Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Villain Codex

To get the full value out of The Villain Codex, you need access to Advanced Class Guide, Advanced Player's Guide, Advanced Race Guide, Occult Adventures, Ultimate Combat, Ultimate Equipment, Ultimate Intrigue, and Ultimate Magic. I expect some crossover between source books, but this guide relies on too many additional tomes in a bid to sell more products.The art, design and writing is fine and there are clever story hooks and background info that GMs will find useful, but every npc build I reviewed referenced class abilities, feats, and spells from books outside of the Core books.What I was hoping for was more flexible: a roster of NPCs stat blocs with interesting backstories and personalities that can be dropped into a game on the fly and run with the core books. With more time for prep, they could be customized based the GM's own library and what they allow in their games. In the end, It looked like too much additional work to get these npcs prepped for my use (not to mention needing access to several books to run them at the table), so I returned the Codex to the seller.I should have researched this impulse buy more closely. My bad.

This book is what I have come to expect from Paizo of late. The positives are that it has amazing artwork, and the monsters/opponents are well-built and put into creative groupings.Now the downsides. This book is basically a re-hashing of the NPC codex, but in my opinion it’s less useful. Sure, the villain codex has more “new rules” like spells and gear, which the NPC codex did not have. But this book seems to have fewer stat blocks overall when compared to the NPC codex (look at the appendix). The main problem I have is that the villain “organizations” add an extra layer of structure that makes it harder to customize (I.e. harder to fit these creatures into my campaign). The appendix has some suggestions for mixing the villain organizations up, but I still find this to be antithetical to the goal of “lazy DMing”. I loved how the NPC codex was organized by class and level. So you could find a perfect (or nearly perfect) NPC or bad guy in a matter of minutes. The villain codex, on the other hand, is not organized this way, and the baddies will probably take much more time to incorporate into a game.Lastly, I find this book too chocolate-y, by which I mean that I wanted baddies that are more vanilla. Some recent splat books have added many more character classes since the printing of the NPC codex, and those new character classes are incorporated into this villain codex. An example of the new stuff is the occult classes, and the new style of spell casting that accompanies them. I don’t use occult classes in my game, so any villain in this book that incorporates that material has to be skipped. This again makes it harder for “lazy DMing”. I either have to re-work the NPCs to remove the new material or I have to look elsewhere for an opponent for my players. I recognize that Paizo has to walk a fine line between old and new material. They have to incorporate these new occult classes into their products to please the occult fans and generate interest for that sub-system, all the while keeping the “older” classes relevant to please the purists. This is a very difficult task! I just don’t think that this book strikes that delicate balance. There are too many encounter groups that mix the old and new material. So even if you love new stuff and want to incorporate it into your game, you’ll probably end up juggling five different rulebooks as you try to run a single villain organization encounter.In short, this book is good but not great for the lazy DM.

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

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!

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.

Great stats for more humanoid enemies and more detailed mobs.

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 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.

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.

Pretty good for low to mid level adventures, but the NPCs are not strong enough for high level campaings... I would have love if some of them could be leveled up to 20th level like they were in NPC Codex.

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

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.