Steve Geddes's page

I picked up three cases of these and received a complete set in each one and no duplicates in any brick (as promised). One of the cases was severely crushed and there was no damage to any of the minis inside.

The painting is very good and consistent and I personally prefer the stiffer plastic to those used in other plastic miniatures. Having said that, it's worth bearing in mind that they have a distinctive style and, for me at least, it's a little too 'cartoony' in some instances. Some of the detailing (particularly around the monsters mouths, for example) is a little too heavy handed in my view. They will look different in a collection of D&D minis - many will prefer the style, but many wont. If you were to pick up one Wizkids mini to use in a game using predominantly D&D minis, I think they would stand out and look a little odd (and vice versa).

My main negatives are the gimmicky 'choice of weapon' for the Frost Giant. It doesnt add much in my view and is just one more thing to break and store/lose. I was also disappointed at the inclusion of non-rare heroes since I dont think there's as much utility in multiple heroes as there is in many copies of the same monster. I'd prefer (when purchasing a random miniature) that it was from a reasonably tightly defined class of miniatures. In my view mingling heroes with monsters and the chosen rarities wasnt quite right. Hopefully this last is a function of it being an 'introductory set' and that future sets will be more tightly themed and/or have the rarities tweaked.

I wasnt as taken with this as previous reviewers. I liked the story, although it's not my favorite Paizo module it's a very good "Fresh faced adventurers heading out into the world" module which usually tend to feel somewhat contrived to me. I also thought it was excellent at introducing some of the more important changes from 3.5 to Pathfinder.

Where it fell down, in my opinion, was in the room descriptions. Some examples: there's no mention of two stairs between rooms 4 and 9 on the first level (presumably they just join up, but it would have been nice to have that spelt out). I'm not sure how one unlocks the door in the southwest corner of room 6... Those sorts of things let the module down for me.

It also hit my pet peeve - the inside back cover is a reprint of the picture on the front. I would so much have preferred the second level map to go there, freeing up one page for expanded room descriptions as per the paragraph above. It's a nice second-best option to have the dungeon map in the centre of the book, but not as easy to find as if it were on the inside cover.

A good introductory module, despite that - the omissions are relatively easy to sort out yourself. It would just be nice to not have to.