Maybe you have been in this situation: You are getting ready for a new tabletop role playing game, working on your character and you have finished the stats, the abilities, feats, spells, and more and you are finished. But, it just doesn’t click; it feels like you need a hook. Or you are running a game and looking to expand out your game universe to add in some flavor by adding in some organizations that are either going to support or try and kill your party.
The Adventurer’s Guide by Paizo is an excellent resource to help in both of those cases.
A Review of Paizo’s Adventurer’s Guide for the Pathfinder RPG
The Adventurer’s Guide is a collection of 18 different organizations that exist in the Inner Sea region of Golarion, which is the home of the Pathfinder universe. And while there are some definitive geographic ties to region, the ideas behind these groups could easily be taken and adapted for a homebrew campaign.
For instance, the Bellflower Network is one of the groups highlighted. Their main focus is that they are dedicated to eradicating Halfling slavery. That idea is a great hook and place to build a character off of or to introduce it into your homebrew game. Imagine your character who is a part of this group and is now having to work with others yet always wanting and needing to drive the mission forward. Or imagine that your character was a former member of the group. What drove them away? What happened to get your character to its current state?
Having 18 different groups with a variety of missions, locations, and causes helps to inspire more ideas for character backstories and homebrew developments.
Additionally, in each of these highlighted factions, there is a slew of material. Certainly, you get the broad overview of the organization but you also get some iconic characters associated with the group and a little bit of backstory on each as you work to create NPCs or need examples of character builds. From there each section has a prestige class, two archetypes that would fit this organization, and then a section on equipment, feats, magic items common among the organization and even some new spells. In just a few short pages, you get a lot of material to work with, use and bring into your game as a PC or as a NPC.
As with all Paizo products, the book is well put together. Each section mirrors those that came before it, so it is fairly easy to navigate and find what you need. The artwork is stellar and worth checking out on its own.
But the power in the book and the content really is in being inspirational, helping players and DMs alike as they work together to build a brave new world and tell stories together. If you are stuck and in a rut creatively, Pathfinder’s Adventurer’s Guide is definitely worth picking up and using to help you over a creative hump.
I give it 9 out of 10 Nerds. You can pick it up from Amazon, directly from Paizo, or potentially at your FLGS.
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