Erik Mona's page

Right.

Probably around 500 souls.

As for people, maybe six or seven more than that...

Thanks for the support, guys!

They are all one-piece miniatures, so none of them should be missing parts. Generally speaking, Pathfinder Battles miniatures should not be missing parts at all, and WizKids is happy to help out anyone who receives damaged minis.

We are working on different packaging options, which is one of the reasons we haven't posted the product page or announced a formal release date yet.

Thanks, Russ!

When I started at Wizards of the Coast, the company already had its name, and I thought it was pretty terrible, mainly because it was weird. But within a few months, I realized that "weird" is actually a really good trait for a company name, because it tends not to get confused with anything else. ( I think "unique" correlates strongly to "memorable.")

Beyond issues of pronunciation, the only time I've seen the name confused was at a magazine distributor conference, where everyone wanted to call us "Paizano," the company that apparently publishes Easy Rider.

Folks,

We just sent Planet Stories subscribers an email letting them know that Robert Silverberg's THE CHALICE OF DEATH will be the last Planet Stories volume for the foreseeable future. We've had a lot of fun with the 33 books we've released in this series to date, but sales of the line into bookstores have been sluggish, and the line has the fewest number of subscribers of any Paizo product, by a considerable margin. That's not a good combination, so for the immediate future we are pushing the "pause" button to consider our options and chart a new course for the imprint.

As many of you know, Planet Stories is a personal labor of love of mine, and something I've poured enormous amounts of time and energy into over the last five years. I am currently talking with my partners in Paizo's senior management to determine what comes next for the line. I have a list of projects longer than my arm that I'd love to do, but in order to make them happen we need to restructure the business, and that's going to take some time.

Given the huge popularity of Pathfinder (and the fact that Pathfinder projects already dominate much of my "free" time), I can't promise a timeline on when I can bring my evil plans to fruition, so for the time being I ask that Planet Stories fans remain patient. I AM working on something, and I do not intend to let the project end permanently with this announcement.

We've removed the option to begin a new Planet Stories subscription as of today. Planet Stories subscriptions are no longer required to achieve "superscriber" status on paizo.com. Current Planet Stories subscribers will continue to enjoy a 15% discount on previous Planet Stories volumes, and if you're missing any of our previous volumes, a good way to show your support is to pick up books you may have missed the first time. Should the line begin anew, we will give subscribers plenty of warning so they can know what to expect, and when.

I'm happy to answer whatever questions I can here in this thread and elsewhere in the Planet Stories discussion folder, which isn't going anywhere.

So, for the time being, keep your eyes on the stars and a fresh charge in your blaster pistol. The future of Planet Stories is lurking up ahead just beyond the next star.

More soon.

--Erik Mona
Publisher
Paizo Publishing

Glad to hear it. I'll post some thoughts in another thread.

I would consider that timeframe more or less "concurrent," frankly.

I will submit that "difficult" is not equal to "impossible."

I can't speak to future sets beyond Rise of the Runelords, but I can say that Paizo is pretty awesome, and I'll leave it at that.

Eric Mona said wrote:

We’re still sorting out the fine details of product format and exact release date, so again, there’s no product page for this set, although I have reason to believe that we’ll have good news to report on that front shortly.

Please tell me if that news is not expected today so I can stop refreshing the comments every 2 minutes, it's killing my smart phone's battery and disputing my work day.

Not expecting news today. Frankly, I'll be surprised if everything comes together by next week's preview blog, so there's no need to panic or check back every 10 minutes or whatever.

In Summary,

WotC: Holiday tradition of firing talented staff like Lisa.

Paizo: Holiday tradition of dinner for your staff, even if you haven't gotten paid yet and are still burning through your start up cash.

In fairness to Wizards, they threw some absolutely killer, extremely expensive and quite lavish catered holiday parties for employees and spouses during the period I was there. So despite the holiday layoffs, they were no slouches in the dinner for the staff department.

Vic Wertz wrote:

It is admittedly on its very last legs right now, and probably won't survive to our actual tenth anniversary, but considering it wasn't brand-new when we got it, it has held up very, very well.

Hey Vic: In case you're not aware, many copiers contain hard drives holding an image of everything that has ever been copied on the machine. If your copier does die, please be sure to securely erase, degauss, or destroy the hard drive therein. ;-)

The idea of our copier having a hard drive in it is equivalent to the idea of a Commodore 64 having a cold fusion hyper-processor.

They would probably look amazing.

Steve Geddes wrote:

Is there any specific reason Malfeshnekor was chosen to be uncommon (instead of rare)? Such unique creatures seem more naturally to fit into the rare category to me, on the basis of usability of likely duplicates in a case. (In fact, I'd prefer these to be the apparent 'super rare' category).

My guess is even though it is a named single NPC in the path, as a general creature it is plenty possible to encounter more than one in a different higher level campaign.

This.

Also, sometimes there are technical reasons why certain figures are more advantageous to fit on the same mold, which can have rareness implications. I'm not saying this is the case here, but it has happened before and will happen again.

Kor: There are no more orcs coming in this set. There just aren't any in Rise of the Runelords at all. Sorry!

Aroden's church was also essentially the state religion of Taldor and Cheliax, two of the biggest empires the Inner Sea has ever known.

So there's that.

Give me a couple of weeks.

I'm pretty sure the yeti in the Bestiary Box is the illustration from the Bestiary.

As these are repaints, do we know whether or not the bases will have a different name and number as the originals from the H&M series?

Mostly different names (the Zombie is still called a Zombie), different "logos" (this one says CE), and different numbers.

Erik Mona wrote:

This is _almost_ impossible, and until we started working much further ahead about a year ago, it would be 100% impossible.

I'm curious: what changed that permitted you to work farther ahead? Was that a consequence of bringing Rob McReary on as AP developer to permit James Jacobs to do more outlining and get ahead of the production curve -- or was it something else?

Good management.

The red doesn't seem too small in person. It's a little sleeker because it is, after all, a young red dragon. Bigger ones later on will be bulkier.

One element you're forgetting is that in order to sculpt a mini, we need art for the sculptor to base it on. It takes about a month from the day we ask an artist to draw something to the point where we have a finished piece.

So take a random villain from, say, the first installment of an Adventure Path that begins in August. Let's say we want to release a concurrent minis set in August, at the same time that the Adventure Path starts.

In order for the adventure to come out in August, we need to have it to the printer in early March (or so). We generally need the finished image for about a month before we ship to the printer, which means we're ordering it from the artist in February, six months before you will see it in the game store.

With all of the tooling and sculpting that needs to go into miniatures, add at least two more months to that, which means we'd really want to order the art for the Adventure Path miniatures EIGHT MONTHS or more prior to the point where that art is seen by the general public. Until recently, that's been before we even have an outline for the AP, and it's WAY before the adventure itself is written.

So what weapons does the guy have? What does he look like? You can't figure that out from the module, which does not exist at this point, so you've got to cull the information from the campaign outline (assuming it's finished, which it probably isn't) and give the artist a fair amount of leeway to decide how to kit out the character, and then force the author to write his adventure with some of the villain decisions already made for him.

This is _almost_ impossible, and until we started working much further ahead about a year ago, it would be 100% impossible.

In order to release a set of miniatures this upcoming August that ties into the Adventure Path we'll be launching in August, artists would already need to be working on the art, and sculptors would need to get started any day now.

It would be an undertaking of Herculean scope, a project coordination task achievable only by the living gods.

It would be awesome, though, wouldn't it?

I was being extra-generous because I've been pumping up this preview for so long, and the weather cheated everyone out of it last week.

What happens with the Shemhazian, which is Gargantuan in the game? Are there going to be Gargantuan minis?

The Shemhazian, sadly, did not quite make the cut.

Perhaps in a future set!

(There is one Gargantuan coming soon, and I'll bet people can guess what it is!)

Tell me more about this new-ish GI Joe on your desk...

It's a Zartan from the latest batch of releases. I collected GI Joes as a little kid, and keep looking at them when I go to Target. I haven't really been tempted to buy any of them for more than a decade, but this latest batch is celebrating some kind of anniversary (30th?), and so they're revisiting some of the classic characters.

I got Zartan and a Cobra soldier, and they both look pretty awesome.

Not as awesome as the Treachery Demon, but still good.

Erik, These look great. I am concerned about your statement It probably goes without saying, but this guy is a rare. Does this mean I will get 3 in a case like Seelah or Ogre? That would be great! I only got 1 Orc Warrior and that is a "common." Not so great. This has been addressed in other threads but rares don't actually seem all that rare. Is that going to remain the case with future sets?

Also, Is there a chance we'll get new variations of skeletons and goblins and zombies and "common" monsters that GM's need more of?

The Large "rares" in a case will likely be repeated, since there are, generally speaking, fewer larges in a brick than medium boosters. I've brought WizKids attention to the case-cracking thread here, but I honestly don't expect major collation changes between the sets to kick in this rapidly.

That said, those fine details have not been decided for Rise of the Runelords yet, so I don't want to share my assumptions that I may later have to revisit.

As for the "common" creatures, this set includes several more goblins, but does not include any skeletons or zombies. There are a few other "regular" undead coming, though.

No, no, no. This PREVIEW largely focuses on stuff from the first three books, but as you note, some of the bigger stuff near the bottom of the preview is from later in the Adventure Path. Rise of the Runelords will cover the entire Adventure Path.

The Treachery Demon is a treachery demon, from the Pathfinder Bestiary (where he goes by a different name).

I am confused. Is the Rise of the Runelords miniature run going to be another random pack assortment like Heroes and Monsters? Or is there going to be a some effort made that a large purchase, like 1 or even 2 cases, is a complete set of minis for the scripted encounters?

Ummmm... both?

It's going to be a random pack assortment, but as with Heroes & Monsters, we're going to try to get you an estimate of how many cases you'll need to buy to more or less ensure* a complete set.

* Not a guarantee, but we'll try real hard to make it as easy to collect as possible. Look to Heroes & Monsters for an idea of what we're shooting for.

My question is: What is with the Harpy's hands? She looks like a petite woman with Shaquille O'Neal's hands on her. She could Palm a Basketball (or an adventurers head).

You can't really tell from the photo, but she has long, gnarly fingernails that make her hands look bigger than they are.

The next set, Rise of the Runelords, is scheduled for release at the same time as the Rise of the Runelords hardcover edition we're releasing this summer.

We haven't released information on what follow-up sets will be. I will say that it is absolutely amazing how many ducks need to line up in a row in order to pull off something like a concurrent prepainted miniatures release at the same time as a current Adventure Path.

It would be _almost_ impossible.

I dunno. Maybe. We've discussed it, but there are a lot of logistical reasons why it may not be practical.

That's definitely how we look at it. And for miniatures fiends like me, it's just more cool minis to add to the collection.

Just to make sure everyone is on the same page, Encounter Packs will pretty much ALWAYS be repaints of existing sculpts. If we could do set packs of new miniatures with no randomness element at all, we would.

Unfortunately, the costs of tooling and sculpting make that impossible, so these sets will not regularly (or even "pretty much ever") include totally new sculpts.

Any chance of a Colossal Xotani from Legacy of fire???

I would pay some serious cash for one of those...

We have no plans (yet) for Colossal miniatures of any kind.

Yay!! ROTR minis! I'm excited to see these. After seeing the Heros and Monsters minis, my gaming group has expressed interest in splitting the cost of another case. I am hopeful that a single case will still be enough to be reasonably certain of a full set.

Speaking of Minis... when will the encounter packs be listed?

Shortly. Details on the first one should be available by the end of this week.

I don't think these comics will be produced with children as the primary audience, frankly, so I wouldn't worry too much about that.

Things are moving forward, with some cool developments today. I think people will be very pleased, and I am looking forward to sharing more info with you about Dynamite's plans once they are a little more solid.

We're getting closer....

Yeah, this guy is definitely aping (get it?) the Troll and others from the first set. I don't think any of the other Rise of the Runelords minis are doing this, though, so if he's part of the "Wave," he's the first guy doing it, and everyone else in the set is just sort of looking at him and shaking their heads.

Exactly.

This is the version of the Yeti from the cover of Ultimate Combat. I suppose that eventually we will reconcile in world why there are two different official "looks" for yetis in Pathfinder, but for this mini it comes down to "this is how Wayne Reynolds drew them, and we thought they looked cool this way."

It's a paint master.

The Yeti is wearing clothes because of Original Yeti Sin, which brought shame and self-awareness to the Yeti community.

Erik Mona wrote:

I've been trying to give a "behind the scenes" feel to my miniature posts, though lately it's been more about making my way through final images of the set, so there's not so much of a look at the process.

I think people will be very pleased next week when we start talking about the Rise of the Runelords set (and showing off preview images), but if you don't care about minis posts now, I'm not sure there's much I can do to make them more interesting for you.

I dunno. Maybe use that time to get an early start on the weekend or something?

Your minis posts are great and I've enjoyed them. However, I, like some others, would prefer to see such things in the Store Blog (and fiction reserved to the Fiction Blog).

To explain a little inside baseball, the store blog comes out of the store team, which generally means it's written by Liz Courts, Jeff Alvarez, or Lisa Stevens, who are in charge of that aspect of the business.

The "Paizo Blog" comes out of the editorial department, which generally means it is written by editors, developers, and your mighty publisher.

The editorial team is in charge of the minis line, and is very excited about the minis line. That means those posts end up on the editorial blog.

The store blog content populates the weekly paizo.com emails, so that's why it is usually focused on what new products have come out this week (and it's why it almost never features older products).

I don't think Lisa (or a lot of the recipients of that email) would want to read about four or five miniature previews every single Friday, but a lot of visitors to the paizo blog are more than happy to do so. That space is more "valuable" if it is focusing on the new hotness that people can order RIGHT NOW than it is if it's focusing on some cool thing down the road.

As for the fiction, we put a lot of effort into it, and I'm pretty sure putting it on its own tab, hidden behind the "real" blog, would mean a large decrease in the number of people who read it. I'm less worried about folks who don't want to read fiction scrolling past it one day out of the week than I am about everyone forgetting that it exists.

And since my editorial team is putting effort into a free Wednesday blog post anyway, I don't really see the purpose of doubling that effort to show off a picture, or what have you.

The Paizo Blog is fun to write and (we hope!) to read, but it's also a lot of work, and to some degree it needs to serve the business interests of the company just as much as the store blog does. The messageboards provide tons of opportunity for direct back-and-forth with Paizo staff, developers, and freelancers, so if you've got some burning question about the rules or the world of Pathfinder, it should be pretty easy to get the answer directly from the horse's mouth here on the boards.

I appreciate suggestions for how we can improve the Paizo Blog, and we're always open to making adjustments, but for the time being we won't be scrapping either the Wednesday fiction or the Friday minis previews.

Especially since we're still five months away from the release of that set! That's 20 preview blogs!

These details are all still being worked out. We'll share them with you guys some point after we know them ourselves! :)

My girls keep begging me to play more pathfinder. On a whim I went down to the basement and fished out some old 1st edition TSR Modules I had: "Keep on the Borderlands", "Sinisiter Secret of Saltmarsh", etc. They of course picked "Palace of the Silver Princess" which I am adapting for them on the fly.

That was the very first D&D module I ever played, and I guess you could say it worked on me! :)

It's also worth repeating that a lot of stuff gets cut for good reason. ;)

I've been trying to give a "behind the scenes" feel to my miniature posts, though lately it's been more about making my way through final images of the set, so there's not so much of a look at the process.

I think people will be very pleased next week when we start talking about the Rise of the Runelords set (and showing off preview images), but if you don't care about minis posts now, I'm not sure there's much I can do to make them more interesting for you.

I dunno. Maybe use that time to get an early start on the weekend or something?

It's the room with the monster and the treasure in it.