Greybishop's Board: So, You May Recall...

...a while back I posted about the Hero Forge Website and how cool it was.

For those who don't recall, Hero Forge is a site that allows the user to create an unimaginable variety of little (1 inch tall-ish humans and bigger or smaller monsters, giants etc) sculptures that can then be 3D printed for purchase. It's not cheap and on my budget I have yet to take the plunge and buy any. Still, just signing up means you can store a seemingly infinite number of your creations in file form and I find it addictive and entertaining every time I find myself surfing over there.

One of the cool creations I cobbled together was an update of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that (finally!) put pants on them and generally gave them a more edgy vibe that I think could really take the property to the next level. I posted pix here and pretty much didn't think about them again.

Then, the other day I found myself at Hero Forge to try to create something else and discovered that there's a new feature available.

Colour!

Now I actually enjoy painting little figures and have done so for years. Still, I have to admit that there's an appeal to the idea of buying my own creations already precisely coloured. I went a little nuts colouring up a BUNCH of the minis I'd already created so I now have about 3 DOZEN to share. I won't hit you with all of them now but I will try to give you an idea of just how insanely creative you can get at the site.

There is a MASSIVE variety of races like humans, orcs, elves, reptilians and more. Every one of those can be customized to a near infinite extent with dozens of hairstyles, facial features, added or subtracted musculature/height/weight, wings, horns and much much more. Then you can mess with poses and facial expressions, clothe your creation in armour, robes, leather or fancy suits. Each character can carry weapons or tools, sling a bow, a backpack or a guitar, carry a shield or even an animal friend. The bases can be customized with textures and/or items like treasure, animals or debris.

The possibilities are quite literally endless.

Then they added colour. You can paint in preset "themes" and then customize almost every single part to your liking. It isn't cheap to print and purchase these little guys and gets even more pricey when you add colour but one of these days, I'm gonna give these guys a bit of my money so I can get one of these:

That's my version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. As I explained before, it always seemed silly to have the ONLY sentient turtles on the planet wearing masks. I get the whole "colours visually explain who's who" short hand that animators used for them on tv, but my version does the same thing but looks badass.

And seriously. Don't they look AMAZING in colour?!?

They needed a villain. I always liked Shredder, pretty much as originally designed:

Remember what I said about infinite variety? One of the reasons I like this site is that I have an idea percolating in my brain for another couple of chess sets like the ones I did back in my bookstore days. I'd like to do a Star Trek set or two. There's a neat set of figures from a company called Modiphius that include enough figures for a full board of Next Generation heroes and villains and enough for the hero side of Original Series pieces but no figures that would work as Original Series pawns on the villain side.

Looking into that is how I found Hero Forge a couple of years ago. I think a few of these guys would work for Original Series villain pawns.

With a couple of stripes on the shirt and maybe hand painting sleeves on this guy, you have a serviceable old school Klingon.

With a few tweaks, this is a pretty solid old school Romulan.

The first figure I worked on back when I found the site was another character I'd like on the villain side of an Original Series set but that has yet to be produced by Modiphius or anyone else.

Ruk.

Like I say, there's an infinite variety of characters you can create and buy. I find just creating them is relaxing and more fun than it really has a right to be. I'm glad that they let you save your creations even if you don't buy them.

Obviously, I'm a big fan of the adventure/hero/sci-fi aspects you can play with, but there's whimsy too: