Introduction:
Race in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game mixes biology and culture, then translates those concepts into racial traits.
Yet since both biology and culture are mutable-especially when one considers the powerful force of magic-racial traits can be so diverse that two elves can be extremely different while still manifesting aspects of their shared heritage and culture.
A race’s traits, its history, its relations with other races, and the culture that all of these things imply-all of these frame your characters.
The Advanced Race Guide is more than that. While the Pathfinder RPG has always featured a variety of races for players to roleplay, this book alone offers 36 diffrent playable races, not counting subraces, and this is merely a starting point.
Virtually all worlds and campaign setting include open environmental and cultural niches that could be filled by new races and cultures uniquely tailored to them.
Thus, this book also presents the race builder-a system that enables you to create brand -new races for your campaign worlds.
These new rules allow you to make an unlimited number of new races, both equivalent in power to the races already in the game or more powerful if you want to experiment with dangerously exotic new characters.
Overview About this book:
This book is organized a little differently than other Pathfinder RPG supplements.
Typically, a book like this is divided into separate chapters on classes, feats, equipment, spells, and magic items.
But since the main theme of this book is race, most chapters instead present a number of races, with each race’s entry containing new alternate racial traits, favored class rewards, archetypes, feats, equipment, magic items, spells, and more.
Chapter 4 presents the exciting new race builder rules, and at the end of the book you’ll find a table to aid you in quickly locating the various spells presented in this book, along with a standard index that includes feats and magic items.
Chapter 1— Core Races:
This chapter reintroduces the core races of the Pathfinder RPG.
Each section of this chapter presents one of the seven core races-dwarves, elves, gnomes, half-elves, half-orcs, half lings, and humans—reprinting and expanding upon the information about those races found in the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook and the Pathfinder RPG Advanced Player’s Guide.
Here you’ll find all the background material for each of these races and the standard racial
traits, as well as a number of alternative racial traits and favored class rewards.
Furthermore, each of the core races takes the idea of alternate racial traits a step further by presenting a number of subraces for those races.
These subraces bundle a group of alternate class features together into thematic categories that provide new takes on the existing core races.
From imperious humans to arctic elves to gear gnomes, each subrace gives players a chance to play a core race in a way that’s completely out of the ordinary.
But races are not all about racial traits and favored class rewards. Each of the core races comes from a vibrant culture with its own history, norms, and adventuring outlooks.
To represent this, each race’s entry presents a number of new character options, such as race-specific archetypes, adventuring equipment, feats, magic items, and spells.
Chapter 2— Featured Races:
Following the detailed information on the core races, Chapter 2 provides a selection of 15 featured races. From the celestial aasimar to the fiendish tief ling, and from the feathery and mischievous tengu to the shadowy and spiteful drow, featured races are those peoples just beyond the core races in their exoticism, who despite their relative rarity are still likely familiar faces for adventuring groups.
As in Chapter 1, each of these entries presents information on the race’s culture, society, interactions with other races, and how the race fits into Pathfinder’s cosmology.
Each section details a number of alternate racial traits, favored class rewards, archetypes, feats, equipment, magic items, and spells designed specifically for those players interested in creating such characters.
Chapter 3— Uncommon Races:
Some races are so rare as to seem strange and monstrous to many of the core races, yet that doesn’t mean they can’t make for fun and exciting characters.
Many of them, like the gripplis, rarely leave their isolated homes, while others, like the kitsune, nagaji, and samsarans, may be more common in far-off lands, but are rare and wondrous in a baseline campaign.
While the entries for the uncommon races are shorter than those of either the core or featured races, they provide a number of new options for those who want to play a truly exotic race.
Each of the 14 uncommon race entries presented here feature a handful of alternate racial traits and favored class rewards; a single archetype; and a mix of feats, equipment, magic items, and spells.
Chapter 4— Race Builder:
The last chapter of this book introduces a new race-creation system that was extensively playtested by the gaming community at paizo.com.
This race builder allows you to mix and match new and existing racial traits using a Race Point system to create new playable races for your campaign.
This system is not merely a matrix of costs and values, but also an essential tool for crafting your race’s story and finding its niche within your game world.
In this chapter you’ll find the point costs for the racial abilities and traits of the races described in the other chapters of the Advanced Race Guide—these examples are there to provide you with benchmarks for your own race creation.
Use them to make sure your new races are balanced, or treat them as a foundation from which you can build more powerful versions of existing races by increasing the Race Point value and adding new and appropriately
themed racial traits.
This is especially useful if you want to create the possibility of more monstrous races coexisting with standard races—you can create supercharged versions of dwarves, elves, half lings, and other core races, with each variant roughly balanced against the others, thus providing a high-powered but roughly even playing field.Lastly, a few examples of new and monstrous races are presented throughout the chapter, allowing you to insert even more racial diversity into your Pathfinder game without having to build a new race from whole cloth.
Incorporate them as presented, or pick them apart and rebuild them yourself. You have the tools now—the possibilities are endless
Review:
“A well presented addition to the Pathfinder game. It is set-out well and is consistent with the core rulebook”.
– S Kelliher
“Surprisingly cool book, expands on all the playable races in cool and cusomisable ways. A very useful book for any GM or player for giving depth and variety to characters or npc.”
– Kayra lee
Book Name
— Pathfinder advanced race guide
Language — English
Publisher — Paizo Publishing, LLC