ToyFair Eve

Friday, February 13, 2015

I just landed in New York City in advance of ToyFair, the annual toy business trade show that launches tomorrow. While Paizo does not have a booth at the show (yet!), it's become an invaluable stop for me to catch up with some of our licensing partners, including the fine folks at WizKids, who manufacture the Pathfinder Battles line. I've got it on good authority that WizKids will have an entire production-run set of Dungeons Deep on hand for their display, and I hope to snap a few key photos to show off what some of the figures look like in hand. Next week's blog will, I hope, feature some images of upcoming Pathfinder Battles figures, and perhaps some additional surprises as well!

But the thing I'm really excited about at the moment is Pathfinder Battles: Iconic Heroes Set #1, which arrived in the Paizo warehouse yesterday, and will hit stores and subscribers very shortly.

When WizKids told us they were aiming for a super-premium production on the Iconic Heroes line, I was very excited to see how that commitment would translate to the final figure. It's relatively easy for a professional painter to produce a killer paint master, for example, but it's another thing entirely for everything to go right at the factory in a way that really raises the bar. Frankly, I think WizKids has been raising the bar set after set with Pathfinder Battles, so while I was excited to see what they could do with Iconic Heroes, I confess my enthusiasm was tinged with at least a little bit of skepticism. I mean, how much better could they be, really?

Well, I'm holding them in my hands right now, and I can tell you the answer is "much better." I don't think I've seen such polished prepainted plastic figures from any manufacturer since the birth of prepainted minis. WizKids has really set a new bar for figures that I honestly don't see how they (or anyone else) will exceed. The figures look fantastic. They have blazed by the threshold of "probably better than I could do myself" to "way, way, way better than I could do myself." I am very excited to see what you think of them.

I do apologize that this shot is a little bit on the blurry side (all the others I took are completely unusable). I'm not dealing with optimal lighting conditions in my hotel room, and my phone is within 72 hours of being death-marched to the Manhattan Apple store, where it will be replaced by an upgraded and superior model.

"Upgraded and superior models." That's a good tagline for Iconic Heroes Set #1!

But enough about Iconic Heroes (for now), let's move on to our next big set, Dungeons Deep, which releases in a few months.

First up this week, is the Goblin Archer. I was astonished to discover, upon adding this guy to the set, that Paizo did not actually own a full-body image of a goblin archer appropriate for use as miniatures reference, so we commissioned an original illustration for the sole purpose of the minis line—the first time this has happened to date (though not the last!). The Goblin Archer is a Small, common figure.

We've already revealed a couple of gnolls in Dungeons Deep, so I thought it might be fun to keep fleshing out their ranks. Here we have the Gnoll Slaver, fresh out of the pages of the Monster Codex. The image above is a digital sculpt, but I've seen the paint master for this villain, and it looks incredible. I can hardly believe it's a COMMON. It's also Medium.

That's it for this week's preview. Tune in next Friday for what I hope will be some shots of Pathfinder Battles goodies from the WizKids booth, ideally taken with a new camera phone!

Erik Mona
Publisher