For the most part, Inner Sea Magic is really a 64 page Player Companion - and a damned fine one too, as it turns out. Ostensibly a Campaign Setting Book - this book is no such thing at all. Which brings us directly to the topic of this week's Paizo product review of Inner Sea Magic. There are a lot of Player Companion books which would benefit from a 64 page treatment. While the talk over the past year of moving the Players Companion to a monthly format has intrigued me, to be perfectly honest, I'd rather they increased the page count to 64 pages instead and kept it every other month.

Easily locating a specific Player Companion on the shelf? Not so much. With a spine bearing a title that can be read when stored on the shelf, you can actually find a Campaign Setting book on the shelf when you are looking for one. Whatever your preference in terms of GM or player oriented material, there is no argument that the Campaign Setting books' larger format and perfect binding has a marked advantage. The focus of the Pathfinder Campaign Setting books is on providing GMs with all the setting information about Golarion’s regions and its various sects, personalities, and many other topics of special interest to Game Masters. The other product line, initially branded as “Pathfinder Chronicles” and now renamed to “ Pathfinder Campaign Setting” books, are 64 page perfect-bound books which release mostly monthly (there are other components to this line which are not books). The format has been threatening to expand into a monthly publication for quite some time now, but the logistics of making sure the production pipeline is full enough to permit a switch to a monthly format keeps delaying that oft-rumoured event.

The ' Player Companion' line uses a 32 page, stapled-cover format to release game world specific material aimed at players every other month. Instead, Paizo uses two alternating publications to detail the world of Golarion outside of the adventure context. While there are a few tables where Golarion specific gods are mentioned, for the most part, the hardcover rules are remarkably 'Golarion free' in terms of how the rules attempt to be setting neutral. One of the hallmarks of Paizo’s Pathfinder RPG Hardcover line is that the books are intended to be setting neutral.

Inner sea magic pathfinder pdf