Tomb Thursday P36: Meet the Greeks

Greetings, fellow Greek citizens! We’ve got a historic DnD 3D Print spotlight today for this week’s edition of Tomb Thursday, and you’re sure to be a fan of these hard workin’ men!

We’re staying true to our weekly STL swap by pivoting back to some sandy miniatures after last week’s terrain feature. We’ll openly admit that we’re a bit behind on our Aether Studios’ desert FDM tiles. The good news is that we’ve got a large number of items 3D-printed, but we haven’t done a mass-batch paint job quite yet because we’re enjoying bringing you a nice variety of Egyptian-style prints. DM Ben isn’t pressing the team to rush anything and prefers we keep building a large library of minatures and terrain to pull down whenever he is ready to shift the campaign storylines. Besides print and painting stress is for the (dire) birds. 😉

Today, we’re going to feature a fun paint mix of Hoplite warriors, but we learned a lot while spinning up this article, as we never really understood their specific place in history. So, of course, we wanted to share these interesting nuggets with y’all. A quick Google search revealed some juicy tidbits.

Hoplites were citizen-soldiers of Ancient Greek city-states (c. 7th–4th centuries BC), serving as heavy infantry armed with a spear and large shield (aspis) and fighting in a close-knit phalanx formation. As self-funded warriors, they were typically property-owning farmers or artisans, distinguished from specialized, full-time professionals like the Spartans. They formed the bulk of Greek armies, fighting in a packed phalanx where each soldier shielded the man to his left, creating a massive, pushing force known as othismos.

That leads us to our STL Creator spotlight and some amazing (supportless) sculpts from team favorite Brite Minis. They’re history buffs just like us and have a nice Greek section of miniatures (which all become available to you for a mere $5 monthly Patreon). We’ve 3D-printed nearly the entire collection. They’re all gems.

Resident painter Kimmy Utah painted all of today’s featured miniatures. Brite Minis’ models have lots of details, and DM Ben’s Wisco sausage fingers rarely do him any favors on these types of TTRPG 3D prints, so he happily tags out to a skilled artisan like Miss Utah. Longtime 3DRPGers already know we ask Kimmy to make duplicate miniatures slightly different, as we like varying paint schemes. It’s also easier to call out a miniature at the table like, “It’s the red helmet soldier’s turn.”

We rarely give Kimmy Utah precise instructions. You can’t stunt a great artist’s creativity, right?! What’s cool about this soldier batch is that she didn’t just do slightly different shields. Instead, she went all-in on different color themes. DM Ben considers this set some of the finest in our entire DnD 3D-print collection!

The other cool take on these Hoplite miniatures is that their robust history instantly creates a cool NPC opportunity. Imagine an ordinary citizen taking up arms against a tyrannical force and even having all their own soldier gear? What’s cooler than that? Maybe your adventuring party is tasked with rescuing him from captivity or joins him to take revenge on his enemies. Plenty of options to get this proud fighter into your campaign!

See? 3D printing and painting larger soldier squads can be darn fun! Until next time!