Hero Forge 2.0 Brings Custom Miniatures into Full Color

Though miniatures have long been an invaluable tool in helping to bring players’ role-playing characters to life, as the role-playing hobby evolves, so too must the miniatures themselves—and the means of acquiring and customizing them. Hero Forge, introduced five years ago and funded through Kickstarter, has made it easier than ever to get your characters sculpted just as you picture them through a web-based interface for use in customizing miniatures. The interface offers a wide variety of fantasy races, outfits, and accessories to meet your exact specifications, and every time I visit the website I find lots of new options have been added.

If there’s been anything missing from this formula, it’s that the miniatures would ship unpainted. While many players welcome this, as miniature painting is a popular hobby in itself, others prefer to have the work done by experienced painters. To meet this demand, Hero Forge has returned to Kickstarter for Hero Forge 2.0, now offering flexible painting tools that allow users to have their miniatures 3D printed in full color or be hand-painted by professionals for more precise details.

Hero Forge 2.0 offers a range of color and texture tools to make your character’s image a reality. Hero Forge

One of the great things that Hero Forge offers is that because the miniatures have so many points of customization, they are not tied to any one genre. This is important because while fantasy adventure is still prevalent in role-playing, the hobby encompasses a wide variety of genres, involving anything players can imagine. In fact, building a miniature on Hero Forge can itself inspire role-playing scenarios you might not have thought of otherwise. For example, when I was still skeptical of the scope that fans claimed Hero Forge could offer, my first attempt at crafting a custom miniature was just for fun: an experiment in how closely my design could visually match Raymond Reddington, James Spader’s character on The Blacklist, something way outside the realm of what the typical gamer might associate with role-playing. But I’m anything but typical, and when I succeeded in making a near-perfect match of the character, it inspired me to work on plotting a whole espionage campaign that would employ themes similar to the show.

While the current campaign for Hero Forge 2.0 is aimed at bringing color options to the interface, the service will continue to offer its classic unpainted miniatures as well, and I expect this will remain a popular choice among users like me, and not just for cost reasons. While I am still a novice painter (and it shows), I find it more fulfilling to paint my own miniatures rather than to pay someone else, as it gives me a greater sense of ownership. At the same time, however, painting takes hours, and as a game master I like to set aside as much of my time as possible to craft exciting adventures and scenarios for the campaigns I run. Having my miniatures come prepainted helps in getting them to the table faster than either painting them myself or hiring someone else locally, so it’s a nice alternative to finally have this option available from Hero Forge.

Hero Forge 2.0’s Kickstarter campaign ends at 10:00 p.m. Central on February 13, 2020—though it has already achieved its initial funding goal almost 50 times over—and expects rewards to reach backers later this year.