It’s the start of my Storm King’s Thunder D&D campaign, and the village of Nightstone is overrun by goblins and wargs. That’s a welcome reason to paint up some Pathfinder goblins from the second Reaper Bones Kickstarter! The Kickstarter included the Pathfinder Goblin Warriors, a warchanter chief, and a group of four Pyros. Let’s start with the Warriors!

The Pathfinder Goblin Warriors (89003) and Pathfinder Goblin Warchanter (89004) from Reaper Miniatures were sculpted by Ben Siens.

Reaper previously had different goblin miniatures; I also own a pack of the classic goblins (77024) from the first Kickstarter back in 2013. But I don’t like the sculpts very much. The Pathfinder goblins look cute and deadly and chaotic, and I always prefer showing art from Pathfinder to my players when using goblins in my D&D games.

The Reaper Pathfinder Goblin Warriors come in a pair of four different figures with different weapons. The Warchanter is a female goblin chief equipped with a whip.

Basing and Priming

First, I glued all the goblins on a standard 1-inch medium plastic base. Second, I worked the base with putty, adding sand and small rocks to make a smooth surface. Third, all goblin figures were primed with an airbrush using black and white primer.

Here are pictures of the individual Goblin Warrior figures, including the Warchanter:

Painting

The goblins from Dungeons and Dragons look different from the Pathfinder goblins, for sure. Nolzur’s Marvelous Miniatures has some official D&D goblins, and they have different body proportions (smaller head/hears for example). But that’s just body shape and I don’t mind that.

To make the goblins from Pathfinder a better fit for Dungeons and Dragons, I simply used the D&D color scheme instead of the Pathfinder scheme: In D&D, goblins have mustard/light brown skin and mostly yellow eyes. In Pathfinder, they have a green skin tone and red eyes.

For the clothes, I mostly used warm browns, representing leathers and furs. They also got rusty weapons, for which I used a rust effect wash. It doesn’t really look like a great rust effect, but the knives look dirty enough. And that was the effect I was going for.

In the final step, I tried out new flocking stuff for moss/grass on the base. Overall, the goblins took me about 2-3 evenings – but that’s all of them including the Pyros. Quick and dirty, but good enough for my gaming table 🙂