I’ve recently started running a Pathfinder 2e edition game for my formerly 5e friend group—and while I’m not abandoning D&D in its entirety, I’ve been super impressed with the system so far.
One blessing to my wallet is how much of it you get for basically free—Archives of Nethys is an officially-supported hub that has all of the player content, creatures, and so on from all sources. It feels like piracy from a sketchy wiki—but it’s not, Paizo’s 100% okay with it.
It’s not in lockstep with official content, but it’s bountiful enough that I’ve not minded one bit. Conversely, its Foundry Virtual Tabletop (VTT) integration just… gives you everything bar the adventures themselves.
Basically, Paizo makes most of its money through official adventure paths, which, as a DM who runs exclusively homebrew, makes me feel like I’ve been robbing Paizo, somehow. Well, great news: There’s now a way for me to feel like even more of a cheapskate, as this absurdly-priced Humble Bundle package is, uh, absurd.
While you can get everything you need to run a homebrew game off those aforementioned free sources, I would still recommend the books to anyone starting as they lay all the info out in something you can read front-to-back. For $15/£11.30, you can get PDFs of the GameMastery Guide, Bestiary, Beginner Box, GM Screen, Advanced Player Guide and Core Rulebook—as well as a bunch of printable mats, character sheets, and some of those aforementioned Adventure Paths and Scenarios to run.
If you want the full package, which is $60/£48, you’re getting over $800/£600’s worth of books for less than a tenth of the price they’d usually be—as well as some Foundry VTT modules (which are included from the price point of $35/£26.50 and up). And you’re technically donating to charity while you’re doing it, with a portion of the proceeds going to TakeThis, whose mission is to “decrease the stigma, and increase the support for mental health in the game enthusiast community and inside the game industry.”
The only caveat I should mention is that these rulebooks aren’t Paizo’s remastered 2e ruleset—which has made some changes to important rules terms, and is, bit by bit, updating the game’s core classes.
All those adventure paths are still compatible, however and, as I mentioned, most of those remastered rules are going to become free on Archives of Nethys eventually anyway. If you’re using Foundry Virtual Tabletop, a lot of them are already there—so if you’re buying this bundle for the VTT modules (or converting the PDFs into Foundry yourself) this isn’t even a problem.