional brown animal skin and felt it was a close second to the purple tone. For the quills, we did one solid color, but then did a slightly different one for some of the random tips (which turned out great).

So, we made the following Porcupos:

• Silver Quills: Potion of Acid Resistance.
• Green Quills: Potion of Resistance (dealer’s choice on the specific type).
• Purple Quills: Potion of Necrotic Resistance.
• Light Blue Quills: Potion of Cold Resistance.
• Yellow Quills: Potion of Lightning Resistance.
• Red Quills: Potion of Fire Resistance.

You could also have the red quills be the key ingredient in making a Potion of Superior Healing (instead of fire) if you want to mix it up a bit more.

These non-cuddly Porcupo monsters will have all sorts of attacks, including:

• Ranged Attack: fire three quills from up to sixty feet away (+6) | 1d8+2 damage per quill.
• Melee Attack: make multiattack (+12) | 1d10+1 damage per quill.
• Reduced to Zero 20-foot Radius Explosion: DC 12 Con Save | 1d4+1 damage x 8 quills.

The spikey zing here is in the damage. If a colored quill hits a player, DM Ben rolls the damage, tells the player the damage type, and then tells them to reduce that same damage by half (due to the resistance qualities of the corresponding quill type). DM Ben will let the players salvage one quill (to act as a potion of resistance with a simple prick) as long as their Medicine check isn’t a 1 or 2 on a d20. Roll a natty 20, and they salvage two quills.

Note: a stray quill cannot hurt a fellow Porcupo. You could have them gain the resistance of their fellow packmates’ damage type and/or even get a little self-heal of five temp hit points.

In terms of the rest of their stats, you could go with this DnD 5e stat block from Roll20, but we’re just using those stats above and going with an AC of 15 and hit points of 30. We have a party of six, fifth-level characters, and those Roll20 stats are a little on the lighter side.

Until next time!