Well..
Just bear in mind that Paizo offers more than one subscription. They have a subscription for each product line. Some of your questions will have different answers based on the subscription we're talking about.
The subscription you're pointing at, the
Core Rules Subscription, comes out
per product. In other words, when they're ready to release a book. The Core Rules
are supposed to be limited to only 3 to 4 releases per year. This year they have the CORE book in August, and the Bestiary in September, and a GM Screen (not sure when) and that is it for the rest of 2009. In early February 2010 they'll have a 'GameMastery' book with variant rules and tips for GMing.
The Adventure Path Subscription is Monthly, and they work pretty hard on keeping it monthly, though with customs and internal stuff, it's slipped a few weeks once or twice.
The Companion Books are bi-monthly (at best).
The Modules are bi-monthly, but they have slipped a few times and shipped a week late as well.
The Chronicles doesn't have a set schedule, but have been coming out monthly as near as I can tell.
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The advantage of these subscriptions is that you have access to a PDF of the product. A nice bookmarked PDF, not a scan, and you can lift them maps out of them pretty easily. You can get the books cheaper from Amazon, but you don't get the PDF that way. That's their incentive from buying directly from them.
They have some good shipping options now, so I have all my books sent in one package, once a month.
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They have another incentive program. If you subscribe specifically to the
Adventure Path Subscription (the one that is specifically monthly) you can get the Pathfinder Advantage.
Pathfinder Adventure Path subscribers also receive the Pathfinder Advantage: 15% off of suggested retail price of all products on paizo.com, with the exception of non-Paizo downloadable files. (In the case of collectible products, the 15% discount will be taken off of Paizo's regular offering price.) This discount even applies to other Paizo subscriptions that aren't normally discounted! (If you already subscribe to these products, you need do nothing—appropriate discounts will be applied automatically.) With the Pathfinder Advantage, you can save on over 20,000 gaming products in the paizo.com store.
Understand, the Adventure Path books are their bread and butter and monthly cash flow. That's why they offer the discount specifically for that subscription.
In my case, I susbscribe to pretty much everything pertaining to the campaign setting.. so I get Adventure Path, Chronicles, Companion, and now the Core Rules. And I get 15% off of all of those subscriptions. However, I only receive that because of the Adventure Path subscription. Remove that one, and I lose the discount.
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In your specific case.. being overseas.. There might be a better option if you can buy it locally. The CORE book is quite large and the shipping overseas is pretty high. If you have a game shop that is going to have it in stock, you could just buy the PDF for $9.99 seperately.
The PDFs are usually not that cheap, the Core Book is a special exception because they're being very aggressive in getting it out to as many people as possible. If available you could buy the Core book from your local shop, save the shipping, and buy the PDF seperately- and save money. That's not my idea, that comes from Erik Mona, the publisher.
But again, PDFs won't usually be that inexpensive, so overall the subcsriptions can be pretty good deals.
Hope that helps.
). I noticed Rob Lazzaretti did the carto on second darkness, that will be a purchase. 