Lorefinder

Silver Award Winner for Best Rules in the 2012 ENnie awards

Where Mystery Meets Adventure

Lorefinder puts you in the role of a brave adventurer in search of forbidden secrets and lost treasures. Uncover strange cults, solve baffling murders, or delve into the deepest dungeons and face their denizens - and, if you are both clever and lucky, return to tell the tale. Your fate is in your hands!

Lorefinder merges the action-oriented fantasy rules of The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game with the streamlined investigative focus of Robin D Law's GUMSHOE (The Esoterrorists, Trail of Cthulhu, Ashen Stars). Bad luck might get you killed, but it won't stop you finding the information you need to move ahead.

For GMs, there are concise, well-honed guidelines on creating mysteries for The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

The Lorefinder supplement contains:

• An adaptation of the GUMSHOE investigative rules for fantasy adventuring
• Character creation and conversion guidelines for use with Pathfinder
• Drives to bring you into the heart of the adventure
• New skills, spells and feats
• Guides for designing mysteries and campaigns
• At Slaughter Field, a sample Lorefinder scenario

Lorefinder will forever change the way you run The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

Short Version: "Lorefinder adds Pelgrane Press' Gumshoe investigation rules onto Paizo's Pathfinder system. Over 40 pages long, Lorefinder thoroughly covers Races, Classes, Spells, and Skills in the Lorefinder system, which provides a framework for your players to perform investigations without dice rolls. It's a light system, and doesn't add much weight to the underlying Pathfinder system, but - after reading Lorefinder - I find it preferable to the default system." (Full Review Here)

Read an interview with Gareth here.

Do I recommend the book? Yes, absolutely! The brief book provides an excellent paradigm for regulating information in a fantasy RPG. Even if you follow that paradigm within the core Pathfinder rules (with skill checks), GUMSHOE is an excellent model and will enrich your game. The advice on divinations and 'clues' in combat are also excellent.

Samples:

Investigative Skills are the core of GUMSHOE. These are the tools and techniques your characters use to uncover the clues you need to complete the adventure. Investigative Skills are broken into three categories - Cunning, Interpersonal and Lore. The chief purpose of these categories is to help the GM find appropriate skills quickly when creating an adventure or when improvising a scene.

Some Investigative skills, like Search, will be used in almost every adventure. Others are called upon less frequently. When creating your character, strike a balance between the skills you rely on regularly and those that are only used occasionally, but are vitally needed when they are called on.

Where a skill from the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (like Bluff) has become an Investigative Skill, notes are given on how to use the skill in its new form outside of investigation.

Investigative Skills: Every character gets a number of Investigative Build Points to buy Investigative Skills. You'll also get a small number of bonus Investigative Skills from your race and certain class abilities.

Boosts: Each character class description lists Investigative Skills that are eligible for Boosts. Choose one of these skills, which is now Boosted. Boosts represent mastery of a particular investigative skill. You must have at least 1 point in a skill to Boost that skill.

Drives: Every GUMSHOE character has a Drive that spurs him to investigate mysteries.

New Feats: A small number of GUMSHOE-specific feats are listed along with conversions of some existing feats to the GUMSHOE system.

49 pages, including specially designed character sheet, investigator matrix, adventure worksheet, OGL, table of contents, and covers.

About this Product

• Author: Gareth Hanrahan
• Art & Layout: Chris Hüth
• Cartography: Ralf Schemmann