These are great minis! Nice color and I like the labled ones. It's intersting because the labels are on the "shadow" side so you can elude to differen things to your players by just mentiong "the half-elf" standing there and then turn it around. Also I like how for certain Small humanoid likes halflings they are smaller than Medium size humanoids like elves. It's little things like that can make all the difference.

I love this document. I have used so many of these paper minis in just the last 2 months. Easy and cheap and they work great on the table. I just use paper binders as littles stands. The only, and ONLY, reason it is a 4 instead of a 5 is because the female NPC's aren't very useful. Their poses make most of them look like they are trying to date the PC's. But.. that is just the NPCs. So if you want monsters then this is a 5 easy.

Fantastic selection of Adventurers and Baddies! More than enough to keep my Basic Fantasy Campaign fresh for a long, long time! This was the best deal in paper minis that I've seen bar none! Very cheap for the amount of options and quality! I would highly recommend this set!

They work great and are super easy to use in the game.

It took me a while to remember to do this, but I wanted to come back and update my review since the publisher has updated the product.

My original review was 3/5 stars. You can find my original review as well as the publisher's response below this updated review.

New review:

Wow, Inkwell really stepped up to the plate in updating this product! Not only are the spacing issues completely fixed (it's chocked full o' monsters, now), but several monster sizing issues were corrected as well.

The addition of many more creatures than the set originally contained, combined with the reflowing and corrections is enough to make me glad I bought this, and happy to have been a part of the Kickstarter campaign.

Many, many kudos for listening to your backers/customers, Inkwell Ideas! I know some of these little guys will see my table.

My original review:

My thoughts on this set echo Bruce's review for the most part. In short:

• Far too few different creatures for the price.
• Dragons are way too small to be printed and used as-is.
• I personal feel that a lot of important classic monsters were left out. Kobolds aren't there? Really?
• The set is basically repeated: once with the monster name at the bottom of the image, and once without. While a nice touch to have them without (so players may not know what it is at first), we didn't need full on duplicates.
• Some of the layout choices are a bit odd, but I'm sure everyone has a different idea of what monsters should go together on a page.
• Tons of wasted space on a lot of the pages. White space doesn't make for a very compelling monster to fight.

The art is nice, for the most part. I'll probably use some of these minis at some point in my games. But to be blunt, my personal method of grabbing an image off the 'net and pasting it into Word is a lot cheaper.

If you were a creator looking to get the "stock art" version of the project, you might have fared better. As a gamer just wanting some more fantasy paper minis, though, I'm a touch disappointed.

The Publisher's response to my original review:

Thanks for the feedback. Really, I mean it. I want to make this a great set. Expect an updated file with several of your changes in the next few days. In short: -We'll add some larger versions of the dragons, and likely a few others. I re-examined the dragons and know we goofed! -More creatures on most pages. We were overly cautious on printer margins and set them to 1". Which leaves a 6.5" horizontal area. In many cases because of the sizes of the minis, we only were able to use 6" across. We'll try for 7" and leave a .75" margin on the sides. -More creatures. At this point I can't put more custom art in the set, but I've already found about 15 more animals. I do have some other monster stock art that should allow me to add at least 5 more, and I'm sure I can recolor the dragons to add metallic dragons. In addition, I can (and have already in some cases) modified some of the stock art to create new creatures that are similar. For example I've made a phase spider based on the drider. I'm sure we'll add 25 creatures, but I'm hoping it will be closer to 50. -Those extras should push us from about 150 different creatures to hopefully close to 200. The product listing notes the current version has 250 different images because some creatures have mulitiple versions: the kobold archer, kobold leader, kobold w/sword and kobold shaman are 4 different images. I'll see if I can do even more. -As you say, everyone will have different layout choices and how to combine things. I felt it was best to make many pages more specialized because I feel you're more likely to want 8-9 goblins and 10-12 hobgoblins than a mix of 4 goblins, 4 hobgoblins, 2 gnolls, 2 troglodytes, 2 vegepygmies, 4 kobolds, and 2 bugbears. That's the reason for the duplication. -Oh but kobolds were in the set. I was particularly proud of doing both modern ones (right side of page 12 and 38, depending on if you want labels or not) and classic, dog-like kobolds (bottom right side of page 17 and 43). Please double check your copy. -I believe the system will notify you when there is a new version posted and let you get the update.

Inkwell has done an excellent job meeting a niche for paper minis for a Fantasy Environment. The quality of the PDF files I received (still waiting on the actual prints from the company) are excellent.

I agree that this was a really nice set of art before the revision and the additional monsters are gravy. Never bought anything from Inkwell before.

I thought it was a great product before Inkwell revised it, it is an even better product now. I am not sure why the other reviewers felt disappointed. I have never disliked an Inkwell product, so maybe I am biased

I bit the bullet and paid the $15. The ad copy is very misleading: they included multiple copies of several pages, to pad their image count, so the 250 creatures is exaggerated, unfortunately. However, what you get is decent, though not as good as I would expect for that kind of cash.

If you visit the producer's web site, you will be able to see everything that is included within this set: http://inkwellideas.com/monster-stand-ins/

Everything on that page is included, the dragons, giants, PC figures, as well as the animals. I would really have preferred more monsters, especially the less common types, as I can print as many copies of any given page, as I like -- I don't need multiple copies of any page included in the PDF...

I applied clear contact paper to my printed 110# cardstock sheets, cut them out, scored them on the fold lines, and then I scored them 2/16" above the bottom edges, to make small, paper bases that fold perpendicular to the standing figures (makes the figures upside-down, T-shaped). A small amount of white glue smeared on the back, just like you would do with a paper model's tabs, press together, and then mount on a properly sized piece of peel-n-stick floor tile (~$0.58/sq. ft.), and you have monster/PC counters, durable enough to last for many years.

There are some nice, additional figures included within the set: multiple types of dogs, including a Basset Hound; a hawk, a fox, opossum (possibly a Giant Rat?), and other animal types. Unfortunately, some of the animal figures have mistakes: the bat swarm is upside-down, on one side, when folded, as is the rat swarm, and spider swarm. The Rottweiler, German Shepard, and Doberman counters are very handy for War Dog counters, giving some variety of choice in breeds, but Irish Wolfhounds would have been good, too.

For an RPG, I cannot afford to buy mini's for every monster I might use in a game. I will never use all 350+ monsters within the original AD&D Monster Manual, but it would really be nice to have a paper stand-in for all of them, just in case...

To its credit, there are three different sizes of Elementals of each type. They represent the 8/16/24 HD versions rather nicely. The Dragons are entirely too small for an accurate counter representation, but they can easily be scanned, and up-scaled, as needed. Same thing for the Giants: too small, but easy to up-scale. Many of the other, larger creatures, are really too small, as presented, but they can be sized to what you need/prefer, with a little extra work.

The groupings on the pages leave something to be desired, as well. Again, I may make up my own 'pages' of figures to scan and print more of what I need, to maximize my output. there is quite a bit of white space on the borders of the pages, which likely could be eliminated, to maximize output per page of cardstock, but that is not too big of an issue.

Overall, not a terrible set, but the price is very steep for what you get: 250 figures, with way too many duplicates, and not enough variety (Will-O-Wisps, strangely enough, were included, but many other things were not -- too bad). Still, they are very affordable compared to buying/painting figures for every monster you may need during the course of your gaming life. Even though no painting is required, the cutting, gluing, and mounting, takes effort, and time. It is pretty mindless, though, so if you organize, and do it assembly-line style, you will churn out counters pretty quickly. Maybe with some feedback, the publisher will improve the content. Cheers!