Pathfinder Tales: Lord of Runes

By: Dave Gross

Narrated by: Steve West

Length: 13 hrs and 1 min

Publisher's summary

The aristocratic Pathfinder Varian Jeggare and his hellspawn bodyguard, Radovan (Pathfinder's answer to Sherlock Holmes and Watson), return for their fifth standalone novel. When Varian is bequeathed a dangerous magical book by an old colleague, he and Radovan are pulled into a mystery that will set them on the path of a powerful necromancer seeking to become the new avatar of an ancient and sinister demigod - one of the legendary Runelords. But in saving the world, will Varian and Radovan lose their souls?

Based upon the world featured in the award winning Pathfinder role-playing game.

©2015 Dave Gross (P)2015 Macmillan Audio

Loved it!

Great voice pretrial of Characters as well as a great lead up climax to a mystery story in the setting of my Favorite Table Top RPG world of Pathfinder.

Better than the last book

I love this series. Sadly, Steve West butchers the established character voices. Pausing should have gotten the normal voice actor.

Pleasantly surprised how well this developed

I really enjoyed the majority of this story. It was a little difficult to tell the difference between the two main characters toward the beginning of the book, but by the middle the issue stopped being one. I look forward to listening to more stories in this series involving the main characters of this book.

great, but dang I miss Boehmer

this story was on par with the other Gross Pathfinder novels, except for one glaring fact: they replaced Boehmer with Steve West.

West is okay. His voice is kind of cool, but it feels just wrong. Every character gets filtered by "sort of bored british accent", and it is a shame. Boehmer's Radovan was such a rascal and I loved it, but West's affect, or lack of it, does a lot to neuter the life these characters used to exhibit, and also makes it hard to tell characters apart at time.

A great start!

Where does Pathfinder Tales: Lord of Runes rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

I've been waiting for the audio formats for this series for years! And the wait wasn't in vain!

What did you like best about this story?

While it does take place as the 5th book in the series, the previous novels do get the appropriate level of history to keep new listeners informed and still allow previous readers to hear it in a new light.

What does Steve West bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

I could not picture a better set of voices for Radovan and the Count.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

That time with Radovan, Jeggare...and the knife! Good times.

Any additional comments?

I can only hope for more wonderful renditions of Gross' and other paizo authors work to make their way to audible.

Still Great!

I was thrown a little with the change in narrator, but in the end it was still fantastic.

Get Paul Boehmer to do it.

I'll give it to you. This guy has a resonant, strong, British, man-voice. But, Paul Boehmer, who read the 4 previous novels, did a better job characterizing the two main protagonists. This guy just ran them together. Paul Boehmer would have been better.

Different Reader...

I have re written my review after 2 things. 1 finding out that all the audiobooks for PFTales were recorded roughly at the same time, so they couldn't use the same reader for all. And once I got the reader from the previous books out of my head I think Steve West actually did a great job with this particular story.

so give it some time before moving on to this one if the reader change will throw you off. but it is well worth it.

narrator

although he did well I didn't care for the change in narrator after being used to the other from the previous books

Introducing Runelords

New narrator but same old story. This has become my favorite steries in the Pathfinder setting. Awesome fo come back to Thassalon and see a bit of the classic pathfinder history.