Today is the day! Pathfinder Second Edition is officially here, on store shelves, at online retailers, and soon on game tables all across the world. It’s been more than three years since we first started work in earnest on the new edition, and after all that time—and with the assistance of tens of thousands of playtesters—Pathfinder Second Edition is ready for action!
With your help, we’ve developed the familiar Pathfinder rules to make them easier to learn and faster to play without sacrificing the deep character customization that has always been one of Pathfinder’s strongest elements. If anything, Pathfinder Second Edition gives players more opportunities to customize their heroes than ever before. GMs will find more tools for creating dynamic and interesting encounters baked right into the core rules, and even the most familiar monsters of the fantasy genre have new abilities sure to interest even the most experienced RPG veterans.
The Core Rules
Everything starts with the Pathfinder Core Rulebook, 640 pages of rules covering character creation, encounters, exploration, treasure, magic, and more: everything players and GMs need to play and run the new game. With 12 character classes, dozens of backgrounds, and fully developed ancestries including halfling, human, elf, dwarf, gnome, and goblin, players have a near-limitless combination of choices that give even characters with the same class and ancestry a unique gameplay experience.
The Pathfinder Bestiary presents game statistics and adventure-inspiring lore for more than 400 creatures. Packed with all-new art and completely redesigned monsters, the Bestiary presents an entirely new stat block format designed to speed up play, as well as tons of imaginative new attacks and abilities that take full advantage of Pathfinder Second Edition’s overhauled rules.
Adventures
A new edition is a great opportunity to start a new campaign, and the first monthly installment of the Age of Ashes Adventure Path launches today. Pathfinder Adventure Path #145: Hellknight Hill kicks off the new campaign in style when strange invaders spill out from an abandoned Hellknight fortress near the heroes’ home village. Secrets uncovered during an exploration of the ruins lead the party all over the world and threaten to unleash an age of draconic tyranny and terror that only the heroes can prevent!
Pathfinder Adventures: The Fall of Plaguestone is a 64-page stand-alone adventure for first-level characters designed to tell the story of how your adventuring party first met and became companions. A short job as caravan guards gets much more complicated when the caravan master is poisoned, and the heroes are forced to solve the murder—or hang for it! The Pathfinder Flip-Mat: Fall of Plaguestone sets the scene with key encounter areas ready for use with miniatures, helping GMs pull players even further into the fantasy.
If you’re looking for a single-session adventure to give the new rules a spin, Paizo’s Pathfinder Society Organized Play program has four Pathfinder Society Scenarios available for download now. In The Absalom Initiation, the heroes join up as the newest Pathfinder Society agents, rubbing shoulders with veterans and embarking on their new adventuring careers. The Mosquito Witch puts the heroes on the trail of a mysterious cryptid in the swamps of the cutthroat River Kingdoms. In the perilous ruins of Lastwall, where the undead armies of the Whispering Tyrant prowl a ravaged wasteland, Pathfinder Society agents race against time to save priceless artifacts and missing-in-action colleagues in Escaping the Grave. With a running time of about 1 hour, The Sandstone Secret presents a fast and furious dungeon crawl and a fun first look at the Pathfinder rules.
Pathfinder Society also provides a set of pregenerated characters that allow you to skip character creation and jump right into the action. A fifth Pathfinder Society Scenario, Origin of the Open Road, delves into the history of the Pathfinder Society over the course of a thrilling 5th-level adventure designed specifically for use with pregenerated characters.
Accessories
Pathfinder Second Edition Launch Day also brings several new accessories you’ll want to check out. The Pathfinder Character Sheet Pack provides custom character sheets for each class, putting the focus on those abilities most important to your character. You can also download a free basic Pathfinder Second Edition character sheet in color or black-and-white formats. Helpful charts and beautiful art combine in two brand new Pathfinder GM Screens (pick your preference between horizontal and vertical orientations). Our new Pathfinder Condition Cards put the details of the game’s commonly encountered conditions in the hands of players, reducing page flips and keeping the focus on the action. We’ve also updated our popular Pathfinder Combat Pad initiative tracker, still the best way to keep track of turn order in combat.Partner Products
Paizo isn’t the only company getting in on the Pathfinder Second Edition action! Dozens of partners, from miniature-makers to virtual tabletops to streamers to foreign-language publishers are on board with a host of additional products available now or coming in the near future. They include:
- Accessories: Campaign Coins releases Pathfinder Hero Point Tokens, a new dice tray, and the Pathfinder Second Edition logo pin. Dog Might launches the Pathfinder Valhalla GM Screen and Dragon Sheath.
- Actual Play: Join The Glass Cannon as they play Silent Tide on YouTube, as well as their live performances in Indianapolis during Gen Con! Don’t miss Geek & Sundry’s weekly Knights of Everflame Tuesdays at 4 p.m. Pacific, Paizo’s very own Oblivion Oath Thursdays at noon Pacific on Twitch, and Dragons & Things live on Twitch at 6 p.m. Pacific every Friday.
- Audio: Syrinscape releases the Fall of Plaguestone SoundSet, giving GMs and players a deeper and more immersive experience as they adventure through the Fall of Plaguestone adventure.
- Miniatures: WizKids releases the Legendary Adventures Preview Pack, featuring 8 monsters and heroes from Pathfinder Second Edition, followed in September by the 44-figure Legendary Adventures booster set and Goblin Village premium set.
- Online: Create a brand-new Second Edition character with HeroLab Online and play with friends around the world on virtual tabletops Fantasy Grounds, Roll20, and d20Pro.
- Online Rules: Archives of Nethys has the official Pathfinder Second Edition SRD available at PFRD.Info.
- Terrain: Dwarven Forge begins preorders on the Fall of Plaguestone Adventure Kit.
- Translations: New Order Editora launches Pathfinder Second Edition in Brazil with the Pathfinder Core Rulebook (PDF) in Portuguese, with additional products released in October and December. Devir (Spanish), Ulisses Spiele (German), and Black Book Editions (French) are all at work on Second Edition releases as well. Stay tuned!
Community
Whether you’re on board for all of this stuff or only the Pathfinder Core Rulebook, it’s now time to find a game! Join up with the Pathfinder Society Organized Play program, check to see if your local retailer is running Second Edition demos or Pathfinder Society events in the near future, or join us this week at Gen Con for walk-up demos at the Paizo booth and hundreds of tables running Pathfinder Society events in the Sagamore Ballroom. If you’re not at the show, you can keep abreast of the latest news and announcements on our Twitch Channel, which will be live-streaming Paizo panels throughout the convention weekend with the assistance of our friends from the Know Direction podcast.
Lastly, join your fellow gamers in our newly revamped Pathfinder Second Edition forums right here on Paizo.com for ongoing discussions about the new game!
Pathfinder Second Edition has finally arrived. The game is YOURS now, and we can’t wait to see where you take your characters and campaigns!
See you at Gen Con, see you on the stream, and see you in the annals of the great adventuring heroes of the next age of fantasy roleplaying!
Erik Mona
Publisher
Pathfinder Second Edition Launches NOW!
Thursday, August 1, 2019