Patreon recommendations

Last Christmas I bought myself an Elegoo Mars resin 3d printer. One thing that has been great is all the interesting Patreons and kickstarters that are starting to appear now the technology is well within homebudget range. This is certainly going to impact the way the hobby evolves over the coming years.

At present most things seem to be around fantasy or sci-fi figures and terrain, but I would not be surprised to see historicals and pulp start to make an appearance soon and start challenging some of the more established companies. Having to buy one set of files for not very much at all... and then be able to print out a many of them as you need... *mind blown*. May are starting to provide pre-supported models too, which takes all the work out of it... just load up the slicer with the bits you want, hit save and print. No more faffing with carefully placing struts on it all.

Some of my favourite Patreon creators at the moment are:

Cult Miniatures. These guys are creating very modular kits that allow real flexibility in positioning and customisation. Below you cna see all the options for *one* of the figures in this month's set. Each month they release one standard size infantry unit, one larger unit, at least one character and something else. Last month was egyptian undead (or Khemri to those of you from WFB), which came with a load ot terrain elements. The previous month was Beastmen, so in addition to the normal two units we got a unit of minotaurs. All for $12 a month... Below you can see the modularity of this month's fungus queen. I have 7TV ideas for her

 

Lost Kingdom Miniatures are hard at work creating some stunning alternatives to WFB classics. Their primary focus so far has been Chaos Dwarves and Lizardmen, with the occasional diversion into heroes for other races... so who knows what will be coming in the future. They recently did a highly successful kickstarter for terrain for these two races with some very characterful figures. Sadly I didn't back this one as I don't need any of the terrain and to get the two or three interesting exclusive figures you had to go all in. This one is useful for filling in some slots in the Warhammer Quest lineup. This month is some skink and kroxigor alternatives that are far far nicer than the originals... not bad for $10

The last one for today is Artisan Guild. In terms of modularity, these guys are slightly less modular than Cult miniatures, but far more flexible than Lost Kingdoms. AG tend to just make the hands separate and create batches with lots of different weapon combinations. They even supply open and closed hands and weapons with no hands... so 5 minutes in Blender means you can start mixing and matching weapons or accessories from other sets very easily. Fancy an elf with black powder weapons? Fine. Take the blunderbus form the Dwarf set and put it into someone else's hands. Some races even share the same hands so it is even easier. The models are a bit chunkier than other ranges though, but that's ok too. Just scale the model down by 10% and it'll now fit with most other ranges. Again, this one is only $10 a month.