Very great arts form by renowned artists. But paper minis are not only stock art. they have art back without back art ( rear ) have a serious lack, imho.

Working off of a central frame image, making minor changes with gear and arm positioning, this collection manages to give us four distinctly different kobolds that all look excellent. Was very happy to see this set become available.

A perfect package of zombies, with a flexible enough license to allow for a great amount of variety easily from the four different zombies presented here. Yet another excellent Inkwell release.

Whatever happened to this poor fellow?

Some great disaster must have befallen this dragon to have him end up thus, a skeleton with battered wings.... or is he some featured exhibit in a museum of the strange?

Conjure up your own stories as you gaze on this quite awesome sketch. If you cannot find him a role in your adventures, you could always install him as a screensaver to keep your players away from your notes!

This image shows a, ahem, well-endowed female vampire who probably started off as the inn-keeper's wife... advancing in a rather scary manner.

The really neat thing is that the 'vampire' bits - glowing red eyes, fangs, etc. - are on a separate layer so if you have even minimal image manipulation skills you can show her 'before' and 'after'... even if several young adventurers might well flee from her even in 'normal' form.

A ferocious take on a fire elemental - these ones are really not to be messed with! Whether you want to illustrate your adventure or use them as a 'flash card' to terrify the characters who have encountered them, these are well worth having up your sleeve for the next time you want to summon a fire elemental.

Here is an interesting take on a dryad, rather than a human-appearing female who dwells in and around trees, here we have one who is made of 'tree-stuff' - bark for skin, leaves for hair, branches for limbs. Yet she's no caricature, but an individual in her own right... you can just imagine her stepping into a forest clearing to admonish some luckless traveller who chose the wrong branch to fuel his campfire!

This is a fine animated - as in, lively, not moving - image of a blue dragon who looks like he's enjoying a good joke!

Just looking at him spawns thoughts of an adventure based around a real personality of a blue dragon, who delights in interacting with the adventurers he encounters and reserves his breath weapon for those crass enough to attack him instead of talking with him.

If dragons feature in your campaign, make sure there's a blue and include him!!!

These are two delightful little chaps, being a warrior and a shaman, both lively-looking and interested in whatever it is that they are looking at. Whether you are writing an adventure about boggards, intend for your characters to visit a boggard settlement (or have these guys come visiting), or just like good fantasy art, these will come in handy.

Just looking at them begins to spawn ideas. Where are they going? And why? Are they friendly, or are they going to throw down a challenge? They are clearly distinct individuals, with personality - now you overlay that with whatever role you need them to play in your 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.

Great image of a dracolich/skeleton dragon. The license is is easy to use and understand, but I would have liked it as a text file with the image so I could keep track.

Otherwise, great piece of art!

Anyone familiar with the Drow within fantasy gaming know the Drider, and what to expect visually. Offering a few variations from the normal with the widow's mark on the abdomen, as well as what appears to be almost a serpent underbelly gracing the torso, and of course the odd "hair" do that could easily be piping/wiring for a scifi setting. Delivered as a PSD with a white background, transparent image on top, this image works well for both a fantasy or scifi setting, and is yet another solid offering from the Inkwell camp.

One of the nicest things (besides quality of art) included within the Inkwell stock art purchases is the insanely flexible license, which allows for modification of said art (as long as you don't end up making the imagery look bad of course). I point this out as I, personally, will be removing the odd wiring/hair growth from around this drider's head, as it looks odd to me, although upon zooming in it appears it might be a crown, headpiece, bizarre tiara kind of thing...not sure. Point is, the license allows for flexibility, which is a huge boon for small publishers, and yet another serious perk when working with Inkwell images.

Needing drow currently, I was more than happy to see full color pieces of drow become available, and two for the price of one is always a well appreciated perk, I just wish it wasn't quite so obvious the artist used the same basic body frame for both images...Oh well, not a huge issue in the end, as there are enough variations in the two images.

One can not go wrong with a piece from Storn Cook, and to get a piece with such an easy to work within license for publication (allows for minor modifications as long as integrity of the art piece is left intact) is fantastic.

Easily one of the better Treant images I have seen, the fact that its available for small publishers to use makes it all gravy. Inkwell's line of stock art truly is highly impressive, and are a must to be picked up.

The fact that the image comes as a 2 layer .psd is an absolute perk, as for some layouts, you just don't want a background, and having the capacity to easily drop the background out is a serious time saver, and a nice option.