Create Your 5E D&D Alien Hero or Villain With Hero Forge

If you are as big a fan of Hero Forge as I am you’ll be as thrilled as me when I let you know they have added alien races to the selection of model choices. The most recent Treasure Tuesday revealed Aliens & Arm Options for your customizable miniature creations.

Alien aberrations of 5E D&D

If alien species is not enough Hero Forge offers four different head choices allowing you to make all kinds of alien characters for your tabletop roleplaying game experiences. Whether you are playing Starfinder, another science fantasy game or you just want to add new and unusual creatures to any RPG you can always count on Hero Forge for creating new additions to make it super easy to accomplish.

These alien species are not the only unique thing. I have been looking forward to release of creatures with extra arms for a while and you can now make creatures with up to six arms. Hero Forge’s advanced positioning capabilities make it simple to adjust your customizable miniature so either an extra arm disappears into the model or adjust it so the arms do not interfere with each other.

As soon as I found out about these releases I began playing around with them right away. Back in the Monstrous Compendium Annual, Volume 1 there was a monster called a spellweaver with six arms and these creatures possess strong magic capabilities. I was inspired to create my own version. If you’re curious to learn more about the spellweaver Power Score RPG wrote a terrific and informative post about these creatures over at his blog here.

Extra arms — available in four and six armed versions — make your customizable miniature an XL size but in so doing create amazing new opportunities for your creativity. My customizable miniature has one free hand, two weapons and three spell effects. II am very pleased with the turn out!

Since the beginning of Hero Forge their tools make it possible to create your own unique heroes but with all the new options and features they continue to innovate and include it’s just as fun and easy to create your own unique and memorable villains right here too. Considering all the accessories, pieces and parts like wings and fancy head choices the possibilities are limitless. Plus you have the option to scale your customizable miniatures up or down, which including scaling of certain weapons as well.

All the tools Hero Forge provides turn the whole easy process into a fun activity and if all that weren’t already blowing your mind the site now offers the Hero Forge 2.0 color options too. Subscribers to Hero Forge can even visit the Booth to make awesome tokens and portraits for virtual tabletops or just to show off your incredible creations.

Now, how will spellweavers become a part of your games? Perhaps the easiest way to represent a new monster in your campaign is using an existing creature stat block for the mechanical components and providing your own creative visual description and lore for the narrative portions.

I created my spellweaver with a climactic encounter in mind. My starting point is the iteration of the creature in the 3.5E D&D Monster Manual 2, which is the source I’m most familiar with and enjoy. From there I take a heavy diversion since I am working on this as a boss monster. I am starting with an archmage — a fantastic place to start tinkering when creating any sort of powerful spellcaster creature. Here is where I go crazy with the weirdness. Increasing the archmage’s ability scores makes a big impact on hit points, saving throws, spell DCs and attacks. A permanent Tenser’s transformation effect while retaining the ability to cast spells adds some serious heft and to really ramp up the power (and action economy) a permanent haste effect too. My spellweaver boss can even use the extra action to cast a second spell! How a spellweaver manipulates magic like this is unknown and never revealed. My spellweaver also needs some cool Legendary Actions, including something the ability to misty step. To make this spellweaver boss even more over the top they might wield a Glaive of Wizardry, a very powerful magic item you can snag for free as a magic item card here.

Obviously for a boss monster this spellweaver is extremely powerful in many 5E D&D games, especially if they’re wielding a Glaive of Wizardry. But this also gives adventurers a tremendous reward for defeating such a creature too, one of my favorite ways to introduce magic items as treasure. Protip: the monsters would absolutely use whatever powerful magic items they’ve got in their lair when it comes to a confrontation with heroic adventurers! With some summoned minions, guards or magically controlled creatures my spellweaver makes for a challenging and memorable encounter.

I can’t recommend or urge you enough to check out everything going on at Hero Forge. Check it out and create your own customizable miniatures as heroes, villains or just for fun to explore your own creativity here.