At time of writing Humble Bundle has another Pathfinder 1e bundle this time on Monster Lore which will make the third Pathfinder bundle I have sprung for. This is pure book goblinism; I now have a digital drive at Paizo stuffed with unread Pathfinder PDFs and the challenge of figuring out what I even have.
A brief sidebar to call out Paizos laser-accurate hits on my need to gather these books for a system I do not even play. The books have always been attractive and there is something rawly appealing about the old 1e flat colour spines with Bestiary 4 - the sheer lack of embarassment about 'this is the fourth time we have fed you more monsters. Have more monsters, nom nom nom'. The sheer size and number of times I have moved blocked just picking the books up to have - I need a better weight ratio - but if I had been static somewhere for the past decade? I would have yards of Pathfinder. So - recognising there is good stuff in here, how to get a grip? Generally, there are so many bundles - on Humble Bundle, Bundle of Holding, Driverthrurpg, DMsguild, Itch.io how does someone keep on top of all the content in their own posession?
The same problem happened with the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality on itch.io - but there it was so much stuff being thrown in as the time ran down that everyone who got it had the same problem - so much stuff it was hard to know what you even had, let alone try to get a grip on the content. In the case of that bundle someone built a site to help people get to grips with what they had.
What I need is some way to scrape ratings for all of these books, tag the description for each of them and then work through what I have. I think working my way through RPGGeek is probably the way to go - I will brute force myself a comparison Excel faster than I will figure out a way to be more clever about it.
*crunch crunch crunch* 3-4 hours later of spreadsheet fiddling about...
Ranking everything in the haul top to bottom by type shows an interesting pattern. Even crushing the graph like this to avoid the post being a yard long still shows the colour banding. Here we see that with a bit of intermixing, in general people think the setting books are best, then the core rules, then the player companions, then the chronicles. Numbers of reviewers varied widely, with most ratings on the core books which is understandable.
So as a first pass, this will do for picking what should be the best of the haul I picked. Top 10 according to this are:
Distant Realms
Druma, Profit and Prophecy
Nidal, Land of Shadows
Belkzen, Hold of the Orc Hordes
Undead Unleashed
Andoran, Birthplace of Freedom
Distant Shores
Occult Realms
Cheliax, The Infernal Empire
Hell Unleashed
Amusingly the things I pulled from the stack at random, going on name or general subject matter are shotgun scattered across that this distribution stack. So my subjective guesses are litterally no better than a chicken working its way down a list. Good to know.
I am also amused to see that my intention of skimming through all these books to skim off and steal the best ideas for my home game is more or less also being discussed on False Machine just now. Perhaps I should take that lead and head straight to the bestiaries? At the very least, I feel comfort that my hoarding of old tomes going 'one day this will be useful' is not a unique affliction.
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