August is upon us, and we've finally reached the release month for the Rise of the Runelords set of Pathfinder Battles prepainted miniatures! We'll debut the set at Gen Con Indy, which means that the complete shipment is currently sitting in our warehouse, which has picked up a distinctive smell of fresh plastic. I love the smell of fresh plastic in the morning. It smells like... Victory.
Anyway, you guys are going to explode with delight when you get the Rise of the Runelords figures in your hands. They are absolutely amazing, and set a new standard for prepainted plastic miniatures.
A standard we're set to exceed with the very NEXT set, the Shattered Star! This third official set of Pathfinder Battles miniatures (produced in cooperation with our friends at WizKids) contains 55 figures, and is currently slated for a January 2013 release. We're still working on some of the final details on price and packaging, so it'll be several more weeks before we have the product pages for this set up and running here on paizo.com, but we don't want to let pesky details like that get in the way of revealing some of the amazing figures we've been working on over the last few months.
Even though we haven't yet revealed a single Shattered Star mini, we're actually much farther ahead in the production process with this set than we've been at a similar period with other sets. We've approved about 90% of the paint masters so far, and are only waiting on a couple of figures. Preview images from the set should be landing here every Friday until I run out of them, and believe me when I say you're in store for some absolutely astounding miniatures.
Before I get to today's initial reveals, I want to talk briefly about spoilers and the nature of previewing a set of miniatures for an adventure campaign that hasn't been published yet—it's going to be a bit difficult, and you probably ARE going to have a few minor details and surprises spoiled by reading these weekly blogs.
I'll take care to hide truly egregious spoilers (“this guy is the arch villain of adventure three, but he's the PCs' best friend for the first two adventures, LOL”) behind spoiler tags, but as the entire point of showing off these miniatures is to, well, SHOW OFF THESE MINIATURES, I'm not going to hide every image behind a spoiler tag. If you're the type of player or GM who gets bent out of shape knowing that certain monsters are scheduled to appear in an adventure you haven't played yet, it may be a good idea to keep your eyes away from this space for the foreseeable future.
‘Cause I'm going to spill some secrets.
Let's start with some small ones, from the very first volume of the Shattered Star Adventure Path, Shards of Sin.
Up first is the lowly Mite, a rank-and-file monster from the pages of the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary. This standard Small fey creature plays an important role in the opening adventure (and this isn't the only mite in the set, either). I love how gross WizKids' master painter made this little bugger, and I can't wait to get a whole pile of them to add to my personal collection.
Speaking of giant piles of monsters I'd quite like to add to my collection, allow me to introduce you to a derro known as Caedimus!
Good Caedimus is a rank-and-file derro. We've given him a specific name to differentiate him from the other derro in the set (which we'll show off soon), but like the Mite, Caedimus is currently slated at the common rarity.
I'm hoping to get a bunch of him.
That's it for this week. Although both of these critters are Small, they're a good intro to the set, which in future weeks will include lots of much, much, much larger figures.
We're on the hunt for the Shattered Star! Come back to this space next Friday for a look at some more awesome minis coming your way in January!
Erik Mona
Publisher
