JoeGKushner
Adventurer
Counter Collection Digital is perfect for those people who enjoy the miniature aspect of 3rd edition, reinforced by the 3.5 upgrade, but don’t want to pay a fortune for lead miniatures. Now this isn’t a cheap product in and of itself coming in at $29.99, but speaking as someone whose tempted to pick up Valten, a special edition miniature from Games Workshop that runs for an even $20, it’s a far cry from expensive.
This is a simple product. It’s not a program that allows you to layout and select images, but rather, a collection of JPEG art set at 300 dpi, allowing the user to size the miniatures at up to 200% with minimum loss of details. There are something like one thousand unique images on file.
The files are broken up as follows: 3RD-Edition, Aberration, Animal, AU, Construct, Dragon, Elemental, Fey, Giant, Humanoid, Magic Beast, Modern, Monstrous Humanoid, Ooze, Outsider, Plant, Undead, and Vermin. The nice thing about the first folder is that it has two PDF files in it. The first file is the whole Counter Collection I: The Usual Suspects. That’s right, the whole first product is here in its entirety. This includes the eight-page adventure, “In the Company of Snule”.
The second PDF file is Counter Collection II, Revised and Revisited. This one includes over 150 unique images and three prestige classes for your 3.0 games. That’s the Brotherhood of Form Idealist, Gnome Combat Miner, and Red Smile Assassin or Death Jester. All three are 10 level PrCs that could work in 3.5 with some readjustment of skills and approval of a GM. Those still looking for a few treats before the counters start have new weapons including the longswords Golem Killer, Despair, and the Demonsword, as well as the Dagger of Truth. After that, the counters start.
The thing I appreciate about this is that it’s nearly a complete collection and may be if some things were more easy to organize. For example, I don’t see the horses and wagons in the files, but they’re in the PDF files. Of course after looking, I find the wagon by itself under the Modern file under Vehicles. I don’t see the spell templates found in the Battlebox, and it’d be handy to have them to print onto transparent paper as opposed to scanning the image and then printing it on transparency.
In terms of completeness though, there are several monsters that we’ll all recognize with a wink. Anyone need a floating eyeball with tentacles atop it’s head with more eyes? Then you must need the Eye Lord. Need a worm like creature whose face ends in tentacles? You’re looking for the Creepy Crawler. Touches like these make those iconic monsters useable to anyone who happens to need them.
The files that may make this worth it for some, are pretty meaningless to me. Take for example, the Vehicles folder, a child of the Modern folder. The views of the vehicles are of the top so most of them look alike despite color variations. The material for Atomic City however, is useful for anyone running a Silver Age Sentinels of Mutants & Masterminds campaign as it includes numerous characters that would be perfect as Mooks. Other files in the parent, the Modern folder, vary in utility for me. See, I hate Urban Arcana. I think it’s the stupidest idea Wizards of the Coast ever had. We don’t need gnoll gangsters and kobold thugs. The real world’s dangerous enough.
Having said that though, having an image of a Star Spawn that looks like a certain squid headed creature from a certain d20 game called Call of Cthulhu that I can balloon up to twice it’s size, is a good thing. That’s right, all of the mythos creatures are in here.
And if you noticed the AU and don’t know Arcana Unearthed, well, that’s what this folder has. Need some Faen or Giants? How about Litorians or Verriks? They’ve got you covered for all the player races as well as many of the monsters like the shadow troll and alabast.
For outsiders, it would’ve been nice to see a further breakdown, like demons and devils, but instead, we get the whole lot in one folder. This includes standard, lower powered opposition like the azer, as well as more unique encounters like the ashmede devil, one of the creatures introduced in Green Ronin’s books covering demons and devilish entities. That’s right, the counters from their collection of GR monsters is also included scattered throughout the files.
In terms of diversity, Fiery Dragon has included almost all of their counters. This means for fire giants for example, we get in essence eight headshots and one body shot. Because the counters have been resized, the headshots look silly next to the body shot because both counters are the same size. Looks like a giant head severed from an even bigger giant.
Some of the placements seem odd. I mentioned the wagon before but another example would be the giant owl being in the giants selection as no other giant animals are in that section. Most of the material is easy to use and navigate, or at least I found it to be so using Windows XP and Windows Explorer. For photo viewing and printing, I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop (talk about overkill), but others online have already started developing tools.
For me, the strength of the product is that I can create and arrange just the files I need and if I print them on cheap paper, I don’t have to worry about them cluttering up the game afterwards. Since almost every monster is represented here, I don’t have to worry about not having the proper counter for the game.
Now I enjoy painting miniatures. I’ve got hundreds of them unpainted due to auctions and it’s often difficult to find just the right one to use for a character. Wizards of the Coast could’ve capitalized on that for roleplayers with their miniature brand, but the money is in randomness so while I’ve purchased a few packs here and there, it’s very nice to have the ability to pick and choose what I want, when I want it with no worry about the rare or uncommon factor to the counter in question.
If there’s an area that the product is weak in, is that while it has fantastic variety, it doesn’t help the GM too much with the template creatures. See, while there are counters for skeletons and zombies, they’re all normal size. We don’t have any large, huge, or small versions. Not a huge issue as you can switch the sizes down with no problem and up to twice the size without quality loss, but it would’ve been nice to see skeleton-medium, skeleton-small, with four images like the familiars and other animals have, and other sized varieties done. It’s obvious that the work was done on the giants for the head shots and having the different sized template creatures would’ve been a great asset and time saver. There’s a similar problem with the small creatures as in the print version, they came four to a square, or four to an inch. Here, it’s one creature per image so that squirrel that used to have three brothers now has none. Now with animals like that, I can see why you wouldn’t need them, but once again, it’s a convenience factor for things like striges.
Those are minor issues though. When you have the ability to field an entire dungeon with creatures found in third party publishers, you’ve got a good product. When the creators are smart enough to know that the users are going to play with the image sizes and includes dpi high enough so that we can without worry right away, that shows the publishers are paying attention to how gamers use products.
I may not use Counter Collection Digital at every game. I love miniatures. I love painting. I love the 3-D effect of seeing well painted, or at least as well as I can paint them, figures, moving through a setup of Dwarven Forge. I also however, like having images that represent the creatures. I like being able to dispose of the counters when I’m done with them, eliminating the storage problem of other counter collections before the tins. I love the fact that they’ve included the AU, Modern, Atomic City, and Green Ronin monsters. The fact that they’ve included the first two counter collections in PDF with full information intact in magic items, monsters, and brief adventure, is further icing on the cake.
If you’re looking for utility, Counter Collection Digital is your product.
This is a simple product. It’s not a program that allows you to layout and select images, but rather, a collection of JPEG art set at 300 dpi, allowing the user to size the miniatures at up to 200% with minimum loss of details. There are something like one thousand unique images on file.
The files are broken up as follows: 3RD-Edition, Aberration, Animal, AU, Construct, Dragon, Elemental, Fey, Giant, Humanoid, Magic Beast, Modern, Monstrous Humanoid, Ooze, Outsider, Plant, Undead, and Vermin. The nice thing about the first folder is that it has two PDF files in it. The first file is the whole Counter Collection I: The Usual Suspects. That’s right, the whole first product is here in its entirety. This includes the eight-page adventure, “In the Company of Snule”.
The second PDF file is Counter Collection II, Revised and Revisited. This one includes over 150 unique images and three prestige classes for your 3.0 games. That’s the Brotherhood of Form Idealist, Gnome Combat Miner, and Red Smile Assassin or Death Jester. All three are 10 level PrCs that could work in 3.5 with some readjustment of skills and approval of a GM. Those still looking for a few treats before the counters start have new weapons including the longswords Golem Killer, Despair, and the Demonsword, as well as the Dagger of Truth. After that, the counters start.
The thing I appreciate about this is that it’s nearly a complete collection and may be if some things were more easy to organize. For example, I don’t see the horses and wagons in the files, but they’re in the PDF files. Of course after looking, I find the wagon by itself under the Modern file under Vehicles. I don’t see the spell templates found in the Battlebox, and it’d be handy to have them to print onto transparent paper as opposed to scanning the image and then printing it on transparency.
In terms of completeness though, there are several monsters that we’ll all recognize with a wink. Anyone need a floating eyeball with tentacles atop it’s head with more eyes? Then you must need the Eye Lord. Need a worm like creature whose face ends in tentacles? You’re looking for the Creepy Crawler. Touches like these make those iconic monsters useable to anyone who happens to need them.
The files that may make this worth it for some, are pretty meaningless to me. Take for example, the Vehicles folder, a child of the Modern folder. The views of the vehicles are of the top so most of them look alike despite color variations. The material for Atomic City however, is useful for anyone running a Silver Age Sentinels of Mutants & Masterminds campaign as it includes numerous characters that would be perfect as Mooks. Other files in the parent, the Modern folder, vary in utility for me. See, I hate Urban Arcana. I think it’s the stupidest idea Wizards of the Coast ever had. We don’t need gnoll gangsters and kobold thugs. The real world’s dangerous enough.
Having said that though, having an image of a Star Spawn that looks like a certain squid headed creature from a certain d20 game called Call of Cthulhu that I can balloon up to twice it’s size, is a good thing. That’s right, all of the mythos creatures are in here.
And if you noticed the AU and don’t know Arcana Unearthed, well, that’s what this folder has. Need some Faen or Giants? How about Litorians or Verriks? They’ve got you covered for all the player races as well as many of the monsters like the shadow troll and alabast.
For outsiders, it would’ve been nice to see a further breakdown, like demons and devils, but instead, we get the whole lot in one folder. This includes standard, lower powered opposition like the azer, as well as more unique encounters like the ashmede devil, one of the creatures introduced in Green Ronin’s books covering demons and devilish entities. That’s right, the counters from their collection of GR monsters is also included scattered throughout the files.
In terms of diversity, Fiery Dragon has included almost all of their counters. This means for fire giants for example, we get in essence eight headshots and one body shot. Because the counters have been resized, the headshots look silly next to the body shot because both counters are the same size. Looks like a giant head severed from an even bigger giant.
Some of the placements seem odd. I mentioned the wagon before but another example would be the giant owl being in the giants selection as no other giant animals are in that section. Most of the material is easy to use and navigate, or at least I found it to be so using Windows XP and Windows Explorer. For photo viewing and printing, I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop (talk about overkill), but others online have already started developing tools.
For me, the strength of the product is that I can create and arrange just the files I need and if I print them on cheap paper, I don’t have to worry about them cluttering up the game afterwards. Since almost every monster is represented here, I don’t have to worry about not having the proper counter for the game.
Now I enjoy painting miniatures. I’ve got hundreds of them unpainted due to auctions and it’s often difficult to find just the right one to use for a character. Wizards of the Coast could’ve capitalized on that for roleplayers with their miniature brand, but the money is in randomness so while I’ve purchased a few packs here and there, it’s very nice to have the ability to pick and choose what I want, when I want it with no worry about the rare or uncommon factor to the counter in question.
If there’s an area that the product is weak in, is that while it has fantastic variety, it doesn’t help the GM too much with the template creatures. See, while there are counters for skeletons and zombies, they’re all normal size. We don’t have any large, huge, or small versions. Not a huge issue as you can switch the sizes down with no problem and up to twice the size without quality loss, but it would’ve been nice to see skeleton-medium, skeleton-small, with four images like the familiars and other animals have, and other sized varieties done. It’s obvious that the work was done on the giants for the head shots and having the different sized template creatures would’ve been a great asset and time saver. There’s a similar problem with the small creatures as in the print version, they came four to a square, or four to an inch. Here, it’s one creature per image so that squirrel that used to have three brothers now has none. Now with animals like that, I can see why you wouldn’t need them, but once again, it’s a convenience factor for things like striges.
Those are minor issues though. When you have the ability to field an entire dungeon with creatures found in third party publishers, you’ve got a good product. When the creators are smart enough to know that the users are going to play with the image sizes and includes dpi high enough so that we can without worry right away, that shows the publishers are paying attention to how gamers use products.
I may not use Counter Collection Digital at every game. I love miniatures. I love painting. I love the 3-D effect of seeing well painted, or at least as well as I can paint them, figures, moving through a setup of Dwarven Forge. I also however, like having images that represent the creatures. I like being able to dispose of the counters when I’m done with them, eliminating the storage problem of other counter collections before the tins. I love the fact that they’ve included the AU, Modern, Atomic City, and Green Ronin monsters. The fact that they’ve included the first two counter collections in PDF with full information intact in magic items, monsters, and brief adventure, is further icing on the cake.
If you’re looking for utility, Counter Collection Digital is your product.
