The Last of the Deadly Foes

Friday, October 14, 2016

Deadly Foes, the next set of Pathfinder Battles prepainted plastic miniatures, releases next month! Over the last few months, I've been using this space to preview new digital sculpts for the figures, and this week I've got the final two miniatures for the set! The Paizo Warehouse Runelords tell me that our shipment of packaged product from WizKids hits our office soon, so I also hope to provide a few first-looks at actual production figures in the weeks between now and the set's official release date in the middle of November.

Then we've got ANOTHER whole set that WizKids just announced this week to cover in future previews—more on that at the bottom of this week's blog.

But first, let's take a look at the last two figures from Deadly Foes!

Up first is the Shadow Giant, the final creature figure to be revealed for Deadly Foes! This guy has a fascinating Pathfinder origin. The Shadow Giant first appeared in the illustration accompanying the religion chapter waaaaay back in the Pathfinder Chronicles Gazetteer, the first-ever look at the world of Golarion as a whole (co-written by yours truly). It took until The Inner Sea Bestiary to give the Shadow Giant statistics. Keep an eye out for their upcoming appearance in Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Bestiary 6 next spring! The Shadow Giant is a Large, rare figure.

The last figure of the entire set to preview is the Rope Trick, a fun piece of dungeon dressing suggested by my friend Ross Williams, a player in my weekly Pathfinder game (under GM Jason Bulmahn). During a particularly rough patch in the campaign, we found ourselves frequently hiding out in the extra-dimensional rope trick created by Ross's wizard, and it often became necessary to know where exactly on the battlefield the rope trick was meant to be. Ross suggested a rope trick miniature, and I thought it a sufficiently fun idea to add it to the set. Opinions here at Paizo are somewhat divided as to the utility of this piece, but I know I'll use it in my game, so it's in. As they say, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Absolutely! The Rope Trick is a super-rare piece inserted once per case in place of an uncommon figure. I hope you like it.

And that's it for Deadly Foes, which I think is one of our best and most useful sets yet!

The end of Deadly Foes previews comes just in time, as WizKids this week announced the NEXT Pathfinder Battles set, Crown of Fangs! Crown of Fangs contains 47 creature figures and a bunch of dungeon dressing. My favorite element of the set is the case incentive, the Court of the Crimson Throne, a full throneroom playset that contains thrones, a banquet table, courtiers, and more. We took the idea from the bar incentive in The Rusty Dragon Inn set and said "how can we make this waaaay cooler?" I think you'll be pleased with the results.

But that's getting way ahead of myself. There will be a lot more time to talk about Crown of Fangs in future weeks!

Until then, I remain...

Erik Mona
Publisher