I Spy with my lil’ 3D Printer

Greetings, fellow street wanderers! Your party has just completed a successful mission and swings back to town for some rest and relaxation, while also resupplying before they start their next conquest. Just remember, you’re probably being watched…way more than you think.

Chances are your adventurers ruffled quite a few feathers on their last mission, without even realizing that their accomplishments probably flipped some very powerful people’s worlds upside down. For example, that evil tyrant they just took out? Well, chances are he probably had some powerful friends and family who aren’t too thrilled with how things went down and the hit it took on their own incomes.

Adventurers rarely notice their movements are being tracked at every turn. They rarely lay low and instead stick out like a sore thumb when they walk through the city gates for the first time. Paid informants watch their city like a hawk and report on new visitors and what they’re up to for their sleazy crime lord bosses. DM Ben wants plenty of miniatures to pull from and represent this ongoing shady spy ring, so let’s see a few recently completed DnD 3D prints.

Heck, even those guards are probably on some payrolls. Now, this dungeon-mastering strategy is a slippery slope because it’s likely to fall into the player trap where they think every new single NPC is out to get them. So, it’s important to ensure some of your NPCs also help the party. DM Ben can’t stress this enough. You need just as many helpful NPCs as you need adversarial ones.

A downtrodden beggar is the perfect guise for a hired hand to keep tabs on new adventurers walking the streets and tracking whom they might be interacting with at any given time. EC3D Designs has the perfect DnD miniature for this NPC. This Human Beggar with Sign is from their NPC cornucopia Everyday Folk Kickstarter.

We tried this STL in FDM on our Prusa 3D printer, and he came out just fine (especially when using the Arm’s Length Rule). Resident Painter Kimmy Utah was our brushmaster and we love her color choices here. The matted hair, the tattered clothes, and even a little sun-bleached skin tone are spot on.

Since we’re in the sprawling city of Waterdeep, and one of our central homebrewed NPCs is good ol’ Ewan McHook, we wanted to include a nice array of market-style miniatures. Once again, EC3D Designs comes through, this time with a Fishwife mini from the Depths of Savage Atoll Kickstarter. This one was a campaign stretch goal, so no rendering is available.

The plank base, a fav of ours, is a dead ringer for where this miniature comes from: the Depths of Savage Atoll KS. Kimmy Utah did this one too. We especially like the thick leather apron, while the rest of the colors complement each other perfectly. You could totally see this cranky lady passing intel to a crime boss in exchange for protection for her struggling business.

We always like to include a backside shot of our featured STLs so you get the full picture before you decide to try ’em. This way you can see all the great model details. We also prefer our miniatures to fill a full d20 square, so we sliced our cranky merchant a bit bigger than the default size. Besides, bigger minis are also always easier to paint and see on the game table. Let the information passing begin!

Until next time!