An interesting small set of paper miniatures from Skirmisher, which might be imagined as "purple people-eaters", since they're all purple-skinned and you probably wouldn't want to get too close to any! There are seven figures, four "normal"-sized humanoids, each with an octopoid head, a larger humanoid form mostly drawn like the convoluted contours of a brain, with tentacle hands and feet, a four-tentacled "land octopus" with a brain-contoured head/body, and a larger worm-like creature with four head tentacles surrounding its mouth.
Mental powers are shown on two of the humanoids as misty green shapes by their heads, while the mage has conjured a small blue crystal-shaped object in the air by its head. The two more physically combative humanoids have green metal weapons, seeming to hint at magical or psionic power in them as well. These weapons and the mage's staff are repeated as separate counters, and on a larger counter showing the complete set together.
The artwork is in Skirmisher's usual bold, comic-book style, somewhat cartoonish, leading to clean, clear printouts, and the figures can be constructed as flat inverted "T"-shapes, as per the instructions, or with their bases recut in "A"-frame standee form. If left intact, the "T"-style bases are plain white, as is the background to the four counters. Some layer options in the PDF file would have been welcome here, to add suitable base textures for these, as they can be quite jarring when used with printout 2D and 3D paper terrain. Or perhaps break out the felt-tip pens to colour them by hand.
Sadly, as also seems typical with many of Skirmisher's paper minis that I've made-up, there are some minor technical problems. An "actual size" printout produces the smaller humanoids as too tall to comfortably fit alongside most other 28/30mm scale figures and models, so will need resizing. Best to try a draft-quality greyscale test print on ordinary paper first, I found. However, you'll find that because the rogue/assassin figure has a cloud of green psionic power trails above its head, this drawing has been reduced in size to still fit the whole image into the same-height rectangle as the remaining humanoids, so ends up looking under-sized this way! This is OK to a point, as a successful rogue/assassin might need to hide in small spaces after all...
More troublesome is the mage, whose staff is held at an angle, and one side of the figure's background panel has been sloped out towards the top of the figure to accommodate this. When stood upright in either a "T" or "A" format, this makes it unbalanced, so even if you normally don't bother, this figure would benefit from having a small weight added to its base. The end of the mage's trailing robe has been cut off too, and as there was ample space on the printed page, I'm not sure why this figure's outline "box" couldn't have been made a little larger and properly rectangular like the others.
Overall, these aspects are not major, but do suggest a lack of care in the final layout. That's disappointing as these are good minis otherwise, which sparked ideas for me in how they might be employed in scenarios, and showing the kind of creativeness with an unusual group of creatures of the sort it would be excellent to see more often.
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