NPC Core is Paizo’s latest rulebook for Pathfinder, offering over 250 NPC stat blocks to help GMs populate their world with tons of characters without having to build them from scratch. The book is structured for ease of use, allowing GMs to quickly drop NPCs into any game and modify them as needed with level adjustments, ancestry swaps, and thematic variations. It releases on March 5, 2025, with a $69.99 price tag, which is on the higher end of Pathfinder books. However, with its hardcover format and almost 240 pages of content, this is a great buy for the right GM.
More Gameplay, Less Lore? Not Exactly.
At first glance, NPC Core is heavily mechanics-focused, prioritizing stat blocks and rules over deep lore. Most NPC entries provide only a sentence or two of description, though a few offer a paragraph. The book also features sidebars that offer additional information categorized through icons, which indicate whether the content is providing lore, mechanical adjustments, location details, connections to other creatures, or treasure rewards. This initially made the book feel like it leaned more toward gameplay rather than storytelling, but that assumption shifted once I reached the Ancestry NPCs section, which delivers a much deeper level of worldbuilding than expected.
NPC Gallery: A GM’s Best Friend
Before reading NPC Core, I assumed it would be a collection of fully fleshed-out characters ready to be dropped into adventures. While this could be useful for some GMs, I wasn’t particularly excited about that idea, since I prefer creating my own NPCs. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this book is much more about stat blocks than pre-written characters. This is exactly what many GMs need. It’s a structured reference that provides immediate, balanced stats without slowing down the game.
The NPC Gallery is especially valuable for homebrew campaigns but can be for Adventure Paths where players frequently go off-script, forcing the GM to create NPCs on the fly. This book ensures that GMs don’t have to scramble to build stats from scratch. The book also provides rules for modifying NPC difficulty, allowing GMs to quickly turn a standard NPC into either a weaker or elite version. There’s even a short guide on handling groups of NPCs in battle, making it easier to manage encounters involving troops or multiple enemies at once. Additionally, scattered throughout the book are random tables, such as one for determining villain motives, which can add an extra layer of depth to these NPCs.
Ancestry NPCs: A Worldbuilding Goldmine
Following the NPC Gallery, NPC Core shifts gears with its Ancestry NPCs chapter, which offers dedicated stat blocks for each ancestry found in Player Core and Player Core 2. This section provides a healthy dose of lore and cultural depth, something that the earlier stat-block-heavy portion of the book does not emphasize. It presents unique NPC stat blocks tailored to each ancestry, alongside sample character names and tables for physical appearances, cultural traits, or mannerisms. This section helps with converting NPCs into different ancestries, allowing a GM to quickly turn a human into someone like a catfolk by swapping out language and giving them night vision.
This portion of the book caters more to GMs who want a buttery smooth narrative-driven experience.
Appendices & Final Thoughts
The final pages of the book are packed with useful GM tools, including creature companions, spells, rules for managing NPC relationships using the Connection subsystem, and a glossary. A large table organizes all NPCs by level, allowing GMs to quickly find an appropriately scaled opponent or ally for their players without having to search through the book manually.
Going into NPC Core, I wasn’t sure how much I would personally need it, but after flipping through it, I’ve realized that it’s one of the most practical GM tools Paizo has released. For those who love homebrewing their own NPC personalities but don’t want to deal with the hassle of creating balanced stat blocks, this is the book. It offers a structured approach that keeps the game running without long pauses.
Is It Worth It?
If you have $70 and a love for making cool NPCs in Pathfinder, it’s totally worth it.
