Best pathfinder core rule books advice for Fantasy Grounds for bespoke adventures and

For an absolute Pathfinder/FG Newbie who then wishes to become advanced, what are the best pathfinder 1e core rule books advice for Fantasy Grounds for creating a) bespoke adventures and b) to increase options in the Adventure Paths in the shop ??

I think at the outset it's probably a good idea to buy the Pathfinder (1e) corebook, Bestiary 1 and maybe the Gamemastery Guide (not sure about that one) and start with those but following on from that I'm not quite sure what to buy considering a) and b) above.

For creating homebrew adventures (a) above), would purchasing say the Ultimate Equipment Guide be a good buy ? Fantasy Grounds seems to have this excellent drag and drop facility I think, whereby equipment, spells, character skills / feats can be dragged and dropped onto the map and character sheets. I am not
so interested in buying RULE books from the Fantasy Grounds shop which have a high level of 'fluff' content, I like stuff which I can pick and choose and drag and drop to incorporate into a game. Which books would be good for a) but for more advanced play ? (for example how would me buying the Ultimate Combat book, allow me to incorporate siege weapons and mass battles onto the map ? does it have that sort of functionality ?).

Regarding b) above which books would be best to buy from the FG store to spice up the options (say equipment and spells) for the Adventure Paths, starting with the first ones say Rise of the Runelords, then Curse of The Crimson Throne ?



thanks for any advice and opinions on a) and b) above.

I've never heard "bespoke" used outside speaking of custom-tailored clothing, so hey, good on you! :)

For years and years before Paizo signed on with FG, all the GMs and community developers had to build their own content. Anything distributed on the forums (and there's a TON of them here) had to be OGL-compliant obviously. All those are still available and they can certainly save you time and money while you're learning the ropes with Fantasy Grounds (welcome, by the way!).

You mentioned drag/drop and automation. So, currently Savage Worlds, 2E, and 5E are the most scripted rulesets that feature the most fancy toys and automation. The PFRPG ruleset is a little older, obviously based off the 3.5E ruleset, so it has less scripting to it (though some community extensions add some, so again, go through the forums for stuff!) so you won't get like siege weapons or mass battle automation. (Neither does 5E as far as I'm aware?) But all the drag/drop stuff works as expected for making characters, running combats, and all the stuff you'll be doing on pretty much every session. Aside from Savage Worlds, the PFRPG ruleset is probably the one I have the most playtime with (Pathfinder Society) and it was perfectly fine before Paizo licensed, and the official content is even better but not something you need to blow your wallet on when there is so much OGL DLC right here in the forum to use for free. (Which is not to say totally skip retail DLC. As one of the Paizo-approved DLC Developers, I would be remiss if I didn't say that we all very much appreciate all the customers who purchase our work to support SmiteWorks and toss a few extra cents our way for the time it takes to make this stuff.)

Now, as for creating homebrew (or "bespoke") adventures... yeah, that's pretty much the one time where having some sort of bestiary (either retail or OGL) is really handy, otherwise you're building each monster and NPC yourself. All the adventure DLC (for every ruleset) in the store all ship with the monsters, NPC, their token graphics, combat encounters, treasure, etc. already built and ready to play so you never need a Bestiary/Monster Manual/etc. There's at least one OGL bestiary module in the forum. The official ones obviously come with the official token artwork so that's always nice and saves you the time having to find images to make tokens from yourself when you could be creating your actual adventure content instead. But that's up to you. As I stated at the beginning, we did it the OGL way for a long time before Paizo signed on.

thanks for that very helpful