The Treehouse is thrilled to be joining the ranks of many gaming stores and groups worldwide by entering into the Pathfinder Society! Read on more to find out more about this roleplaying campaign on an epic scale…
Starting October 13th, The Treehouse board game cafe is thrilled to join the ranks of many gaming stores and groups worldwide by entering into the Pathfinder Society! This enormous roleplaying game campaign is played by thousands of adventurers around the world, and gives players the chance to grow and develop their own character without committing to more sessions than they want. You don’t even need to create a character in advance if you don’t want to - pre-generated characters are always available to jump right in and play!
To help potential players orient themselves in this brave new world of adventure, read on for an introduction to Pathfinder Society.
The Pathfinder RPG
Pathfinder is a roleplaying game first published in 2009. It’s directly influenced by Dungeons & Dragons, the original fantasy roleplaying game, and if you’ve played any D&D then Pathfinder will look very familiar to you. I’ve written separately about the mechanical differences between the games here, so if you want to dig into the mechanics feel free to take a look!
Beyond the nitty-gritty, a session of Pathfinder looks a lot like a session of D&D. Players take on the roles of heroes in a fantasy realm: exploring the world, taking on quests, defeating monsters, and reaping the rewards. In some circles, Pathfinder has a reputation as a more complex D&D, perhaps to the point of inaccessibility. While that was certainly true for Pathfinder’s first edition, the second edition (released in 2019) offers a vastly streamlined experience without sacrificing the wealth of character options available. I genuinely think that anyone capable of learning D&D (in other words, everyone) can learn how to play Pathfinder!
The Lore, The Merrier
Something that really excites me about Pathfinder is the sheer tonnage of setting information available. The home setting for Pathfinder is the world of Golarion, a setting that has been slowly built up over the last decade and a half of game design to encompass dozens of countries and hundreds of diverse settlements.
In this campaign specifically, players are agents of the Pathfinder Society, a group of individuals empowered to explore the distant lands of the world, report on what they find, and cooperate to ensure the tenets of good are upheld. With the resources of the Pathfinder Society behind you you can be whisked to any number of far-away locations, so every session offers something totally new.
High Society
What makes Pathfinder Society so exciting is not just the chance to explore a fantasy world, but the structure of the games themselves. Unlike a normally roleplaying campaign, where you’re expected to show up regularly to experience every beat of the story, Pathfinder Society is a totally commitment-free experience.
Every session is a standalone adventure, but put together they begin to point towards a larger metaplot. If you want to just attend once to try it out, you can do that! But if you start to attend multiple sessions, whether consecutively or with gaps in between, you’ll be able to level up your character and acquire exclusive treasures! You might play with new players every single time or find new friends to battle by your side through multiple sessions.
I feel like this flexibility makes it a great fit for Treehouse Worlds. We’ve always thought of ourselves as a way to build up community through RPGs, and through regular Pathfinder sessions we’re hoping to do just that.
Let The Adventure Begin!
If you’re as excited by the idea of Pathfinder Society as I am, then we can’t wait to see you for our first sessions in October! If you already know your stuff, you can feel free to build a character beforehand - I recommend skimming through the Guide to Organised Play to see what is and isn’t accessible to your character.
If you’d like a little bit more of a helping hand, we’ll be running a free character creation session on Thursday 6th October. You can attend this session whether you’re planning to play in Pathfinder Society or not - just as with the rest of the Society, there’s no prior commitment required. I’ll be taking you through the basics of the system in a chilled environment alongside your fellow players, and we’ll have rulebooks on hand to help you create characters. Find out more information here!
Tickets for our sessions go on sale two weeks before the event date, so keep an eye out on our events calendar to get your seat at the table. And, as ever, you can get in contact with me and the other Treehouse Worlds GMS (as well as your fellow Pathfinders) on the Treehouse Worlds Discord server, where we’ve created a special channel for Pathfinder discussion.
Pathfinder Society is a brilliant bold new chapter in the Treehouse Worlds story, and we’re hoping you’re just as excited to see it come to fruition!
