Happy Birthday to Me!

Friday, April 24, 2015

As I mentioned in last week's preview, Wednesday was my birthday, so for this week's preview blog, I want to be a bit selfish and focus on three of MY personal favorite figures from June's Dungeons Deep set of Pathfinder Battles prepainted plastic gaming figures.

Without further ado (and because I'm old now, and I'm rapidly losing patience), let's get on with it!

Here we have my favorite figure in the whole set, the Cruel Conjurer, from page 190 of the Pathfinder RPG NPC Codex. The Conjurer in that book is statted up as a 15th-level human wizard, but I think the figure works for just about any sort of evil mystic. I say evil because of the various hooked chains and things hanging from his belt, and for the foreboding hood he wears, but we all know a lot of player characters like to look a little tough now and again, so I can even see the Cruel Conjurer used as a player character mini. The Cruel Conjurer is a Medium, uncommon figure you won't believe isn't a rare.

Aside from a great sculpt and an awesome paint job, the Cruel Conjurer has two unusual elements that push it to the top tier of minis, in my opinion. The first is the unusual swirl of green mystical energy keeping him levitated off the ground. This is a weird effect for a mini in general, making the Cruel Conjurer stand out from the crowd, but the really exciting element here is the color of the energy. It's difficult to describe, and I'm not certain it comes out perfectly in the photos, but the green WizKids used here is an AMAZING shade of green. It's got just the right level of tone and opacity to create a very special effect. Whenever I take the Dungeons Deep figures around the office, the Cruel Conjurer is one that everybody highlights as a favorite.

But really, the coolest aspect of the Cruel Conjurer is his grimoire, which balances atop the green energy. WizKids went above and beyond with the tampo stamp effects on this guy to the point that his magic book even has magical writing on the pages! The photo above is a little rough and blurry, but you can see over his shoulder that this mini is reading a bit more than the usual blank pages so common among his 30mm peers. I love it, and consider the Cruel Conjurer the greatest birthday gift of the entire set.

But the Cruel Conjurer isn't the only disturbing figure in the set. For my favorite of the gross figures we've got the Mouth Horror, a familiar creature from page 153 of the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary. Dude is gross. I don't know what else to tell you except that you probably need three of them. The Mouth Horror is a Medium, uncommon figure.

And here's a figure that no one outside the office has seen yet, as we haven't taken him to any of our spring trade shows—the Emperor Cobra! Oversized snakes are a staple of fantasy fiction and gaming, and when it came time to add our own to the ranks of prepainted plastic, I just knew we had to go cobra. Inspired by Wayne Reynolds's cover illustration for Pathfinder Adventure Path #9: Escape from Old Korvosa, the Emperor Cobra stands well higher than a Medium adventurer, and its open mouth promises a nasty poison bite. He's even got a cool symbol on the back of his hood, as seen below. The Emperor Cobra is a Large, uncommon figure.

And that's it for my birthday favorites! Actually, there are so many cool figures in this set that I could add a handful more, but hey, I've got to make these previews last through June!

And now I leave you as a broken old man, crippled with age and arthritis, shuffling off into the slow decline into retirement.

Godspeed, all.

Erik Mona
Publisher