FDG Ranger

 

This is one of the support-free FRPG minis produced by Fat Dragon Games, in this case a ranger.

I like them as gaming pieces because their poses tend to be quite restrained. I'm not fond of the sorts of fantasy minis that are presented in hugely animated leaping-slashing-bellowing poses; they're exhausting to look at.

These FDG minis have the additional benefit that they can be reliably and successfully printed on a FDM printer.

That's maybe not as important as it once was, now that decent resin printers are affordable, and the resins available are tougher, but I still appreciate it. Plus, the new generation of FDM printers appear to be capable of detail and smoothness comparable with entry-level resin printers, while being much cheaper to run.

My old Ender 3 is not, alas, that good. Still good enough for tabletop work though.

FDG Goblin King Kitbash

 

Fat Dragon Games recently had a Kickstarter for a whole heapin' helpin' of new STLs, among which is a tribe of diminutive goblinish critters.

Their king is provided with a throne, as shown here, but not with any option for him to actually sit on his throne.

So I got to work with the STLs and kitbashed one together.

I didn't change the king's pose much at all. I just cut his legs off, separated them and re-sited them.

I had to give him a new pair of knees and a new kirtle, but the most labour-intensive part of the process was in removing the remains of the old base from under his feet.

That became a lot easier after I discovered the box trim and lasso trim brushes in Blender's sculpt mode, but it was still something of a grind: my computer is five or six years at least out of date, and with a puny 16GB of RAM I had to be sure to save after each and every cut to be sure that I didn't lose too much in the event of an out-of-memory crash.

I printed the new king enthroned twice, once in resin, and once in FDM using Tom Tullis' latest miniatures profile for Cura 5.x and a 0.4mm nozzle (with tree supports added).

To be honest, there's not a lot to choose between them, and at tabletop distances I think most people would find it a challenge to distinguish them.

The resin model has better definition of his toes, but I think that's mainly because the FDM supports under his feet detached from the build plate, and the feet ended up having to print in mid-air. Considering that, I think they actually printed surprisingly well.

New FDG Bits

I backed the recent Kickstarter by Fat Dragon Games, and today they started sending out links to the STL files for the new stuff. This openable dungeon door is the first of them that I've printed and painted.

One thing about this piece, with its rather narrow base, is that when it's open the weight of the door tends to pull it over. That will probably be less apparent when it has other floor tiles next to it to rest on.

I've trimmed off most of the base, since I don't use clips and things to hold everything together. I find that securing everything together slows setup enormously, and also print times for the trimmed versions are somewhat faster.

The new tiles are half-height (i.e. low walls), which I'm much more likely to use, since they make handling miniatures much easier than the full-height versions.

Next Day:

I printed a bulk lot of door pieces, and one of the doors fell over about two thirds of the way through and so was incomplete.

I whipped up a barred grill top piece and glued it on to the incomplete door, and hey presto, fixed.

FDG Lizard Man — Mook-paint test

"Ready for my close-up Mr. DeMille"

A fine figure of a man-lizard

This is a test-paint for some Lizard-men mooks, using one of Fat Dragon Games' Lizardfolk minis, in this case LF02_v1.1.stl. The painting is very fast, using the "slap-chop" method of overpainting a zenithal primer with translucent glazes. The idea is to produce a table-worthy result with the absolute minimum of effort, so that I can produce a whole horde of them without getting too bored. I wasn't really timing myself, but I'd guess that this paint-job took me about ten or twelve minutes.

In theory, Fat Dragon Games' minis can be printed without having to bother with slicer supports, and in general I've found that to be true. In this case though  it could have done with a support under its snout, as my now-elderly Ender 3 printer's inadequate bridging has left it a bit flattened towards the end. Unfortunately I don't have the custom supports add-on installed in Cura any more, and adding general tree supports increases the print time from about an hour and a half to a bit over two hours. That's not too bad for printing a single figure, but it adds up when you're printing a bunch at a time.

I generally like Tom Tullis' (FDG) sculpting style, as the minis' poses tend to be fairly compact and restrained compared with some of the overwrought and rococo poses affected by some other sculptors. In my mind it's like the difference between Classical Greek sculpture and the later Hellenistic style. To me, the restraint in the poses makes them much more useful as gaming pieces, as they tend to take up less room on the tabletop as well as being less fragile.

In the case of this particular figure, if I were sculpting it I would probably have curled its tail more around its legs rather than sticking it straight out the back. It would have given the mini a more snakey appearance than its current crocodilian air, which may be a good or a bad thing depending on your personal taste, but it would have reduced the mini's footprint on the games table. Not that the issue is particularly egregious in this case, and I certainly won't be bothered trying to change it.

Skeleton Crew

 

The skeletons are printed from a digital model by Tom Tullis at Fat Dragon Games. The necromancer is a miniature from Reaper.

FDG Goblin Sample

This is a free sample STL sent out by Fat Dragon Games with their monthly newsletter. Apparently they're about to kickstart a collection of goblins, and this one is a teaser.

I thought at first it was a bit too big, but having put it next to other 28mm figures, I now think that illusion was created by the very large head-to-body size ratio. I like that, as it gives it definite and identifiable non-human-normal proportions.

Fat Dragon's miniatures are all designed to print support-free, which is a boon. Generally speaking, I like their designs, which tend towards the chunky for reliability in printing.

I'll take a look at the kickstarter once it's up and running, but in general I've had a gutsful of kickstarters — they tend to take forever to fulfill, and as I found with the Reaper kickstarters, I often end up paying for a whole lot of stuff I don't really want or need, which makes the so-called "savings" a bit dubious; I'd often be better off financially by just waiting for the thing's general release and buying only the things I actually desire.

Here it is next to a Reaper 28mm hobgoblin (?) that used to be a half-orc in my AD&D campaign.

It's shorter than it looks.