Getting the right miniatures for a Tabletop RPG can be a herculean task. First you need to find a suitable model, then you need to assemble and paint it. Hero Forge does all that for you.
Through their website you can design a custom model. They have numerous parts and templates you can use, and then they will 3D print it for you. Alternatively you could simply buy the stl file from them and print it yourself.
I really like the idea of custom models, but the prices are too steep for my liking. When I buy models, I will usually spend $15 or less for a metal figure. Despite that, when I saw the Hero Forge Color kickstarter announced I couldn’t resist backing. I couldn’t pass on getting a color printed custom made miniature.
I used to run a Shadowrun campaign at various conventions, as well a home game, set in a slight variant of the official Boston setting. One of the main fixers in my campaign was a MIT&T college student named Cerra. Do to bad luck, and her latent pyromancer powers, she found herself drawn into the corporate underworld. My players got to know her fairly well, and she was a staple character in my one shots. Though I’m now retired from the convention circuit and haven’t used her character in a while, she was still the best choice for testing out Hero Forge.
I spent a long time designing her on their site. I ended up having to manually adjust her arms and legs because the template pose they had was backwards from what I wanted and mirroring it didn’t have the right look. This is what I came up with.
After debating for weeks if I was happy or not with it, I finally bit the bullet and clicked order. I was given a ship date of July 31st, so I was pleasantly surprised when it arrived after three and a half weeks instead of two months. Here’s how she looked
Though the colors don’t pop as much as I had hoped, the coloring is better than I would have done painting it myself. I have a huge backlog of minis to paint, so when I find the time to paint I tend to do a bare bones / three color paint job. Even when I spend more time on them, I rarely do the fine details. Taking that into consideration, I would certainly consider ordering another Hero Forge figure the next time I’m in a long running campaign. Unfortunately I can’t justify the cost for most of my mini needs.
Sorry for the low quality photos, the lighting hides a lot of the color and details.
What are your thoughts on the Hero Forge Color figure? Have you ordered from them before? Would you consider ordering from them in the future? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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Thanks for reading!
After posting this article I received a lot of questions about the QUALITY as opposed to the look of the model. As such I wrote a followup article dealing with it. You can find that here
