Fiery Dragon Productions, Counter Collection I: The Usual Suspects is the first in what I hope will be a long line of counters. The set includes over 450 counters including all the common races and classes as well as dragons (small ones anyway), horses, and a good selection of monsters including goblins, lizardmen and even rarities like Medusa and Shadows.

Each counter was penned by the skillful hand of Claudio Prozas, a self taught artist with an excellent eye for color and style. I strongly recommend you check out his site to see some of his other works. His work is clean and simple and very to the point without any extras to get in the way.

The first thing you notice when looking that these counters, besides the great artwork, is the shape, they are square. This kind of threw me at first but after playing with them for a few sessions the shape didn't matter. The counters are on card stock of about the same weight as that in the Dungeon and Dragons Adventure Game and are single sided. Being single sided actually is an improvement I think. Without the glossy paper on the back of each sheet the counters don't slide around as much. Each counter is 1 inch square and has a space for either a number or name to help keep track of who is who. There is also an arrow on each to show character facing and is a big improvement over the ones from Wizards. This little point should help to eliminate any question of how a character is facing.

Besides the 8 pages of counters there is a D20 adventure called "In the Company of Snule". The adventure is designed to fit into any campaign setting and can be used as a one-shot adventure or starting point for a Snule campaign. The adventure takes 4 5th to 7th level characters through the criminal world of Snule. The layout of the adventure is pretty typical with a well though out and adventure background section. The only thing I would change would be to add a full scale map of the Snule Hideout so it would make using the counters easier without having to draw the rooms by hand.

The only other product on the market that can compete with these counters are the Cardboard Heroes set from Steve Jackson Games. The Cardboard Heroes are in a different catagory though as they are a stand up marker. It would be nice to see if in one of the future sets Fiery Dragon goes to this style. I like the stand up markers a little better. Even if they don't I will be looking forward to what I hope are several future sets. Fiery Dragon's Counter Collection I: The Usual Suspects is well worth its $12.95 price tag and it is defiantly on my must buy list.