Building Kingdom Death Survivors

Transcript

Today I’m going to do a hobby vlog and a KDM episode—two different videos. Trying to separate them out. First, I’ve got to figure out the battlefield for KDM because I want to 3D print the terrain.

Setting Up the 3D Print

I need six plants, a bug patch, and two random terrain cards. I shuffled up the deck and drew three stone columns and a survivor corpse. I don’t think I have an STL for the survivor corpse, so we’ll still use the tile for that. But I do have three stone columns and the other stuff.

The comments and the designer say to just lay them flat on the plate, but everything in me says that’s a mistake. I’m going to trust it though and just lay them flat. What determines the length of a print is how tall the tallest piece is. So really, I should have everything that’s roughly the same height printing on the same plate and then print all the short pieces separately. But I’m not trying to print optimally—I’m going for convenience. Four and a half hours would be cool because I’d still be able to play today.

Lego DnD Bases

I’ve got 100 of the large bases and 50 of the smaller ones. I already have some, so that’s why I only got 50. I’m going to stack them on top of each other so they’re just a little bit thicker on the bottom. Once these arrive, plus some other stuff that’s already on its way, I’ll be able to start doing the DnD-on-Lego thing. I think this is the last bit of stuff I needed.

3D Printing in the Cold

I got the heater going. It’s too cold to hook up the exhaust, but I’m very far away from everybody else—in the basement, a couple rooms away, even vertically very far. I’m hoping the heater keeps things warm enough that the print doesn’t fail. I’ve got an extra bottle of resin warming up. There’s not much resin left in the vat, but we’ll see what happens.

Everything finished printing except one tower—I think I ran out of resin for it, but it actually looks kind of cool messed up like that. I broke one of the columns, but luckily it was one that misprinted anyway, so I’ll just glue it back.

The Magic of KDM Sprues

Now for the actually fun part. If you’re curious about the figures themselves, I’m pretty excited. The bases are 30mm with face inserts, and they give you a good chunk of inserts in the box—there are plain ones too, though I’ll probably need to 3D print some for the bigger bases.

This is the coolest part about KDM, and it’s why I bought it even when I didn’t plan on playing it. Every single item and every single piece of gear in the game is on sprue. The figures are broken down into individual hands, weapons coming in left hand, right hand, and no-hand versions. It’s like that for everything—there’s a skull helm, masks, torsos, legs. The raw hide armor is here, the unarmored guys are over there. In most cases there are at least three, sometimes more, of every possible option. The sprues even say “Lion Kit” on them so you know exactly which armor set you’re looking at. Very cool attention to detail.

Building Sophia the Strong

I started with Sophia the Strong, our oldest living survivor. I built her in white lion armor with the club, since I don’t want to use up all my rawhide pieces. I want a rawhide person holding a spear and another with the guitars. Since I’m done fighting level one white lions, I know what gear builds I need going forward.

There’s a fury potion piece—two of them to put on the belt loop. Just so cool. I love the club, but I hate the little pokey thing at the bottom. It doesn’t make sense to me, so I clipped it off and used the back of my X-Acto knife to round it out and carve some organic shapes to make it look like a knuckle bone. When you use the back of the blade, you don’t risk gouging it or leaving cut marks, but you still scrape the material off. This took me about an hour between finding all the parts, trimming them down, and getting the mold lines off.

The Unarmored Bow Carrier

Next up is our unarmored bow carrier. Ours has a mask in the game, and I briefly thought about putting it on the mini, but then I realized that was a pretty lucky draw to get a mask merchant. In most cases we probably won’t have that mask, and the bow person is going to be the one who doesn’t get armor. So I kept her unarmored.

There are a lot of parts and it’s kind of difficult posing these. They’re so small that I didn’t want to bother with blu-tack, though maybe I was wrong about that. There was a lot of back and forth—eyeballing it, getting out of my chair, and literally posing myself to figure out what a natural look would be. I’m envisioning her striding forth into the darkness with the lantern, bow behind her.

Finished Survivors and Posing Philosophy

We finished up our new heroes: Sophia the Strong with her club in lion armor, the spear carrier (whose name will probably rotate since he’s not necessarily a named character), the unarmored bow carrier striding forward with her lantern, and Clette Nestra the Castrator in her action pose.

When you have models that are this modular—where an arm is two halves, a hand, and a weapon—it’s very easy to end up with blocky or unnatural poses. You really have to think about composition. You’re almost sculpting at this point. You want to tell a story with each figure.

Sophia is holding the club with her lantern down. She’s not really afraid—she knows she’s going to handle what she’s facing. The spear carrier is checking his weapon, preparing himself before the hunt. The unarmored archer is striding forward with a lantern in front of her, the wind blowing in her hair, bow at the ready behind her. She’s not showing any fear. And Clette Nestra is our only action pose.

Final Adjustments

Watching the footage back, I realized I didn’t like how the bow carrier’s arm position looked. So I repositioned it—now from the side, it looks like she’s actually striding forward and in the process of lifting the lantern in the air. The lantern hasn’t swung back down to be perpendicular to the ground yet, which really gives the illusion of movement and motion. Much happier with this.

I used Mr. Cement Deluxe because it’s like normal plastic glue but has resin in it, so it gap-fills and helps cover line gaps. When the paint goes over it, it does a really good job filling in those seam lines. Very happy with today’s build session. Pretty awesome hobby day.