Overread wrote:Second is a large host of Patherfinder lore/source books from the Lost Omens setting. This is quite a big bundle and has more tiers than normal and goes to high a high value for a
HB, however its a LOT of material (though I must profess I've not read it so would be interesting to hear what peoples views are on it).
I don't know if I have much more to say about them than "they're neat", but I found them to be useful and interesting for GMing.
Starting with the caveat, I'm more on the narrative side so the extra rules in these books tended to be of less interest to me, and since Paizo puts up character rules, equipment, feats and all that stuff online for free, rules reference hasn't been of much use to my group. As such I can really only speak of the boon these books are to storytelling. Also, that's a lot of books and I haven't read all that many of them. The ones I did read, though, I found to help me with making the setting come to life.
Now my take on Golarion is that it offers a somewhat generic setting you can insert all manner of ideas into without them appearing odd or out of place. It's probably why Pathfinder has stuck with my group more than any other
RPG, because the setting offers something for everyone and it's not hard to mash wildly different ideas together ans still get something cohesive, both on the player party side and on the setting the
GM creates. As such I found that the generic information you can find on wikis is pretty much all you need as a starting point and strictly speaking you don't need to feel like you missed out if you don't read any setting guides.
That said, I think the guides I read were nice, light reading to give the setting flavor over the generic overviews you get in Campaign Setting (and that by and large the things you'll get on a wiki), describing locations in more detail without becoming so granular it gets tedious to read and remember everything, provide you with tourist attractions, important people and plot hooks, give you an impression of what sort of wildlife to expect in these places, some relevant history, and so on. Nothing surprising, really, but pretty much what it says on the cover. A solid look at what you might find in the place the book covers.
I think they hit a good spot on level of detail, providing a solid foundation to give you an easy answer to general questions the players might ask you, but not going into so minute detail that you lose your freedom to shape the setting (or have to go to the trouble of altering so much stuff that you'll get confused between what you read and what you rewrote).
And depending on how grounded your imagination is, you may want to have a few of these guides around on topics like planes and other such nonsense. A guide that explains the mechanics of the more magical places, I found, does not go amiss. That said, the top tier of that pledge is unfamiliar to me, so I don't know exactly what's in those books.
Guess I had a bit more to say than "they're neat" after all. But yeah, I think they're neat.
