Dungeons and Lasers Prismacast Caves

I finished removing my Archon Studios Dungeons and Lasers Caves set from the sprues, and thought I'd report back on it. I spent a little time playing around with the layouts, and learned a whole bunch. This shows more or less the amount of tiles you get in the retail Caves set. I've only put walls on one of the rooms at this stage, but it gives you an idea of what you get.

Bear in mind when looking at all of this that all I've done is cut these tiles off the sprue. They come pre-painted - as I understand it they're painted by machine - and the paint quality is as good as I'd likely be bothered to do on some dungeon tile terrain!

The tiles come with moulded points to add connectors which join the tiles to each other and the walls section. They go together quite easily, and it's a firm connection so they don't come apart as you move them about.

Here's how a small room might look once you've made it up. The holes can be used to add walls, or you can add a simple grey peg to fill the space if you want it to be an open area.

You then add walls on to finish the effect. The curved pieces are two parts that fit snugly together before you push fit them into the relevant connectors. You can put them on the sides, or create a wall across the middle of a room if you wish.

At the time of writing, you can buy this set unpainted for £75, or the painted one for £95.

I will caution that it's quite a bit of work to set them all up - you need a little bit of oomph to get each connector to go together, and when you're doing a bunch of rooms, it gets tiring quick! I gave up on getting everything out at around this point - I'd definitely started with the intent to put walls on everything. 

I also got three smaller "themed" sets too. Given the aforementioned loss of oomph, I didn't get everything out - but I wanted to give an impression of the kind of thing you get. This is the spider set, which has narrow bridges held together with strands of web, and tiles covered in web and egg sacs. 

You can see the "Deep Mines" set floor tiles in the bottom room. There's also a bunch of walls with cool crystals that come with it that I did fail to photograph.

The Deep Mine set has two pairs of these stairs up to a pile of gold and treasure. This could be excellent set dressing for an abandoned mine, or perhaps a dragon's lair.

I also got the Goblin Lair set, which has this great little mini hut / building that attaches to tiles. I just attached it to the standard Caves tiles at this point, but you also get a whole bunch of themed tiles for a Goblin Lair too.

The goblin lair tiles are a lot more rickety, with lots of planks with gaps and detritus on the stone floors. I think if you were using either the Spider or Goblin sets you'd probably want to have a black cloth underneath the set to represent the gaps. They definitely weren't quite working on my white table.

The goblin set came with a handful of details like this dead dwarf that you can plug into some of the connection holes to add extra detail. There's not enough for every hole, but it's good to add a little variety.

With my experience putting these together, I certainly wouldn't want to try and assemble them on the fly for a randomly generated dungeon, or as I went according to a map. Assembling a whole large dungeon map also seems like a bad idea from an effort to reward point of view, though I could see an exploration set piece with something to mask sections being quite fun.

If you're actively using these, you probably want to either have some pre-constructed for a fight you're expecting to have at some point, or be pacing your games so a fight starts just before a break or at the end of a session so you can set up for the start of your next one. They do take some serious time to put together and I'd practice doing it a couple of times before committing to doing it on the fly mid game.

I think it's worth noting that you both need quite a lot of tiles, but also get quite a lot in a box. With all the above out on the table, I still had all the below still to use. I got mine through the Kickstarter, but one core set is likely plenty for most standard encounters you're putting together.

If I was going to expand what I have, I'll likely be looking at their older sets that have been converted to Prismacast that are designed as humanoid built dungeons rather than a cave network.

One thing I do need to think about is a better storage solution. I've thrown everything into one big Really Useful Box, and this is Not The One. I was at least smart enough to put all the connectors in sealed plastic bags which helped a bunch, but I think they need sorting by floor tile and wall, and by set.

It was taking me far too long to find the right bits, and it added to the already quite extensive job of putting a layout together.

I'm not sure what the right storage widget is to make this work, but if anyone can think of the perfect solution, please do let me know!

Dolmenwood Review

 

My Dolmenwood Kickstarter arrived last week, and I've taken some time to go through it and write a few thoughts on it. I originally planned to write this on Sunday evening. At about 7pm I sat down to have a quick scan through the Player's Book . . . and then it was bedtime.

I'm glad I didn't write the review on Sunday evening, because as I read through, and talked to a few of my friends over social media, I picked up a few nuances my initial scan read had missed.

Dolmenwood is both a game and a setting. The game is in the style of early D&D, with nine classes and six "kindreds". Attacks and skills seem to be quite a shallow progression, while hit points start very low with a dice per level and low modifiers so  the increase feels a lot steeper. I haven't had time to learn the spells yet, so I'm not sure how much they increase the power level.

The setting is a fantasy medieval realm, with a mix of mortals and fairies. As you may pick up from the name, the majority of the published setting is set in a large wood. It's ruled over by mortal nobles, has more civilised and more dangerous areas, has fairies, witches and monsters.

The game runs off three books - a Player's Book, a Monster Book, and the Campaign Book. The Player Book has all the player facing rules, the Monster Book does precisely what you'd expect, and the Campaign Book includes the GM guides, a detailed world guide including locations, NPCs and factions. I cannot emphasise enough how massive the Campaign Book is. It's more than twice the size of the player's book. I also got a book of maps with a mix of maps that are of use to the GM, and a bunch you can show to the players.

My Kickstarter Pledge also included four pre-written adventures. At least some of these have been previously published for Old School Essentials and D&D 5e. I had a scan through Winter's Daughter, which was a good starting adventure that gave a good indicator of how you might want to organise your own adventure if you were making your own.

It's an excellent adventure that's got a big "fairy tale" vibe. It's dripping with character and style. It feels very accessible and like a good starter.

I also got a canvas map designed to be player facing, and two canvas referee maps with all the secret information you need. I am unsure why I got two referee maps - it was in my pledge manager automatically at my pledge level.

The map is huge, and shows the real depth of Dolmenwood. It can be played as a hex crawl exploration, and this is where it's real "unique selling point" is. Every single hex has a write up in the campaign guide (though obviously, I've not read every single one, so I don't know what the balance of "places of interest" to "featureless swamp" there is. But there seems to be quite a lot there.

I also picked up the Adventuring Party box with a bunch of miniatures, because I am a sucker.

There's eleven miniatures in the set, with a mix of the different classes and kindreds. There's a bit of a shortage of goat people, short moss people and little bat people miniatures, so it's particularly useful for those.

The dice and dice bag fills me with joy. The highest number on each dice have little mushroom symbols on. They include 3D6 so you can roll your starting stats. The dice bag has some lovely embroidery on, and feels like a much nicer material and better quality than the Critical Role dice bag I got a while back.

Dolmenwood is selling you a dream. It has the potential set up for a massive long running campaign with your friends, in person, with beautiful in person props and miniatures. It recommends you run with six characters, whether that's six players, or having retainers and hirelings to make up numbers.

But the recommendation of numbers alone makes me want to run the "perfect" Dolmenwood game with six players - a sandbox where it's based off the goals the players come up with rather than a fixed plot arc or specific threat for them to try and defeat.

I don't have a local tabletop group yet, and you'd not want to jump straight into a massive commitment of a campaign like this. You'd want to build up to it.

But the dream is there. 

Wizkids Pathfinder Leshy Window Box Set Review

Recently arrived after a bit of a delay is this box of Leshy miniatures for Pathfinder. It's classic Wizkids pre-painted stuff, but at the higher end of that scale. You're getting eight miniatures, which are all based on the book art of the Leshy, a popular PC option in Pathfinder.

The Leshy are spirits inhabiting small plant bodies. With the recent Pathfinder Remaster they moved from an "Uncommon" player option to a "Common" player option, essentially becoming a comparable player option to Humans, Dwarves and Elves. That said, they gain their sustenance from sunlight, with their "rations" being very pricey, so they're not well suited to underground campaigns.

(There's a weird point on this one, where Fungus Leshy are mentioned a living in the Darklands, Pathfinder's Underdark, but the PC Fungus Leshy still need sunlight by the book. Still, this is a weird little side annoyance for me, and not super important.)

Here, left to right, we have a Lotus Leshy, a Seaweed Leshy and a Flytrap Leshy. Flytrap Leshy aren't a specific PC option (though there's a monster stat block), but mechanically they work just fine using the Cactus Leshy options.

The great thing about Leshy, being spirits inhabiting humanoid shaped plant matter is that you can really have a wide range of different themes or vibes.

Next up we have the Gourd Leshy, the Sunflower Leshy and the Fruit Leshy. Sunflower Leshy are another "monster option" that fits into other character classes just fine.

The paint jobs on these models are at the higher end of the Wizkids pre-painted scale, and really quite fancy. They've gone with brighter colours, which suits the general feel of Leshy in general, but there's a couple of spots, such as on the Gourd Leshy, where a little more shading would have probably brought them up an extra notch.

Finally, we have a Cactus Leshy and a Fungus Leshy. They're all very distinct with individual silhouettes so easy to tell which is which. All the sculpts are oozing character.

Leshy are small in the rules, and here you can see one being a little shorter than an Aenor goblin who was what I had around to compare them to.

The recent NPC Core book introduced an NPC profile for a "Gourd Witch", which is a pumpkin headed Leshy with a witches hat and witch spells. I'm only shocked I hadn't thought of it myself before now.

As a few Leshy face off against some marauding goblins - would I recommend buying this box? It is really pricey for what it is, but the quality is at the top end of what Wizkids do. For me, it was a must buy because getting the 'official sculpts' and not adding to my painting queue was an easy choice. There aren't many other good options for small plant folk right now outside of 3D printing. It's not going to be everyone's aesthetic, but if you've got the budget as a Pathfinder GM who uses miniatures, I'd recommend them.

Wargames Atlantic Dead Animal Bits

 

I was checking my Bluesky account the other day when I noticed I had a notification of being tagged by someone. This is unusual a I'm not super busy on Bluesky, but it turned out that Wargames Atlantic had done a draw of their followers on Bluesky and I'd won a box of their miniatures.

We got to pick which box it was, so I went for "Dead Animal Bits", which is a whole bunch of bones, bits of corpses and so on, which can then be used to decorate bases or terrain.

The box is three copies of the same sprue, with a whole ton of bits on. The detail on them is perfectly fine for what it is, and there's a huge selection of horns, ribcages, hands on hooks, the works. They're all going straight into my basing box for future modelling projects. It's definitely something folk could get plenty of use out of.

I didn't get on very well with the Wargames Atlantic Halflings I got a few years back, but these seem great. My only worry is that I might have too many of them for my purposes! This one box is going to last me years, and I've put off getting several Wargames Atlantic boxes for D&D and such like because I don't quite need that many miniatures! I'm guessing it's how they achieve a lot of their value / economy of scale, but it might be something to club together with friends to share between you, to eBay spare sprues from, or just to pick up a single sprue from eBay unless you're planning a big army project that's going to need a lot of them.

Obviously, as mentioned above, I received this box for free, but have not been asked to review this product, all opinions my own, etc, etc.

Product Review - D&D Icons of the Realms - Ship Scale Boxes

 

For the last of my "Wizkids boxes I bought in the Black Friday sales" reviews, here's a review of some Spelljammer "ship scale" miniatures. The first one I picked up is the "Astral Elf Patrol", which consists of two dragons and two ships - a Star Moth and a Dragonfly.

The dragons are fine, meant to represent Ancient Dragons in the ship game. Ironically, their base sizes are quite reasonably sized for a normal Adult Dragon in normal miniature scale, with the miniatures only a little too small. Miniature scale creep has gotten ridiculous of late, and they may end up being useful gaming pieces for normal D&D.

The Dragonfly (the smaller ship) is fine and does OK for what it is. I'm less fond of the Star Moth. The huge plastic wings don't fit particularly snugly, so will come out if you so much as breathe near them. This leaves you with the dilemma of gluing them in, which makes the whole thing an absolute nightmare to store - there's a reason they were packed separately in the box.

The Star Moth also feels a little bit "plastic toy", as well? The big see through plastic doesn't help with that, but the bold, blocky colours go on to make it worse rather than better. If you compare it to either of the dragons, they don't necessarily feel like they come from the same line? With there not being many other options for the classic Spelljammer ships, it's a bit of a disappointment.

The next box, "Threats from the Cosmos" is a monster box with four creatures. First up, we have the Cosmic Horror and the Tyrant Ship. The Cosmic Horror is excellent. It's a spooky Far Realm monster that has been painted up all gribbly. I don't see it's normal state line will see much play - a CR18 space gribbly isn't one for regular play - but in 28mm scale, some summoned horror could easily be represented by this.

A Tyrant Ship is a Beholder ship, carved out of rock with disintegration rays. The paint job is deeply disappointing - while it's canonically carved out of stone, the colours they've chosen to represent that look more like the model has been roughly undercoated rather than a good stone texture. It's a swing and a miss, really.

We then have an ancient red dragon, which is fine, and a murder comet swarm. And here's where there's a little bit of a rant coming. A murder comet is a medium creature - so the scale of the murder comets here is completely wrong. There's no stat block for a murder comet swarm, so you're left having to come up with something. And by having a non standard stat block, it's not much use for a 28mm scaled encounter either. At least if they'd had a "giant murder comet" miniature with a normal base, it could then be used as a normal murder comet at normal scale. The paint job is dire, too, using metallic silver to try and approximate the art of a glowing gas ball, where the whole thing would have been much better undercoated blue then an airbrushing of white over the top to get a simple but good effect. Just a catastrophic miss on every level.

Last up, we have "Attacks from Deep Space", starting with an Astral Dreadnought. This thing is huge and heavy. I dropped it on a metal miniature and the metal miniature broke. Lets get an idea of scale.

So yes, this is a Big Chunky Monster. The painting is great, the sculpt is great. Just excellent. It's another high CR monster (CR 21 in this case), so it's much more likely to be encountered as some kind of puzzle encounter rather than a straight up fight. You might be trying to escape it, or trying to trick it into swallowing you so you can recover something from it's magical stomach - donjon. You can definitely make some memorable encounters out of this.

The rest of the box consists of a giant gelatinous cube (again, lacking a published stat block for the current edition, but a nice concept for an encounter), and three smaller ships - a turtle and two lampreys. The sculpts of these are fine, but both of the lampreys fall victim to the "bold bright colour" paint job issue, making them look like children's toys again.

Spelljammer ships and creatures are always going to be incredibly niche purchases, and these boxes vary from "key to populating a basic ship table" to "forgettable", with unfortunate mixes of ships and monsters when you're most likely to want duplicates of the ships (if, you know, you're made of money). All in all, these are such a missed opportunity - some better choices with the paint jobs and different combinations of boxes could have made this a far more appealing product.

Product Review - Pathfinder Battles - Fists of the Ruby Phoenix Martial Arts Masters

 

Another cheap box of Wizkids miniatures I picked up from Thistle Tavern is the Pathfinder: Fists of the Ruby Phoenix - Martial Arts Masters" box. This is a box which is paired with a Pathfinder adventure path - the aforementioned "Fists of the Ruby Phoenix".

This isn't an adventure I own, but the concept is a martial arts tournament on an isolated island. The box looks to be significant or unusual characters from the adventure.

There's a "Kongamato", a primeval dragonkind which is basically a big dangerous predator type. The mini is one of the better ones in the set, and easily re-usable as some sort of draconic or primeval beast.

And then there's a yeti monk. 

Another excellent figure, this one doesn't exactly have a common use in the average fantasy RPG. There's particular genres where it will be perfect, but for the majority, it simply won't fit or make any sense. So, a niche figure that's very marmite. I love him, but I have no idea when I'll run something that will need him.

A more usable figure is the onidoshi - an Oni miniature that is really high quality and looks excellent. Pathfinder uses these villains primarily in Tian Xia, but they are found elsewhere as well. They have a canon in D&D lore too, and are recognisable enough within D&D tropes that they end up not feeling out of place in "generic" D&D. Without knowledge of the existing milieu of D&D, they might feel out of place in a western fantasy.

Next up, we have a named witch whose hair is an animate weapon, and a Tengu in some kind of special combat form. The former's shtick has now been adopted into the standard player options for the witch, meaning that it's not super niche in Pathfinder. The model could also be a flying character with a lot of hair.

The Tengu is terrible. The model arrived bent, and while I used hot and cold water to bend it into position, over the course of about a day it slowly bent back into position. The weapons look bad, the teeth look bad. It's non-standard form means it ends up being incredibly, incredibly niche. A catastrophically awful miniature with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

The lower of the two here is a named ghost character. It's a cool see through miniature with a bunch of detail and weird items. It's not going to suit every ghost you want to use, but a specific character ghost it will be excellent for.

Then we have I Don't Know What. It's . . . very 90s? It's a lady who seems to be wearing underwear, a half put on robe and a weird hat. There might be a reason for her looking like this, but I don't own the book to know the context. It's a mediocre humanoid figure before you take into account the dubious choice of clothing.

So, seven figures, of which I think two are actively bad, and five are good. I am very excited about the yeti monk but will probably never use him, while the Oni is the one most likely to see some play. The pricing on this box at recommended retail price is absolutely extortionate. I picked it up at "we need these out of our shop because they haven't sold" prices, and it seems likely they lost money on stocking them.

Pathfinder definitely has some good Wizkids products - their Goblins frameworks box* is stellar - but there's also some catastrophic misses. Some models I pre-ordered for "April 2024" still haven't delivered, so there's all sorts of different problems the range is having right now. Hugely discounted boxes are going to end up defaulting to be the massive misses. My overall opinion of the Wizkids range remains "do your research and be very picky".

* Don't go looking for the blog post where I "definitely assemble them in March". It was massively optimistic and I completely failed to achieve that.

Product Review: Pathfinder Battles: Impossible Lands - Masters of Magic

 

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.

Product Review: Dungeons and Lasers PrismaCast Pre-Painted Dwarven Mine

 

While I was clipping the pre-painted Dungeons & Lasers scenery out from the sprue, I thought I'd write a short review. There wasn't quite enough space to lay everything out, but hopefully this will get you enough of an idea of what you get.

The painting quality is really good - someone's hand painted everything, which has then been scanned and painted on the sprue. This is a better quality paint than you could get for the money if you bought it unpainted.

You get six sprues like this - four painted with the centre of the floor panels brown, with another two with the centre of the floor painted blue. This gives you some variation - you could have it not matter, or have the water be deeper and inhibit movement.

This means you've got 72 squares of floor tiles that can be used as corridors or rooms, and each of the six sprues has a door, two torches, a free standing lamp on a stand, four short walls and one long wall. That gives you a bunch of flexibility and plenty to make a small encounter room. For a larger encounter or quest I'd be tempted to get somewhere between two and four sets if funds allowed.

The Dwarven Mine set wasn't designed for Prismacast, so there are spots where it falls down a little. Obviously, they can't paint anywhere that the sprue connects to the miniature. There's also a few spots of mould lines that are unpainted. They've put the base material as a dark brown plastic so it mostly gets away with it, but there's a few places where it's a little more obvious when you look closely.

The free standing lantern poles are the most obvious. There should really be, you know, light there! But the quality line is far, far higher than the Wizkids pre-painted models, so if that's your line, you'd definitely be fine.

So the technology is clever, but at least for this set that wasn't designed for it, there's limitations that a hand painted set would surpass. It's good for the money but not perfect, so if you want it perfectly, you'd need to get the unpainted and get it done the old fashioned way. But for the money, the pre-painted option is very very good and will get painted scenery on your RPG tables very quickly.

Wizkids Bigby Glory of the Giants General Release Miniatures

I'd picked up a few bits and pieces of the Wizkids "Bigby Glory of the Giants" release as well as the limited ones, so thought I'd share what I picked up.

In a fit of disorganisation, I got the normal release Frostmourn as well as the one I got in the limited set. Still a big tall spooky girl, still got some freaky weird posing because of a naughty artist using AI to help his posing.

A Spectral Cloud is an undead Cloud Giant. A good mid level scary monster that doesn't feel like a boss fight, but more a tough challenge when some dungeon delve suddenly goes horribly wrong.

A Firegaunt is an undead Fire Giant. I've got a proper old set of dead giants from this set - ironically, more than the number of living giants I own now! It feels like a good premise for an old tomb of some lost giant empire or something.

Here's a Deinonychus and a Dilophosaurus. The first has a simple profile for a low level beast, while the second doesn't have a published D&D profile. A good acid spitting dinosaur would be a good addition to a combat. I wonder if it got cut for space in the book?

Ettercaps are a classic D&D monstrosity. This is one of the best monsters I've seen from the Wizkids pre-painted lines, and I kind of love him. It's definitely a monster that you'll get use of in any traditional D&D campaign.

Finally, we've got a giant lynx and a giant badger. This is a different paint scheme to the limited giant lynx I already have, which mean I could do an encounter of a pair of giant lynxes now. A giant badger is a low level threat, but could work as a summoned ally by a PC, or part of a swarm of animals summoned by an evil druid.

Oddly enough in this set, I'm more impressed by the medium sized creatures than the big giants. There's a few gems hidden away in the line, but I certainly wouldn't buy any blind boxes in the hope of getting the few I like out of the set - a split box service is definitely the way to go from my perspective.