Where There’s Smoke, There’s 3D Prints

Greetings, fellow firefighters! We’re pretty stoked about another weekend of DnD gaming and hobbying, but first, let’s ensure emergency services are prepped and at the ready. Safety first, right?

Feels like it’s been far too long since we did a new Kinda Sorta Portal entry. Almost like we fell off the wagon (pun intended). In our ongoing campaign, our players have retrieved their portal after a two-timing party member stole it from the group. Since the players are likely to use its magical teleportation properties, DM Ben wanted to ensure he had about 10 potential scenarios to roll on should its magic go astray. We’re so close!

Longtime 3DRPGers will recall that the Kinda Sorta Portal works well…most of the time. We let our 3D prints inspire us in terms of possible scenarios, and we felt a perfect new chaotic predicament could be the players teleporting into a five-alarm fire situation instead of returning to their Bastion as they had hoped.

DM Ben had been mulling this type of encounter for a while, but there weren’t any STLs that were speaking to him for this one. That all changed when the talented team over at STL Miniatures released their fab Firefighter Set. This DnD theme has all sorts of fun pieces, but today we’re going to focus on the classic fire wagon scatter terrain.

We looked up actual horse-drawn fire wagons, which were a thing from 1860 to about 1910, for color palette inspiration. Once we find the right look, we then take that image and ask Google Gemini what Army Painter or Green Stuff World paints to use to achieve the desired final outcome.

We’ll start with the front cart, where you’ll notice from the artist rendering that our two front lamps took direct heat during the support removal stage. We can be impatient clutzes with this part of the deplating process sometimes, and if we inadvertently lose a detail or two from the STL, that’s just the way the resin bounces.

Since this fire wagon is a nice, beefy size of 3×3 d20 squares (per cart piece), DM Ben didn’t mind coloring this one up.

• Prime Flat Black | Slapchop Base.
• Base Heavy Timbers: ASP Dark Wood.
• Remaining Wood: GSW Skeletal Brown + Dark Wash.
• Front Cart Wood Trim: GSW Zombie Dipping Ink.
• Hoses: FAN Uniform Gray + FAN True Brass.
• Water Tank: FAN Gun Metal.
• Metal Accents: FAN Mithril & FAN True Copper.
• Wheels P1: ASP Enchanted Steel.
• Wheels P2: FAN Angelic Red + Red Wash.

A friendly reminder that DM Ben is a novice painter, and the team appreciates him making an effort to help get 3D prints to the game table if resident painter Kimmy Utah is in a backlog situation.

One last little fun tidbit about our latest wagon project is that we’re on a bit of a magnet craze lately. So, we used some of our trusty Loctite Super Glue Gel (from our 2025 Holiday Gift Guide) and attached a small, circular magnet to each hitch so that both carts would snap together. For this particular DnD hobby use, we prefer the FINDMAG Small Round 2×1 mm magnets.

We’ll flesh this scenario out more with some minis and such, but we wanted to get the fireball rolling, as it were, with our first scatter pieces for this new DnD encounter.

Until next time!