The Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition Player’s Guide gives players all the spoiler-free information, inspiration, and new rules they’ll need to create characters prepared for the daring and adventure of the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path.
Within, players of this campaign will find everything they need to create character backgrounds tied to personalities and events vital to Pathfinder Adventure Path’s initial expedition into the exciting frontier of Varisia, along with new campaign-specific traits to give bold adventurers the edge they’ll need to take on the unpredictable dangers of that untamed land. This player’s guide features a full gazetteer of Varisia, revealing spoiler-free details of the land, both to chart their backgrounds and future adventures.
True heroes don't need to take on a risen Runelord unprepared! Gather your allies and let the Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition Player's Guide be your first step of the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path.
Paizo's adventure paths for the Pathfinder RPG are an excellent idea: a single long campaign, with six separate chapters, sufficient to take a party from Level 1 all the way up to the Level 15-18. This past summer, I started directing my first adventure path, Rise of the Runelords, using the "Anniversary Edition" hardcover (which collects and updates the original adventure path featured in the monthly Pathfinder magazine). I think the adventure path is fantastic so far and am having a blast, but I have to say the one part that lets the campaign down is the Player's Guide.
The Player's Guide, which is free to download from Paizo.com, is intended to introduce players to the adventure path by giving them some background on the setting of the adventure, the type of stories that will be told, and sufficient links to the first chapter so their PCs know where they are when the campaign begins. The Anniversary Edition Player's Guide offers 1 page of helpful "Character Tips" (explaining that the adventure path involves ancient lost cultures, fighting giant monsters, and surface exploration) and then offers several excellent campaign traits (connections to the path's starting location, Sandpoint, along with a permanent mechanical advantage of some type). There's then a color map of Sandpoint and a very small map of Varisia. So far, so good. But the entire remainder of the Player's Guide consists of *nine pages* of description of various landmarks in Varisia, the vast majority of which the PCs will never visit and which are of no particular interest to the players; frankly, it's rather boring. The material is a copy of the material that appeared in the third volume of the adventure path, but should have been added, if anywhere, to the Anniversary Edition itself (though, with a separate sourcebook on Varisia available to GMs, it might not be necessary at all). Finally, there are two pages of ads for products that will only be of interest to the GM, not the players!
When the Anniversary Edition Player's Guide is compared to the original Player's Guide for the 3.5 edition of the adventure path, the faults of the new version become even more clear. The old Player's Guide featured an introduction to the three human ethnicities that are the dominate players in Varisia (Shoanti, Varisians, and Chelaxians), an explanation of how all of the core races are like in Golarion and Varisia, an overview of how the different core classes are perceived in the setting, an overview of the deities of Golarion, some flavourful equipment particular to Varisia, and a two-page spread on Sandpoint that gives just enough of an introduction to the town without spoiling anything. All of this information is especially useful to players who have never adventured in Golarion before.
If I had to do it all over again, I would give the players the old Player's Guide along with a link to the Archives of Nethys list of campaign traits for the Anniversary Edition. I'm confident this way would be a more enjoyable and flavourful introduction to the campaign.
First, ask yourself, what is the purpose of a Player's Guide? It's to tell the players what they need to know about a campaign. That includes providing information about the location they'll be visiting and providing potential hooks for their characters.
This does a little bit to provide hooks in the way of campaign traits. There are a handful of suggested traits that would give the PCs a reason to be in Sandpoint, and some of them are very powerful -- I'd say they should almost be feats instead.
After that, there's very little useful information for the players. There's about nine pages' worth of descriptions of locations that the players will never visit unless they go completely off the rails of the campaign. There is very little information about the actual culture and history of Varisia as a whole. There's a map of Sandpoint, but the actual description of Sandpoint is only two sentences long. Your players will find themselves asking, what roles do the different races and classes play here? What deities are commonly worshipped, and what role does religion player in your average citizen's life? What languages are commonly spoken? What is the (known) history of Varisia like? What types of unique equipment or creatures are found in the area? The player's guide does not provide answers for any of these questions.
In short, they're better off just reading the original player's guide and skipping this one.
I found this Player's Guide to be useful for my group. However, I will note that we ran the original RotR arc 2-ish years ago, so the fact that the opening parts hint at what you're going to be facing was a bit of a moot point with us; they already knew what to expect and when.
Overall, I thought the traits were fitting, and I liked the paragraph entries on some the 'lesser known' sites and towns in Varisia. As for not including the town of Sandpoint itself, I used the map and entries in the actual AP; again, more as a refresher for my regular group.
As for the cover art, I see nothing wrong with it. You have women in real life who dress in more revealing clothing, and no one bats an eye. Also, it seems the woman in the center is garnering all the attention and causing people to jump to conclusions about girls in fantasy settings. I would like to call everyone's attention to the woman on the right of the cover.
All in all, it was a decent supplement to refresh my players' memories, and to provide a little extra info on the area for them to sow seeds for potential tangent side stories. What else do you really need from a rehashed/revamped adventure?
Overall, the various player’s guides for the different adventure paths make up one area where Paizo still seems to be figuring out what works, given the vastly varying levels of usefulness from one to the next. Unfortunately, the Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition Player’s Guide is one of the less successful. Apart from some campaign traits to choose from during character creation, players will get very little use out of this book.
So... that cover... what happened to Lyrie's clothes?
She's an academic researcher who is employed for her magical nous but apparently she dresses like a Calistrian temple girl?
This kind of verisimilitude-breaking, porn-tastic art is really annoying.
Sex sells flat out. The closer you get to soft core porn the better sales will get. Hollywood knows this and so does Paizo.
I too am bored to tears of this, but what is one voice versus hundreds or thousands that get excited by scantily clad women on the cover of gaming books and drop their hard earned money on it.
Does it detract from the overall product? No, not at all. Garish yes, tiresome yes, well done, for fanta-porn, sure.
Hi, Twigs, thanks for the +1. I tried Thorkull's suggestion of grabbing the 'background' image out of the PDF, and all I got was this weird shadow image of just the coastline, and GIMP's PDF importer will just flatten the whole thing, text and all.
HangarFlying wrote:
Fwiw, I used the Varisia map from the original Player Guide. I only did descriptions for a handful of locations though, the ones listed above and one or two more. I ripped the traits and character tips from the new players guide and ripped the Sandpoint section from the old players guide. I added a two-paragraph write up about why the characters are in Sandpoint: a blurb on the Late Unpleasantness and a blurb on the ceremony/festival. In all, it came to be 10 pages (including a title page containing the sihedron rune ripped from #1. Oh, I ripped the Sandpoint map from the new guide too.
You have to look at it, like a book spread, with 2 page view (with show cover on).
What does that do, exactly? The box is still there, and I still find it annoying, aka too big compared to the space available at the right margin of the page.
Or is it supposed to be some kind of book marker which you see (in theory - not applicable here, due to too less pages, I'd guess) from the side?
Ruyan.
As Enlight_Bystand points out above with the new layout for both products they went from the top of the page bar section reference method for this hopefully one off side page method which gives section info on the odd pages. I for one am not a fan of the layout especially the even page margin graphics which just look a chapter intro images gone horribly wrong.
Oh boy, my GIMP skills are _not_ up to the task. I'll outline my evil plot for this 'less-than' map idea I had, in case anyone else wants to pick it up.
I'd like to build the Varisia map with _fewer_ waypoints, and then as my players explore more, I could slowly add them back in. A good plan, but wait.
The font for the different map points is Jubilee. It has this nice shadow effect, there are weird glyphs for the points themselves, and someone with, you know, actual cartography talent did the placement and drawing text on paths, and things like that. So, I'd rather use their work than have to reproduce it from scratch.
So here's the plan.
a) Grab the unadorned map into one layer of an image editor
b) Grab the adorned map into a higher layer of the same image
c) Using the eraser tool, I could poke holes in the top layer, and get identical (sans text) picture underneath.
Here goes.
Using Windows Adobe Reader (the Mac version doesn't work I don't know why), I was able to grab the textless image. But there's a problem: the image is larger than the PDF's 'image window' (in other words, some parts of the map are hidden by the 'background' of the PDF), and also, not only is the text missing, but also the 'not this country' shading and boundary line effect. In addition, I don't know the scale of the image to the printed material. That is, the picture itself is 971x628, but I don't know how many pixels per inch it's supposed to be viewed at (which changes the size of my text import from the PDF). It's around 150 ppi, but that's when I discovered the 'underlap' of the map in the PDF.
tl; dr: way beyond my shooping powers. Sorry Twigs.
Hi, Twigs, thanks for the +1. I tried Thorkull's suggestion of grabbing the 'background' image out of the PDF, and all I got was this weird shadow image of just the coastline, and GIMP's PDF importer will just flatten the whole thing, text and all.
HangarFlying wrote:
Fwiw, I used the Varisia map from the original Player Guide. I only did descriptions for a handful of locations though, the ones listed above and one or two more. I ripped the traits and character tips from the new players guide and ripped the Sandpoint section from the old players guide. I added a two-paragraph write up about why the characters are in Sandpoint: a blurb on the Late Unpleasantness and a blurb on the ceremony/festival. In all, it came to be 10 pages (including a title page containing the sihedron rune ripped from #1. Oh, I ripped the Sandpoint map from the new guide too.
Sharing is caring guys!
I don't have a problem with sharing, per se; I think what I've done falls outside of the community use policy, and I don't want to get into trouble. Especially since 90% of it is a straight copy/paste (well, technically, I transcribed it by typing it into word, but the effects are the same).
I can at least tell you what I did so you can rebuild it for your own use with ease. And since I wrote the Adventure Background section I can give you that:
Adventure Background:
Five years ago, tragedy struck the small town of Sandpoint. First, a spree of murders claimed the lives of dozens of citizens, rocking the foundation of safety and security that the citizens had held for the past forty years. The assailant, called Chopper by the locals, was interrupted during his final attack and was revealed to be a likeable, yet eccentric, local artist by the name of Jervas Stoot. Second, less than a month later, a fire burned the town church to the ground and nearly claimed the entire northern section of the town. Many lives were lost, including the much loved Father Tobyn and his foundling daughter Nualia.
Physically, the town has healed and rebuilt the damage caused by the fires. A new cathedral has been constructed, and buildings have been replaced. Though, emotional scars still remain, the people of Sandpoint find themselves on the eve of a grand festival, the Swallowtail Festival, with the hopes that games, food, and the consecration of the new cathedral will finally heal the wounds caused by the “Late Unpleasantness”.
Next, I copied the "Character Tips" and "Campaign Traits" sections. Page five had a copy of the Sandpoint map from the Anniversary Edition PG. On page 6 and 7 I copied the Sandpoint description section from the original Player Guide. I changed up the intro to take out redundant info that I put into the background info. Page 8 had a copy of the Varisia regional map from the original players guide. Page 9 and 10 had gazetteer info from the Anniversary Edition PG. I copied the intro paragraphs then copied the info for Curchain Hills, Janderhoff, Kaer Maga, Korvosa, Magnimar, Mierani Forest, Nybor, Riddleport, Sandpoint, Turtleback Ferry, Urglin, Whistledown, and Windsong Abbey.
EDIT: I forgot to say that page 1 was a title page: A simple "Rise of the Runelords" at the top with a copy of the Sihedron rune from the first page or so of #1.
Finally a Player's Guide that's a Player's Guide and not a board game manual!
I understand they had to cut the goblin sing-along mini-game for space reasons. The karaoke rules at the Rusty Dragon are now a bit more free-form.
Hahaha, I know certain players in my group (self included) would probably play a karaoke mini-game in PF.
On another note, there's been a great deal of focus on Lyrie. She is, literally, front and center. Lyrie Schmyrie, let's focus on what's really important here: full body art of my bb Kaven. :D
Hi, Twigs, thanks for the +1. I tried Thorkull's suggestion of grabbing the 'background' image out of the PDF, and all I got was this weird shadow image of just the coastline, and GIMP's PDF importer will just flatten the whole thing, text and all.
HangarFlying wrote:
Fwiw, I used the Varisia map from the original Player Guide. I only did descriptions for a handful of locations though, the ones listed above and one or two more. I ripped the traits and character tips from the new players guide and ripped the Sandpoint section from the old players guide. I added a two-paragraph write up about why the characters are in Sandpoint: a blurb on the Late Unpleasantness and a blurb on the ceremony/festival. In all, it came to be 10 pages (including a title page containing the sihedron rune ripped from #1. Oh, I ripped the Sandpoint map from the new guide too.
Sharing is caring guys!
I don't have a problem with sharing, per se; I think what I've done falls outside of the community use policy, and I don't want to get into trouble. Especially since 90% of it is a straight copy/paste (well, technically, I transcribed it by typing it into word, but the effects are the same).
I can at least tell you what I did so you can rebuild it for your own use with ease. And since I wrote the Adventure Background section I can give you that:
** spoiler omitted **...
I have done much the same, and it's all rebuild-able.
a) I grabbed the Character Tips section
b) I made up my own character creation section (ie, no half-elves, half-orcs are called 'orcs', which books are legal, etc.)
c) I copied the graphs describing traits out of the APG
d) I copied nine spots out of the gazeteer as good 'starting city' material (elf forest, gnome creepy village, orc wrecked city, dwarf undermountain, the three big human cities, Kaer Maga, and Sandpoint itself). The only thing spoiled from there is (I think) a teaser for Second Darkness in the Riddleport entry. I offered a weak trait (+1 to Know: geography) if you picked one of them as your 'hometown'. I also copied the three paragraphs on Varisia out of the Inner Sea Primer. This references the 'ancient empire', but hey, there's ruins everywhere, not really a spoiler.
e) I copied the six religion entries out of the first player's guide, and included the domains, favored weapon, and paladin preference for each of them. I offered another weak trait (+1 to Know: religion) if you picked one of them.
f) I copied the campaign traits section
g) I would have fiddled around with pictures, but the doc was late enough as it is
total length: 9 1/2 pages. I'm going to give my characters 20 point buy and 3 traits, but the trait selection pool is _really_ limited, and two of them are bad. I think it was a good trade-off between getting people interested, and giving them way too much to read.
I, for one, dislike this player's guide. On the one hand, I can see why they cut so much out... but I think they cut a little too much. There's actually very little on Sandpoint itself. In fact, I was kind of hoping they'd make a more player-friendly reprint of all the stuff in the AP#1 on Sandpoint, a lot of which I felt should have been in the Player's Guide. While not all characters are going to be from Sandpoint, plenty are, and they should know all those thousand little details about the town.
Last time I tried to run this AP, I had to pull information out of the first module and create a supplement to the Player's Guide. This time, I may have to do the same, except it will be a replacement, rather than a supplement.
I, for one, dislike this player's guide. On the one hand, I can see why they cut so much out... but I think they cut a little too much. There's actually very little on Sandpoint itself. In fact, I was kind of hoping they'd make a more player-friendly reprint of all the stuff in the AP#1 on Sandpoint, a lot of which I felt should have been in the Player's Guide. While not all characters are going to be from Sandpoint, plenty are, and they should know all those thousand little details about the town.
Last time I tried to run this AP, I had to pull information out of the first module and create a supplement to the Player's Guide. This time, I may have to do the same, except it will be a replacement, rather than a supplement.
I agree 100%. I'm actually going to do almost the exact same thing with my players. I added my own review to balance the ratings a bit so that they're not just about -gasp!- the cover.
Lynn, I have never posted to these forums before (that I remember) but I was moved by your plight. Allow me to assist you:
https://paizo.com/pathfinder/rules/downloads
The first link on this page will take you to a character sheet that will be appropriate for any character in the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path.
But just so you know, you may find a multitude of interesting handmade character sheets and much more on sites like Pinterest, Deviantart, Reddit, and more! The tabletop hobby is a wide and varied world of interesting things to find! If you cast your net a little wider (only folks discussing the release of this adventure path will see your post here, for instance) and explore a bit, the possibilities are endless!
