Crab Can Do

Greetings, fellow beachcombers! We’ve got a new Wandering Monster of angry proportions, so let’s see what all the fuss is about.

So, we’re technically not strolling through the forest today. More so, it’s like you’re walking on a beach or near some shallow water. Hence, this isn’t technically a wilderness monster and is more water-esque. We’ll eventually do an aquatic and amphibious table, but for now, we’ll add them in our main free outdoor table as an option for thee.

Today’s STL comes from the marvelous mz4250 and his brilliant DnD design skillz. This TTRPG 3D print is a Crab Folk monster and, of course, a free download. We love this bruiser-style sculpt and felt we had a great handle on how to paint him.

In case you’re in a time crunch or you’re also a prepainted miniatures collector, don’t forget about the most-excellent Seas and Shores series, which includes a Crab Folk mini. We indeed have one of these mighty pinchers and even wrote about it, but we wanted a group of them, so we fired up our 3D printer and got to work!

Since this crabby foe takes up a 2×2 d20 set of squares and we’ve had some nice crab successes recently, DM Ben was happy to give this free DnD 3D print a paint.

• Prime Flat Black | Slapchop Base.
• Large Shell P1: Layer FAN Pure Red.
• Large Shell P2: Dark Tone Wash | then Red Tone Wash.
• Large Shell P3: Stipple middle area with ASP Fire Drake.
• Head/Inside Shell P1: Layer Citadel Contrast Snakebite Leather.
• Head/Inside Shell P2: Drybrush white over the top to lighten it up.
• Limbs: ASP Nuclear Sunrise + Orange Wash + Black dabs.
• Feet: Black.

Very simple, right? We really liked dimming the middle of the shell and then doing some light edging (which sorta looked like scratches from previous battles).

DM Ben got a little experimental on the base, and that’s where things took a bit of a turn. For Pop’s day, DM Ben got the complete line of new Texture basing materials by Green Stuff World. And he really wanted to test a few of them out here.

He popped open their Aquatic Sea Foam Texture and their Beach Sand Ground Texture. The bummer here is that these products are so new that novice DM Ben didn’t have many video tutorials to go on, aside from GSW’s own promo vid. Still, he was feeling courageous and pressed ahead.

Now, we rarely experiment with new materials on freshly painted TTRPG miniatures, and even afterward, a few people on the team were like, “Ben! What were you thinking?!” That’s because we typically experiment on partially failed 3D prints or only on the separate base.

The biggest takeaway from these GSW base textures was “less is more!” Starting with the Beach Sand Texture, it went on a little light in color for us, so we went back with a drybrush of FAN Desert Yellow to darken some of the sand. For the really tricky seafoam, the trick is to put it on very sparingly and thin. Also, applying any of these materials with an old paintbrush works best. We’ll get better with practice. 🙂

Let’s finish up with a DnD 5e stat block for our newest 3D-printed monsters! There’s a darn good, out-of-the-box Crabfolk set of stats that made the numbers game here a snap: AC 16, HP 68, Speed 40 ft, multi-att: +6/1d6+4 & target is grappled (escape DC 14). Reach 10 ft.

Hence, DM Ben is thinking 3-4 of these hard-shelled warriors at a CR3 each for his six-member, sixth-level adventurers.

Now all that’s left to do is update our table and add another nifty on-decker for all your DnD monster needs.

Until next time!