I can imagine they will fix the typos that were present in the haslab version, and they will include the Artifact and Equipment (Alchemist Shop) cards included in the quest book along with the book itself. Other than that, I would expect to find the Bard (or a re-sculpt at least) along with his hero card, Rapier equipment card, and three spells.
The only other plastic would be the entrance and exit doors since this expansion uses those (identical to the ones in KK/ROTWL). As for anything else, that is up to Avalon Hill. If this is the "smaller box" used in KK/ROTWL they would still have plenty of room to "fill" it with whatever they wanted.
This would be a golden opportunity, along with Prophecy of Telor retail release, to give us those "stretch goal" extra minis from the Haslab campaign, again even if they are just re-poses or slight tweaks (much like the Guardian Knight was in Rise of the Dread Moon). They could put the Green monsters in this one and maybe the White monsters in Baker's box. And if we got Crypt of Perpetual Darkness, they could put the Gray monsters in that one. It would seem fitting anyway.
What does everyone else think? We know it is coming out this year, which would mean within 5 months. I wouldn't be surprised if both this and POT are finalized as far as contents and materials are concerned, so hopefully they are well received. Regardless of the actual quality of these I would expect them to be slightly improved from what came in the Mythic box at the very least, and the point is that so many fans WANTED this content but didn't have a chance to get it and now won't have to pay scalper prices, which is a great thing (and kudos to Avalon Hill for swinging that with their bosses at Hasbro)! Collectors won't lose out on any of this because they still have their 2021 version, warts and all, whatever they happened to pay for it.
I don't have a problem with "good guy monsters" and as I've said before, I loved monsters as a kid, so I would have jumped on any excuse like that. As to whether the big dumb evil army of lunks we love to hate are suddenly just poor misunderstoods, yeah I know that tarnishes some people's memories. You can always gloss over that part of the story. I prefer the headcanon that a few of the orcs were "reformed" as opposed to the Warcraft storyline where they were simply corrupted late in their history. Even Tolkien imagined that some of the Orcs towards the end of the War of the Ring were getting fed up with being used as cannon fodder by the Dark Lord and his wicked minions (doesn't make them "heroes" necessarily, but perhaps not irredeemably evil either). And not all Orcs are dumb either, we've had Orc bosses who even learn magic way back in the original game system, remember. I anticipated these criticisms as I was reading through the quest book when my copy finally arrived on that amazing day now years ago (time flies!) but I was reassured that most of the Orcs we'd encounter were still the same old nasty lunkhead villains we always appreciated these past three decades.
As silly as I still think the Orc Bard is (as many others have pointed out, he much more fits as an individual player's custom hero or a comic relief addition, or an NPC than an archetype hero), I have no doubt that he's pretty much what we'll be getting in this retail release, because like Rise of the Dread Moon's variant of the Guardian Knight, the whole point of these is to give people who missed the exclusives to finally get a piece of that action. So I would not anticipate much, if any, change to him this time. Maybe if he was holding his sword in a swashbuckling pose instead of bursting forth in song he'd be cooler? It's very easy to re-imagine him as an Orcish Pirate...
