Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Villain Codex

As a preface, I'm a pretty avid RPG player. I DM Pathfinder, and play in several other weekly RPGs. I'm a big fan of 'lazy DM'ing' options - premade encounters, premade cities, things that can easily be dropped into a sandbox campaign as needed, so I can avoid spending a week creating a city, organization, etc. This is one of my favorite books for Pathfinder - and I own a lot of them. It's effectively a collection of 'generic badguy organizations', and their various members and stat-sheets. They provide pre-made encounters for each organization, each of different difficulties so you can drop them into a campaign as needed. Each organization also has some nice flavor/fluff ideas, story hook concepts, but is all overall 'generic' in the sense that you can slap whatever name/title you want on the group and members, and drop them right into your setting. Additionally many of the organizations have new feats, class archetypes, etc, for use within that organization - however the book specifically mentions potentially using these as a reward, should PC's end up being buddy-buddy with the organization, which I find pretty cool. There's also a few new magic items which is always welcome. Totally worth the purchase if you DM

Mostly higher CR, but still really good pre-built villains and paired with the NPC codex you will have plenty of options for a small group of enemies to throw at your players or a beefy boss encounter to challenge them.

This book is full of interesting baddies to put a story together in no time flat.

Good layout, solid art, and lots of fun NPCs to throw at your players.

Good stuff. Some items (class abilities, feats, spells, items) that can be used by PCs, even good PCs, but most items are aimed towards villain-type characters. Good villain builds, seems likely that between this book, the Gamemastery Guide, and the Monster Codex, you could find at least 75% of the specific builds you'd need for a standard campaign, thus simplifying preparation for a GM.

It delivered what it promises and was also a good read. If you want to know how some classic fairy tale/Disney villains would work in a d20 system, like the queen from Snow White or Jaffar from Aladdin, or how to populate an evil organization so that it's interesting and diverse than this book is perfect.

This is a book loaded with enemy factions, vague yet detailed information about each guild, alliance or cult as well as the most important thing; statblocks for faction members. I am in favor of anything that promotes "Easy GM-ing" and this book does that in spades, even including special options unique to each faction to really make them feel alive!

Great stats for more humanoid enemies and more detailed mobs.

This is the product NPC Codex should have been. Only thing it could *REALLY* use are directions for leveling up/down the NPCs, with snapshots at several levels. That would decrease the variety of NPCs in the book, but increase the usability of the NPCs contained within. But all in all, this is a good NPC "Bestiary" that I intend to draw from for quick NPC stats or to simplify encounter creation or as a starting point for preparing my own PCs.

El libro está genial, pero el paquete me ha llegado pobremente empaquetado, causando deterioros en los bordes.

Réception à terme, produit impeccable

This book is not the best put out by Paizo as far as utility goes but it’s also far from the worst (I'm looking at you horror adventures). To start with this book is essentially really a DM only book. The format is near identical to the Monster codex which is nice because it’s a familiar format. There are some new magic items and spells and feats and so on but ultimately they are of little use to players and especially little use to good aligned player character. The book is broken up into factions the first page of each faction tells you basically their backstory and evil mo. Then there are about 5-7 pages of “villains” who are part of this faction there are 2 per page and this is sort of where my issue with the book comes in. These NPC villains have no life in them, they have no flavor text about the villain and what makes them tick. This has come up with me a few times in the past especially with bestiary 5. I like the flavor text because it gets the imagination going and helps with coming up with some creative stories or encounters. My example is the Wyrwood in bestiary 4. The description of that monster alone is enough to set the mind racing with ideas for entire campaigns, societies, villains and heroes all from a description that is 2 short paragraphs. This is just lifeless stats over pages and while they are fine for what they are it over all takes away from the book as a whole to me. Also each entry does not have its own image to go along with it. I hope that they remedy this with the pawn set which is supposed to be coming out but I will be making sure I look out for a review on that before purchase I can promise that. I will say that some of the evil organizations are very interesting and things that really you could build entire adventures around and there are handy adventure hooks in the book as well to this effect. Finally at the back of the book are about 2 dozen more organizations with small paragraph descriptions of how they function just to give you some more food for thought which I did appreciate. The art that is present in the book as always is beautiful and that is one of the best things about the pathfinder books. They have the best art of any RPG out there.

NPCs in pathfinder are hard to make. This book comes full of them. A lot of the spells and feats require look up in their own books though, and that slows down play considerably/increases my overall prep time.