Earlier today Josh and I were going through our podcast episode as planned, or at least attempt to. Not only was I incredibly idea-blocked by some invisible wall but we ended up spending a whole lot of time talking about aspartame of all things. I don’t know what the deal was, but it was unfortunately a raw deal that felt so confusing because what we wanted to talk about kept coming up and we kept getting distracted which was a complete first for us both in our adventure together.
What we really wanted to do is quickly define ‘home-brew’ and ‘third party’ content, meaning experience and published usually falls under Third Party, and done for your game and blasted on the internet is Home-brew. We defined it this way, because usually published content is a bit more balanced and battle tested. We all know that in the era of 3.x home-brew content was EVERYWHERE! Entire sections of the internet dedicated directly to individuals creations to expand on the game. And with that, the start of a lot of third party content.
At the time we didn’t allow a lot of non-cannon books because of issues such as balance and a lot of times things didn’t quite match up well enough to work with many campaigns or settings. That can still be the case, but now a lot of third party content comes in two flavors. Additional monsters, which is awesome because it adds more options to your combat needs and new campaign settings, and that is what I want to explore today!
While at GenCon last weekend I came across A LOT of third party content that I wanted, and what makes this so exciting is that instead of additional monsters, classes, or races to add to my games I picked up additional campaign settings much like the Pathfinder Midgard setting I reviewed earlier. Freeport City, Zodiac Empires, and The Journey to Ragnarok are all expansive campaign settings that use the existing system rules in order to tell your story in additional exciting ways.
The reason this is so important is because there gets to be a point in time when as players or dungeon masters we become a little “bored” of the standard game. The options have become tiring, and the mechanics stale, so we look for other things to suit our desires for different. While there are plenty of games that do different aspects of games better than others, excluding or not looking at 3rd party campaign settings can be a huge mistake. In my soon to be done reviews, I’ll explain why each captured my attention, and why I decided to add on to some of the games I already own with third party content.
But right now, look for ways to add on to your current games by looking at 3rd party campaign settings for whatever you’re playing.
