Review: Rite Publishing – Adventure Quarterly Issue #1 (Pathfinder)

Adventure Quarterly Issue #1
Adventure Quarterly Issue #1 is an epic fantasy magazine for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game with pieces written by Adam Daigle, Tim Connors, Tim Hitchcock, and Creighton Broadhurst and published by Rite Publishing.
By Aaron T. Huss

Learn more about Adventure Quarterly Issue #1 here
Purchase Adventure Quarterly Issue #1 here

Adventure Quarterly is a new Pathfinder magazine from Rite Publishing with a different mindset than their ongoing Pathways. While not being offered as a free product, it is much more focused and can be considered more as a collection of individual products rather than just a magazine (in other words, it is a magazine-styled release of multiple supplements and modules). With that in mind, Adventure Quarterly Issue #1 contains three adventures and two supplements.

CONTENT

Adventure Quarterly Issue #1 contains 5 different offerings for Pathfinder:

Too Many Cooks is an adventure module for 1st-Level PCs in an investigative style and meant to be placed at the front of or surrounding pieces of a much larger campaign.

The Book of Promises is a location-based adventure module for 5th-Level PCs with a number of hooks for weaving it into a larger campaign.

Soul Siphon is a location-based adventure module for 12th-Level psionic PCs designed to be used with the included pre-generated characters.

Random Tribal Name Generator is an extensive tool-kit to help GMs create a name for their tribe and possibly create the flavor that surrounds that tribal name.

Organization: The Forked Legion is a detailed look at the Forked Legion organization including structure, missions, base of operations, allies and enemies, and how to become a member.

OVERALL

Adventure Quarterly is a great direction to take in terms of offering smaller publications in a single product. It helps reduce the cost for customers and allows them to pick this up in Print-on-Demand (you can’t do POD for products under 40-something pages without it costing too much). This is a great direction for Rite Publishing and really provides a great value to the customer as they don’t have to purchase a bunch of smaller PDFs and pay to have them printed elsewhere or use all their own ink when printing them at home.

RATINGS

Publication Quality: 10 out of 10
Adventure Quarterly Issue #1 is a great offering and a great-looking book. With a combination of content in a magazine style, the layout and formatting are clean, clear, and concise. In addition, along with the PDF purchase, a set of battlemap images are provided to coincide with the scaled-down versions found in the magazine. The stock art chosen matches up extremely well with the content and I love the creature commissioned for the cover and inside.

Mechanics/Storyline: 9 out of 10
The best part of this magazine-style of release is that you get adventures and supplements in a single product. The three adventures have solid storylines with adventure #3 being my favorite and the one I feel has the best plot line. The mechanics provided for the Tribal Name Generator and the incorporation of mechanics for the Forked Legion means a GM can add their own flavor to those adventures using included content, create their own adventures launching off the ones inside, or creating your campaigns using bits and pieces of what’s offered. It’s truly a complete offering for GMs.

Desire to Play/Use: 9 out of 10
The three adventures in Issue #1 do not tie together, nor do they flow from one to another in terms of PC level. In fact, there’s a chance all three are so completely unrelated you wouldn’t be able to run them all in a single campaign. That said, you can certainly use them all in a number of different campaigns or create different hooks throughout your campaign to weave these three adventures into your overarching storyline. The included Tribal Name Generator and Forked Legion means the GM just has that much more material to work with when constructing their own adventures and campaigns, which could be used to tie the three adventures together. I can see a number of different uses for what you find in Issue #1.

Overall: 9 out of 10
I may be slightly biased, but I’m a fan of the magazine-styled release format for smaller, sometimes seemingly unrelated releases. The customer is getting a great deal for their money and the publisher doesn’t have to pay the extra overhead of offering multiple, low-cost publications. Topping this all of is the availability of the Print-on-Demand, another driving factor for this style of product. In my opinion, it’s a definite great buy for Pathfinder GMs, even if you only use 60% of the content.