The NPC gallery from the legacy GMG wasn’t reprinted in GMC. No more generic “bandit” “mad scientist”, “assassin”, “priest”, “necromancer”, “gang leader”
These had a lot of value for telling the sort of stories I like to tell in my games, which are less about killing unequivocally evil “monsters” and more about regular people who may be morally complex and provoke more interaction from the players.
I’m well aware one can simply use legacy content, but that ignores that some of these had mechanics that have been revised in the remaster, and they were an important part of the toolkit provided to GMs in the GMG. Right now, the GM Core feels very lacking in terms of providing support for creating a cast of NPCs in adventures. There’s literally a half a page dedicated to NPCs and it basically just says “make 'em up”. Saying “You can use legacy content” is not a valid point when these new books are supposed to serve as a foundation for the system standing on their own.
Additionally, the official Paizo FoundryVTT bestiary portraits module, which I paid good money for, appears to have removed the portraits for these generic NPCs when the remaster content was added to the system. The realization of that was actually the thing that prompted this post. I was setting up an encounter for my players and was confused as to why the “Antipaladin” art was this instead of this. I am almost certain that before the remaster it used the art from the GMG for those tokens.
“NPC Core” was announced at PaizoCon as a core rulebook coming out in 2025. Not a lot of description yet, but I’d assume it would be an expanded version of what came with the original GMG.
Yeah, GM Core was a downgrade from the GMG, dropping NPCs and some variant rules (such as stamina). The NPC Core book will be great, I’m sure, but it doesn’t make up for the fact that that some of that content was available for the price of the GMG.
It’s hard for me to be too upset, though, when AoN and pf2easy have that content. But it is still pretty disappointing.
That said, having tokens you paid for revoked is a complete and total outrage.
Yikes! I’d be pretty ticked too if I paid for something that ended up removing content I already had. I’m still muddling through bringing my game from DnD5e to PF2e so I might be mistaken but you might try to re add the removed artwork by using the PDFtoFoundry module with your watermarked copy of the GMG. Otherwise I’d report it as a bug to Paizo and see if this is what is intended to happen.
The PDF module won’t help since the module I’m referring to isn’t an adventure module. It is a 1st party pack of token and portrait images for actors imported from the bestiary. It’s possible it’s a bug though.
In any case, while that was the thing that made me notice this issue, I still think the bigger issue is that there are now no remaster-compliant standard statblocks for humanoid NPCs that are nonspecific to ancestry or faction.
The remaster is ostensibly meant to be a new baseline for the system. But if any version of DnD released without statblocks for stuff like bandit, assassin, and cultist, people would be justified in complaining that there’s some fairly important support missing for creating adventures.
Once again I could very well be mistaken but the last time I was monkeying with Foundry trying to import Abomination Vaults I saw the option to add Bestiary and GMG PDFs and when I did it I’m pretty sure it created the NPC and monster actors for me. Or added an archived or zipped version I could pull from maybe?I forget what those zipped folders are actually called, I’m still not great at working Foundry.
That does seem like a big issue and I agree that the remaster should include these basic stat blocks. If you do post this feedback to Paizo on their forums or discord or something please let me know. I’ll swing by and say “Yeah, that guy brings up some good points!” Or something lol
I will look into if there’s something that can be done with the PDF module. If not I’ll post to the forums. Another user mentioned the reason these statblocks have been removed is actually because Paizo is planning on releasing an NPC Core book next year. That does calm my more system-related concerns.
BTW, are you planning on running AV? I have been running it for the past year and my players just finished the first book of the adventure.
Is it out yet? I thought it was coming August 1st?
Been waiting for pathfinder nexus to update since as I understand it they’re kind of the official online pathfinder wiki (at least according to their FAQ)
