Sunday, October 24, 2010

Pathfinder: On Golarion's Roads

I'm going to be running a new tabletop RPG campaign in 2011 titled, "On Golarion's Roads," using the Pathfinder RPG rules, which are widely referred to as "D&D 3.75."

The game is loosely based on The Wizard of Oz, with the PCs playing the part of Dorothy. The metaphor stops pretty early on, however, as there's no wicked witch or lollipop guild. Instead, the players will be sucked over from Earth and immediately dropped into the chaos of every day life in a world where magic and monsters are as common as fruit carts. The primary plot revolves around the attempt to return home, though presumably the characters will come to question this goal as they become more entrenched in Golarion.

One experiment I'm trying is the creation of my own Player's Guide. The guide for this game can be found at www.ajs.com/pathfinder along with all of the usual information on what books to get or Web resources to use. The Player's Guide was a real challenge, mostly because of the complexity of introducing the characters as level 1 NPC classes and then "upgrading" them to PC classes after the fact. Lots of decisions had to be made about traits, attributes and so forth, all of which assume the character grew up on Golarion and has always been the "heroic" type. I hope that this guide might actually end up being a useful resource to others who seek to implant characters from other worlds into Golarion, in the future.

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