'Bloody' fine miniature set

Head over to heliostabletop.ca and if you are into gaming minis you will be in for some very big smiles.

This Canadian crew is doing some very sweet miniatures with an eye to them being perfect for D&D-style role playing games.

Each month they are offering up a small box of themed minis which actually come with ‘an encounter’ gamers can use to insert into their campaigns meaning the minis can hit the table without the GM having to bodger up an encounter and create a stats package etc – that can come later though.

Now some of the mini packs are a tad more versatile too – including the Haemoturgy Lab set being reviewed here.

As the name implies these are some blood-themed baddies, and they come looking decidedly dastardly, if not outright evil.

Now you might open a dungeon door in a D&D-style campaign and find theses blighters waiting to bleed you dry, but they would be equally fine on a post apocalyptic setting, or a gothic horror RPG, or one were vampires abound. There is some really nice flexibility in this set, and gamers will appreciate that as we don’t usually play only D&D RPGs.

So to get some insight to these minis – which I should note Jordan one of our gaming gang’s more enthusiastic painters fell in love with before they even arrived – I turned to Joel, the lead encounter designer and of the in-house DMs at Helios for some insights into the creation of this box.

Canadian designer

“One of my favourite things to do, and a strength of my DM’ing is creating fun, engaging and challenging combat encounters that get the players working together to succeed,” he offered via email. “Combat in 5e can be a slog if it involves standing still and hitting a sack of hit points turn after turn. That's why it's my goal to provide interesting objectives, difficult choices and ways to interact with the terrain to keep the players engaged during combat. 

“The first thing I like to do for inspiration is to look closely at the miniatures. That gets my imagination going, and allows me to start thinking about the overall theme. I also try to incorporate small details of the miniatures themselves into the stat blocks and overall objective/mechanics of the combat encounter.”

You can almost see the gears turning for Joel coming at the process from the perspective of a player with a design flair.

“With the Haemoturgy Lab, the first thing that stood out to me was that the minis we chose all had a certain level of human features to them,” said Joel. “This immediately made me think that a good narrative would be that these creatures had once been human, and had suffered some form of strange mutation. I noticed that the creatures had biological texture and bodies also had a blood/gore type appearance, along with shards and spikes that were protruding. So in my mind, this was some type of blood magic experiment that had gone wrong. The encounter begins with the players arriving at the abandoned lab. On the map that I designed, the sterile white tiles are covered in blood in places, and some stasis pods are broken open, with corpses half falling out of them. It immediately sets the scene that something bad has happened, and may well happen again...”

Here you can see the versatility that is inherent to this box from Helios in terms of crossing genres more easily than say the kobolds we recently reviewed which are typically D&D fare and not much beyond that.

As for the creatures, the Haemolyser is large, covered in spikes and looked brutish and reckless to me.

“I wanted it to be mobile, and have it feel cinematic as it crashes through players and the operating tables/stasis pods with its reckless charge feature,” said Joel. “Considering how much larger it is than the other creatures, I also wanted to incorporate a story reason for this within its stat block.

“That’s where it’s “Flesh Consumption” feature originated. The idea is that it can consume organic biomass (aka PCs in this case) in order to grow bigger and stronger. This ability is also fun because it creates a game play loop within the encounter, in which party members can deal slashing damage to the Haemolyser in order to try and cut open the monster to free their trapped allies.”

Here is a strength of Helios, the minis come as more rounded creatures ready for game play, not just a plastic mini to paint.

“The Blood Symbiotes are a fun way to balance the encounter by turning up the stakes as the Haemolyser gets more injured,” continued Joel. “After certain thresholds of damage are reached, they slough off the body of the Haemolyser and come to life. They can both heal allies and hit the PCs with ranged attacks while slithering up the walls to stay out of the way. This gives players another problem to overcome, and allows ranged characters or spellcasters to shine.”

The ‘encounter’ for this one really is a moody one in the sense it fits the creatures like the proverbial glove.

“To add some randomness and a dynamic element to the encounter, the ‘Failed Sanguinations’ are randomly introduced to the battle on initiative count 20. A d12 is rolled to determine which stasis pod they burst out of,” explained Joel.

“For added fun, I like to let each player have a turn at rolling this d12 to determine their spawn location. These creatures are designed to grapple and debuff the party with their infectious bites, creating attrition and dividing attention away from the Haemolyser. They have relatively low health, so it is up to the players on whether they think it is worth focusing on the big boss, or taking down these creatures before they debilitate the party too much. 

“Adding decision trees into every combat is something that I love to do, because I think it makes things more interesting for the players. Instead of the barbarian standing still and hitting every time, they now need to choose between options such as: Do I try and kill the big damage dealing Haemolyser? Do I save my grappled wizard from the bites of the Failed Sanguinations? Should I smash the stasis pods to prevent new enemies appearing on the battlefield? Should I change from my Warhammer to my battleaxe to free the fighter who is currently stuck inside the boss and being dissolved? Etc. I think the Haemoturgy Lab encounter does a great job of being both fun and engaging, while also telling a cohesive story through the battlemap and stat blocks. The fact that it was also designed specifically around the appearance of the miniatures we provide also gives it that added level of verisimilitude, because the players can connect what they see on the table, to exactly what is happening to their heroes." 

Now in general terms the Helios minis are excellent and the encounters such a great add-on that it’s easy to suggest taking time to look through what they offer if you mini game – but Haemoturgy Lab is just a smidge above the average making it one to definitely search out.