Pathfinder Adventure Path: Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition Player's Guide (PFRPG) PDF

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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.

This product is designed for use with the Pathfinder Adventure Path: Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition.

Other Resources: This product is also available on the following platforms:

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Are there errors or omissions in this product information? Got corrections? Let us know at store@paizo.com.

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No Sandpoint, No Happy

3/5

I'm a bit surprised to see four 5-star reviews here, none of which refer to the content of this Player's Guide.

First of all, why no info on the starting city of Sandpoint?

Longer review at my blog

In my opinion, the Player’s Guide for Paizo’s second AP, Curse of the Crimson Throne, set a high bar for what I’m looking for in these player guides. It gave information about the city the PCs start in that made it a living, breathing place, offered feats and equipment that further gave life to the people and culture of the city and the land of Varisia, and offered traits that didn’t giving anything away about the bigger story, while hooking people into the AP’s opening events.

As for this product, it is a lost opportunity to charm people into wanting to play or run Rise of the Runelords. I have read through the original run of RotRL, and what I thought were the most appealing elements of enticing people into playing the beginning of RotRL – description of the most of the PCs’ home, the charming village of Sandpoint, and description of Paizo’s fresh and unique take on goblins – have zero word count in this Player’s Guide.

(Granted, there is a map of Sandpoint, but only 2 landmarks are labeled on it, and absolutely no information on NPCs or the history or the buildings within the city.)

Instead, we have 2 sections:

1 – First, a collection of campaign-specific traits for PCs. As a GM, I will not let the players look at these because they telegraph ahead of time precisely what types of creatures and areas the players will face. Instead, I’ll be working with the players to decide what traits make most sense for them.

2 – Second, a gazetteer on the land of Varisia. There is a lot of interesting information here, but again I think it totally misses the ball — barring the cover and credits page, the designers had only 12 pages to work with but devoted 9 pages to Varisia. NO information on Sandpoint, and no narrative “tour” that’s cohesive — instead, we get a paragraph on each place.

Granted, perhaps information was omitted from the Player’s Guide to spur us into buying some of Paizo’s Companions. But the PCs’ hometown not to get any love is a bit confounding.

What we have in this Player’s Guide is high quality — the traits are well-conceived, and the descriptions of Varisia’s key places are evocative. But what’s sorely lacking is… well, sorely lacking.

Paizo has set a high bar for itself in past products, which this Player's Guide unfortunately does not meet.


Yay!

5/5

Great product. Totally STOKED about doing this. And I agree. I want to see a dude on the cover in a banana-hammock. Just because you used that term. (Actually, I think that might point out better to us guys how ridiculous it looks to some of the ladies.) Well, how about a dude in a banana-hammock, and a chic in a chainmail bikini? Or wait! a DUDE in a chain mail bikini, and a chic in a banana-hammock! YES!


Cool thing to have

5/5

I would like the original cover better, but I love to see the original comic-like art remade. And seriously... near porn? See some young girls in summer, see what the stars wear at the red carpet during any festival. Still wondering where the inspiration comes from?


Good product!

5/5

Great product! There is nothing wrong with the cover. The players in our group have already read this and everyone is very excited getting ready for the return of the Runelords!


Good guide, offensive art.

4/5

Awesome! Great guide. Love the text.

But... Did we HAVE to put THAT on the cover? WHY did we have to do that? And can we stop doing that, please? As a female RPG player, seeing stuff like that makes me pretty angry. Why is it never a guy in a banana hammock? Why does it always have to be gratuitous near-porn of women?


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Leopold wrote:
GeraintElberion wrote:

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.

A topic about people "problems" with the Cover.


ohako wrote:

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!


RuyanVe wrote:
Quote:
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.

Liberty's Edge

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Twigs wrote:
ohako wrote:

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.


Great! Good point on the community use policy. Thanks nonetheless, you guys! I hope all your hard work pays off! :)

Liberty's Edge

Fletch wrote:
Gorbacz wrote:
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


2 people marked this as a favorite.
HangarFlying wrote:
Twigs wrote:
ohako wrote:

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.


Sounds great. Good luck with your game!

Ruyan.

Owner - House of Books and Games LLC

(finally looking at the cover)

Really? That is what all of the stink is about?

*shrug*

That reminds me, I'm going to the beach next week! Woot!!


1 person marked this as a favorite.

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.


Derek Vande Brake wrote:

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.


The cover might not be the most family friendly thing out there, but it's okay, 'cause the RotRL ain't all that much family-friendly to begin with...

But that is all right, 'cause the player's guide is free and available and that's always a plus, by my reckoning.


I need to find the character sheets. Please help me!


Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber; Starfinder Charter Superscriber

Which character sheets are you referring to?


Zaister wrote:
Which character sheets are you referring to?

My husband needs to build characters.


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!

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