WIP Wednesday! Seeing Red

As DM Ben continues to build out our office campaign’s next traveling encounter, we thought we would share our ambushing monster-for-hire pick – the much-feared Redcaps!

If you’ve been following previous WIP installments, you’ll know we’ve utilized some amazing D&D accessories from Loke Battlemats: The Long Road RPG Toolbox for an upcoming outdoor travel encounter. Their D&D supplement has given us some new-found inspiration so we’re just continuing to flush out what we’ve rolled up.

So what the heck are Redcaps anyway?! Welp, they’re small, old-lookin’ Fey who pack a serious punch. Don’t be fooled by their appearance in the least! These cranky, lil’ bastards make the perfect mercenaries because of their chaotic evil mean streak and they’re also a bit on the rare side to encounter. So, when your party ultimately figures out who they are, you know their employer was serious about eliminating you as a threat. Check out this fun video by Nerdarchy that goes into even more detail.

They are a bit easier to hit (AC 14) but these grizzled creatures have a slew of attack options including Rage, Blood Cap, and Multiattack. DMs will have a ball playing these marauding monsters. Click the image above to see the full stat block from a fun Reddit thread.

Now this is 3DRPG after all, so of course we went ahead and used our Mars Pro 3 resin printer to produce a few of the models by The DM Workshop. However, this encounter is coming up sooner rather than later and these prints are quite small. Thus, it was unlikely we were going to get these back from resident painter “Kimmy Utah” in time.

We decided to order two affordable, pre-painted miniature options off eBay. Wizards of the Coast released them in their Wild Beyond Witchlight set & also in their Tomb of Annihilation set. We already had one from the much older Rise of the Runelords release. Buying small minis off eBay can be risky because they can take a beating during shipping but these survived.

It’s pretty uncanny how close our free STL version came to the officially produced WotC versions though! In a pinch, you could have certainly slap-chopped these prints for the base coat, carefully dabbed the feet black to represent their iron boots, and then colored their headgear red. But alas, we went for the speediest solution. We still plan on getting one pro painted to represent a future boss.

There were certainly plenty of classic monsters to choose from for our roadside ambush encounter:

• Kobalds
• Orcs
• Gnolls
• Human Bandits

But “cgulash” said it best on the Dwarven Forge Discord! And if that isn’t a resounding DM endorsement, we don’t know what it is.

Now that we’ve got our setting (escorted travelin’ caravan), the villain (Mimford Fugelfort), and his sickles-for-hire (Redcaps), next time we’ll focus on the targetted NPC: Shelley Packatase (and her face card and selected miniature)!