You can nab Owlcat’s first Pathfinder CRPG for $45 or $4 right now, depending on whether you want a library’s worth of TTRPG books too
Good news for fans of amassing huge numbers of PDFs they’ll never read on an external hard drive (me): Humble Bundle has a load more to sell you at a relatively negotiable price. The Pathfinder Kingmaker Bundle contains 53—count ’em—separate bits of Pathfinder Kingmaker TTRPG stuff, mostly tabletop corebooks, sourcebooks, maps and knick-knacks, but also Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Owlcat’s first CRPG take on the setting from 2018.
As ever with Humble Bundles, what you get is down to what you pay. Spend $45 (£36) and you’ll get the full 53-item set, meaning a bunch of Pathfinder Kingmaker PDFs, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and a physical Pathfinder Kingmaker Bestiary hardback book. For $35 (£28) you get the same stuff minus the physical book. $30 (£24) nets you the ebooks without the game, while the $15 (£12) and $5 (£4) tiers net you a diminishing number of ebooks.
Whether or not it’s worth it is dependent entirely on how much use you’ll get out of many volumes of Pathfinder books. Grabbing the bundle just for Kingmaker would be daft: the game’s been on sale for prices as low as $3 in the past, and is actually currently available for a paltry $4 on IndieGala if it’s all you’re looking for.
But if you’re a pen ‘n’ paper sicko, it could be well worth it. Pathfinder Kingmaker—the TTRPG, I mean—is all about players building a kingdom from scratch, and dealing with all the administrative and political headaches that inevitably causes.
As for the game, well, back when we took a look at it at launch, Andy Kelly wasn’t wowed by the game in his Pathfinder: Kingmaker review, and it’s definitely been overshadowed by its sequel, Wrath of the Righteous. But it underwent a comeback over the next few years, adding in stuff like a turn-based mode and free DLC. Quoth our own Jody Macgregor in 2021: “Replaying Kingmaker today is quite a different experience than it was in 2018.
“Turn-based combat means area-of-effect spells actually hit the enemies you want, and your characters don’t charge into battle directly over traps that have already been discovered. It’s easier to manage your kingdom thanks to crisis points that can be spent to improve the odds of dealing with disasters, while the build points you need for construction and research projects can be bought right there in the kingdom management menu rather than by exiting it, then physically leaving your throne room to find the one merchant in your settlement who sells them.” Sounds a lot less tedious to me.
