The latest RPG-themed offering from the good folks over at Humble Bundle is all about Paizo Publishing and their Pathfinder and Starfinder ranges. Pathfinder was, for a good wee while, probably the most popular RPG until the resurgence that Dungeons & Dragons experienced with the release of 5E. It’s not surprising the people who were not impressed with 4th edition flocked to Pathfinder, given that it’s basically just D&D 3.5.
Despite D&D regaining its crown, Pathfinder has remained popular and Paizo has released a second edition. They’ve also branched out and released a sci-fi spinoff in the form of Starfinder.
And now we get the chance to pick up a ton of PDFs at a discounted rate, eh? How good is this bundle, though? Is it worthwhile? Is it better than the last RPG-based Humble Bundle we looked at? I hope so…
As usual, the bundle is broken up into tiers. This time there are 4 tiers. At each level, you pay the required amount to unlock the new content in that tier plus all of the content from previous tiers. The first tier contains 10 items and will set you back £4.44:
Okay, so, let’s start on a technicality. Usually, I get a bit annoyed when the core rulebook for a game is not contained in the base level of the bundle. This bundle has that same problem, but at least we get the digital editions of the Pathfinder and Starfinder Beginner Boxes to tide us over. These sets are the main items in this tier and are the only really substantial items.
The Pathfinder Beginner Box is stuffed with content, including rulebooks for players and GMs, premade characters and blank character sheets, and more odds and ends. I’m not 100% clear on what’s in the digital edition of the box. We’ll talk a little later about the physical edition.
The Starfinder Beginner Box is pretty similar in concept and contains largely the same material, just for a different game. Honestly, I think I’d probably use Starfinder before Pathfinder, as I like both the setting of Starfinder, and the distinction from games like D&D. I already have D&D, so I really already have something thematically very similar to Pathfinder.
The rest of this tier consists of small items like battle maps, one-shot adventures, and character material. It’s fine, but I tend not to often pick up these very small PDFs. I’ve made exceptions in the past, of course.
The next tier is, to me, where things actually get a bit more worthwhile. It will soon become obvious why this is the case. Your £13.34 will net you all of the items from the previous bundle and a further 15 items on top:
Yeah, the core rules are here. The core rules for both games are here. These are weighty tomes (640 pages for Pathfinder and 528 for Starfinder) that are stuffed with content. Unlike the Beginner Boxes, these contain all of the core rules for each game, far more options for character creation, items both mundane and magical, spells, setting/background information, and more. There’s specialised stuff for each game, of course, such as starship combat rules for Starfinder.
Unlike the previous tier, there are actually some other items to get excited about in this tier. The biggest thing for me would probably be the bestiaries. The Pathfinder Bestiary contains over 400 monsters. Many will be your typical fantasy types, of course. Most pages are also illustrated, which is a big plus for me. I like that it also introduces some universal rules for monsters. Universal rules help to simplify a system by offering consistency across creatures.
The Alien Archive for Starfinder has a wee bit of a bestiary to it, with over 80 creatures covered. More interestingly, it also offers over 20 new alien species for players to use in character creation. I love having access to different playable species, so this is really cool. There’s other stuff in there as well, but they’re the highlights.
Beyond these items, there are also some more adventures, maps, and the like. They’re cool. It’s niced to have them. I just find it hard to get that excited for them, y’know?
On to tier 3! Again, you’ll get all of the 25 items from the previous level, but you’ll also get an additional 16 items, bring us up to 41 in total. This will cost you £22.23 and contain the following:
For a jump of nearly a tenner, what do we actually get? Well, there’s a lot of stuff, but I’m finding it difficult to really get excited about it. More adventures, maps, and so on, definitely, but what do we get in terms of more substantive content?
Well, there’s the Pathfinder Gamemastery Guide. It’s a guide. For game masters. It says that on the cover. GM guides tend to be a bit hit or miss. Some are really useful, and sometimes compulsory purchases (I’m thinking Call of Cthulhu, here) whilst others are often interesting and potentially useful (or situationally so) for specific things, but not strictly necessary (Dungeons & Dragons is a good example of this). This one seems to fit the mold of the latter. It’s full of advice and rules for running your campaigns, including new feats, magic item progression (I like that!), multi-classing, new subsystems, a bunch of NPCs, and more. It sounds pretty useful, all in all.
For Starfinder, we have the Galaxy Exploration Handbook. This has a number of new class options, backgrounds, items, and more. The coolest thing is probably the ruleset for creating new worlds, details of different biomes, and new adventure hooks. Whilst not a GM guide as such, this does give a lot of the same tools in that regard. Yeah, a lot of potential in this wee book.
Beyond that… eh. It’s more adventures, maps, and some NPC pawns. All useful. All potentially cool, but just not really what I’m all that interested in from one of these bundles.
This brings us to the final tier. This tier sees a price jump of around £18, taking us up to £40.02 and only gets you a single item. The thing is, this is a physical item. As such, the price isn’t quite honest, charging an additional $30 to $45 for international shipping. Let’s take a look:
The physical item that you get at this level is the Beginner Box. This is a great box. You get the basic versions of the rulebooks for players and GMs, some premade characters, maps, pawns, and dice. This is a good set.
Is it a good deal?
No.
It’s not a good deal for anyone outside the US. the price of the bundle as a whole is the cost of the beginner box (here’s a link to it on Element Games). Factor in the international shipping and you’re eliminating the saving that you’ve made form the rest of the bundle. So, no. let’s just leave tier 4 out of this.
So, is the bundle worthwhile?
Maybe. I think it depends on the level at which you back. For me, the sweet spot is tier 2. It has those all-important core books, and there’s nothing especially exciting after that level. If you wanted the best of all worlds, you could buy the starter set (either Pathfinder or Starfinder) within the UK and pick up that tier 2 bundle for the core rules.
You can click here to visit the bundle page at Humble Bundle.
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