Print Minis release pairs industrial Bulkborn brutes with Fireguard heroes

Print Minis leaned hard into painter bait with its May 18, 2026 Miniature Monday drop: the Bulkborn and the Fireguard. The appeal is immediate. One side is a gang of genetically engineered industrial brutes built to look like living machinery, the other is a crew of undercity fire responders with enough story baked in to make every hose, tank, and burn mark feel earned.

The Bulkborn are the easier sell if you like heavy texture. Print Minis describes them as engineered to survive cold, toxins, and blunt force trauma while working in places like sub-glacial caverns and toxic mining pits. They can carry their own food and water inside those huge bodies and keep going for weeks at a time. For painters, that is a gift: this is not just “big sci-fi brute” territory, it is a built-in excuse for layered rust, chipped armor, stained workwear, grime in every seam, and bright hazard markings that read from across a gaming table.

The Fireguard pushes the opposite direction without losing the industrial fantasy edge. Cormac founded the crew after losing his wife in an Etheum fire, and the backstory gives the models a hard, practical identity instead of generic heroic shine. In-setting, water is too expensive, so the crew relies on fire foam, inert gas, dry chemical powders, and sand. Cormac’s Deluge Cannon makes that even better for the hobby side, because it gives the model a natural focal point and a clear narrative prop to paint around, whether you go for heat-scored metal, foam residue, or the kind of soot-dark casing that looks like it has been dragged through the undercity for years.

That contrast is what makes the release unusually rewarding. Bulkborn and Fireguard sit in the grimdark world of Mortuus Secunda, where Print Minis has been building a serial setting through weekly STL drops that come together as one larger collection. Miniature Mondays usually land on the 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th of the month, and the monthly Tribe subscription is priced at $12.50. For collectors, that makes this more than a single character pack. It is another piece of a growing industrial-fantasy line that already includes the Flesh Guild, Stratos Guild, Power Guild, and Guttercogs.

That larger world gives the set extra painting mileage too. Etheum, the substance tied to the setting’s resource economy, is described in lore as an oily residue that bubbles up in the outer Brinklands and may come from the decayed remains of gigantic beasts. Put that against the Bulkborn’s machine-heavy silhouettes and the Fireguard’s rescue gear, and the whole release clicks: one half is built from pressure, soot, and steel, the other from flame response and survival. Together, they make Mortuus Secunda look dangerous, functional, and worth painting one weathered panel at a time.