Pathfinder: A First Look

One of the members of my group, James, pre-ordered the Pathfinder book and got it in the mail yesterday. We usually get dinner before the game so as we muched down some subs at Blimpie we looked over some of the book.

My first impression was that it looked great. The book is huge (over five hundred pages) is well bound, hardcover, the cover art looks great, and the interior art and page design look excellent as well. We didn't have a whole lot of time to look over rules at this point, we usually use diner time to catch up so we didn't get any hard look at the rules until we arrived at Josh's house where we play.

At first everything seemed normal. I didn't participate in playtesting for the game, and I don't keep up with the message boards over at Paizo. So if they leaked certain information, like Clerics no longer getting heavy armor proficiency, I was unaware. Needless to say there were a few surprises of that sort in the book. Other than those things, the books looks great. I won't get a chance to actually play the game for a few months, but I'm looking forward to it.

For those of you who do not yet have the book here is a preview!

You can head over here and order the book (it's going to be on back order for a while), or buy the PDF for only $9.99. On that page they also have some pages of the book that you can take a look at. Also, Paizo is providing players with a Conversion Guide to aid the transition from 3.5 to Pathfinder. This is all the more impressive when you consider that their competitors (and in my quest to stay neutral I'm not naming any names here) refused to do the same thing. The Conversion Guide is absolutely free, but heavy traffic has made both the Core Book and the conversion guide difficult to download since it came out yesterday. The conversion guide, and Pathfinder's forward from Monte Cook, show that Paizo is really keeping their fans in mind.