I find it very strange the pawns it chooses to include, and the pawns it does not. Take Rise of the Runelords for example. Why no Malfeshnekor? It's the climactic encounter of the first book! Surely that's one of the most important pawns to have!
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I could be wrong here but by my count, just from Snows of Summer, the following were not in the pack...
Arctic Tatzlwyrm
Stag (Elk)
Rohkar's Raiders (Human Warriors)
Frost Skeletons
Giant Weasel
Air Elemental
Teb Knotten the Moss Troll
Advanced Giant Mantis
Emil Goltiaevna
Katrina Goltiaevna
Lytil the Witchcrow
Bordegga the Ice Troll
Animated Ice Dragon
Water Elemental
Yana Dultsev
Spriggen
Doppleganger
Animated Ice Nymph
MandragoraSome of these you may not really need (like Emil and Katrina if they don't wind up fighting them) but, I bought the pdf so I could use the images to create tokens for a VTT game I am running in roll20.net. But, so many are missing, I am having to get creative (rooting around on internet... using photoshop... etc) Not really mad about it so much as just wondering why they don't include all of the pawns in the set..
See that's the reason I asked for examples...in the case of NPCs I could see them leaving out some that are of a more generic appearance but for them to leave out things that are hard to find/replace like a Arctic Tatzelwurm, Moss Troll, Ice Troll or some other odd creature is really just bad form. You buy the tokens so you can play the game with visual cues and leaving out some of the more interesting critters is silly. One more sheet of pawns isn't gonna break the bank or just pare down some of the NPC/generic creature pawns and include the more interesting and unique ones.
I really have no answer but the question alone make me more reluctant to give my money up for an incomplete game experience so thanks for bringing it up.
Senior Developer
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There are three main factors that influence the pawns chosen for an AP pawn collection. The first, as you mentioned, is whether pawns for a monster already exist in a Bestiary Box (or in another AP pawn collection). If so, we usually won't include them in the AP pawn collection. (The frost giant pawns in the Reign of Winter Pawn Collection are a bit of an exception, since there's only one frost giant pawn in the Bestiary Box and the AP has an encounter with 8 frost giants. As a result, there are 7 frost giant pawns in the Reign of Winter Pawn Collection. Add those to the frost giant in the Bestiary Box and you have all 8 that you need.)
The second factor is space. An AP pawn collection has 8 pages of pawns. The actual number of pawns varies, depending on what size pawns are on each sheet, but there always 8 pages of pawns. Sheets with Large pawns have less creatures than sheets with Medium or Small pawns. What this does is limit the total number of pawns in a set. The distribution of pawns on a sheet (such as 15 Large pawns or 28 Medium and 1 Large pawn) is determined by a die - the template that is used to cut the cardboard in those shapes. There is not an infinite number of dies, and creating a new sheet requires creating a new die, which is not cheap. As a result, we tend to reuse the same dies. Furthermore, the largest pawn size is Huge; so any Gargantuan or larger creatures are automatically disqualified from receiving a pawn.
The third factor is art. Art is by far the most expensive component of any Pathfinder product (in terms of pre-production). As a result, the vast majority of art on pawns comes from the AP itself. We do occasionally order new art for pawns, but the art budget for a single pawn collection is significantly lower than for all 6 volumes of an AP.
Put all of these factors together, and this explains why there is not a pawn for every monster or NPC in the AP. It's just not possible to do so without significantly increasing the price of a pawn collection. Building one of these collections is like putting together a complicated puzzle - you have to make a list of all of the monsters, see which ones we already have pawns of, then assign them to sheets, picking which dies to use to maximize the number of useful pawns in the set. Then you have to see whether the art actually fits on a pawn; if not, you then have to decide whether to order new art or cut that pawn in favor of another. And at some point in the process, you have to make painful decisions about which monsters or NPCs to include and which to cut, because there's no way to include all of them.
All of this is just to give you a little insight into the process. Be assured that a lot of thought goes into these. I would love for the pawn collections to include all of the monsters and NPCs for an entire AP, but since that's not possible, we try to make them the best we can, and as useful as possible.
And as rknop said above, check out the Pathfinder Paper Minis line. These are done by freelance artists and since they are PDFs and don't have to worry about the production side of printing and cutting and packaging, they generally include all of the creatures in a given AP volume.
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I find it very strange the pawns it chooses to include, and the pawns it does not. Take Rise of the Runelords for example. Why no Malfeshnekor? It's the climactic encounter of the first book! Surely that's one of the most important pawns to have!
Nice summary, Rob.
(Glad I don't have to try to explain it. ;-)
Well considering even with a decent mini collection 90% of the monsters used to be 'pennies, bottle caps, generic heroclicx base removed, etc.' and so on. The pawns do a great job giving me the ability to represent quite a bit of the battlefield with decent art and size.
I'm quite satisfied with the line - more so now that beast box 2 is out - and very excited to get beast box 3 this month (which fills in quite a bit of the menagerie.)
I know it's not announced but I'm assuming I can anticipate beast box 4 sometime this year too :)
To the OP: another place you can find some things that were not included in the Pawn set - the battle lines - many times things not included in the pawns are well represented in the plastic minis - and while not cheap you can buy singles from the web store if you feel something demands representation (and don't want to substitute) - as others have stated the paper minis line also exists - and there are how to's a google search away that show you how to print these out and get the same size and thickness/sturdiness of the actual pawns.
To be honest, my main issue with the AP pawns collection is more the fact that they get released so late.
The Pawns for Wrath of the Righteous are scheduled for April, that's 2 month after book 6 is released, that's not ok!
At the very least it should be released simultaneously with the 6th book.
Lauraliane -- we're working on coming up with ways to fix that. The problem is that pawns take considerably longer to print than an AP volume, but until the last volume of the AP is developed, we're not always certain what monsters/NPCs/etc. are going to be in it. So right now we can't put the pawns together until the last volume is in development and its art is in, but if they get sent to the printer at the same time, the pawns come in months later.
We're trying to figure out ways to get that nailed down earlier, but given how much things can change in development, it's risky.
Actually, a page detailing where any missing (because they exist elsewhere) units can be found would REALLY COOL.
All pawn sets list what they contain. Also, the AP materials quote where a monster's stats can be found if it's not included. Looking at that quoted source's pawn collection would be the first place to go.