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The Harnish
Germany
Duisburg
NRW
Cult of The Harnish Leader
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The Kingmaker Player's Guide is, as the title suggests, the background player information for the Kingmaker Adventure Path. It is available as a free pdf download from Paizo.
The Physical Details
The pdf is a full-color, 16-page book formatted for letter-sized paper. Its layout, like most Pathfinder products, is quite excellent: attractive, yet easy to read, both on screen and printed out. The only criticism here is that the full-color layout makes the item potentially expensive to print-out, especially in full color. However, it's hard to quibble over that considering the rarity of full-colored free pdf products.
Kingmaker is Paizo first attempt at creating a much more open, "sandbox" type of adventure path: While there is still an underlying story, the encounters in each adventure module aren't necessarily laid out in a linear (some would say railroad-like) manner and a lot of time is spent just exploring the environment.
The Contents
So what's inside? The product opens up with a half-page background about the area in which Kingmaker will be set, specifically the region known as the Stolen Lands in the River Kingdoms area of Pathfinder's Golarion setting. It then moves on to the meat of the book which is a section on how to create PCs well matched for the coming adventure path. The main purpose of the section, and the Player's Guide as a whole, is to provide the background and context for creating characters, and ultimately a party, that will fit right in to the trials that will face them.
That doesn't mean the adventure path is highly restrictive in the types of characters a group can play. In fact, Paizo's gone out of its way to show how all the core 3.5/PFRPG races and classes can be used. Instead it focuses on providing details that are useful for understanding the context in which each of an adventurer of a particular class or race would find themselves involved in the adventure, as well as provide suggestions on the skills, patron deities, etc. for players to work with.
The book finishes up with some optional Kingmaker specific campaign traits for players to choose from - these are something akin to backgrounds specific to the adventure path (but not too specific or integral) that can hook players in quickly.
Aside from the text, the book also includes the various forms the players will use in utilizing some of the new rules and subsystems related to exploring, settling, and ruling a small kingdom that are going to be integral to the adventure path. Though no real info is provided about these rules, you do get a "Kingdom Sheet" which is sort of a character sheet for the kingdom, along with a sheet of hex paper, images of various buildings (e.g., a shrine, smith, castle), and a grid to place them on in laying out settlements. How all of this will be used is still a mystery, they certainly look interesting.
Verdict
It's hard to be too judgmental about a free pdf product, especially one which has so high quality production values. The contents certainly provide a hint that the Kingmaker adventure path will be very unusual and potentially very cool. While the path is obviously designed for the Pathfinder RPG (& 3.5 by pedigree), it could be of interest to anyone who's willing to do some conversion work since much of the real value in the product is in the fluff and maps rather than the crunchy, mechanical bits.
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