What Do Treants, Gelatinous Cubes, Mimics, and Displacer Beasts Have In Common?

The latest D&D miniatures set, Monster Menagerie, is now here. From WizKids, check out some of these repainted plastic figures below. "In Monster Menagerie you will find a vast array of challenges for your heroes to overcome and allies to fight by your side. Face Bulettes as they use their powerful claws to tunnel through the earth when they hunt. Or the Gelatinous Cube as it scours dungeon passages in silent, predictable patterns, leaving perfectly clean paths in its wake. Or the Displacer Beast which takes its name from its ability to mask itself with illusion, displacing light so that it appears to be somewhere it is not."

(Apparently any article headline in the form of a question can be answered "no"; so I decided to rise to the challenge.)

Find it at WizKids here.

 

[Skyscraper]

The new set looks interesting. I admit that the paint jobs have been underwhelming in past sets. Perhaps this time around the pain will be better.

 

[evilbob]

Still random packs: still not interested.

At least 3rd party places still carry individual minis.

 

[RedSiegfried]

Still random packs: still not interested.

At least 3rd party places still carry individual minis.

Yeah, I'm pretty much over buying new random minis. I pretty much only buy new minis if they're singles (like the excellent Tiamat in the new line) or if they're sold aftermarket individually.

 

[RedSiegfried]

A high part of the cost of a line of miniatures is designing and creating the set of molds to cast them. Miniatures are sometimes called "repainted" when they are cast in old molds (to save the design and development costs of the molds) but are painted with new, different paint schemes in order to distinguish them from the prior miniatures that had been cast and sold from those same molds originally. (Or so I understand. . . .)

Okay, that could be, but usually I've just heard those called "repaints." Maybe a difference without a distinction. I don't recognize any of those figures as being from previous sets but I could be mistaken; I certainly don't recognize all of them on sight. Funny how you can recognize others though, even from different lines (Heroscape and D&D come to mind, even before they had official D&D Heroscape sets.)

 

[Tony Vargas]

(Apparently any article headline in the form of a question can be answered "no"; so I decided to rise to the challenge.)

I suspect everyone knows this, but the point of that was that newspapermen (what we used to call bloggers back in the day) would punch up a headline & sell papers without technically committing libel/slander/whatever by making it a blatant lie of some sort, with a question mark at the end.

Like "Did Bush Plan 9/11?" or "Clinton Leads Lesbian Coven in Black Mass?" or "New D&D Has Fighters Casting Spells?"

What Do Treants, Gelatinous Cubes, Mimics, and Displacer Beasts Have In Common?

No. (See? Doesn't work, because the headline isn't in the form of a lie.)

Slightly more seriously, though, they are all visually deceptive: Treants can pass for trees, 'Cubes are transparent, Mimics & Displacer Beasts it's right there in the name.

Still not seriously, I want to say that they're all ripped off too - Treants from Tolkien, Displacer Beasts from an obscure sci-fi story as PF took advantage of by licensing the original 'choerl' or whatever it was. There's gotta be some kind of hungry monster that disguises itself as an everyday object that predates D&D. But, while the ochre jelly and black pudding have obvious B-movie antecedents in the Blob and giant amoeba in Angry Red Planet (which features a badly done scene of an astronaut suspended in it's cytoplasm), I can't think of anything quite as quixotic as the 'Cube...

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[tomBitonti]

There is a full gallery available here http://www.minisgallery.com/dnd/dnd5.htm.

The photos from the gallery mostly look worse than the pictures shown above. The following is based on the gallery photos.

Many look very meh. Especially the humanoids.

What looks good to me are the Will-o-Wisps, the Gelatenous Cube, and the Umber Hulk.

The skeleton is very nice as an advanced (armored, armed) figure, but not so much as a common skeleton, which has neither arms nor armor, and is good quality for a Common. But a good useful Common.

The wolf has a nice combination of utility and quality as a Common. Folks with lots of miniatures will have lots of wolfs, but maybe not *too* many to be able to use this one.

The Displacer Beast looks nice to have (Merfolk, Meduse, Displacer Beast, Dryad, Mummy, maybe a couple of others.)

The rarities are strange. Mummy should be Rare, not Common, as should the Mimic.

The humanoid figures look terrible.

I suppose the invisible figures are nice to have, but, they are very rare, so one won't have many. Why so rare, when they represent *no* painting effort?

The Rare miniatures, for the most part, don't look as good as I expect. Especially, the Rakhasa, which looks much worse than the prior Rakhasa miniature. And Strahd ought to be painted much better, for being such an iconic character. (The photo linked just above looks a lot better, so maybe just a bad photo.)

The treant seems an odd choice for the Unique. There are probably a *lot* of huge treants from the earlier set still around for cheap, and a treant doesn't seem to get much use.

Thx!
TomB

 

[Emirikol_Prime]

It's too bad a lot of these are a serious step down from their Pathfinder mini counterparts. It's the same company making them.

 

[Corpsetaker]

Perhaps this time around the pain will be better.

Wow, I've never met a masochist on here before.

 

[Xavian Starsider]

I was really hoping for an animated broom. Aside from NPCe, pretty much everything here has been done. Why not some of the untapped potential from Curse of Strahd? Scarecrows would be nice.