Today Paizo released a free supplement to their Pathfinder Beginner Box product called Beginner Box Transitions. This PDF release is designed to help a player that entered the Pathfinder system through the Beginner Box to transition beyond 5^th level and into the Core Rulebook.

Readers of The Iron Tavern know I have posted a fair number of articles around the Beginner Box. While I have played Pathfinder with my son in the past, the Beginner Box was the set that allowed me to hand him a set of books and he was able to read them himself and learn to play and GM his own games. Even many months later, my son still can be found reading his Beginner Box rule books, creating characters and designing encounters. I was certainly curious to see what this Beginner Box Transitions PDF was all about.

The artistic quality of the PDF is excellent as one has come to expect from Paizo products. The PDF does include an index at the end to help find certain rules quickly. I was disappointed to see that there was not a bookmarked table of contents. Those can be very handy when looking to jump to a certain section of a PDF. Not a major issue, but it would be nice to see a Bookmarked table of contents, maybe in a future update.

The PDF includes 9 chapters covering a myriad of topics from new rules to know when moving to the core rulebook, reading stat block entries from the core rules and bestiary, adventure conversions, leveling your character, and more.

The PDF handles all of this in a very clear and easy to follow manner. New rules are covered in small sub-sections, graphics are used to help dissect spell and monster stat blocks. They really strive to make the transition as easy as possible.

The PDF includes a conversion guide for Master of the Fallen Fortress. Using those steps a reader can get a good feel on how to convert many other modules in the Pathfinder Module line. The PDF includes a list and short summary of several eligible modules.

There is a lot of information in this free download from Paizo to make a person’s transition from the Beginner Box to the Core Rules as painless as possible. My post here is based on a quick read (it has only been out for a few hours), but it looks like an excellent free product to transition those Beginner Box players into the full set of rules. Well done Paizo!

Iron Tavern readers have certainly noticed I have written about the Pathfinder Beginner Box a fair amount. Everything from Beginner Box Anticipation, Hero Lab for the Beginner Box, mentions in weekly reviews and just earlier this week an actual play account of playing the Beginner Box. All of this has led to a final post about the Beginner Box, my eight year old son, whom we will call X, GMing his own adventure.

X has been studying the books in the Beginner Box since he received it in December. He will ask the occasional question out of the blue “What is DR?”, “Tell me more about alignments”, “Dad, why don’t black dragons deal acid damages with their bite too?” and several more over the past weeks.

A little over a week ago he started mentioning that he wanted to try to run an adventure. I told him we could take a week off our normal weekend game and he could run what he had come up with. I showed him how the creatures had challenge ratings and gave him a rough idea of how he could use those to gauge semi-appropriate encounters. He picked up on the concept and ran with it.

So this past weekend he announced he was ready to run his adventure. I built up a quick Dwarven Barbarian and advanced him to second level. His younger sister broke out her 2^nd level cleric and we took along Merisiel as a pre-gen. While I put the finishing touches on my character he took care of rolling out my battle mat, getting the wet erase markers ready and picking out his pawns he would need for the adventure.

He started us off in Sandpoint with the mayor summoning us for some assistance. Apparently various weapons and minor valuables had been taken from people’s homes over the course of the past five nights. The mayor requested our help with investigating and tracking down who was responsible for these thefts. We did some dialoging with the mayor and then headed off through town to check out the most recent house that had been burgled.

We approached cautiously and observed the house for a bit to make sure it was not being watched. Then we approached and searched around and found tracks. The tracks were not human tracks he said and after a knowledge nature check we were able to determine they were lizard, web footed like tracks. We also found some scratch marks on the door from some sort of clawed hand.

We then talked to the owners of the house and asked to see the locations where things had been taken from. X did a pretty good job of playing this out and seemed to pick right up with responding to the questioning.

Soon we found ourselves heading out of town and towards the swamps. We traveled for a bit and found a roguish looking individual whom we spoke with. We dialoged a bit with him and learned of some lizard, frog like creatures off the main trail in the woods. Sounding like someone we might be interested in we headed off that way.

We traipsed through the woods a bit and came across an enormous tree where we encountered a few goblins, several of which tried to sneak up on us after we had already engaged the first few.

With those goblins dispatched we found a hole that seemed to lead into an area near the tree roots. My dwarven barbarian promptly went in and we encountered several giant centipedes. The fight was a bit on the tough side with Merisiel getting poisoned multiple times, but we were victorious.

Unusually enough we found two boggards who had been prisoner beneath these tree roots. We quickly realized their feet could have made the prints we found in town. With information from the two we found we plunged further into the woods.

We met a trio of people that we thought could possibly be bandits but it never came to blows, so we simply used information from them to further close in on the boggard camp. As we headed that way we did encounter an abandoned building of sorts which we checked for more clues, but found little else than a series of traps!

With that we reached the final encounter. Up until this point all of the encounters had been fairly balanced. It seems X is a chip off the old block and is a firm believer in tough final encounters. Turns out these six boggards had a boss. Their boss just happened to be a young black dragon!

We fought and we fought hard, but in the end the party fell one by one, finally losing our cleric which soon led to my barbarian falling in battle as well. We actually managed to take the dragon down, but the remaining boggards made easy work of a bruised and battered party at that point. I think this encounter worked out to the ballpark of a CR7/CR8 encounter. Just a tad much for us!

All in all X did a great job running this adventure. Frankly, given the number of mock battles he likes to play through on his own, I expected it would be one encounter of random monster after another. He surprised me with opening with an investigative scenario and handling the investigation questions pretty well!

From there he dropped in some roleplaying encounters on the road (ideas he said he picked up from the Game Master’s Guide) before reaching our first actual combat encounter. He chose interesting terrain for that encounter and the dug out opening under the tree’s roots was a nice touch. His dropping some boggard prisoners in there was a great link to the actual enemy who had been causing the town’s problems.

The final encounter was a little overwhelming, which I chalk up to inexperience. We’ve all been there I think where an encounter turned out a little tougher than originally intended. The fact the boggards had a big boss orchestrating the whole thing was great though!

To me this really helps show how awesome the Pathfinder Beginner Box is. It enabled an eight year old boy with an interest in the game to learn the rules to the degree of actually being able to run a session himself. He did this with only a few questions of me as he studied the rulebooks and pieced it all together himself. I fully consider the Pathfinder Beginner Box a success in bringing the game to people new to the hobby – both young and old.