Monday, October 20, 2014

Paizo's Pathfinder Pawns Need Patching!

Even though I'm heavily invested in the Pathfinder miniatures, having purchased every complete set except the most recent, I still found it worthwhile to pick up the Pathfinder Pawns NPC Codex Box.  The cost per cardboard pawn is roughly 10 cents, which compares quite favourably to the $3-4 per miniature.

Truth be told, there are several cardboard pawns in the NPC Codex Box with artwork matching the characters in the new Pathfinder ACG Character Decks, and I wanted to have pawns available to represent those characters, rather than using the included playing-card tokens that otherwise are placed at PACG adventure locations to indicate which location a character is visiting.

Most of the artwork on the pawns in the NPC Codex Box is acceptable or better, but there are several pawns that include artwork that is smaller than it should be.  Rather than complain about the undersized art to Paizo on their website [an arguably futile endeavour], I printed slightly larger character artwork and produced my own replacement pawns.  Here are several of those original pawns, with their replacements.


The Areelu Vorlesh pawn [from Wrath Of The Righteous] was an especially egregious example of undersized art [please excuse the blurriness of the photos, the art on the original pawns and the replacements is actually crisper than the photo suggests].  My replacement pawns for Areelu cut off the mini-dragon and wing-tips respectively, but I don't think you need the entire image on the pawns.


Arueshalae [another pawn from Wrath of the Righteous] was also slightly undersized, so I increased the artwork by a couple of millimeters and produced a new pawn for her.  I suppose I could have adjusted the artwork so she was "higher" on the pawn, but I am, nonetheless, relatively happy with the way this replacement pawn turned out.

While I was printing out replacement pawns for those pawns that Paizo undersized, I created several pawns for the characters included in the Skull and Shackles Base Set and Character Add-On Deck.  It would have been nice if Paizo had better coordinated the release of PACG adventures and the related, prepainted miniature and cardboard pawn.  For example, they produced a prepainted miniature for Lirianne the Gunslinger,

but not one for Jirelle the Swashbuckler [the custom-made cardboard pawn in the center, below].

 
Until a miniature for Jirelle is made available, I can use my custom-made pawn, above, in lieu of the playing-card token included in the PACG Skull and Shackles Base Set.
 
 
Since there is no pre-painted miniature for Alahazra, she received the custom-made pawn treatment as well.  I understand her pre-painted miniature is included in the upcoming Lost Coast miniatures set, but I'm still annoyed about the reduction in the size of the Pathfinder miniatures sets, from 55 to 45 unique miniatures, so I haven't yet made up my mind on investing in more pathfinder miniatures.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

My main problem with the pawn is not the size but the color scheme. Everything is so dark that all the datails on the clothes and stuff get muddled in a blackish brown.

(But that's a problem I have with Paizo modukes as well - I don't know why the dungeon maps have to be so dark and muddled...)

Aaron E. Steele said...

Agreed. You'll notice that my Areelu and Arushalae pawns are brighter than the official Paizo versions.

Unknown said...

Nice overview of the product. Planning on picking these up for PACG as well, good to know what to except.