Whether you are a new Game Master or experienced storyteller, you can always find new ways to hone your craft. This 256-page Pathfinder Second Edition rulebook contains a wealth of new information, tools, and rules systems to add to your game. Inside you will find handy advice for building your own adventures, designing towns, and creating vibrant characters alongside rules systems for dramatic chases, thrilling tournaments, and deadly duels. This book also includes more 40 pages of sample nonplayer characters, from the simple town guard to the vile cultist, presented to make your job as GM that much easier!
The Pathfinder Gamemastery Guide includes:
Rules, advice, and guidelines to build adventures, campaigns, and the denizens and treasures that lurk within, from settlements to nations to infinite planes!
Creative variant rules to customize the rules to make the game your own, including variant bonus, feat, and magic item progressions, characters gaining the power of multiple classes at once, and more!
All sorts of new and variant magic items including intelligent items, cursed items, artifacts, quirks you can add to items, and a brand new type of item called a relic that scales with your character!
A catalog of subsystems to handle unique situations, from thrilling chases to researching mysteries to vehicle combat to elaborate duels to sandbox-style "hexploration" and more! Plus, a universal victory point system to help you design your own subsystems!
More than 60 new NPCs to use in your game, designed for maximum usefulness to all Pathfinder campaigns!
ISBN: 978-1-64078-198-6
Available Formats
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The quality of this book is very extreme: either it's superb or outright terrible. Personally, everything was well designed except for:
* Hexploration: very confusingly written, so few activities that everyone has to homebrew the other 50%
* Leadership: plain boring and even detrimental if you use lieutenants as cohorts
* Skill Points & Ability Score Variants: there's no benefit of using these except to shut up 1e diehards. Incredibly complicated mechanisms that play out almost exactly the same.
In short, a great book for some GMs and of limited value to others. The distinction rests primarily on how closely you follow prewritten adventures or if you generate all your own content. The further towards the home campaign you get, the more value this book has for you.
The specific encounter types like chases and infiltration are terrific. Solid subsystems and I've made good use adding one or two of these into adventure paths and scenarios I've run. They make definite sense and once players understand them, ratchet up the narrativist play in complex encounters instead of being all about single rolls. One of the biggest problems I've seen in other games is watching group subterfuge always fall apart because one player rolls bad once. This softens that out, adds concepts for how a not-sneaky player can add to a stealth mission, and so on. Really happy about this.
The alternate rules are quite nice and some are highly creative. I haven't gotten to use any at a table yet, but I will when the timing is right (for instance, I'm strongly considering running Agents of Edgewatch with automatic bonus progression to avoid some of the loot troubles that AP appears to have). Dual classing is incredibly popular, I have seen around here and elsewhere, though I haven't had a scenario where it was a particularly good fit.
Other additions are nice. Monster creation rules, NPC codex, and basic GM advice are never bad things, though they are a hard reason to strongly recommend this book.
Not a buy for players, probably shouldn't be one of the first books a new GM buys either. But established GMs, especially ones building campaigns and encounters on the regular, can definitely get some mileage from this book. Overall, not essential but probably beneficial.
Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber
RiverMesa wrote:
...EDIT: Well okay immediately after saying that I spotted a ruffian on the list. Still, most of the names seem to avoid trying to correlate with what already exists for PC class/class path names.
There's also the Mastermind, which indo believe is more or less believed to be a Racket for the Rogue in the APG. But still, it isn't the name inclusion itself that leads me to this belief, but the sidebar, which solidifies the idea in my head.
The Raven Black wrote:
Antipaladin has too long of a history in the game to ever change.
Though I agree that Ravager or Destroyer would be a great fit for CE, with Tyrant for LE and Terror for NE.
I mean ya, but even Wizards moved away with the term briefly with the Blackguard. And for a system that's trying so hard to separate itself from its predecessor, why keep such a silly name?
Alas, I digress. Simply personal preference here. Either way, my Ravagers of Rovagug shall soon lay waste upon Golarion and free the Great Destroyer from his worldly bindings. And then, all of life shall be unmade, as the Rough Beast ravages the multiverse; first devouring the work of the gods before turning to his would be captors for their hand in his imprisoning. *insert maniacal laughter*
Pathfinder LO Special Edition, Maps, Pathfinder Accessories, PF Special Edition Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Starfinder Superscriber
Huh. I thought the "main class" is called "Champion". :-)
Quite a few people have been having the same problem recently, but the above option seems to work for some. Clearing one's cookies works for others...
As to "why?", I don't have an answer - sorry.
Good luck.
And if nothing seems to work, contact Customer Service Department (open Mon–Fri, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Pacific) at (425) 250-0800 and customer.service@paizo.com
Can anyone clarify something for me? The statblock of the Hunter has Hunt Prey, and says its as poacher, but 1d8 precision damage. The damage to Hunt Prey is already 1d8 precision. Is this just a typo and it works identical as the Poachers version?
Two questions about the picture on page 146:
1. Is that the same airship defined on page 177-8? If not anyone know of a product it is defined in?
2. Is that a goblin attacking them?
Pathfinder Pathfinder Accessories Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
marv wrote:
Two questions about the picture on page 146:
1. Is that the same airship defined on page 177-8? If not anyone know of a product it is defined in?
2. Is that a goblin attacking them?
- I don't remember other flying ships being statted in any other book yet. Currently, it can work well as an alternative interpretation of the airship than the image on 178.
1. Is that the same airship defined on page 177-8? If not anyone know of a product it is defined in?
2. Is that a goblin attacking them?
- I don't remember other flying ships being statted in any other book yet. Currently, it can work well as an alternative interpretation of the airship than the image on 178.
- It looks like a hobgoblin.
Thank you!! I think you are right on both accounts.