Bestiary or Game Master Guide?


Advice


Hey guys new Pathfinder player, my buddies and I are going to be running the Rise of the Runelords campaign very soon. I will be GMing for the first time. I currently have the Core Rulebook, Advance Players Guide, and the RotR anniversary book. Which of the books in the title do you find a bit more important for us to get going??


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Bestiary, no question. the GM Guide is full of good advice and tables to roll d% on, but the bestiaries will be useful to you in every game. The only non-CRB book I'd recommend more would be the NPC Codex. Welcome and good luck GM'ing. =]


Thanks for the advice so should I get the NPC Codex first??


As has already been said, get the Bestiary first.

Save the GMG and NPC Codex for after you get some experience under your belt, if ever.


Bestiary, most definitely.

Grand Lodge

I still do not have the GMG, and have been a GM for a couple years. Beastiary is the better of those 2, imo, in both the short and long term.


Thanks guys

Sovereign Court

The Bestiary, and after that, more bestiaries. They're among the most useful books for the GM, for three main reasons:

1) They have pictures of monsters, so you can show them to players.
2) If you're looking for inspiration for a side-adventure, leafing through a Bestiary is nice. Let the pictures and descriptions inspire you.
3) Monster stats are in there, and you look those up a lot.

These are all things that (for me) work better with a physical copy in my hands.

I guess the NPC Codex might be useful as well, although I've never really used it myself. It gets used quite a bit in PFS for stats for people you're not really supposed to fight and who therefore don't really need stats, but just in case.

The GMG has some additional subsystems for things that don't come up all that much, and quite a bit of advice on how to run the game. I haven't really read through that, because I learned GMing much earlier. I think it's worth reading through once or twice, but I'm not sure you'd use it often enough to make it worth owning. I'd go with just reading it on the PRD.

Apart from that, I think your players may like Ultimate Magic, Ultimate Combat and Ultimate Equipment. They're not strictly necessary, but there's some nice stuff in there.

Apart from Bestiary I, I can recommend buying the others at some point; they're all themed differently.

I: the basic monsters, everything you can get with Summon Monster and Summon Nature's Ally. Absolute top priority.
II: lots of elemental, construct and weird outsider things. Some monsters from Runelords as well; if you're playing Runelords this one moves up a bit in priority.
III: lots exotic monsters, drawn from (among others) Norse, African and South and East Asian cultures. My favorite for flavor.
IV: lots of cosmic horrors and Lovecraft Mythos monsters. Mythic monsters. This one's a bit more tailored to high level play.

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