I had a pretty restrained Black Friday, but did take the opportunity to grab a few heavily discounted Wizkids pre-painted boxes from Thistle Tavern. I've previously bought cards for Flesh and Blood from them, and was after a play mat I really liked, but on an impulse grabbed a few Wizkids figures.
This box was discounted to £11 from the £35-£40 range, and when I received it, I became gently fascinated by the choices made to put these figures together in a box that led to such a large discount.
Pathfinder's setting is the world of Golarion, and they facilitate a wide range of different game styles by having different areas of their world hit different tropes. The Impossible Lands are where a bunch of the weirder concepts are: here lies the wild west / steampunk gunslinger city, a post magical apocalypse wasteland, a high magic land, a land ruled by undead, a fey cursed lost kingdom and a small India themed high magic island.
So, first up we have a Rakshasa Maharaja and a Japalisura Asura. These high level fiends are a good medium level adversary, campaign villain or boss fight, but their complexity means you're getting a mildly disappointing paint job for a premium price. Finding any miniature that meets these monster descriptions is likely a challenge, but given their leader / manipulator energy, I'd probably end up searching for a higher quality miniature I could paint myself so they weren't a bit of a disappointment for a climactic battle.
Next up is an Ifrit Pyrochemist and a Manticore Paaridar. So, a mortal linked to the fire plane who's become an alchemist specialising in firey bombs, and a monk from a niche group who's absorbed monster energy in some way to try and improve their physical prowess.
These are excellent odd profiles to add into a fight as a henchman, specialist hireling or leader of a bunch of goons. You'd want to craft some narrative around the encounter and design the fight around them, but they'd be memorable and interesting.
The next models we have are Nex and Geb. These are the ancient rulers of the high magic land and the undead land, each of which is named after them. You might meet them as a quest giver but if you end up in a fight with them, you'll have an entire nation after you.
Frankly, these are baffling choices to have made, let alone put into such an eclectic box. You might need one or other of these in a weird, niche campaign, but even adventures set in their respective lands might never see either of them.
And finally . . . Nethys the god of magic, and Anong Aronak, the leader of the Dongun Hold.
I'm straight up stumped here.
No-one is going to be straight up fighting a God in almost any campaign, and picking a neutral deity not one of the evil ones, and making it a human sized figure at that, is pretty baffling. I thought maybe you could use this for the 10th rank "Avatar" spell that allows level 19 and 20 clerics to take the form of their god as a powerful divine shape change . . . but that spell makes you Huge, so this model remains utterly pointless.
Alongside that is the third "ruler of a country" model - in this case the dwarf who rules the dwarf hold who makes firearms for the wild west steampunk town. Probably more usable than the other two ruler figures by sheer dint of being a slightly more reasonable power level, it remains weirdly niche by not being a prominent figure from Alkenstar, where most of the adventures happen, but the lore obscure neighbouring dwarf hold that helps excuse the setting's firearms.
So, in short, these perfectly tolerable figures will be unlikely to all be used in the same canon campaign, make little sense to be in the same style of adventure, and all see only weirdly niche uses. They have plenty of options in weird homebrew campaigns, but they're never going to be your first choice purchase. It's a weird one for completionists and lovers of the whackier settings Pathfinder has to offer. And even then.
I definitely only got this because of how cheap it was. I don't understand why it exists.
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