Hello! We're Dimension 20's Rick Perry and Shane Brockway - the people who make minis and battlesets! AMA!

Your work brings the magic to the show for me! What is the most challenging mini you had to create?

Spoilers for A Crown of Candy!

Easily the sugar plum fairy. Some times we have minis where Rick has a distinct vision in mind, sometimes it's vague and I can bash whatever I want. This was a bit of a mix, Rick knew he wanted to harken back to classic biblical angels which excited me and so I sketched some ideas. The issue with that is there is never enough time for a full sculpt, so we are picking and choosing minis online we hope will work. In the end there's a pile of misc quality in misc sizes. Now couple in the fact that that mini is absolute madness of a floating beast with absolutely no where to hold onto. My hands were covered in glue, pieces fell off more then a handful of times, but I'm the end there was quite a unique miniature.

-Shane

The 6mm scale player characters for the tiny Crown of Candy battles were nuts. We used the heroforge stl files that we created for the 28mm scale pcs and attempted to print them at 6mm…. Which is almost the size of a grain of rice! Their arms and legs didn’t even print! So we scaled them up just a bit and printed them again at about 9mm scale and it worked. SO TINY!

-Rick

I'm constantly impressed by the minis the team puts out, especially how you incoproate player choices into the models (for example, Zarb's six buttholes.)

Do you have any good stories of having to quickly change mini's or encounters due to unexpected player choices?

It happens. I’m dealing with this exact issue right now on a future season 😅 I think the first time was when Lou (Fabian) decided to befriend that demon motorcycle… In my brain I’m thinking, ok, now we need Fabian by himself, Fabian on the motorcycle, and the motorcycle by itself and we need it in 3 days!

-Rick

The day I was shipping a box of "Coffin Run" minis to set (yay covid work days!) I got a call from Rick, there where 3 weird little demon figures already bubble wrapped and good to go but then came mighty Zarb. An hour before he flew across country he was made from cutting up those 3 familiars. He's a small figure, and when Rick mentioned the buttholes he did so in the I know he's small and ready to ship but it'd be fun... Sooooo..., Way he's squeezed many last minute conversions out of me. What can I say, when the job demands last second buttholes, you give it last second buttholes 🤷

-Shane

Is there a mini idea that you've had to say no to yet? How crazy of a piece would it have to be for you to say no?

Yes, just one. Though I'm ambitious and love to attempt any whimsy Rick and Brennan have. (Shot out to the amount of buttholes they've paid me to sculpt) but the losing factor is time. The only time I can recall saying absolutely not was on our 15 of an intense rainy day of speed building and painting the final set for "Bloodkeep" it was 11pm and Rick asked if I thought I could sculpt jeans on a giant eagle and paint it before I went home. That mini never got made.

-Shane

Hahaha! Yes. I knew the answer before I even asked. But was worth a shot! I was so sad we couldn’t make those jeans happen. :*(

-Rick

Which was the hardest season to work on design wise? and is there any minis or sets you would go back and rework if you had the chance?

Hmm, hardest mixes with one of the more fun ones I'd say, "Tiny Heist". The difficulty came from finding a good balance between painted miniatures and bashing real life items. As anyone who's put unpainted rocks on the base of a painted miniature before knows, sometimes having real items only makes your painted ones look that much more artificial. So that season was about finding a good balance. Reworking is a hard answer for me because literally every season I'd happily continue. People are surprised to know just how little time we actually have to build things that there's always more we could do if given the time. But that's miniatures for you, there's always more detail to add!

-Shane

Thanks for the question! I have to agree with Shane. Tiny Heist was very challenging because we wanted to use “real world” materials but they had to be the right scale for the minis. So Brennan would be like, ‘they have thimbles for cups,’ which is a great idea but actually isn’t the right scale… And the materials we used needed to look real but also be fake so they would survive the grueling aspects of filmmaking. So like grass, we needed REAL grass but it had to be fake which meant deep diving into the realest fake grass… lol

-Rick

Of course I gotta ask, which battle scene was your favorite to make?

It's a tie between two for me, the lava board from "Escape from Bloodkeep" and the sewers from "Unsleeping City". Both are such classic DnD encounter environments which made it exciting to actualize. These boards also were probably the 2 that were the most even mix of hands between Rick, Sabrina, and I, which from that collaboration it really made an amazing end result. Special highlight to how cool the sewer was thanks to making a classic trap into a tangible effect.

-Shane

My favorite might be the ice cream temple from Crown of Candy. The way the timing worked out, it happened very fast and there were a lot of fun technical challenges. With the negative space and the fog. All the tiny army 6mm scale stuff from Crown of Candy was also a blast to figure out and see realized.

-Rick

Are there any minis you made that went unused that you wished had been used?

Yes…. Pour out a bowl of chili for the lost Meat Gladiator fight. There was also a scrapped ACoC battle set in a sort of Venetian Fruit Brothel/ House of Pleasures… I came across the unused seductive apple and pear minis last week. That would have been a fun one.

https://i.imgur.com/MvLLZum.jpg

-Rick

The most devastating choice in D20 history (for me) was not going to the Meat factions location. One of my favorite ideas that never made it to the table was the massive gladiator arena made of meat, filled with some of my favorite minis I ever made for the show. A sloppy Joe spider monster, a chicken breast beast, and a shrimp. Plus some more meat people. I even bashed a sausage man vendor selling a whole strand of tiny screaming sausages.

-Shane

Do you know ahead of time what miniatures you need to make? What’s the process of making them? With dnd the story can go a lot of different directions, so how do you plan for that? Do you have all the miniatures made before filming episode 1 or do you make them episode by episode?

That's a solid 40:60. Most of the mini bashes I'm aware of days before they need to be made, so there's never a down moment of planned preparation. It's always a mad dash to do as much as humanly possible! And as you said, it is a live play show so there hasn't been a shoot day where we aren't working on minis and sets for the next week. This leaves room to add things naturally, though does help sprout more grey hairs given the intensity there 😅

-Shane

Howdy! Thanks for the question. I work with Brennan (and now Orion too!) to figure out all the battles before a season starts. Which also helps build out the world and shape the arc of the season. In doing this, we get very detailed about needing ‘6 skater dwarves’ or whatever. Regarding making minis, we do whatever works! Love to find a great existing mini we can just paint, but 9 times out 10 it has to be customized in some way. It could be adding a few small elements with green stuff, it could be kitbashing 2 or more minis together (IE head from one, legs from another, etc.) It could be a minis fully sculpted from scratch (Creamed Corn Ooze). Or it could be a mini we get a 3d sculptor to make and then we print it! It’s nuts. And of course, over the season unexpected things come up and we try to accommodate new mins when we can!

-Rick

What are your favorite materials? Glues, fillers, paints?

As an avid terrain maker I'm always looking for practical tips and while I don't have your budget, I'm curious what exact kinda magic y'all do <3

We sort of use whatever works. Start collecting bits that you can use, bottle caps, plastic canvas, tiny cheap chain. We often sculpt terrain from the 2" foam insulation board from the hardware store and coat it with 5 minute epoxy. Tips: think about how the terrain will be used while sculpting. Consider where and how minis will stand. And if you want to get more than one use out of the terrain, make things that are not TOO specific to a single battle scenario.

-Rick

I'm a big terrain/diorama fan myself (infact I enjoy that even more then minis) so I get the love there! Trash, thrift store runs, foam board, and Vallejo texture pastes are a big plus! Terrain is actually the cheapest aspect of mini making, in my opinion as it's really down to your creativity, and ability to find great shapes in trash! Keep your eye on @7he_Blindman on Instagram as I'm going to be branching out on exactly this! Terrain building tutorials to help prove you don't need a budget to make a killer board for your games!

-Shane

Love your work, it's really outstanding! Are there any particular genres you've preferred making things for over others (e.g. fantasy vs. sci-fi), and is there anything you have as a "dream build" that you'd love to work on for D20 or just for fun? (spoiler-free, of course) Also, what's the process of making the GM screens like?

Hey thanks for the kind words! And the questions. This is so fun! I love grimdark stuff, fantasy, scifi, whatever. Making the GM screens is one of my favorite parts of the job. It’s basically a big sculpture that needs to represent the theme of the whole season AND has this really specific 3 angles that we see it from, AND it can only be so tall so as not to block the cast. So it’s always a bit of a challenge to work out. Usually I start by researching and sketching building rough version out of 2" rigid foam held together with bamboo skewers. Then it’s a bit of subtractive sculpting, adding in elements, and fussing back and forth until it’s right. Then paint!

-Rick

https://twitter.com/dimension20show/status/1549082431025823747 https://twitter.com/dimension20show/status/1549082441326936065

I'm personally a dark / horror fantasy fan in my personal work, but also love scifi. This meant for me the hardest seasons to paint were anything modern and candy court. When you're used to painting furs iron, and body paint, needing to paint clean jackets and BRIGHT candy people is more of a challenge. Dream build is hard for me as I try to build just as much terrain and minis for my own games as I do for D20, but I suppose I've always wanted to make both a massive colosseum and a battle for helms deep board. Though I'd be hard pressed to make it for anyone but myself 😅

-Shane

Rick and Shane! Yall are amazing at making things come to life!

How do you guys make your trees/flora come to life? It's been consistently my biggest failing point for years now. Anything I do with them feels flat, bulky and inorganic. Any tips?

Now we're talking, as Rick knows trees are absolutely my wheelhouse. I have a collection of 36 misc trees that grow yearly 😅 here's a picture of my go to filler trees for my personal work. While I buy tree kits, I cut them up and blend in real tree roots to add some more life. You can only fake organic to a point, so using real organic shapes to help it feel more real is absolutely the way to go in my opinion!

Also try to go on some hikes and really study the trees, variety in colors and textures is the key to a realistic forest.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Ce1qq0tOLtj/?hl=en

-Shane

Hey Thanks for the kind words! Trees are a challenge. If you use the Woodland Scenics kind of turf, they look good but are so crumbly… Lately I’m loving Dwarven Forge’s trees because you put minis in them pretty easy! Games Workshop has some rad trees tool

-Rick

Ya'll have hidden a lot of dicks in battlemaps, but what was you favourite dick??

(or just favourite hidden thing in general).

RICTUS WAS HERE! 69420 Spelljammer Lane was the address for the Fantasy High house party battle. And the Rec 97 docking bay number was also 69420. We are children.

-Rick

As the man who got to paint all the graffiti on terrain, I have hidden lots of stuff in Fantasy High and Unsleeping City 👀 - head cannon only but there's absolutely a skeleton graffiti artist named Rictus - those that know, know.

-Shane

first: your work is so incredible + adds so much to the show!!

second: what’s one detail about a design you’ve made that you wish people knew? what was the hardest set + mini to create?

thanks so much!!! 🫶<3🫶

Thank you for the kind words! Now I had to think about this a good while but I think I got it! I'm a details guy but so much has to happen in such a short time we don't always get to add everything I want. I remember on "Unsleeping City, when we had to send our city streets boards I took it in my own hands to add 3 things I found important to really capture the sidewalk experience without being asked to. Leaves stuck in the gutter, and blackened chewed gum on the sidewalks by the cross walks, and cigarette butts. Such minor things I'm sure no one has ever even noticed but it made me very happy to do it!

-Shane

Hey thanks! Thats means so much to me. Listen, I tried hard to get Baron into The Seven. Too hard, actually. But dang I would have loved to see Brennan do him again. Can you blame me? The most difficult ones are always the ones with major environmental changes: Rising sewer water level, sinking cheese ships, chase sequences… Designing that Tiny Heist toy car chase across a teenagers bed was challenging. And speaking of it, there was a final set piece ending planned where the bowl of cereal was going to dump over but the ending that Travis and Griffin came up with was just so satisfying, it was unnecessary.

https://imgur.com/a/d6qQBzx

-Rick

Is there a particular environmental mechanic that you've wanted to make a set build around, that you haven't gotten a chance to work on yet?

LOVE a good environmental mechanic! So many possibilities. TaleSpire is fantastic and it’s been so great to realize things we could never do physically, but I would love to do a space physical minis season. 😜

-Rick

Agreed with Rick here, I remember we brainstormed a dream set of doing a multi level spaceship with metal exterior so that the PC's could be magnetized to space walk. Please give me an excuse to make that 😅

-Shane

Are there any minis or battle sets from any of the D20 series that used talespire that you wish you could’ve made?

Easily, since season one Sabrina and I were begging to do a scifi season. And as someone who's played in their fair share of space pirate RPGs (including one run by Rick 👀) it was a little heartbreaking seeing that go digital. But I'd rather a season go digital then never get made!

-Shane

Yeah, same. I mean anything we build in TaleSpire would be so fun to build in real life. It’s actually a potentially a great tool for working out physical sets… 🤔 Would LOVE to build Leviathan.

-Rick

how do you think you all have improved over your time making sets? what was your favorite npc mini to make? thank you for all the work y’all do!! you’re so amazing at what you do and it really brings the seasons to life:)

As someone who typically focuses on pumping in details and various colored washes in their personal work this show has absolutely trained my speed painting abilities. You'd be surprised how much detail you can skip I'd you can just make the faces and metallics look good! Favorite NPCs is probably an impossible question, but I will say the fan reaction to an NPC that has made me the most happy. When we started "Crown of Candy" Rick bought a bunch of minis and random food bits from Etsy and let me just bash some test minis. No real guidance there just a way to test the theme/idea. I made a donut cutthroat, a chocolate pimp... And a cake dandy. I paint a LOT of striped pants on my personal minis because I'm a massive fan of stripes in general, so the fan reaction and obsession with Lord Calroy, a mini I made as a random test that Brennan breathed such amazing life into makes me ecstatic! The perfect representation of the power of a mix of a Rick idea, a bash from me, and a Brennan character becoming something greater then all parts.

-Shane

Hey! Thanks so much! I personally feel like any area of creativity is really about building up a personal bag of tricks or tools. Those tricks come from experience, Where you have a creative challenge and you need to innovate a solution. And then the next time you have a similar challenge you can look back and say, oh yeah we can just do what we did last time but a little different. Or combine it with this other trick. And then THAT becomes another new trick for your collection! The more experience you have, the more tricks you have. Does that make sense? ha

-Rick

Rick Perry, how's your Mothership campaign going? (I'm not trying to be a creep, just noticed you're in the Mothership discord too, and got curious.)

Howdy! I need to play more Mothership! I ran a one shot with just my wife and I one date night and it was a blast.

-Rick

How did your role change when COVID hit? For example, I know D20 used talespire a lot in order to compensate for the lack of minis due to COVID precaution

Wow, yeah. In the fall before covid, I had just moved up to a sort of remote island in WA state but was keeping the miniatures shop down in Inglewood. I was planning to come back to LA to build and in fact, had a plane ticket to come start the Mice & Murder build when everything locked down. For months we just sort of paused and kept evaluating how we were going to keep making the show. I ended up closing my shop in LA and moving everything up to WA. Shane came out and the two of us did the whole build. Definitely more shipping happening these days, but thankfully miniatures are small! TaleSpire and Roll20 are additional options now for how we make any given season. Which is really great to have and I’m sure we’ll be back to it again.

-Rick

Easy for me, covid meant I couldn't partake anymore. I had to be a fan from the sidelines like everyone else untill the minis could trickle back. They still do a fantastic job without us but I'm biasedly happy minis are back!

-Shane

First, you and the whole D20 team are incredible. I got hooked last year and find myself rewatching them whenever I can’t decide what to watch.

Of all the D20 seasons and stories, which are your top 3 favorite experiences?

Thank you so much, even as someone who's worked on it I find it just as impossible to point at a favorite season. It's the variety that makes the show so strong in my opinion. Now to answer your question, as a gamer and miniature collector myself, it's hard to deny the lack of diversity in miniatures. I love that D20 goes out of the way to encourage this and spread a more positive and accepting world of miniatures. This however has lead to one of the weirdest conversations I've ever had at work, discussing the ways to represent the genders of the historically genderless - cheese 😂. While the context made it an important conversation to have the absurdity of the words we were saying made it impossibly humorous.

-Shane

Hey thank you so much. And thanks for the question. A Crown of Candy, or Candy Throne as I think of it (our internal working title) is definitely our most highly produced minis seasons and I feel pretty proud of it. Designing and building the Misfits and Magic DM Screen was a blast and included working with the tiniest 3d printed vehicles-- like if I sneezed they would blow away. Very fun. Annnd… Coffin Run was really fun. Jasmine & Orion are a heck of a team. It was kind of the first time designing maps for ‘not Brennan’ and it was awesome to break some of the rules we sort of fall into.

https://imgur.com/a/HgDncnu

-Rick

Weirdly specific but how do you get the 1" grid dots onto the d20 terrain, especially the uneven areas? I'm just starting into terrain building and I love the look of the dots vs classic gridlines, but struggle doing it by hand.

It’s a huge pain. Different team members who have done it have used different methods. Often we use a big drywall t-square. We’ve made jigs using string with dots painted on it every inch. The latest idea which we haven’t tried but I’d like to is setting up a projector and projecting a grid of dots on and painting them.

-Rick

The very few times I did it was exactly that - struggling to do it by hand and hoping someone else would take over 😅

-Shane

what was it like building sets for Tiny Heist, given that you used a lot of old toys and other things that didn't need to be built from scratch, alongside more custom pieces? did you have things like tamagotchi slot machines, for example, in your original design plans?

Almost every D20 season is strange in some way, food people, or animal people, but Tiny Heist was THE MOST odd compared to other seasons. Scale was really tricky. It involved a lot of shopping at thrift stores for random things and I would bring a mini with me in my pocket to compare to what I was buying!

-Rick

What mini did you most want to just stick in your pocket and take home at the end of the show? Before the auction i figured some minis might have been nabbed but they seem to be treated pretty well and stored just in case, but if that wasn't the case what would you take just to have at home or use at your own table?

Taking Miniatures is highly discouraged but if I hypothetically did it only would have been 2 unused meat minis to mend my broken heart over them getting cut from Crown of Candy 👀 - forgive me Rick - and if I did do that I'd have them just to keep on my desk because I loved them so much.

-Shane

Hmmm… Maybe Joren Jawbreaker? Because the heroforge model of him, pre-kitbashing, was sort of a self portrait. (btw, I had no idea he was going to be such a jerk! I just thought it would cool to have a candysona that was related to Lou!)

https://i.imgur.com/8hmD3hw.png

-Rick

When I make and paint models I often feel like I'm missing some kind of polish or finishing touch on mine. Do you have any recommendations for getting better at aging, distressing, or generally giving a finished, lived in look?

Weathering is my bread and butter on my home minis so I can absolutely help you there. Step 1 is reference photos, whether it's rust, mud, or verdigris real life objects get banged up. Even the minor subtle effect of using Vallejo - Earth Dust wash to add some dust / dirt to the bottom of a cape dragging in the woods can have such a huge effect to the level of realism on a figure. And always remember less can be more, just as more can be more. Just think about the logic of the character or terrain piece and the places to weather will appear!

Texture paint and Vallejo washes, which function more like a glaze then Citadel making them great at weathering passes are some good standard tools to keep in your kit for that.

-Shane

Giving mins a coat of Tamiya flat clear or Dull Cote can really add something. Also adding an element or two that have a completely different physical texture can make a mini pop, ie, real cloth vs plastic. Using oils paints on minis for aging is an exciting area. Lets you work longer and has a singular finish. Also, sometimes it’s helpful to take some photos of the mini and look at those blown up instead of looking at the mini itself. Somehow it gives you a fresh set of eyes and you can notice issues.

-Rick