The peoples of the Pathfinder Campaign Setting have raised empires, mastered the greatest secrets of magic, and explored their world and beyond. Now delve into their histories, cultures, and powers with Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Inner Sea Races! Inside this book, you'll find details on all the major races that shape the Inner Sea region, from elves and dwarves to celestial-touched aasimars and subterranean drow, along with new details on a variety of rare and mysterious populations. Dive into this tome of secrets and discover:
In-depth discussions of the natures, histories, and cultures of all seven core races—including 12 different human ethnicities—plus races like the maniacal goblins, crow-headed tengu, fiend-blooded tieflings, and more!
New feats, spells, magic items, armor, and weapons for characters of all the races commonly found in the Inner Sea region.
A summary of the rules for building a character of any featured race, as well as alternate heritages for races with diverse origins.
Character traits to help you get the most out of your character's cultural history, beliefs, and backstory.
Glimpses of rare races hardly ever seen in the
Inner Sea region!
ISBN-13: 978-1-60125-722-2
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Overall, Inner Sea Races is a very good and useful book. The first three chapters contain a wealth of information about the various races inhabiting the Inner Sea region, and although some of this information comes from previously published books, much of it has been updated and expanded upon. Importantly, it compiles all this information into one easy-to-reference book. The fourth chapter is the weakest part of the book, but there is still much in the chapter that is useful to people creating characters for the setting. The book is already a frequently referenced source for my own games and is likely to be for many other people’s games as well.
Filler, teamwork feats, repeated material, and teamwork feats.
I'm kind of iffy on buying fluff. I really don't like material I've seen before. This book is fluff that we've seen before.
The fluff isn't even that good. It's kind of bland, generic, stuff that's repeated elsewhere. There's no depth to it.
When it comes to the crunch it's teamwork feats, teamwork feats, teamwork feats... Almost NINETY PERCENT of the feats are teamwork feats. Teamwork feats start as problematic because you need someone else to take them, they get worse because they've been balanced for class features that are going to take them for free.
They're even WORSE for a race book, because you need a veritable celestial alignment of someone else with the feat AND the right positioning AND with the same build AND the same race as you.
With all the untapped potential for race related feats THATS what gets added in as crunch? You couldn't even think of one non teamwork feat per race?
GOOD:
For people that don´t have the partly sold out Player Companions "xxx of Golarion", this book offers a brief overview of the different races that populate the "Inner Sea" and their history.
BAD:
This book does a very poor job of compiling all the great information from the 32 pages Player Companions into one source.
Humans get by far the most pages, with some other races barely getting mentioned. Also there is 90% flavor and 10% rules in here, of which most are unusable.
UGLY:
This book is not worth $45 or $32 for the pdf.
If you´ll buy the "Elves of Golarion" pdf for $6.99,
"Dwarves of Golarion" pdf for $7.99,
"Gnomes of Golarion" pdf for $7.99,
"Halflings of Golarion" pdf for $7.99 and
"Humans of Golarion" pdf for $7.99, you will get much more flavor and crunch.
The Players Companion: "Humans of Golarion" alone covers about a third of this Hardcover in it´s 32 pages.
I thought this volume would compile the most important parts of the 10 Players Companions (Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, Orcs, Halflings, Humans, Goblins, Blood of Fiends, Blood of Angels & Kobolds) into one volume, but it doesn´t.
and thus not worth buying. If you want the crunch, you can find it for free on PF crunch websites.
In other respects, all the changed in descriptive flavor (the things upon which role-playing is based) are actually steps backwards from previous products, such as Humans of Golarion.
Which is to say: this product is actually counter-productive. It actively makes the game worse. It indeed contributes to lack of RPing in the hobby, because the focus of the changes became what was fashionable in the current year. But nobody really needs a guide that caters to their own ideology; people who are going to play their own opinions out rather than immerse themselves in a fantasy mindeset can do it without a guide.
They will probably still buy it for confirming their views. I do concede there is some entertainment value in that sense. But for people interested in RPing in a fantasy sense, you are much, much better off simply buying the earlier race guides, which are still available, and giving this one a pass.
Great background and really glad it's not full of crunch
I had cut down on my Pathfinder purchases a lot because the volume of crunch is, to my mind, becoming pointless. Pathfinder Campaign Setting material is often the main exception to that and this is a great hardback, full of considerable detail on a great many races.
As others have pointed out, humans get a lot of coverage, but it doesn't feel like a bad idea, to me; they make up the substantial majority of playable individuals in Golarion, and have the most variety (on account of being so dominant over the Inner Sea), and as this isn't a bumper book of crunch--which I'd absolutely not have bought, anyway--then to my mind it makes a lot of sense.
Stuff like this is, in my opinion, where Paizo really excels. I get that the crunch-monster needs to be fed, but for many of me that obscures what I really liked about Paizo in the first place, which is that they make really engaging campaign material.
Poor Lem, he's like "Hey! Hey Wayne! You remember that I was commissioned to be in this picture too, right? You're not going to cover my face with that big 'ole label, are you?!"
Ahahahahahahahaha! Yes! This looks like a must for me and I am stingy about spending on hardcovers. I have only bought Bestiary 2, APG, Ultimate Equipment, ISWG and ACG.
Same, the non-core races are what I want to know about.
At the very least, it seems like aasimar heritages from Blood of Angels are in, and thus probably also tiefling heritages. Hopefully also dhampir heritages, especially with the fixed ability modifiers that Patrick Renie posted last year. It took a long time to get the dhampir modifiers errataed, I'd hate to see the same mistake done again in Inner Sea Races.
I don't know why they would repost the aasimar and tiefling heritages. Unless it includes something new, they're just recycling the same content. In the tiefling's case, it will be the third time (the first being in Council of Thieves and the second time in Advanced Race Guide). In general, I'll be curious to see what this book has to offer that other similar, previous books haven't already delivered.
I'm hoping for additional Changeling options more than anything.
Also hoping they will cover favored class bonuses for the ACG classes for non-core races.
The "Tiefling heritages" that people are talking about are only found in the Blood of Fiends book. They alter the racial mods, spell power, and skill bonuses based on what kind of fiend they are related.
The main reason to reprint them would be to have a handy catch-all double-page spread table with ALL the races, instead of having to flip through three dozen different Player Companions to figure out who gets what.
I am fine with races that can live for 1000 years, I have problems with races who take 100 years to be considered 18. If they change the Aasimar/Tiefling then they need to change elves as well.
I was wondering about the skinwalkers as well, since they also gain variable statistics.
Also, it really is a shame that aasimar and tiefling ages are still getting nerfed to basically half-elven aging, despite the fact that they have an ancestor who is literally ageless.