Villains are at the heart of every great adventure—scheming, plotting, and causing mayhem—but creating a convincing and detailed group of antagonists is no easy task. Pathfinder RPG Villain Codex serves up 20 groups of vile miscreants waiting to menace your player characters and foil their every plan. Inside this time-saving tome, you will find a wide variety of foes, from a scheming regal court to a sinister doomsday cult, ready to challenge characters of any level. These villains come equipped with a host of new rules elements to give them the edge against players and fit into nearly any campaign!
Villain Codex is an essential addition to the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. This imaginative tabletop game builds on more than 15 years of system development and an open playtest featuring more than 50,000 gamers to create a cutting-edge RPG experience that brings the all-time best-selling set of fantasy rules into a new era.
Pathfinder RPG Villain Codex includes:
- Complete sections for 20 villainous organizations, including a power- hungry arcane society, a greedy merchant caravan, a fleet of scandalous pirates, a creepy secret society, and a wily thieves’ guild. Trade blows with the serpentfolk-worshiping monks of Fang Monastery, match wits with the sly bandits of the Merry Outlaws, or defend civilization from the wild druids of Nature’s Scourge! - Information on each organization’s history and structure, along with plot hooks to get the players interested in confronting the group. - New rules in each villain section, including feats, spells, and magic items. - A wide variety of new stat blocks for all organization members, using each villain section’s new rules. - Premade encounter groups, allowing Game Masters to quickly make use of the villains in every section. ... And much, much more!
If you're looking for some organizations to throw into your Pathfinder campaign, the Villain Codex has you covered.
Weaknesses are that it has no names. I get maximizing the 'generic' nature of it but there are so many default bits added already that having actual names would save the reader a lot of trouble.
Adding a 'suggested' place/local in the Pathfinder default campaign setting would've also been nice.
Their villains tend to cap out in the teens in terms of maximum power level.
Mind you that's not necessarily a bad thing. While I myself am among those who enjoy seeing how the rules can be twisted/bent to make some really powerful characters, most campaigns probably don't get that high in level.
Some fantastic art in the book and it's well worth it if you're a fan of fantasy art, solid stuff as common in Paizo products.
Basic Premise: A rogues' gallery of bad guys to use in Pathfinder.
This is a very useful book for those GMs needing quick, ready-to-use stat blocks for villains in their games. There are full organizations here and levels of characters, fleshed out and ready to go. There are plot hooks and encounters. Highly useful stuff here.