A First Look at Crown of Fangs

Friday, December 2, 2016

By now I hope you've had a chance to check out Deadly Foes, the hot new Pathfinder Battles set of pre-painted plastic gaming figures from WizKids that's in stores and shipping from the paizo.com warehouse RIGHT NOW! Deadly Foes contains a wide variety of commonly encountered creatures from the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, and looking at the production-run figures, I think it's one of our finest sets to date. In fact, following up Deadly Foes is a bit intimidating.

Happily, our next set, April's Crown of Fangs, ups the ante in ways that will take me several weeks to fully explore. It's an exciting time for Pathfinder Battles, with lots of new figures and set features unlike anything we've done before.

It's become a bit of a tradition that the first image I post from a new set is that set's limited edition case incentive figure, but in the case of Crown of Fangs, the Court of the Crimson Throne incentive playset is so awesome, so packed with value that I don't have enough time today to go into it in full, glorious detail. Instead, I'd like to show off four figures (including two from the incentive) that give a nice taste of what's in store.

For starters, Crown of Fangs is a bit of an unofficial companion to Paizo's popular Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path, now available in a special collected hardcover edition! The set includes many key NPCs, factions, and creature types encountered in that classic Pathfinder campaign, but the set also includes plenty of "generic" figures useful for any fantasy campaign. Today's preview shows off both types of figures.

First up today is the imposing Queen Ileosa Arabasti, wearer of the titular Crown of Thorns and a major, let's say character, in the Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign. Ileosa previously appeared in a different outfit in our Legends of Golarion set a few years back. I'll leave the reasons behind her costume change to the campaign itself, but suffice it to say we thought it would be fitting to include an "after" figure to Legends of Golarion's "before." Queen Ileosa Arabasti is a Medium, rare figure.

Here's another look at Queen Ileosa seated upon the eponymous Crimson Throne itself, the centerpiece of the Court of the Crimson Throne case incentive playset. The seated version of Ileosa seen here also comes in the incentive playset, and is fully removable from the throne, which stands alone as an amazing piece of dungeon dressing.

But it's not just Crimson Throne and Ileosa all the time. Crown of Fangs also includes tons of in-demand figures for commonly encountered foes such as this awesome Bone Devil. The Bone Devil is a Large, uncommon figure, and I simply cannot wait to add a couple of handfuls of these to my personal Pathfinder Battles collection.

Speaking of Pathfinder Battles collections, the best way to make sure you never miss a single figure is to sign up for a Pathfinder Battles Ongoing Subscription, which delivers Pathinder Battles goodness directly to you as it is released. Your subscriptions are the single most important factor in keeping the line healthy with lots of robust offerings, and I'd like to offer a heart-felt "thanks" to all current and future subscribers.

You guys are the best!

Next week, I'll have more awesome Crown of Fangs figures to reveal!

Until then, I remain...

Erik Mona
Publisher