D&D General The Sad Tale of a HeroForge Death Knight

As an experiment I designed and made myself a death knight using HeroForge. It cost me $100. Here’s how it looked on the site after I’d finished designing it.

It arrived broken, unfortunately, and took ages to get here due to Brexity shipping delays but otherwise I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. These things are not cheap though!

The broken sword is easily fixed with a spot of glue so I’m not too worried about that.

I liked my death knight. I’d designed it from scratch using HeroForge. I was going to give it a name. Make it a named figure in games I wrote.

But my dog ate it.

Yep, I owned my $100 HeroForge death knight for less than 6 hours. It is now a mangled mass of plastic.

Life goes on. For me. Not for the death knight.

The culprit​

 

[prabe]

We've been pretty happy with the minis we've gotten from them, both blank and colored. I think the occasional fragility of thin bits is a known issue--my wife's monk mini had its quarterstaff break the first time we handled it (not in transit the way your sword seems to have broken, if I understand you).

 

[Oofta]

I've gotten a few myself, haven't had an issue with broken bits yet but it didn't have to go through international shipping. Maybe it helps if the bits that can be broken can lay flat with the rest of the mini? If you were to lay that death knight flat (cool mini BTW), the sword sticks out quite a bit from the rest of the figure making it more prone to breaking.

Lately a lot of what I've been using it for is to have pictures of important NPCs to show to the group.

 

[prabe]

I've gotten a few myself, haven't had an issue with broken bits yet but it didn't have to go through international shipping. Maybe it helps if the bits that can be broken can lay flat with the rest of the mini? If you were to lay that death knight flat (cool mini BTW), the sword sticks out quite a bit from the rest of the figure making it more prone to breaking.

Lately a lot of what I've been using it for is to have pictures of important NPCs to show to the group.

Were your minis color? I think the color minis are a little more fragile. They look cool, but they're not gonna survive being tossed in your dice bag and flung around.

My wife and I use it for something similar--for visualizing character ideas more broadly, both plausible PCs and (for me) occasional NPCs.

 

[Oofta]

Were your minis color? I think the color minis are a little more fragile. They look cool, but they're not gonna survive being tossed in your dice bag and flung around.

My wife and I use it for something similar--for visualizing character ideas more broadly, both plausible PCs and (for me) occasional NPCs.

No, they're the premium plastic because I like to paint. Good to know about color minis being more fragile though. Our group may finally be getting back together in person in a little over a month after we're all fully vaccinated and I was thinking of surprising one of my players and was debating color.

 

[ART!]

One of the people in our group gets these color figs on a pretty regular basis, and they always look great. I almost got one recently, but couldn't quite afford it.

 

[collin]

I've ordered minis from Hero Forge since their first iteration some years back. I own over a dozen, both unpainted (standard and premium plastic) and prepainted (I got in on the Kickstarter). The materials they are using now are better than their original plastics, but I tend to agree they still appear to be rather brittle. They are not like the rubberized resin that Reaper Bones and the original WotC minis are made from. I have not had one break on me yet, either in shipping or handling, but I could see from the get-go how that might happen, so I have been very careful in their handling and storage.

 

[prabe]

No, they're the premium plastic because I like to paint. Good to know about color minis being more fragile though. Our group may finally be getting back together in person in a little over a month after we're all fully vaccinated and I was thinking of surprising one of my players and was debating color.

I am pondering the idea of getting color minis for people as end-of-campaign mementos. We backed the color kickstarter, so some of those we have already paid for (which makes budgeting easier).

 

[Blackrat]

I bought STL files for a bunch of minis when they were having a sale, and a member of my gaming circle printed them out. Turned out better than I hoped for. Haven’t had the time to paint them yet though:

 

[collin]

No, they're the premium plastic because I like to paint. Good to know about color minis being more fragile though. Our group may finally be getting back together in person in a little over a month after we're all fully vaccinated and I was thinking of surprising one of my players and was debating color.

I will say that traditionally, in my experience, the premium plastic minis from HeroForge are more brittle than their basic plastic. What you gain in detail you lose in durability.