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This was a fantastic audible! I don't have much to add that the other reviews haven't already said. I can't wait for the digital download of skinsaw murders to become available!

The short: My wife wanted to get into Pathfinder. So I started a home game of Serpent's Skull and printed these off. We played Friday night for a few hours.

As I was reading NPC entries and what they look like I stopped, looked up at the board, and said "Wow, just grab the minis, they look exactly like that!"

Todd does such a fantastic art job with all of these minis. I have never felt such a relief with a new player (my wife for that matter!) than to not try to coerce their imagination into seeing a character and being able to just say "Look at this one, it looks exactly like that!"

Also something to note, I use pawns as well. I didn't want to feel like I wasted money (economy and what not) so I had sought a way to combine the two and be able to pack the minis in my pawns box. What I did was Cut them out, fold the bases in between the two sides (without gluing on the bottom circle), and plug them into the Pawn bases. Works great and saves room (as well as giving you WAY MORE MINIS). The pawns aren't so big in comparison as everyone says, and it helps if your players are the ones using pawns to help differentiate from the monsters on the board.

I wish Todd would do Carrion Crown (hint hint)

So let's point out the positives in this review first.
1. If you love to play dwarves, elves, and humans (both male and female) you will want to pick up this set. I've never seen a more dwarf friendly set! Which is great for me! The multitude of elves and humans was unsurprising, so I'm not as excited.

2. If you love half-orcs, you'll be either excited or irritated, depending. Most of the half-orc npc's are male (which irritates my wife because she was looking forward to a female half-orc for her PC in Serpent's Skull). They are also mostly cast in the typical evil orc fashion. This is a bane to those who play them, but a boon to GM's who need more "orc" minis.

3. If you love halflings and gnomes, there are a few. However, they are somewhat hard to distinguish (I'll get to that later).

4. If you love half-elves, they kind of blend with elves and humans. You'll be good to use either.

5. The animal companions are represented (for the most part). This is great and I'm glad for it. While most people can just borrow from the bestiary, it was nice to have the ones that naturally don't start at a smaller size being made smaller in this set.

6. There is a mini for just about everyone.

Now with that in mind, let's get to the negatives.

1. Almost none of the titles of these pawns match the respective image. No, I don't mean they mixed them up. They were titled the same in the NPC Codex hardback too. Ignore this, if you can. I'm considering just putting the minis in order of race to eliminate this problem.

2. The pawns are indeed not fully cut like the Bestiary was. You can use pretty much any knife to solve this issue.

3. Some of the pawns are cut off at the weapon, which isn't cool. The images could have been shrank a bit more to accommodate at least a portion of them. This is glaring in the animals as well. The dog should not be bigger than the leopard. And dogs need butts too.

4. Lighting. I'm unsure if it's simply due to the shrinking of the images or poor printing, but some of these minis are quite literally black shapes with little art. This rankled me at first, but I've resolved that they have become the Dark Folk. Thus my purchase is still justified.

5. The obvious gnomes look like they are straight out of wonderland. This is not ok.

All in all, I'm glad I purchased this from amazon for about 12 dollars less. The pawns don't justify the 39.99 price tag. But for 27.99 and free shipping they do.

P.S. With all of that in mind, there is one mini that just stands out fantastically. The Knight (aristocrat npc pic) is glorious and should be used for any male human full plate warrior. They should have made more.

P.P.S. After punching them out and attempting to re-sort them into the frames it has dawned on me that not all frames are punched out in the exact same shape. So I have purchased Business Card slip sheets and they work fantastically for the large and medium pawns. The small pawns luckily will fit back in their frames (and for longevity sake, put the smooth side DOWN in the smooth from so they slide off each other instead of raking the cardboard). With that done, I have a final total

Halflings-39
Gnomes-35
Humans-168
Half-Orcs-51
Half-Elves-48
Elves-40
Dwarves-48
Animals-25

As you can see, there is a good variety for everyone. I've based these numbers on the races listed for the entries from the NPC Codex pdf.

We've all been there. We're thinking of a character to play, we keep looking at the monk, and we sigh because it's just not right. There is one ability that will be wasted. You will have to multiclass to get your character concept and you don't want to miss out on level dependent abilities. You think armor is for dwarves and wussies (and you're not confusing the two as synonymous).

Or you just got done watching any japanese or chinese movie/anime and you immediately want to play that kind of character. One of these two are usually the issue.

That's where The Talented Monk comes in.

What can I say that hasn't been said? This pdf is awesome. I'd buy this in print if I could. I'd staple it into my core rulebook in the monk section. IT'S THAT GOOD.

Now you're reading this and thinking "but if it's that good, it must be overpowered." I know, I thought the same thing. Monks never run the perfect line of good power and balance. They're usually broken in either a good or bad way. But this time around, it's not. The monk is broken down into component bits that you can plug and play with to make your perfect character. If it were not for the feats, I would consider this the better fighter. Give me another hour of tinkering, and I might be able to make it the better fighter. But if you don't want to be a fighter and want to focus on ki powers, do that instead (or mix them up!). If you want to be a Tai Chi master and wield a longsword while flurrying, go for it. They even took the archetypes abilities into consideration and broke them down too. Don't feel constrained to abilities that are one trick ponies. Pick up a smidge of what you wanted from it and keep going. Be a martial arts master, a ki mystic, a ronin samurai, or a devoted warrior guard.

It's all in here. It's 3.99. It's worth more than anything else you will buy for 3.99. Feel hesitant, go read the comments section. I was hesitant. And I'm glad I bought it anyway. My group will be glad too. And as an added bonus, this book will open up so many options in any eastern campaign it's indescribable.

Enough rambling, go treat yourself to the monk you've always wanted.

Wrote a longer review and the boards glitched me.

The short: These maps look like blown up, unlabeled versions of the maps found in The Trial of the Beast and Ashes at Dawn. The other two towns don't even matter to the campaign. Those maps should have been Ravengro/Harrowstone and Illmarsh as those adventures spend a decent amount of time in the area. And labeled. Labeled! LABELED!!!!

The map of Ustalav on the other hand isn't too bad. I'll be laminating it and putting it up on the wall to track out progress and side quests.

I purchased these through third party (as well as Carrion Crown) because I was interested in having more detailed maps of smaller areas. I knew what I was getting (Smuggler's Shiv, Saventh Yhi, Ilmurea) and was just excited to have a high quality map of each of these areas (especially since I believe our current GM is interested in running Serpent's Skull). However, after a comparison to books in his collection, I feel we would have been better off just photocopying the pages with the maps on them. These maps look too blurred after being blown up to this level. And there are no legends on the maps to help as a GM tool (in my opinion).

I wanted to be excited for these and honestly I feel let down.

I bought these quite a while back, but have been working on getting a good group of guys together for game. After playing a while as a Monk (Martial Artist) I remembered I had these and brought them to game last week. These were INVALUABLE! Fantastic for me to remember what I can do with Stunning Fist and Improved Grapple. I just keep the cards next to my character sheet for reference. It's so good the current GM asked how much they cost so he could buy some!