Pathfinder Battles Preview: Crazy-Good Commons

Friday, November 4, 2011

Just yesterday, the fine folks from WizKids stopped by the Paizo offices to drop off the final batch of Pathfinder Battles Heroes & Monsters miniatures. I now have, sitting on my desk, actual production-run copies of all 41 miniatures in the set, from the lowly Goblin Warrior to the mighty Huge Black Dragon. Looking at them all lined up on my desk, I’m very impressed with the quality WizKids brought to bear on this set, and I think players are going to be absolutely thrilled with them. As much as I like sharing these images with you every Friday, there’s just something special about holding these miniatures in your hand that can never come through on a photograph.

I’ll begin revealing images of these final miniatures starting next week. This week’s batch is the last of the pre-production samples. Generally speaking, these look identical to the final versions except they haven’t yet been attached to the bases. I’ll see about showing off the bottoms of the bases next week, too, as they look a little different from prepainted plastic miniatures you’ve probably seen from other companies, in that you can actually read the name of the monster and other helpful information. More on that soon.

Today I want to focus on some of the common miniatures in the Heroes & Monsters set. When I first came into the prepainted miniature business, my understanding was that common miniatures often had very few paint steps, and were basically created as “cheaply” as possible as a way of subsidizing the more complicated miniatures pegged to the more scarce rarities. While there is some element of that in the Pathfinder Battles line (very complex minis are indeed more likely to be rarer), I was very pleasantly surprised to see the amount of quality and detail WizKids put into even the common miniatures in the set.

When I’ve showed the production samples around the office, it’s often been commons like the Orc Warrior or Lizardfolk Champion that folks identify as their favorites. With Pathfinder Battles, we let game utility dictate rarity more than things like sculpt complexity or paint steps. If you might want a ton of a certain creature in your game, we did everything we could to put that creature at the common rarity. If you only needed one, we made it a rare, and so on.

Here are preview images of three such common creatures, starting with the friendly (or not-so-friendly) fellows who tend to show up every time your player characters get into trouble in a town or city: the watch!

Here we have the lowly Watch Guard, the rank-and-file police or guard who peers through the darkness with his lantern and impales criminals with his simple spear. You can almost hear him say, “Wot’s all this, then?” as he advances toward your criminal player characters, with very little sense that they might have six or seven levels on him and weapons that cost more than he will earn in a year of cleaning up the city.

Every good gaggle of guards needs a leader, so when we were first planning this set, I asked WizKids to add a Watch Captain to the list. The guy they came back with looked pretty cool, but I thought he was a bit too regular-looking to fully pull off the “captain” rank, so I busted him down. He’s now the Watch Officer, nervously looking over his shoulder for a future set that might include his direct superior.

Or perhaps he’s nervous about an attack from this next common, the mighty Orc Brute! WizKids did an awesome job with the set’s two orcs (the Orc Warrior, taken directly from the Pathfinder Bestiary illustration, is even better than this one). This guy is ready to knock your head off with a nasty club capped with a bunch of nails. If it came down to the fight between the Orc Brute and both of the Watch figures put together, my vote goes to the orc. As Wesley Snipes once famously said: “Always bet on green.”

That’s it for this week. With a full set of finished minis to show off, next week’s preview will be the cream of the crop. Let me know what you’d like to see, and I’ll be sure to add it to the list!

Erik Mona
Publisher