Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Ultimate Campaign Author: Jesse Benner | Language: English | ISBN:
1601254989 | Format: EPUB
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Ultimate Campaign Description
- Series: Pathfinder Roleplaying Game
- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: Paizo Publishing, LLC.; 1st edition (June 11, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1601254989
- ISBN-13: 978-1601254986
- Product Dimensions: 11 x 8.7 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
For a long time I've thought this book is going to be more or less a compilation of subsystems from various APs, so I was a bit skeptical. Now that I have ze PDF, the question is, what actually is inside Ucamp?
First chapter is the character background generator. Now, it's not just a set of tables, but it's connected to Traits and new Story Feats. I love the idea of meshing PC backstory with Traits ... because I've been doing this for several years, awarding appropriate Traits for writing a one-page character history. Neat, Paizo stealing ideas from my brain. What next, they'll publish a pirate AP oh wait.
What's also nice is that the backstory generator doesn't do all the work for you, there's still plenty of room left for improvisation and meshing it all together. So overall, almost a perfect chapter BUT while all the classes are represented, there are only backgrounds for core races. One could wish at least the more popular (Tieflings, Aasimar, Tengu, etc.) minor races would get their due. Oh well.
Chapter Two - Downtime or the dreaded question "what can my PC do between adventures". Well, this one handles this one pretty much completely, including a rather neat if baroque system for establishing your own facilities/buildings/hirelings/businesses. I can't think of any angle not covered here. Paladins running brothels, finally with rules and tables. Oh d20, you and your shameless desire to have numbers for everything! We love you so much for that, you nasty little minx.
Chapter Three - Systems. A collection of various aspects of not-combat-related mechanics. There's Honor, Reputation, the flamewar magnet of Retraining (anime MMO munchkins territory oh noes Gary save us!), Hexploration and several others.
I am a big pathfinder fan, and their latest books (Advanced Race Guide, Bestiary 3, NPC Codex) made me pre-order this without hesitation. I've plans for a game that in 3.5 would have used the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook and so that was my main interest when purchasing this book.
On the whole the material feels a little thin. One of the first things you are presented with is an entire re-hash of how to make a character's backstory, and a reprinting of every trait with a few new ones. The backstory stuff isn't bad, but it didn't really feel appropriate to the book. Traits and their negative counterparts never interested me, there were always too many with too little flavor and too little impact on gameplay so reprinting the entire list just to add a few seemed like a waste of pages even if it did tie in to the backstory section. They even attempt to justify it in the text of the book saying that some of them have been updated. Do they not print errata?
Next of note is a new set of feats, called "story" feats. I really like the idea, but based on the execution as a GM I would think twice or thrice about letting them in my game. The power curve seems to range from worthless to just-short-of-ridiculous supposedly in proportion with the difficulty of achieving the conditions. A lot of these conditions require an obliging GM to provide an artificially constructed opportunity or an enterprising player to circumvent an uncooperative DM. It feels like a recipe for bad blood rather than good storytelling.
Now, the section I was most interested in was the castle/organization building portion. Having read the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook the systems are similar though Piazo has managed to both remove much of the complexity and replace it with more complexity.
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