Logan Bonner

Background
I read through this product, and then ran the beginner box adventure (about 50% shortened and a bit remixed) with a group of three kids aged 8-12 who were beginners to RPGs plus one adult who has played plenty of Pathfinder 1st and 2nd edition. I was also very familiar with both editions already, but it was my first time GMing this system.

Summary
This box is good and recommended for anyone having (or hoping to find!) a group to introduce to Pathfinder 2nd Edition. The box comes with everything needed to get going: rule books, pre-created character sheets plus blank sheets, a dice set, a pre-written adventure, plus maps and standees for the adventure. That's a lot of bang for the buck bundled for convience. The GM's book continues to give ideas and tips for future adventures plus plenty more monsters (with standees), material for more than enough adventures to bring the characters up to third level (which is the maximum in this box).

While some rules, and the character creation process especially, are simplified compared to the full rules, characters and all rules elements are fully compatible with the full Pathfinder 2e game. So you can, for example, keep playing Beginner Box characters in campaigns using the full rules, or import rules elements from the full game into the Beginner Box adventures.

Among the negatives are slightly uneven production quality and editing/proof-reading, and I have some personal qualms about the pre-written adventure.

Score: 7/10

Rules, content
PF2e is one of my favourite systems so yeah, I like these rules. I find it pleasant to both play and GM apart from some minor grievances. The three-action system was easy to understand for the young players and after getting their footing, they started to confidently figure out their turns, utilizing their character's special abilities. The robust encounter building rules make it very easy for the GM to fiddle around with the encounters.

The rule books are slimmed down in large part thanks to having reduced the player options down to three ancestries, four classes, a handful of backgrounds, and much fewer spells. This may disappoint players who know of and want to play other classic fantasy RPG characters like halflings, gnomes, bards, and paladins. But, for my beginner players, this was plenty enough of differentiated choices to get them excited in making characters. Several less important rules (or less palatable for beginners?) are removed, such as encumbrance and some traits.

A good selection of magic items and monsters are included.

Production value, editing
The books are good-looking with excellent artwork and nice layout, not to mention their 150 pages are lot less intimidating than the 640 page tome that is the full core rulebook. The dice set is highly readable and brightly colour coded, very smart! "Which one do I roll again?" "The d20; that's the red one".

The many standees were a very nice inclusion, but on many of them, a big chunk of the art goes outside the area you punch out, leading to characters with hands/weapons and so on not being included on the standee itself. Very weird, not sure if intentional or misprinted. Also the cardboard doesn't seem like great quality.

There are some misprints in the books and papers too, a rather glaring one is that the pre-generated character sheets lack the symbols for one-action and three-action activities. Luckily the blank ones are printed correctly. The rule for recovery checks is stated differently in two places, and in either case doesn't take into account the "Diehard" feat. The adventure has a room described as "totally unlit" when the PCs look into it, but when they enter, there is suddenly a torch casting light. Room 12 has the wrong name, duplicated from another room. Nitpicks? Maybe. I think at least the mistake on the pre-generated sheets should have been caught.

The map is sturdy and looks nice, but I would have preferred it cut up into tiles rather than the huge flip-mat, because:
- It takes up the whole Abadar-darned table
- The players can see the whole map unless I cover it up with paper
- Tiles make the maps easier to remix, reuse, and adapt

The adventure
This section does not go into any plot or detailed spoilers, but it goes into the general design of the included adventure.

Honestly? I haven't loved any Paizo adventure that I have read or played. To my tastes they are usually too linear/railroady, and too stacked with constant combats. I really like the tactical combat in PF2e, but, that's not all I want to be doing! And I don't want RPGs to feel like a video game where all creatures outside the safe zone are XP bags that attack on sight.

Anyway, the beginner adventure has this problem (of mine) too, it is a hefty dungeon slog crawl with 19 rooms, linear except for some "optional" stuff (a.k.a. content that the players might miss...) of which a whooping 11 locations are expected, not to say mandated by the book, to trigger combat encounters. And I get why this adventure in particular is like that, it is structured to teach GMs and players alike the rules, bit by bit, while playing through the scenario. In fact, it is really pedagogical, and I'm sure a new GM could sit down and just run the adventure from the page without pre-reading it first (although I'd still recommend reading the whole thing beforehand).

But as a "tutorial mission" for new GMs and players, I think it could have been shorter and still get across most of the stuff it wants to teach. I guess it wants to level the characters up during the adventure, to teach character advancement, so that's why it needs to be of a certain length and packed with monsters to kill for XP.

So altogether, it's fine. It's a good teaching tool for new GMs, and experienced (or bold) GMs can remix what they find lacking. I just hope new players and GMs don't get put off by the grindy nature of the scenario.… (meer)