Shambling Mound Matters

We’re eager to develop the High Forest and make it a bustling hub of activity around the players’ newly acquired Bastion. So, let’s see what sorta colorful 3D print they might run into next.

Look, no one wants to live by the freeway, right?! Well, that is what is starting to take shape here in The High Forest. Our players rooted out the evil Night Hag and, as a reward, received the deed to her old cabin in the woods.

Yet the players are quickly learning that their celebration is short-lived because The Forgotten Rails Hovertrains want to run routes right through the sacred High Forest…sorry, woodland inhabitants, it’s just business.

This territorial conundrum is starting to pit the peaceful High Forest against the mighty aspirations of Waterdeep’s Hovertrains, led by money-lovin’ Omin Dran. DM Ben wants the players’ new digs to be right in the center of all the chaos. Now all we need to do is 3D-print and create said chaos.

We’ve already made several fun forest prints, so we decided to add another classic monster to the mix – the infamous Shambling Mound. Our favorite STL sculpt comes from a 2024 freebie promo by The Dragon Trapper’s Lodge, part of their 12 Days of Christmas countdown.

Their designers released a holiday and a non-holiday version of a Shambling Mound. Even though we didn’t have a specific scenario in mind initially, we just had to 3D-print this tangled vines beauty. We were also just reminded by Dungeon Classics that this guy is also part of their April 2025 Patreon release, so you can get him for a song by subscribing.

DM Ben stepped up to the painting plate for this one after being incredibly inspired by Miniature Hobbyist and his video, “The FASTEST Way to Paint HeroQuest Miniatures Without Sacrificing Quality.

We love his videos, especially because he always clearly shows the specific paint color he uses for a particular part of a miniature. In this case, we were amazed at how good Army Painter Brownish Decay Speedpaint looked on this SkullBlight mini.

Not sure how painting goes for the rest of you’s, but for DM Ben he often gets color picking paralysis, where he just can’t commit to picking out his colors for a particular coloring job. Vines are in a lot of minis and scatter, so once Miniature Hobbyist showed us how awesome Brownish Decay is for woodland stuff, he just flew through this paint project.

The other great suggestion he had was using Army Painter Sand Golem Speedpaint to represent the leaves on his creepy back. This fall color paired perfectly with our traditional flocked base. We also added some ASP Dark Wood to the sturdy parts of his body, like his big ol’ feet.

That leaves us with the age-old STL question: what comes first, the 3D print or the DnD 5e content? Usually, for us, it’s content that drives a lot of what we print and paint month after month. However, sometimes a particular 3D print is so frickin’ good, that 3DRPG just can’t contain its excitement. Darn you, brilliant creators out there!

We think this menacing creature could pair well with Shady Tree and his Angry Acorns, or maybe this vindictive vine defected from that group to lead the rival Mighty Mushrooms? This Shambling Mound could also be a backup entry from our free d20 Wandering Monsters Wilderness Trek Table. We’ll see where our creativity takes us. 🙂

Until next time!