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The Shackled City was one of the great successes of the D&D3 era. It was an adventure path published in Dungeon magazine, with several related articles in Dragon. It was later released as a single book, and showed that there was still interest in those long campaigns typical of the 1980s. After The Shackled City we had two further examples: Age of Worms and Savage Tide.

When Paizo lost their license to both magazines, they decided to continue with adventure paths. The first one is called Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords, which they will publish in six books.

Since the campaign needs the players to be familiar with the lands of Varisia and the town of Sandpoint, Paizo also released a 16-page booklet with the preliminary information. And this is the product I’m reviewing today.

Introduction

The place is called Varisia, but it could be called Yafs (Your Average Fantasy Setting). It’s a frontier land, between the colonies of a crumbling but still powerful empire to the south, and seven barbaric tribes to the north. Varisia is claimed by two powerful city-states related to the empire, although its influence it’s diminishing.

Another characteristic of Varisia it’s the large number of ruins and old monuments, coming from an unknown ancient culture.

Contents

The booklet is quite short, but there’s plenty of information. It includes:

• Welcome to Varisia (1 page)
• Races of Varisia (3 pages). These lands are largely dominated by humans, which are divided in three societies: the imperial colonists, the northern tribes and the Varisians (think about gypsies). There’s also a dwarven town, two forests populated by gnomes and elves and the usual halflings, half-elves and half-orcs.
• Adventurers of Varisia (4 pages). The chapter discusses the eleven core classes, and introduces the main pantheon, which is the average one.
• Equipment of Varisia (2 pages). Seven new weapons and several common tools, including the typical Varisian scarves.
• Varisia (3 pages). And introduction to the world, plus six new background feats.
• Sandpoint (2 pages). General information about the starting town, with rumours and a list of noteworthy people.
• Two full-page maps: Varisia and Sandpoint.

Style

Here the booklet really shines. The Player’s Guide is a really elegant product, very easy to read. The illustrations are excellent, with a very compact style, and some of them are very atmospheric (the ruins in page 12). Both maps are also fantastic.

Conclusions

As I said, the idea behind this product is that all players should read it before creating their characters. To achieve this, Paizo is selling the booklet for only $2.00, or you can download it for free from their web page.

The world is not terribly original, but we must wait to see how they develop it. I love the decision to avoid introducing new races or classes - we had already enough of them.

I love long published campaigns, and some of my best roleplaying experiences have been Night Below, The Enemy Within and The Masks of Nyarlathotep. I think the Rise of the Runelords premise is quite interesting, so I hope it will fulfil my expectations. If it does, I will review the next volumes…

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