If you follow along with the Epic Table Games Audio Show, you know that Potato and I really stick closely to the first edition Pathfinder, by Paizio Publishing. It really follows in the heart and tradition of my favorite Dungeons and Dragons Edition which was 3rd and 3.5. In fact watching the system develop from its small roots into the behemoth it is today has been fun, but there are plenty of things I haven’t hopped on now that Pathfinder is onto it’s second edition – and Dungeons and Dragons its 5th.
So, as we burn through home-brew worlds and stories, we often find ourselves building expansive worlds, new monsters, and items to help our players along the way in whatever scenario we’ve crafted. And just recently, I’ve added 3rd party content to my general use repertoire. There are entire worlds and games built on the rules and mechanics that my favorite game systems have already established without encroaching on the actual copyright material. Unfortunately this does mean that you will need the Core Rulebook from most games, but at this point in the venture I believe you should already have that.
This initial foray into these publishers really came out of the desire to play a different themed game without having to truly switch systems. Granted, we could have always played Savage Worlds and one of their expansions, but my table knows Pathfinder by the back of their hands and we wanted a limited learning curve. I was exactly looking for games that had a much more viking thematic element, and while I did pick up the system Fate of the Norns, it was still a new system.
Now, because I don’t play 5th edition I’m really shooting myself in the foot here, because so many cool looking supplementary rule sets are built on fifth edition. That means Journey to Ragnarok was out of the question, and also the reason I’m going to start picking up 5th edition books now (albeit nearly 10 years late). Now for those of you who play 5e, the idea of 3rd party content is likely not something you turn away from anymore, considering a lot of the groups I’m a part of talk about the Kobold Press Creature Codex and how much they love it. Or we converse on how we supplement our games with various puzzles and traps from Wally the DM. Many of us even reminisce about Grimtooth’s Traps and how deadly they were.
It used to be that 3rd party content was so far off balanced from the rest of the game that it made it much less hassle to simply ban it from our tables. This got really sticky when Paizo never published any official psionic content, but Dreamscarred Press did! Now with the psionic base system in the bag, and opening the flood gates for possibly balanced 3rd party material we started looking a little heavier into it. The third party material still had to be looked over with as much of a fine tooth comb as we wanted because somethings didn’t always jive but here we were now looking through new classes, powers, feats, magics, etc.
As much as I love supplementing my games with third party material now, and mentioning that I was looking for a viking themed system earlier what happened of that? I picked up Midgard by Kobold Press, and the pathfinder specific game. They do have one for 5th edition which I may or may not pick up depending on how we get into that particular game. We have a lot of things we want to run through, and I am hoping you’re all hear for the journey.
