Flumph Minis!
Little bouncy friends with an attitude.
The Project
Once of the sessions in my D&D campaign involved a warhammer-style battle between the forces of good and evil. It was originally supposed to be one session, but after playing a few rounds, we quickly realized it might take a a couple of sessions to resolve the main battle.
There were several different armies involved in the battle - On the evil side were the Arden, Blights, and Cultists. On the good side were Villagers, Crew, and Zombies. There were also two wildcard armies that could show up if certain conditions were met - The Shadow Lurkers (chaotic neutral), and the Flumph Army (Lawful good).
We played on a village map I designed and had printed at FedEx - it was a huge map, the size of a table. We had minis I had specially created and painted for the game too...
... The problem was I couldn't find any mini's I liked for the flumphs. I needed flumphs that had attitude and that carried weapons... So, I set off to create my own set of custom mini's from scratch. If anything, this would be a fun new 3D project that would give me a chance to dive into sculpting, a skill I had not yet attempted.
Flumphs?
These small, jellyfish-like beings are known for their peaceful nature and their distinctive appearance. They have a bell-shaped, semi-transparent body and a number of tendrils that they use to move and interact with their environment. Flumphs are typically described as having a sort of benign, almost comical appearance, and they emit a faint, pleasant glow.
The Flumph Models
I'll do a separate post on the battle system we pulled from warhammer and where it worked / didn't work for D&D - but for now, here's are some quick learnings from building the flumph minis. First of all, this was a really fun project. It allowed me to explore sculpting for the first time, and how to use basic shapes like a sphere and cylinders as the foundation for the flumph, and then manipulate them via splines into the shapes I wanted. It also gave me some experience with the sculpting tools, remeshing, and using brushes to add additional detail and realism to the model.
There were four flumphs in total that got modeled:
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Regular flumph - just a regular, basic flumph happily floating away.
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Attack flumph - An aggressive flumph all coiled up and angry wielding a sword.
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Battle flumph - A flying flumph with a mace, two swords and some scars.
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Sneaky flumph - who kind of looks like he's trying to deny the fact that he stole your pouch.
Printing
Of course the fun thing about these models is that they're printable. :) I wanted to use them in a warhammer-style combat, so I designed bases and supports for them as well.
Once printed, I painted them up, and voila - a flumph army!
Conclusion
I just saved the STL files with supports and Zipped them - but the file is about 1TB in size, which is a bit silly for printed models. I need to go back at some point and simplify the STLs so they're downloadable and sharable. Until then - enjoy the pics above! :)
these are soooo cute !!! i love the one where he is hiding the sword behind his back. keep up the awesome work !!