H2 - The Maze Under Stormpeak

I'm a big fan of miniatures. I love Reaper and the more esoteric brands like Avatars of War along with those in the middle tier like Heresy and Dragonblood. However, there comes a time when you're looking for something very specific for the adventure you're running and can't find it. This could be either becaue it's an 'official' monster that has no generic likeness such as a Norker, or a NEW official monster that is too new.

In addition, there are times when you don't want to be weighed down with a ton of miniatures. Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition does many things, but making it easier to carry around a small number of figures is NOT among them.

So after after on some boards (RPG.net and En World) and discovering that things like the Norkers haven't been made and the carnage demons is another one of those figures that Wizards of the Coast made that is a squatter (look at the various figures and you'll see many of them in some painful squatting situation), I decided hell with it and got the Maze Under Stormpeak.

While I am not impressed with the amount of pages in the product, it fits the bill perfectly. It's also completely disposable. It has everything you need. Instead of carnage demons, you get slaughter devils. In addition to covering all the major encounters, it looks like several of the potential random encounters are covered as well. For example, I printed out an encounter with five fire bats and what do you know, there it is. The only one I wasn't impressed with was the one I was looking forward to the most, the Norker.

Here we get the Norbliner. It's not a bad illustration, but it doesn't cleave enough to the new illustration and looks far too similiar to the hobgoblins included already here. In addition, much like the boxed set miniatures, I wish that they would have included a 'bloodied' side so that I could print the counters twice and put one side as bloodied.

The Maze Under Stormpeak is $4 for six pages. First page is a title page, second and third are full pages, then you get one that's a mix due to changing size, another that's not quite full, and a last page with a few huge statues. If you're looking for an easy way to represent the second adventure in the official range, this is much easier than going through the full range of miniatures.