What's On My Shelf ...
What's on my Pathfinder shelf, and whatever shall I use it for?!
For a game that takes place primarily within a shared imagination space — with the help of numbers printed on loose paper and a writing implement of some sort — Pathfinder is a hobby that breeds plenty of physical stuff: books, maps, dice, minis, and all manner of tabletop accessories.
Trust me when I say I’ve got plenty of it.
However, my collection of various Pathfinder stuffs has not always been particularly well organized or thoughtfully displayed for use.
When I became the GM for our home game back in the halcyon summer of 2016, I inherited a blue duffel bag that our previous GM (hi Das!) had filled with the dice and flip-mats and minis they’d inherited from our previous previous GM (hi Jason!).
For years, I stuffed that blue duffel bag into various nooks and crannies of the compact apartments I called home as it swelled with rulebooks and GM screens and even more dice.
So many dice.
On the topic of dice, please earn yourself a Hero Point by tumbling over that heart button up top. I have no idea what it accomplishes, but dice don’t lie.
But since late last year, when I moved to the new Lake District Lodge, I’ve had what noted Pathfinder player Virginia Woolf (“OK where do you guys want to explore next?” “To the lighthouse!”) always longed for: a shelf of one’s own.
I haven’t had a ton of time for gaming lately. Sometimes life’s like that. But seasons arise and fade away, and sorting through my physical materials — especially as I rediscovered some items I’d forgotten about entirely — got me jazzed to imagine a period in the not-too-distant-future when my Pathfinder wheel starts spinning again:
Need cardboard minis? I’ve got two sets of them, the old PF1 pawn box that I inherited with the GM’s bag augmented by a new PF2 pawn box gifted to me by my daughter for Christmas. Each features more than 300 monsters — from the small lantern archon to the huge zombie hulk — printed on double-sided cardstock that slots into plastic bases.
If you can’t defeat those pawns with attack rolls, you can crush them with hefty hardcover rulebooks. The PF2 Core rulebook was my much-thumbed-through guide to the edition change back in 2019 (launching the same week my daughter was born), while the Battlezoo Bestiary: Strange & Unusual is a huge point of pride, containing as is does my first two published monsters from the RPG Superstar competition.
Stacking up a lot slimmer than the Core rulebook but no less important are my GM screens for both PF1 and PF2, used to hide upcoming pawns and my never-fudged dice rolls. Speaking of dice, I’ve got too many to count rattling around in my Crown Royal dice bag, and I love to chuck ‘em in that felt-lined octagonal dice tray. Another natural 20 for the night hag?! Sleep well, sweet rogue.
As a GM, I’m a sucker for all the possibilities offered by one of Paizo’s pre-written adventure paths, and I’ve got softcover collections of four separate APs: Hell’s Rebels, which I ran for PF1; and a trio of PF2 paths including my lockdown-era game Extinction Curse; my play-by-Discord path Quest for the Frozen Flame; and a third as-yet-unplayed story arc I purchased for a rainy day, the steampunk-y, scores-to-settle concept of Outlaws of Alkenstar.
Pathfinder is a collective storytelling game, but it’s also a tactical combat simulator fought over a grid of one-inch squares. My growing collection of laminated flip-mats include generic blank terrain that I can draw buildings or streetscapes upon with dry-erase markers, as well as my more recent fancy: preprinted scenes of swamp landscapes and ancient dungeons and forest clearings, which can inspire homebrew encounters of their own.
And then there are the odds and ends: my collection of old campaign notebooks which I can flip through when I’m feeling nostalgic for Strange Aeons or The Dragon’s Demand; a deck of PF2 condition cards used to explain the rules, and a Harrow deck for when you want to smash the rules to smithereens; and my Wonderboom portable bluetooth speaker for rocking atmospheric Trevor Morris playlists at home or on the road.
When I lay it all out like this in bullet-point format, I gotta say: we’re as ready as we’ll ever be to go adventuring. Now all I need is a quorum of adventurers and we’ve got ourselves a party!
THE MINI AND THE DICE
Our image this month consists of three long-forgotten pieces I dredged up during my organizational efforts for this post: the premade pewter mini is Tango, Rusty’s tengu inquisitor of Milani from our Hell’s Rebels campaign.
He’s standing in the Jarvis End neighborhood of one of my favorite settings in all of Golarion: the erstwhile-Chelaxian city of Kintargo. I printed and laminated this 11x17 poster map for regular use during our urban campaign, and it was great to find this old game aid to bring back memories of charting the party’s movements around this fascinating town of artists and rebels.
And those wild funkyhedral dice: I honestly can’t tell you who made them, but I know they came into my possession via my friend Toufeeq, who played the swashbuckling pirate Gojee Shakes in that campaign. Man, those are some weird dice.
NEW FROM THE WAREHOUSE
Seeing those AP volumes with their numbered spines sent me to the Paizo product page, wondering what’s new in the pipeline. And in a sweet echo of my own prized volume #100, which was Book 4 of the Hell’s Rebels AP written by OG Pathfinder author James Jacobs, it turns out Paizo just published volume #200 of their AP series … also written by James Jacobs!
Seven Dooms for Sandpoint is a single-volume, 200-page adventure path taking characters from 4th to 11th level, set in and around another of Golarion’s most iconic locations, the Varisian town of Sandpoint:
The town of Sandpoint has seen more than its fair share of danger and trouble over the years, including harrowing fires, prolific serial killers, goblin raids, and attacks by giants and dragons, but what faces the so-called Light of the Lost Coast now is its greatest threat yet! Something sinister has been manipulating events all along, and now a new band of heroes must step in to save this legendary small town from seven deadly dooms!
The double-volume AP is available in standard paperback (PDF version out today!) as well as a special hardcover edition, the latter of which includes “an exclusive double-sided poster map of the town of Sandpoint and its environs to set the scene for high adventure.”
Because more stuff is always better.
That’s it for this month’s edition, my elves on the shelves. And so, as I say at the end of every Pathfinder module I run: this has been Ambush Tactics. I’ve been your Game Master. I hope you had a fun time.
Adventure!