Well, I am happy to report that I have found the approximate upscaling of the original Kickstarter STLs to match the newly scaled Carcass Front and Prussian plastic kits. Well, approximately.

You see, my original plan was - and still is - very simple.

Get those crazy-ass leper peasants with all their millstones, paint up an entire war band within the 700-900 Dukats range, add some mercenaries, and still have a bulk of exchangeable soldiers. That would mean paint up some OG Trench Pilgrims with their funny hats, maybe add another anchorite shrine, maybe an extra nun (not in that awful “outfit” of the original Kickstarter sculpt) and then I can switch freely between Trench Pilgrim variants. Flexibility is the name of the game.

Some light kit-bashing and sculpting and a unified painting scheme would make them look like a coherent force, no matter what I swap in or out.

That is, until I discovered that the plastic kits are absurdly far away in scale from the Kickstarter STLs, as described in my previous post .

So, the community came to the rescue, and I threw myself at this issue.

When I posted the original comparison photos on Instagram, people’s reactions were a mixture of amusement and annoyance, because turns out, I wasn’t the only one who had dumped a lot of money on the Kickstarter only for it not to fit my newest warband.

On Discord I got advice on how to approximate the size difference between the minis and apply that in any random slicer that has a measure tool. Which is, uhm, all of them.

So, extremely professionally I measured the height, hat to toe, of my Castigator with my son’s ruler. Then I took those 40 mm I measured and applied them roughly in a slicer to the Kickstarter STL of the Castigator. They don’t have 100% the same pose, but that doesn’t matter, I would have to do test prints either way.

A good friend in my local club went to work and printed a bunch of test prints on his FDM printer, starting at an upscale of 9% all the way up to 13%. My man also added the percentages to the front of the mini – what an MVP!

When comparing the outcome, we both agreed that a 14% upscale was probably the right spot to land on – it would approximately be the height of the new models, probably a teeny tiny bit higher, but that would actually be okay.

Why?

Well, as expected - it’s not just a difference in height. They have a heroic shape.

Translated into non-miniature-hobbyist lingo: they have bloated heads and bloated extremities. They are chunky and not true to human proportions. It is basically the difference between making a person taller and turning them into a comic-book figure.

There can be different reasons for that (plastic production being one, as resin can still produce much finer sculpts), or it could simply be a change in art direction. I admit, chunky minis are fucking cool.

But even if 14% turns out to be the sweet spot for height, it won’t make the old and new sculpts identical. A Kickstarter arm on a plastic pilgrim might still look a bit funny, and enlarging an STL doesn’t magically give it those heroic proportions. I’m going to have to find out with actual prints and a bit of cutting, gluing and sculpting. The FDM tests got me a number to try.

Still, that’s a lot better than staring at the original baby Castigator next to his enormous plastic father and wondering what the hell happened. Thanks again to the people who offered advice, and especially to my friend for printing a whole line-up of numbered little men.

The leper procession is back on.