Stand-Ins Printable Figures - Fantasy Set #1

[IDA_Guy]

Stand-Ins: The Fantasy Set #1 includes figures for any fantasy game. You can print a party of adventurers, an army of orcs, or a single vampire lord. The figures include high quality art, with separate images for the front and back -- no outlines or silhouette backs. Figures are scaled for most fantasy RPGs, including the 3.5 edition of the most popular fantasy RPG in the world.

Stand-Ins are attractive and easy to use. They can be printed on paper, or for increased durability, on cardstock. If a figure gets crushed, lost, or bent, simply print out a new one!

This set features 258 black-and-white figures, including spellcasters, familiars, warriors, townsfolk, dwarves, halflings, elves, orcs, undead, giants, demons, and even a camel. Print as many as you need as often as you need them. The B&W figures can be used as they come or custom colored to match specific characters.

As a bonus, 62 figures are also presented in full color. A total of 320 figures!

[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][size=-1]Now available for sale at e23, RPGNow.com.[/size][/font]

 

[Crothian]

With the release of the 3.5 D&D books many people have noticed that miniatures are used more often in examples of combat. Including miniatures more into the game has been a little controversial. Miniatures are not needed to play, but it seems that more and more people are starting to think they do. Stand Ins Printable Figures is one of the few products that allows people to have miniatures at a much more reasonable price.

I do not normally make price a factor when it comes to pdf. However, anyone who has looked into miniatures knows that it can cost quite a bit. This pdf offers a solution that is much easier on the pocket book. The product does cost 12 dollars and one does have to print this out to use the paper stand ups. But it can be printed more then once for an almost unlimited amount of stand ups for a campaign.

This product is filled with fantasy stand ups. There are sixty two colored ones. The art is well done and nicely detailed. There are stand ups of the Pirate Queen and the Knight in Full Plate. It also has more monstrous ones like the Kali Snake Demon and Giant with a Club. The black and white file has many, many stand ups. Well over two hundred of them. You get things like goatmen, gargoyles, titans, badgers, desert toughs, horses, and many others. The art on the black and white ones are nice as well.

I like the alternative to miniatures this presents. There are some hidden costs with having to print them out yourself but it is only fourteen pages of the black and white stand ups and one other page with bases on it for the larger creatures. The color stand up are on four pages so it is not that bad as far as amount of ink used. I found that printing them on normal paper works fine, but I’m tempted to reprint the color ones on a stronger paper so they last being carried from place to place.

The files involved here are large. The zip download is a little over thirty megs in size. The zip consists of 3 pdf files a four and a half meg cover page, five and half meg pdf for the colored stand ins, and the black and white file is a little over twenty three megs. That may cause problems for people on slower connections and also if people want to take the files someplace to have them printed.

 

[francisca]

Nice review. I'd like to pass along one bit of commentary: anime-city. Big eyes, small mouths, impossibly long legs, skimpy outfits, and big, bulging, bare breasts.

If you like that kind of thing, this is right up your alley.

If not, you may not find this product to be worth the $12.

 

[francisca]

Nice review. I'd like to pass along one bit of commentary: anime-city. Big eyes, small mouths, impossibly long legs, skimpy outfits, and big, bulging, bare breasts.

If you like that kind of thing, this is right up your alley.

If not, you may not find this product to be worth the $12.

 

[GameWyrd]

I've a cable modem. Phew. If you want to download Stand-Ins Printable Figures - Fantasy Set #1 then you'll need something similar to cope with the 30MB+ file.

That's 30MB of art; art you cut up and fold. Stand-Ins are Interactive Design Adventure's offering to the "paper miniature" market. Interactive Design Adventures are not a late entrance to this particular niche; this particular set was published in November 2003 and since then they've added Modern & Superheroes set one and Sci-Fi too.

The problem I've had with some of the PDF products in this niche is that they're too small. You end up with a small collection of paper models which you might use for the PCs and then struggle for everyone else. That's not a problem here. There are 15 pages of black and white cut-outs here! That's about 250! You've more than just "core D&D races" too (this isn't a D&D product as such, but you'll recognise certain monsters) as it has everything through cat familiars, to famous monsters and to giants.

I think these 250 or so figures are a great stock of monsters. For your money you get 60 more - and they're in colour. Since they're in colour they make the obvious choice for the PC paper models (if you don't have metal ones) or for the extra plot special NPCs.

Breasts. It's a fantasy tradition that heroic females often have large breasts and small costumes. This is continued here - and it's especially obvious in the coloured section were you have red circles on pink. I don't mind but the style does dictate the sort of game I'd use these with. I'd be playing Macho Women With Guns, a cheese fantasy game or even a suitably adult game.

The strength of these paper Stand-Ins is that you've enough. They're cheap (just under 4c a card) and that doesn't count the re-printing. Since we're electronic you could even have a go at swapping bits and pieces around yourself and producing variations. It's also extremely useful to have such a wide range of images; monsters, familiars, non-humanoids.

If you're into PDF terrain or floor plans, certainly if you have time for PDF paper models, then you need to check out Interactive Design Adventure's Stand-Ins. It's a one off investment which you'll use again and again. Then you'll use it some more.

* This Stand-Ins Printable Figures - Fantasy Set #1 review was first published at GameWyrd.