Paizo Publishing's 10th Anniversary Retrospective—Year 9 (2011)

Taking On the Role of Industry Leader

Thursday, November 29, 2012

This blog entry is the tenth in a series of blogs commemorating Paizo's 10th anniversary.
Click here to read the first installment.

As I mentioned in my previous blog, Paizo found itself in a very interesting position as we came to the end of 2010. Never before in the history of tabletop RPGs was there a market leader that wasn't Dungeons & Dragons. Why is that important? Well, there are certain tasks that the tabletop RPG industry has always relegated to the top dog in the category—and chief amongst those was player acquisition.

Common wisdom in the industry was that only the market leader had the ability to bring significant numbers of new people into the tabletop RPG hobby. One major reason for this is an idea called network externalities. When the telephone was invented, its usefulness was limited until other people installed telephones; as the telephone network expanded, having a phone became more and more useful. The same thing goes for interstate highways, DVD players, and Facebook. And when products reliant on network externalities compete with one another, the one that wins is usually the one with the bigger network.

It may not be immediately obvious that RPGs rely on network externalities, but they do. Let's say there's a new RPG that you're really keen on trying. You can't play it yourself, so you need to find three or four other people who want to play that RPG. Chances are good that if you get a group of four or five people together and compare notes about what game they all know how to play, the answer is most likely to be the market leader. Which, for the entire history of RPGs, had been D&D. I remember when I first started working on Ars Magica back in 1987—I would have Storyguides (the Ars Magica equivalent of GMs) sending me letters lamenting the fact that they couldn't find a group because everybody was playing D&D. Matter of fact, another piece of the industry's common wisdom was that, in the odd cases that an RPG other than D&D brought you into the industry, you'd still eventually end up playing D&D because it was the one game that almost everybody knows how to play.

Network externalities also meant that only D&D had the name recognition and placement in stores to be able to attract significant numbers of new gamers into the fold. Even as D&D cycled through multiple editions, essentially creating a new branch of their network each time a new edition was released, the fact that TSR or Wizards focused on products for the current edition meant that players were incentivized to stay on the newest branch; they didn't have to compete with themselves. But then the OGL came along, and so did 4th Edition.

The fact that Pathfinder is built on the 3.5 SRD means that if you've played D&D, you can quickly become familiar with Pathfinder. 4E, on the other hand, was different enough from what had come before that it created a new branch of the network, and for the first time, gamers could choose to follow D&D to the new branch or stay on the old branch with Pathfinder. And at the end of the day, Pathfinder ended up being the one with the bigger network.

Before 2011, we never really had the reach through hobby game stores, book stores and organized play to be the game that people start gravitating to. Then, seemingly suddenly, big book stores were putting together islands of Pathfinder products. They were facing our books cover out on the shelves. They were talking to us about running games in their stores. And most of all, they were asking us for an introductory game that they could sell to folks who never played Pathfinder or D&D at all.

We had always dreamed about creating an introductory boxed set for Pathfinder. Paizo staffers each had their own story about buying one of the intro sets for D&D back in the late '70s or early '80s; the wonder of learning a new game that would become such a big part of our lives was something indelibly etched into our minds. But with those memories came expectations about how awesome our own version would need to be. And until 2011, Paizo didn't really have the clout or the reach to make our expectations a reality.

Boxed sets are complicated and expensive to manufacture. Most book printers don't make dice. Most dicemakers don't make boxes. And most boxmakers don't print books. So you usually need to deal with multiple vendors to coordinate delivery and assembly. And a lot of hands involved means a lot of cost. But an introductory box can't have a high price tag, so you need to work with pretty low margins. And that means that you need to make a LOT of them to make any money on them. And when you make a lot, you need to be able to sell a lot. Frankly, every time we'd looked into the logistics and finances of making a box set, it had scared the crap out of us. But now, we thought we could sell a lot. We had the opportunity to make the intro set we had always dreamed about.

To start the process, we had a meeting where I brought in every single D&D intro set TSR and Wizards had ever made. We opened up the boxes, rummaged through the components, scoured through the books, and made lists of things that we liked and didn't like about each set. One thing we noticed was that the earlier sets—the ones that had hooked us in our younger years—did a much better job of providing you with a simplified game system that you could actually run campaigns from. They provided young GMs with the tools to understand how to run a long-term D&D game. As the years unfolded, it seemed that the D&D intro sets moved away from that and became more and more a programmed intro that was meant to be played and discarded as the new gamer moved onward to the core rulebooks. While we needed new players to eventually graduate to the core Pathfinder rulebooks, we also wanted our own intro set to provide more of the tools we remembered from the intro sets we grew up with.

The white board becomes the design medium of choice for the layout of the Pathfinder RPG Beginner Box.


Paizo staff members try to puzzle out character creation during an in-house playtest while Sean K Reynolds watches.

One of the things we knew we needed to work hard on was accessibility. When we looked at the Pathfinder Core Rulebook, we saw a reference book that was great for finding rules when you already knew how to play, but was not very friendly when you were a beginner attempting to navigate the sometimes arcane rules of our game system. We decided to approach our own intro set, which we had decided to call the Pathfinder Beginner Box, from a graphic design and layout point of view first instead of the normal process of providing our art team with finished text which they then laid out. Sarah Robinson, Paizo's Art Director, has a background in creating strategy guides for video games, and we thought we could learn a thing or two from their approach on teaching.

The process became a very collaborative (if time intensive) one. The design team would tell the art team what content they wanted to have in the book. Then the art team would create a graphic layout that they felt would be the most accessible, and they'd give that back to the design team. Then the design team would have to rewrite the content to fit the graphic design, sometimes needing the graphic design to change in order to present the rules better. This happened back and forth numerous times, each time with the product getting better and more clear.

Once we were done, we needed to do some testing to see if our theories would stand up to the test of actual use. Our first test was having some folks who were rather new to RPGs inside Paizo test out the character creation system to see how intuitive it was. When only one of the four testees was able to finish character creation without some help, it became apparent that there were problems. But it gave us some ideas, so we went through another couple of rounds of design and graphic design until we had a new iteration that we thought might work better.

The next test was to bring in friends and family of Paizo employees to create characters and run a short adventure under our watchful eyes. This test went much better, but there were still a few sticking points. After a few more cycles of tinkering, we faced the closed door playtest. In this test, an outside company that specializes in product testing recruited groups of people who didn't know how to play RPGs but, based on their other hobbies, might have an interest. These testers were given a prototype Beginner Box, and we were allowed to watch their progress through a one-way mirror. We would not be allowed to give them any help, thus simulating the experience a customer would have once they brought our product home. We took a lot of notes.

The experience was both stimulating and humbling. Some things that we thought were downright obvious weren't, while other innovations we had come up with in our iterative process proved to work very well. The best part of these tests was the disappointment on the gamers' faces when the testing came to an end and they had to stop playing the game. They were really having a good time and were genuinely bummed that they had to stop. That was a very good thing.

While design and art were working back and forth on the books, Jeff Alvarez took on the task of getting the Beginner Box manufactured. In addition to the box, books, character sheets, and dice, we had decided to include cardboard pawns similar to the ones we'd made for our Kill Doctor Lucky board game (which meant we also needed plastic bases for those pawns) as well as a Flip-Mat printed with an introductory dungeon on one side and a plain grid (for long-term play) on the other. Jeff's office became overrun with printer samples from all over the world as we tried to find the best prices and highest quality. Eventually, we found a place in China that could handle most of the components (and pack in the few things that needed to be made elsewhere), and we were off to the races. We wanted the Beginner Box out for the holidays—which meant it needed to be in stores at the end of October—and the deadline to finish up the product was tight. Many late nights and weekends were sacrificed, but we were able to get the product shipped to the printer on time.

When the Pathfinder Beginner Box came out in October 2011, we had unprecedented buy-in from the retail community. From Barnes & Noble to your friendly local game store, Beginner Boxes flew off the shelves that holiday season. Among the most rewarding things that have come out of the release of the Beginner Box are the stories we've heard from gamers who used it to introduce their children to the game, or first-time gamers who saw the product at their local store and are now gamers for life. We are very proud of the product we ended up producing, and of the group effort that allowed it to take form.

The core rules line in 2011 took a slightly different take with our first two rulebooks. With the release of the Advanced Player's Guide in 2010, we had added a number of new classes to the game. After a lot of discussion, we had decided that we wanted to get all of the major fantasy classes out early in Pathfinder's life cycle, so our 2011 books were strongly class-oriented. Thematically, we divided the two releases up into one book that focused on magical classes and one that focused on combat classes. Four new core classes were created: the magus, samurai, ninja and gunslinger, along with a wealth of archetypes that covered the fantasy gamut.

The rest of the schedule for Pathfinder pretty much followed our standard path. The Carrion Crown Adventure Path for the first half of the year allowed Managing Editor Wes Schneider to delve deeply into the haunted hillsides of Ustalav. Later in the year, James Jacobs finally got his chance to explore a new continent in Golarion with the Jade Regent Adventure Path, which took characters from familiar Varisia over the polar ice cap into Minkai.

The Pathfinder Society organized play program took an even bigger part in our marketing efforts starting in 2011. In previous years, Pathfinder Society was always part of one person's larger job, but we were never in a position where we could afford to have a single person focus on this vital part of our plan. In August, at Gen Con, we interviewed a number of candidates, focusing our efforts on people who had been in the trenches of Pathfinder Society on a local basis. After numerous interviews, we settled on Mike Brock, who had expanded the Pathfinder Society presence in Atlanta to impressive levels. Under Mike's guidance, Pathfinder Society has grown like gangbusters and now has a presence all over the world.

Will Chase surveys the first shipment of Pathfinder Battles: Heroes & Monsters miniatures from WizKids.

In our minds, one thing that a world-class RPG publisher should provide for its players is prepainted plastic miniatures. D&D Miniatures had been a huge seller in the paizo.com online store, so as Pathfinder grew, we constantly talked about the possibility of doing plastic minis. The problem stems from the fact that it is exceedingly hard to do well and profitably. Paizo's competencies lie more along the paper printing line, so we were stymied in our efforts. Then, one day in early 2011, Justin Ziran from WizKids emailed me asking if we might be interested in working with them to create a line of Pathfinder preplastic minis. Maybe I came across as too excited, because it took us months and a lot of information exchange before we managed to go forward with one single product: Beginner Box Heroes, a four-pack of miniatures depicting the iconics used in the Beginner Box.

When WizKids announced the 4-pack to their retailers, the size of the orders caused them to fast-track a 40-mini set dubbed Heroes & Monsters. We were hoping to have it come out at the end of 2011, but in the end, only Beginner Box Heroes made it out by year end. But the groundwork for a long and fruitful partnership had been made.

Early 2011 also brought a most unexpected opportunity. In January, I was browsing Facebook when I noticed my friend Ryan Dancey had left CCP, where he had been working on a massively multiplayer online RPG (abbreviated to MMORPG or simply MMO) called EVE Online. I sent him a message that ended with, "So what are you going to do now?" His response was not what I expected: "Have you ever thought about doing a Pathfinder MMO?"

I actually had thought about what a Pathfinder video game might look like, but I'd always figured that someone like Electronic Arts or BioWare would eventually come along and ask for a license to make such a game. But what Ryan was suggesting was starting a new company to make the Pathfinder MMO ourselves. I was scared and intrigued all at the same time. So I asked Ryan to come up with a plan and pitch it to me.

A month later, Ryan came to Seattle with his plan, and he won me over. The fear subsided and the excitement kicked in, because Ryan wasn't asking for the usual huge bankroll that many MMOs have blown through trying to take a crack at supplanting World of Warcraft as the market leader. No, he was being much craftier. He wanted to put together a tight team to build the Pathfinder MMO for a small, organically growing audience. No need for the enormous marketing budget that would attract millions of customers at launch, or the even bigger development budget used to generate tons of content for all those players to burn through; he was looking to launch for just a few thousand customers. Ryan was also talking about a making a sandbox MMO—a game where the story is controlled by the players and set in a digital world that they can help to build... or seek to destroy. It was a plan that learned from the failures of past MMOs and blazed new trails for the future. It was a plan I could get behind.

The teaser image for the launch of Goblinworks. We later announced the company and Pathfinder Online on the Paizo Blog.

But one doesn't decide to do something as epic as an MMO without a lot of planning and a fair bit of money. Over the next several months, Ryan worked on a business plan and a design document for the MMO, now called Pathfinder Online. We wrestled back and forth over the numbers—I needed this project to be as lean as possible, and I trimmed out all the fat I could find. In the end, we had a compelling game that would cost little enough that I felt it would be feasible to find funding.

In November, we announced Goblinworks, Inc. and Pathfinder Online to the world. Why would we announce it so early considering the game wasn't even funded at the time or even a certainty? I have always run Paizo in a very transparent manner. I knew that as we went out to look for funding for our new company, word would get out about what we were doing. I never want a Paizo customer to have to try to piece together news about our company from whispers and half-truths—I would rather put the news out there so our customers know what's going on directly from our mouths.

After we announced the company, we launched a series of bi-weekly design blogs on goblinworks.com, where we've been sharing our vision for Pathfinder Online, and we've been interacting with the growing Pathfinder Online community on the paizo.com messageboards. Our plan has always been to work closely with our customers to make Pathfinder Online, much like we have with the Pathfinder RPG. Thousands of brains and years of experience will lead to a much better game than a handful of folks, no matter how talented, working in a vacuum.

At the ENnie Awards in August, Paizo won 9 golds. The awards received were:

• Best Adventure: Gold Medal to Pathfinder #43: The Haunting of Harrowstone
• Best Art, Interior: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Inner Sea World Guide
• Best Cartography: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Inner Sea Poster Map Folio
• Best Monster/Adversary: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Bestiary 2
• Best Production Values: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Bestiary 2
• Best Setting: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Inner Sea World Guide
• Best Supplement: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Advanced Player's Guide
• Product of the Year: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Advanced Player's Guide
• Best Publisher: Gold Medal

The Pathfinder RPG Beginner Box is unveiled for the first time at Card Kingdom in Ballard, WA.	Will Chase, Sean K Reynolds, Cosmo Eisele, Jeff Alvarez, James Sutter, Judy Bauer, Jason Bulmahn and Chris Self survey the cosplay outfits at PaizoCon!	The first Pathfinder Society Venture Captain dinner at Gen Con.	The Pathfinder Society room grew significantly for Gen Con 2011!

One specter that raised its head in 2011 was the rumor of a fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. In the spring we started to hear rumblings which surprised us quite a bit. Wizards had just launched their "red box" starter product the previous year, and we thought 4th Edition was just starting to get into its groove. The idea that they were seriously considering or even working on a fifth edition was a move we didn't see coming. Just before Gen Con, we heard that they would be announcing the new game at the show. Of course, this made a lot of sense; they'd announced previous editions at the show that was built by the success of D&D. However, at the show, the buzz went around that something happened and the rumored announcement was cancelled at the last minute.

Of course, the idea of a fifth edition had our heads swirling at Paizo. It made some sense since sales of Pathfinder had surpassed that of D&D, but it also seemed much earlier than we had expected. What should Paizo do? How should we respond? Since we didn't know anything about their plans, we decided that our best course of action was to just stay the course, put out the best products we could, and see what WotC had up their sleeve. In December, we found out that the fifth edition announcement had been rescheduled for the beginning of January.

As the year ended, Pathfinder was getting stronger and stronger. Sales of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook had been growing each year since its release. The number of people playing in the Pathfinder Society program were also jumping up year after year. All signs were looking up as we headed into our tenth anniversary year in 2012, but the impending 5E announcement was waiting for us in the new year.

Employees who started in 2011 (in order of hiring date):
Megan Armezzani, Customer Service Representative
Chris Lambertz, Digital Products Assistant
Michael Kenway, Warehouse Personnel
Patrick Renie, Developer
Dylan Green, Sales Assistant
Lissa Guillet, Assistant Software Developer
Mike Brock, Organized Play Coordinator
Erik Keith, Customer Service Representative

Employees who left in 2011 (in order of their end date):
Matt Vancil
Hyrum Savage
Megan Armezzani

Lisa Stevens
CEO

Storming the White Castle

Mike Brock joins Paizo as our Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator.

Wow! I've already passed my one year anniversary at Paizo. That was fast—and the best year I have had on any job. As I mentioned when I came on board as the Organized Play Coordinator in my first blog, I am privileged and honored at the trust Paizo has given me to oversee Organized Play in general, and Pathfinder Society specifically.

I first met some of the current Paizo staff in the late '80s and early '90s. I played at Living City tables with Jason Bulmahn's character, Thalkin Talymir, human fighter of Torm, and Erik Mona's character, Ellund Torvin, another human fighter. I still have a letter dated October 1997 from Lisa Stevens, then Vice President of the TSR Brand Team, advising that she was helping to get the RPGA up and running again. It's kind of neat to look back and see that I have come full circle and actually get to work with these awesome folks who have been a part of my hobby for more than 15 years.

Like many of you, I started as a fan of Paizo with the magazines. I remember renewing my Dragon and Dungeon Magazine subscriptions only to be advised a month later that they were going away. Enjoying the Adventure Path installments in the later Dungeon Magazines, I of course opted into the Pathfinder Adventure Paths, becoming a charter subscriber. Shortly after receiving my first AP volume, and experiencing Paizo's awesome customer service (though I still haven't gotten any of Liz's cookies), I became a charter superscriber. I was hooked.

A year or so later, my home group was in its fourth year of a Forgotten Realms campaign when Wizards of the Coast announced 4th Edition. I gave my group the Pathfinder Beta rulebook and some of the other books I had added to my collection, and they voted to play Pathfinder instead of 4th Edition. Like many of you, while we awaited the finished RPG, I continued running Adventure Paths using the 3.5 rules for my home group (Legacy of Fire is still my favorite), while dabbling in Pathfinder Society occasionally when someone would miss a game.

Fast forward to Gen Con 2011. Shortly before the convention, the Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator position became available. I remember joking with my home players that if they didn't shape up their tricked-out characters in our Legacy of Fire game, I would apply for the job at Paizo. They surprised me by encouraging me to go for it. I emailed Erik and told him I was interested in the job but I didn't think it would go any further than that. Several weeks later, I was at Gen Con GMing 10 slots. I was surprised yet again when Mark Moreland came up to me and advised that Erik wanted to chat about the job with me. When Mark told me the meeting with Erik was going to be at White Castle, I thought it was a big joke my friends from Georgia had set up. Had I known that White Castle meant serious business to Erik, I would probably have been a little nervous. But Paizo bought my meal (if you can call it that), and I got to sit and chat with several employees over "wonderful" cheeseburgers, and then I went back to GMing, thinking that was the end of that.

Several weeks later, I received a call from Erik asking if I would like the job. Many would think I would have accepted it straight away. There was one problem, however: I had not told my wife, Mrs. PFS, that I was seriously pursuing it. I had to find a way to convince her that a move from Georgia to Seattle, uprooting our family, was a good thing. I eventually found a few ideas to bribe her with, and lucky for me, she accepted the position for both of us.

I've been here for several months past a year now and it doesn't seem like it. Time has flown, and Pathfinder Society is growing by leaps and bounds. The growth surpassed my 12-month goals, and I look forward to seeing how far it surpasses my 18- and 24-month goals. Even after a year, I am still honored and privileged to come into my office, with maps of Golarion and all the Pathfinder books I could ever want, sitting in front of me. And I love the tons of emails I receive about how Pathfinder Society has positively influenced people's lives. Much like my last job, making a difference in people's lives matters to me, and I am glad I am able to provide that in this line of work as well.

Thanks, Purple Golem!

Mike Brock
Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator

Swimming Lessons

Patrick Renie poses for one last picture on his last day as an intern.

It probably sounds cheesy, but that's probably because it is: ever since I was a kid, I'd always dreamed of writing these kinds of books. But I won't bore you with such a familiar tale; many of you doubtlessly already know that story. Let's skip to the middle, instead.

While studying at Western Washington University, I was originally on track to get my B.A. in a branch of journalism called Visual Journalism. I had always sort of figured that RPG writing, and by extension all of fantasy writing, was little more than a pipe dream for me; after all, I'd talked to countless talented GMs and players like me who would have loved nothing more than to work for a tabletop RPG company, and they'd never so much as scratched the surface of this occult industry, so what chance did I have? I imagined that a degree in journalism would be more marketable than one in English (I know, I know... I was young) even though I wasn't as passionate about it, but I checked the job listings on the Paizo website every week anyway, just to see if there'd be an internship open anywhere near me. At the very least, I thought, I could get to see what working at my dream job was like, if only for a few months.

I didn't have to wait long; by spring quarter of my junior year, there was an opening for the Editorial Intern position, and I leaped at the chance. When I actually landed the internship, I was ecstatic. I drove down from Bellingham to Redmond (a 100-mile journey each way) three days a week for over two months, and I couldn't have been happier. I switched my academic path to Creative Writing as soon as I got the gig and realized that perhaps my childhood dreams could indeed become manifest, and I even scored a not-inconsiderable amount of freelance throughout the year after my internship. I applied for the Developer position shortly after my graduation ceremony. Getting the job was far from a sure bet, in my mind—I worried incessantly about it, both before my interview and afterward. I remember having nightmares of getting hired, not getting hired, what I'd do if I didn't get hired, that kind of thing. But, well, I probably don't need to tell you I was eventually offered the position. Wes called me in late July while I was hiking around the Grand Canyon, and I said I could start Tuesday.

I've learned a lot since I began working full-time at Paizo almost a year and a half ago. Socrates is quoted as saying that "the only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing," and while I would hardly consider myself truly wise in any sense, my first few months here served as a valuable lesson in teaching me just how much nothing one can know. Pathfinder is huge, and while I thought I knew the rules and world pretty well when I hired on, I was quickly proven wrong. Very, very wrong. It hadn't really occurred to me until I started working here full-time just how expansive Pathfinder was—Golarion, the history of the industry, the complexity of a large-scale publishing operation, the passion of the fans and employees. It all took me very much by surprise, and during those first months (when I was thrown headfirst into development with products like the Jade Regent Player's Guide and Book of the Damned III), I often wondered, "Is this what drowning is like?" Yet, with drowning, there is undoubtedly fear. Anyone who's ever swam in the ocean before knows the immensity and unbridled power of water, the strength and inherent danger of crashing waves. Paizo strikes a similarly awesome, similarly daunting figure, but I wouldn't say I was scared when I first started working here. I may have been scared or intimidated leading up to it, but once I was in the thick of the work and immersed in the culture, entrenched alongside the amazing people who worked at Paizo and the fantastic fans of our products, I wasn't scared—I was invigorated.

I've felt the same exhilarating sensation ever since, though the thought of drowning has since ebbed from my conscious mind considerably, now little more than a distant rumble of the waves that reaches my ears only when we're buried in the latest hardcover. Every day at Paizo, I get to relive the half-remembered dream-moments of my youth, when I'd spent innumerable hours crafting larger-than-life characters and building fantastic worlds for no one but myself. Only now, I get to work alongside dozens of brilliant and wonderful people, and the fruits of our labors are enjoyed by thousands of other gamers all around the world. Paizo even pays me to do the work I'd happily do for free (but don't tell my bosses that; seriously, don't—I've got bills to pay), and that's pretty nice too.

Patrick Renie
Developer

The Little Robot that Could

Overall, my experience with roleplaying games and Pathfinder in particular was relatively novice when I applied at Paizo. I had been playing in a Kingmaker game for a little over a year at that point, and while I was confident in my ability to fill the job requirements (my previous occupation was in pre-production for a printing and manufacturing plant), I couldn't help but wonder if I should have done more research on wizards and combat maneuvers. It took a few months to hear back, and right when I'd assumed that they'd probably found someone else, I got an email from Gary asking about a phone interview. I was elated and somewhat shocked, but two interviews later, found myself trying to figure out how to transplant my life to Washington.

My first week at Paizo was crazy. I'd left my previous job on a Friday, traveled with my husband, pets, and belongings over 700 miles on Saturday, unpacked on Sunday, and was at Paizo that Monday, and somehow had overlooked that PaizoCon would be happening at the end of that week. I struggled a bit at the convention, getting fellow employees names and faces switched up (sorry, Sutter and Wes!), and truthfully not really knowing what people actually did at PaizoCon (was it games? dice? booths? meet and greets? prawns?). In retrospect, this was probably the best week to start at Paizo. There were no training wheels. I found myself tasked with a fairly sizable amount of projects and a long to-do list, but was ready to tackle it all.

My role as Digital Products Assistant is somewhat split between multiple kinds of work (part website tasks, part digital product delivery, part design, and part customer service) which took some time to adjust to. Prior to the release of the Jade Regent Adventure Path, I had been working on a new product feature that we now know as the Interactive Map PDFs. This involved bending InDesign to perform tasks that it's not usually intended to do, and finding a solution that worked with Paizo's existing workflow. We also had the release of the Beginner Box, the redesign of the Pathfinder Reference Document, and a myriad of other items that ended up on paizo.com before the end of the year. Being a member of the tech team also meant picking up an array of technical knowledge and valuable skills from Gary, Lissa, and Ross (and I still do).

I spent the first six months traveling 2 to 3 hours each day to and from the office (sometimes arriving at the unearthly hour of 6 AM, for which I now can thank my new coffee habit). And not only did a new job bring along the array of normal challenges, but relocation had brought it's own set of stressors to the table. It didn't really hit home until the Paizo holiday party that I had actually accomplished a somewhat monumental task. I'd moved my whole life successfully and everything else just seemed to be falling into place. And the best part: I'd found a company to work for with people that cared about the same things I did, who shared an intense amount of passion for the work they did, and who really do value each others opinions. Though I don't do anything very publicly remarkable like write rules and adventures, it's exciting to come into the office each day. I am grateful for the ability to be myself at Paizo: nerdy, somewhat awkward, but proud of it.

Chris Lambertz
Digital Products Assistant

The Other Erik

Erik Keith shows off his cosplay chops to Wayne Reynolds.

The first time I heard of Pathfinder and Paizo Publishing was winter 2008. I was trying to rework one of my favorite homebrew adventure paths for a new group of gamers and had gotten together with one of my favorite friends to ping ideas off of. While I was over that night he mentioned a new system that a friend had picked up for him at Gen Con that was compatible with 3.5. I was a bit skeptical of trying a new system, but when he presented me with the system's softcover beta rulebook, I had to admit it had my complete attention. I quickly flipped through the amazing illustrations inside of the book, went over its designer notes, and promptly asked if I could borrow the book for the next few days.

From there I went to the Paizo website and followed the game from there. I was working a job as a night auditor at the time, which left me plenty of time to browse the messageboards and take in the clever banter of the Paizo community over the next few years. One particular night, a certain thread posted by the company's "Gninja" caught my attention—she mentioned that Paizo was hiring a new customer service representative. I enjoyed my job at the time, but felt like I had been shoehorned into a niche that I was unlikely to grow from. I created a resume from scratch that very night, attempting to balance professionalism with geekiness to create a suitable blend to potentially set myself apart from the other applicants. With a little luck (and a cosplay picture) I managed to find myself a short period of time later prepping for a phone interview, but with an entertaining twist.

The key thing about working as a night auditor is that, well, you work at night. I had planned on immediately going home and getting a few hours of sleep before my phone interview, but when one of my coworkers called in sick that morning, I had to cover for them. I found my plans foiled and myself on the phone with bloodshot eyes and almost no sleep. Despite everything, I felt that I delivered a fairly strong interview. I had answered all of the important questions in a decisive manner: My class was a paladin, dexterity was my highest stat, and I was genuinely looking forward to using my skills to make Paizo a better place for everyone. My greatest flaw was that I couldn't decide if my favorite animal was a honey badger or a snow leopard, but I felt I still sounded confident in my indecision. Afterward, all I could do was sit back and see if my delivery was strong enough.

A week later, I came to discover that while it had been a very close call, they had opted to go with another applicant. I had no regrets; even if I hadn't been their choice, it was still nice knowing that I was in genuine consideration for the position. Over the next 6 months, I attended PaizoCon and met the Paizo staff in person, which was the first time I truly came to regret not having landed the job. After PaizoCon, I started planning for my next convention, which was PAX. A few weeks before that show, after fulfilling my duties at work, I found myself browsing the Paizo messageboards again. This time, I discovered that they needed volunteer GMs for the Pathfinder Society area at PAX.

I signed up on the messageboards and found myself gamemastering at PAX. I had a lot of fun, and while my player survival ratio was embarrassingly high compared to the other GMs, the players I was hosting sessions for seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely. I left my number with the Paizo staff in case they needed an emergency substitute GM, and didn't think twice about it, so I didn't expect the phone call I got a few days later. Because I'd made a good impression at the convention, and had been a close call for the CS job earlier, I suddenly found myself on the other end of another phone interview, this time with a much more relaxed tone and—equally wonderful—a full night's rest. I put in my one-month notice at work the next day and found myself at Paizo not long after. The events that have transpired since then have been truly amazing, but I believe I'll leave that story for another day. After all, I haven't even started talking about the daily games I run during lunch with the warehouse staff yet!

Erik Keith
Customer Service

Rise of the Runelords Deluxe Collector's Edition Unboxing!

Thursday, November 28, 2012

The Rise of the Runelords Deluxe Collector's Edition pre-sale promotion has been extended! From now until Sunday, December 2nd at 11:59 PM Pacific Time, active Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscribers who order will receive a free PDF edition of this book when the print edition ships.

Join Paizo Publisher Erik Mona as he gets his hands on the first available copy of the Rise of the Runelords Deluxe Collector's Edition and gives a rundown of its awesomeness. The edition is very limited, so order yours today!

Killing Time

by Dave Gross

Chapter Four: The Killing
Radovan

It'd been over a year since I'd felt the touch of a woman's hand, much less the rest of her. Iolanda, the most beautiful prostitute in Absalom, had just offered me a whole night with her. All she wanted in return was one little murder.

"No dice, sweetheart."

She looked me over again, her eyes lingering on my arms, the spurs on my elbows, my fists, and all the fights carved into my red leather jacket. "I thought you might be the sort of man who had killed before."

"I'm trying to cut back."

She turned real slow, her dark eyes stroking me. A bead of sweat slipped down my neck.

It'd been over a year. I'd never gone a year.

"What'd this guy do to make you want him dead?"

She sat down in front of a vanity and held my brothel token near the lamp. I could just make out the naughty image on its face. "He took a purse full of tokens like this one."

"Exactly like that one?"

"No," she said. "All different. He doles them out as tips to common, ugly men, brutes and servants."

I tried not to take it personal. There wasn't a thing I'd rather do than to go through that purse and cash in every token, one by one. Still, it wasn't worth a man's life. I said so.

"He beat me," she said. "In front of everyone."

Back in my Trick Alley days, I beat the hell out of the men who got too rough. I broke a lot of arms and legs, cracked more than a couple of skulls, and I was happy to do it. But the rule was, you don't take a life except for another one.

And yeah, I knew some men need killing. Those cutthroats I'd beaten earlier. It wasn't wrong to say I'd have done Absalom a big favor by ending them.

But I hadn't. Sure, both in the Goatherds and later, working for the boss, I'd had to do some killings, but it'd always been to keep the other guy—or rat-man or demon—from killing me first. They all had it coming.

This last year, though, in the body of my own personal devil, I'd killed plenty of guys who didn't have it coming. I thought about the monks of Iron Mountain almost every day. I had nightmares about those phoenix girls.

"I can get those tokens back for you. I can even bust him up real bad. But I don't kill him."

She turned to spill all that black, black hair over the shoulder. "For an hour of my attentions."

"All night."

"You drive a hard bargain."

It had been a year. "Sweetheart, you got no idea."

∗∗∗

Iolanda pulled a bell rope that summoned the thin white butler. She whispered in the servant's ear, and she or he nodded, led me halfway downstairs, and pointed through an open archway at a game of towers in the next room. There was my mark.

The big fellow lounged back in his chair, drawing on a fat cigar as one of his two toadies played his cards for him. Thick hair bristled on his bulging forearms, and his beard was coming in after a morning's shave.

"They will leave soon," the servant whispered. "They must be far away before any misfortune falls on them."

I gave the servant the don't-tell-me-my-business stare. She or he called over a hellspawn girl to keep me occupied, but I didn't want to spoil my appetite. "I'll just hang out."

The mark gave up on towers a couple hours later. He tipped the dealer with one of those platinum tokens. I couldn't see what favor was on its face, but from the dealer's eyes, it was a good one. The mark and his lackeys pushed off. I gave them half a minute and followed.

I saw the mark's goons walking away without him, a carriage rolling off in the opposite direction. I recognized the shape of the mark's head in the rear window.

Desna was smiling on me.

Before I could whistle, another carriage pulled up. The horses shied as they got close to me, so I jumped into the cab. As they settled down, the driver who'd dropped me off turned around with a grin. He'd been waiting for another good tip.

"Follow that carriage," I told him. He slapped the reins.

We followed the mark back toward the docks, where he got out beside a warehouse office. His buddies were nowhere in sight, but he paused before putting a key in the door. He looked right at the carriage. Right at me.

He pointed at the docks and crooked a finger before walking over to the boardwalk.

"Shall I drive on, sir?"

"Nah, this is good." I tossed him the second-smallest of the purses I'd taken from the cutthroats. Before he could ask, I said, "Stick around. This won't take long."

I followed the mark across the boardwalk. The place was almost deserted, with only a few night watchmen swinging lanterns between the warehouses. My guy went up to one of them and bought the lantern from him. The watchman got lost while my guy climbed a narrow stair beneath the boardwalk.

I followed him down. The beach stank of fish and seaweed, and the lantern light cast long shadows across the pebbled shore.

The other fellow rolled up his sleeves as I moved in, showing off just how big his arms were. The way he did it reminded me of the bouncers back at the brothel. In fact, everything about him reminded me of those bouncers, like they were imitating him when they used that gesture.

He just put up his fists and beckoned me to come on. I kissed my thumb, drew the wings of Desna on my heart, and went in.

The guy surprised me with a quick, long punch. I got my arms up barely in time, but he smashed my guard back into my face.

He fought in the classic style, fingernails up for inspection, thumbs outside. I bounced back, slid to the side, and went in for a shot to the ribs. He shot back with a one-two that cracked my wrist and smashed my ear. I danced away, grinning with a confidence I didn't feel. He rushed me again.

I put a dock piling between us. He came around, and I ran behind another one. I needed to think. All those great moves I'd learned in Tian Xia were scrambled in my head. I'd learned them while stuck in a devil body. Now that it was gone, I didn't feel them the way I had for the past year. I had to think about them, and that made me slow.

"You going to run, run now," he said. "Just don't let me see you back at my brothel."

Radovan's jacket tells a story, but not a happy one.

Your brothel?

I came around the piling, fists high. When his shoulder dropped for a punch, I Swept the Beach. My foot barely caught his heel, but quick as spite he stomped my ankle. He put all his weight down, pinning me.

He walked up my leg. I tried kicking him, but he caught my other foot and twisted hard. He got a scream, but not as much as he wanted. He raised a foot to crush my gnarlies.

I winced, expecting the pain but knowing it'd be worse for him. He must have seen it on my face. At the last instant, he turned just enough to smash my thigh instead of impaling his foot on my spiked cup.

I scissored my legs around his foot and rolled. We both went down, tumbling over the stones. A dead crab tore the hell out of my cheek. The guy got his finger in my ear, moved to put a thumb in my eye. I kneed him in the gut and tried to roll away, but he hung on.

His size and strength gave him the advantage. We fought with knees and elbows, which gave it back to me. I bloodied his hip with a spur. He pulled a razor from his belt and damned near drew me a new smile.

"Stupid son of a bitch, I wasn't going to kill you," I growled.

"You think you're the first? I'm sick of it. Once I'm done with you, I'm going to kill that whore."

I pushed away the hand with the razor in it. Then I let it come back, only this time I turned my head and opened wide. I'm not proud to be a biter, but you got to go with your strengths.

He lost the razor along with most of the use of that hand.

"I'll kill her slow," he gasped. "Believe it."

Before I could answer, he smashed my nose with a head-butt. The pain blinded me. He pushed me away. We got to our feet, blinking and reeling. Somebody kicked the lantern, sending the world spinning under the docks. I closed my eyes and listened for his breath. I charged, catching him right in the breadbasket.

We fell into the surf. His head hit something hard, but not hard enough to knock him out. He fought for his life, because that's what we were fighting for now. I got his ear in one hand, a hank of hair in the other. I shoved his head under the water.

His fingers found my throat. For a second I faltered. His head came up. "You don't know who you're dealing with! You'll never get out of Absalom ali—"

I put his head back under and counted. At thirteen I let him up again. He sputtered, "I'll pay you!"

That got my attention. "What about Iolanda?"

"You can buy out her contract. She gambles it all away anyway. You can win it back like I did."

He beat me. Those had been her words. I'd just assumed she meant the other thing.

Which was what she'd been betting on.

This guy was her pimp, not a bad customer. Iolanda knew he wouldn't let things go if I just beat him. If he went back to kill her, it was her own damned fault.

Still.

"Tell me you won't lay a hand on her," I said. "Make me believe it."

"I swear."

His eyes flicked down as he said it.

"Sorry, pal." I put his head back under. "I believed you the first time."

∗∗∗

It was just after dawn when I hopped out of the carriage in front of the boss's little clubhouse. Smoke rose from a blackened building. The boss stood beside a scorched semicircle in the lawn, standing straight while a couple of Pathfinder mucky-mucks chewed him out. Arnisant caught my eye like he wanted to escape, so I called him over and scratched his jaw.

When the shouting was done, the boss came over with a fire-crippled servant carrying his satchel. The boss stopped when he saw the cab. "I have been too long without the Red Carriage," he said. "Back to the inn. We shall collect our things and take the first ship to Greengold."

That was fine by me. I'd be glad if we never saw this damned town again.

Arnisant followed the boss into the cab, and the burned servant offered me the boss's bag.

I said, "You want to help with the luggage?"

He hesitated, glancing back at the smoldering building. I could tell he wanted an excuse to leave but needed a little incentive. I held up the purse I'd taken from Iolanda's pimp. "I'll make it worth your while."

Coming Next Week: A band-new adventure featuring Norret the alchemist and his resurrected brother Orlin in "Thieves' Vinegar"!

Enjoying this story so far? Check out even more adventures of Radovan and Varian in the new novel Queen of Thorns, available now!

Dave Gross's adventures of Radovan and Count Jeggare include the Pathfinder Tales novels Prince of Wolves, Master of Devils, and Queen of Thorns; the novellas "Husks" and "Hell's Pawns"; and the short stories "A Lesson in Taxonomy," "A Passage to Absalom," and "The Lost Pathfinder," all available at paizo.com/pathfindertales. He also co-wrote the Pathfinder Tales novel Winter Witch with Elaine Cunningham, and has written novels for the Forgotten Realms as well as short stories for such anthologies as Tales of the Far West and Shotguns v. Cthulhu. Dave is the former editor of magazines ranging from Dragon to Star Wars Insider to Amazing Stories, and is currently a writer for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition.

Illustration by Carlos Villa

Pathfinder Online Kickstarter Now Live!

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

This is an exciting time at Goblinworks, and we wanted you to know about our latest development! As our biggest fans and customers, it is important to us that you are in the loop right away. Your support for Paizo and Pathfinder has allowed us to make Pathfinder the top RPG in the world! That success has lead us to license the MMORPG rights to our sister company, Goblinworks, so they can make a next generation fantasy sandbox MMO called Pathfinder Online. Last May, we launched a Kickstarter to fund a Technology Demo, and many of you supported us there. In turn, that Demo allowed us to get the funding we needed to put Pathfinder Online into production. Right now, a small team of very cool professionals are working very hard on building Pathfinder Online, and we have you to thank for that!

But right now our team is limited in size. There are nine people working on Pathfinder Online—enough to get us to launch in a few years, but not enough to do it with the speed and scope we really want. So we are launching a new Kickstarter for the Pathfinder Online Fantasy Sandbox MMO. The purpose of this second Kickstarter is to get the money we need to make Pathfinder Online bigger, faster and better than we can with our current level of funding. It will let us hire more people and dedicate more resources to Pathfinder Online, potentially cutting the time to launch in half, and massively expanding the content and features available on release.

Could we have gone out and got investment capital to do this? Sure, but with that investment comes costs and entanglements that could very well derail the vision that we have for Pathfinder Online. Investors don't like to push boundaries, color outside the lines, or think outside the box. Instead, they want you to do things only in ways already proven successful for other companies. It is their money, after all.

Our vision for Pathfinder Online doesn't fit those boundaries. It doesn't color within the lines. It doesn't want to exist inside of a box. You already get that—you have believed in Paizo from the beginning and helped us to create a unique community around the Pathfinder RPG. We would rather report to you than to a group of investors who are only interested in making the biggest pile of money and having an early exit strategy. You are with us for the long haul. You believe in our vision for Pathfinder. We would prefer never to sacrifice this vision in pursuit of bigger profits. With you, we can make an MMO that we can all be proud of, and it can happen if we are successful with this Kickstarter. We can do this if enough folks want to become our "bosses" and work with us to make Pathfinder Online.

Another cool aspect of this Kickstarter is that we are finally revealing how YOU can become an Early Enrollee and get involved with the Pathfinder Online Beta. As you probably already know, during the Beta, we are going to limit the number of folks who can enter the world of Pathfinder Online each month, so that we can slowly begin building the society that is going to make Pathfinder Online so successful. The new Kickstarter offers a limited number of slots for each month on a first-come, first-served basis. The earlier you back this Kickstarter, the earlier you will be able to get into the Beta. After the Beta, we'll open the game to everyone, and as part of this Kickstarter, you can preorder your copy of the game at a discounted price.

Because our customers are so important to us, we're contacting you right away. We hope you take advantage of this early notice to become the first to join us as we crowdforge Pathfinder Online. Crowdforge? Glad you asked. Crowdforging is the word that we've come up with to represent the intense process we will use to work with you, our customers, to make Pathfinder Online the best MMO it can be. When you get into the Pathfinder Online Beta, you will become intimately involved with the decisions that go into making a game of this size. If you have helped Paizo playtest our various RPG projects, you understand what we are aiming for here. No other game will give you this type of access and input into its creation. But there are only a limited number of folks who will be able to get into the early stages of crowdforging this game, so make sure you back our Kickstarter soon!

In closing, we would like to thank all of you for helping us make our dream a reality. We wouldn't be here without you, and we very much appreciate your ongoing support. For this Kickstarter to be a huge success, we're going to need your help getting the word out to the MMO and RPG communities. Please tell your friends on Facebook, Twitter, various messageboards, and anywhere gamers congregate. Together, we can grow the legions of fans interested in building our next generation fantasy sandbox MMO. With enough support, we can all make Pathfinder Online faster, bigger and better.

The journey is just beginning!

Lisa Stevens
CEO, Paizo Publishing
COO, Goblinworks, Inc.

Pathfinder Society in Finland

Monday, November 26, 2012

Illustration by Daren Bader

We move from our last international blog in South Africa to a location in the extreme north: Finland. I knew that Finland had a very strong playerbase in Pathfinder Society during its first few years, but for whatever reason, interest had waned. Back in May, I wanted to bring back the Finnish fanbase because I knew they could only add to the Pathfinder Society experience and make it better. After a series of emails answering concerns, Jukka Särkijärvi agreed to come on board as a Venture-Captain and help revitalize Pathfinder Society in Finland. After six months, I can say that he and his Venture-Lieutenant, Jussi Leinonen, have done an excellent job and I am excited to see Pathfinder Society once again a highlight of gaming in Finland.

Without further ado, I present to you Jukka and Jussi's report on Pathfinder Society in Finland.

We had Pathfinder Society in Finland at the very beginning. The campaign's registration in 2008 actually began during Ropecon, our largest annual gaming convention (roughly 3,500 attendees), where Sampo Haarlaa and I had a presentation about organized play campaigns, which we had already written for, played, and organized for years. Ropecon 2008 was slightly too early for there to be Pathfinder Society at the convention, so the first actual session—Murder on the Silken Caravan—wasn't run until two weeks later. Jukka Särkijärvi, later to become Venture-Captain, ran that one. He didn't get to play his first session until some three weeks later, and after an unlucky critical hit, became the first Finnish Society player who needed to register a second character.

Jukka eventually became the first player to lose two characters, and after a series of unfortunate and inexplicable TPKs, shortly after he was appointed Venture-Captain, he lost the distinction of owning the most dead PCs. The most dead PCs at tables he ran, on the other hand...

Pathfinder Society started slowly over here. There were maybe 25 somewhat active players spread out between the Helsinki metropolitan area and we played through new scenarios as they came out. We were usually soon left hankering for more until we got our next fix. People eventually gravitated toward running Adventure Paths for fixed groups or to different games altogether. After the flowering of Season 0, for two years we had very little Pathfinder Society in Finland outside of Ropecon.

In 2011, Ropecon asked if Erik Mona might be interested in coming over as a guest of honor. He said "yes," and the rest is history. It gave the community new energy to run and play, and we had the untouched expanse of two years of modules at our disposal, with no danger of running out. Old players came back and new ones were recruited. In the end, Ropecon 2011 featured a very modest seven sessions of Pathfinder Society (out of a total of 165 sessions of roleplaying games), but we had Erik there, which kindled the enthusiasm of the wider player base, and it continued long after he had left the country.

In the Helsinki area, much of the resurgence in Society play happened through the involvement of the RPG actives of the local engineering university. There, it quickly became apparent that the organized play model, where Game Masters and fellow party members change from one session to another, was ideally suited for busy students whose unpredictable schedules made it difficult to commit to campaigns with a regular group. During Season 3, more sessions of Pathfinder Society were run in Finland than during the previous three seasons combined. Ropecon 2012 saw 20 tables of Pathfinder Society, including the Blood Under Absalom special. We could probably have accommodated a few more tables, but three of our five most active Pathfinder Society Game Masters, including Venture-Captain Jukka Särkijärvi and Helsinki Venture-Lieutenant Jussi Leinonen, were members of the organizing committee and busy with other duties during the convention.

The Lay of the Land

As stated, Ropecon is the primary gaming convention in Finland, held every summer in Espoo, next to the capital city of Helsinki. The second most important is Tracon, which used to bounce around the calendar from winter to spring until finally settling in the early autumn where it now resides. It is primarily an anime convention (the anime fans are enthusiastic and numerous and we're still trying to figure out how to get them interested in roleplaying games), but thanks to the organizers' varied interests, there are also some roleplaying games scheduled. At this year's Tracon, we had seven tables of Pathfinder Society (out of some 20 sessions altogether) and again, there was demand for more, but the convention ran out of room for tabletop games. We foresee significant growth for both Pathfinder Society and roleplaying games in general for next year's Tracon, and are working closely with their organizing committee to give these offerings a greater prominence at the convention.

There are also smaller conventions in the country, such as Conklaavi in Turku and the biannual Maracon in Oulu. Bringing Pathfinder Society to these conventions and trying to start up self-sustaining player communities and eventually appoint Venture-Lieutenants for these cities is also on the agenda.

At the moment, outside of the convention season, Pathfinder Society in Finland is centered around the university gaming clubs in Helsinki, Espoo and Tampere. Autumn is an especially fruitful time for introducing new players to the campaign, with the influx of new students.

Unlike America, Finland has never really had a culture of playing RPGs in games stores, but we are currently working to change that with regular games scheduled at the Puolenkuun Pelit store in Tampere. At the time of writing, however, the campaign in Finland is strongly focused on running a single session at a time, with the occasional convention and club game day with more activity. We also currently don't have regular weekly game evenings, and each session is coordinated individually at our community wiki and messageboard. Although this approach requires some more initiative on behalf of the gamers, it also adds flexibility as nobody is excluded from Society gaming just because he or she happens to have the regular day of the week booked for something else. With the prominence of current and former university students in the player base, we have been able to use the campus clubrooms for additional public gaming space. These have been important especially for introducing new players, whom the regulars are understandably hesitant to invite to home games. Running games in a public area also brings visibility to Pathfinder Society through the curiosity of other gamers hanging around.

The number of active players in Finland stands at an approximate 60, though the amount of active Game Masters is not quite large enough to meet the demand. We are working on changing this, too, and it is a happy thing to see players enthusiastically taking up the GM screen. Here as well, the organized play model of Pathfinder Society has proven to be advantageous: prospective Game Masters can give GMing a try without committing themselves to providing a long-running campaign, and nobody is worse off if the new GM decides that it's not for her, or something she prefers to do only once every few months. This has encouraged many new people to run games who might have otherwise been unlikely to do so, despite the fact that GMing in an organized play campaign might be considered to require a higher standard of quality than a "casual" game.

Due to our northerly location beyond the Baltic Sea, the Finnish gaming scene is relatively isolated even from the rest of Europe, not to mention North America. That said, the great majority of gamers around here are happy to play a session in English (after all, that's the language we read our rulebooks in), and many fluent GMs can also be found.

If you find yourself in Finland in need of a Society game, email us at pfshelsinki@gmail.com (Helsinki metropolitan area) or pfsfinland@gmail.com (the rest of the country). For the more serious gaming tourist, Ropecon (to be held July 26–28, 2013) is an increasingly international convention with some 3,500 visitors annually, with Pathfinder Society and much more.

Jukka Särkijärvi Venture-Captain, Tampere, Finland

Jussi Leinonen Venture-Lieutenant, Helsinki, Finland

Thank you to all of the players, GMs, VCs, and VLs for reigniting an awesome Pathfinder Society Lodge in Finland. I look forward to the additions of new Venture-Captains and Venture-Lieutenants in other regions of the country and watching Pathfinder Society grow strong. Keep up the awesome work!

Mike Brock
Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator

Reign of Winter Mittens

Friday, November 23, 2012

Winter's almost here—are you ready? Warm mittens are a vital part of adventurers' gear, protecting hands from the cruel cold that nips at fingers and blackens bare skin. To help you survive with enough fingers left to grasp a sword, I hereby present to you the Reign of Winter Mittens!

When I heard about this Adventure Path, I immediately started wrestling with charts and experimenting with patterns. The cozy mittens that are the final result are decorated with motifs representing the Reign of Winter Adventure Path's key elements: a large snowflake representing Baba Yaga, smaller snowflakes representing the 14 queens of Irrisen, the date on Golarion (and on Earth) when the AP begins, and of course the Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga itself. Happy knitting!

Download the Reign of Winter Mittens Knitting Pattern - (102KB zip/PDF)

Judy Bauer
Editor

Illustration by Wayne Reynolds. Widescreen version here.

NPC Codex Q&A

Thursday, November 22, 2012

The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: NPC Codex is a first for Paizo—a 320-page Bestiary-style book full of NPC stat blocks instead of monsters. We’ve asked designer/developer Sean K Reynolds to answer some questions about this latest release for the Pathfinder RPG, and why NPC Codex is a must for your Pathfinder game.

Why should I get NPC Codex?

The NPC Codex can save you time. If you're a GM, prepping stat blocks for a game takes a lot of work, and NPC Codex has full stat blocks for over 300 NPCs. That's 20 of each of the core character classes (cleric, fighter, and so on), 4 of each of the prestige classes, and 10 of each of the NPC classes (adept, commoner, and so on), all ready to drop into your game with no prep required. Appendix 1 has 45 animal companion stat blocks for various companions at different druid levels. Appendix 2 has 7 pages of themed encounter groups (such as "barbarian warband" and "pirate crew") at low, medium, and high levels, telling you exactly which NPC stat blocks you should use to build that encounter.

If you're a player, you can use those NPC stat blocks for cohorts or followers. If you're playing a druid or a ranger, you can use the animal companion stat blocks from Appendix 2 for your animal companion. If you need a character for a pick-up game, NPC Codex includes three stat blocks for each of Paizo's iconic characters (at level 1, 7, and 13).

What books does NPC Codex use?

The NPC Codex uses classes, races, feats, spells, and magic items from the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook. A few of the animal companion stat blocks use monster feats from the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary, such as Improved Natural Attack or Multiattack.

Why doesn't it use options from the Advanced Player's Guide and other Paizo sourcebooks?

The Core Rulebook gives you many options, and we wanted to demonstrate that you can use those options to create hundreds of unique, interesting characters. By just using the Core Rulebook, NPC Codex allows players who don't own any other books to get full use out of it, and players who do use the APG and so on are still able to swap in feats, spells, and items from those other books. We are looking forward to the opportunity to publish a similar book using the APG character classes, archetypes from Ultimate Magic, and so on.

Are these NPCs generic, or are they unique characters?

There is a mix of both. Each NPC is presented with a generic role, such as "fire cleric." As each page has a stat block, full-body illustration, and tactics for the character, some NPCs (especially spellcasters with long stat blocks) only have a few lines left for personal information. Whenever there was room, we gave the NPC a specific name, background, goals, and suggestions for using the NPC in a combat encounter and roleplaying encounter. For example, after the "fire cleric" stat block is information about Aleksion Coric, who uses the flame of truth to burn away impurity and rebellion.

Of course, if you just need a stat block and not a character concept, you can replace that descriptive text with something more appropriate to your campaign.

How easily can I fit these NPCs into my game?

We wanted to give you many standard options for each character class, but also to give you some unusual characters that may have a unique role in your campaign. In general, every other character for each of the base classes is a typical representative of that class. For example, the 1st-level wizard is a typical adventuring mage and the 3rd-level wizard is a mercenary universalist, but the 2nd-level wizard is a street magician enchanter and the 4th-level wizard is a diviner working as a private investigator. By giving you a "normal" member of that class at every other level, at most you're only one CR away from what you need for an encounter.

Chapter 3 presents characters of levels 1–10 for each of the five NPC classes. If you need a stat block for a simple beggar, pig farmer, shopkeeper, sailor, carpenter, guard, squire, or similar non-adventuring characters, this chapter has it covered.

Are the stat blocks customizable?

Completely! If you want the dwarf mountaineer (ranger 7) to use a battleaxe instead of a warhammer, just swap the weapon and keep playing. If you want the sylvan protector (druid 3) to have an animal companion instead of the Air domain, grab an animal companion stat block from Appendix 2 and you're good to go. If you're willing to do a little more leg work, you can even change the NPC's race or add an archetype. The purpose of NPC Codex is to give you complete stat blocks you can use right out of the book, but if you like to tinker, go for it.

Is there new art?

Of course! Just like the Bestiary, every page of NPCs has a full-body illustration from Paizo artist favorites such as Chris Seaman, Tyler Walpole, Scott Purdy, and Roberto Pitturu.

The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: NPC Codex is now available
for purchase at paizo.com, and at your local game store!

Killing Time

by Dave Gross

Chapter Three: The Dead Prince
Varian

The intruder stepped out of the shadows. I stood, shocked by several simultaneous realizations.

Foremost was that he had employed magic to read my thoughts, thus causing my momentary dizziness and his echoing of my unspoken notion. My irritation with the Decemvirate paled in comparison to my outrage at the violation.

"You will never guess who I am." The intruder's voice was a sneer behind his golden mask.

Locking my gaze to his jaundiced eyes, I made a silent inventory of my weapons: riffle scrolls before me, the Shadowless Sword at my hip, and Arnisant at my feet. Yet for the moment, my most powerful weapon might be a sharp tongue. "Prince Kasiya of Osirion."

He choked. "How—?"

"You wear the funereal garb of the royal family of Osirion, with the addition of a few rather gaudy accessories." The latter caught my interest: the miniature chariot had to be a magical conveyance, and by the durable bindings—one crocodile hide, the other the skin of a large blue-skinned reptile—I inferred Kasiya's books contained arcana or similarly rare material. To my knowledge, Kasiya had not been a spellcaster when we last met. Of course, to his knowledge, neither had I.

"So my attire made it all too easy for you to guess my mortal identity. Still, you can hardly deduce the nature of my incredible return from death and entomb—"

"Vampire."

"How could you possibly—?"

"You are smothered in the traditional burial ointments and herbs, yet not of sufficient quantity to disguise the stench of a ghoul or ghast. You are obviously tangible, so you cannot be a spectre, wraith, or ghost. You speak articulately, so your mental functions are no worse than they were in life. And let us be frank, Kasiya: You were never lich material."

"Prince Kasiya!" he sputtered, bloody flecks forming around the rim of his mask's mouth. He struck the table with such force that he left the impression of his fist in the mahogany. "You will address me as 'Your Highness.'"

As he raged, I slipped a pair of riffle scrolls into my coat pockets. I did the same again and put a third pair in my hands before he regained his composure.

"You are no longer a prince, Kasiya. You are a corpse, a carcass, a cadaver—a casing of dead flesh. You have sunk lower than the grave, become more common than dust. 'Kasiya' is too much name for you."

"You, a mere count, dare speak to me with such insolence? You should bow to the ground and grovel for mercy, for I have bided my time for decades, mastered the arts arcane, plotted every calculation for the singular purpose of—"

"Revenge." I yawned into my palm, holding the riffle scroll between my fingers like one of those loathsome cigars with which Radovan used to annoy me. It was, I thought, a rather good semblance of nonchalance—so long as Kasiya did not notice the trembling of my fingers. "Vengeance is the common motivation for your ilk."

"Again you say 'common'!?" Kasiya sputtered. "And my ilk?"

"Vampires are as susceptible to pride as... well, as susceptible as princes. Dead ones."

Kasiya raised a bandaged hand to trace a symbol in the air. I recognized the gesture as the beginning of an incendiary invocation. As he cupped his hands around a growing spark, I dropped a riffle scroll and snatched another from my pocket. Its pages snapped across my thumb. I felt the arcane tingling of my counterspell wash away his nascent fireball.

"Not in the library," I admonished him. While he glowered, I dropped the expended scroll and slipped another into my hand. "After all, you too were a Pathfinder, once."

Kasiya's halting breath gurgled and broke into such a repugnant sound that it took me a moment to recognize it as laughter. "You hide your fear well. I had forgotten that you too enjoy some excess of pride."

"Honor."

"Semantics."

His words struck like a dash of cold water. Either Kasiya had been spying on me for hours, or else—

No, I refused to believe my artless Osirian nemesis had gulled me with an impersonation of a member of the inner circle. Besides, it was inconceivable that a vampire could infiltrate the Decemvirate. Or so I prayed.

"You mentioned revenge," said Kasiya, rising confidence in his voice. "Tell me, Chelaxian, what in your infernal empire is a fit punishment for a man who betrays a prince and leaves him for dead?"

"Your implied accusation is false on both counts."

"How do you mean 'false'?"

Kasiya's mask cannot hide the horror he's become.

"First, I did not leave you for dead; you were in fact dead. Second, I did not leave your remains; I returned them to your royal brother, whose noble hospitality I repaid by withholding the true account of your treachery."

"Enough," said Kasyia. "It is time to make you suffer."

"In that you have already succeeded with your tiresome posturing."

Kasiya lifted the blue-bound book hanging from his girdle. He twisted open the latch and revealed the contents. In an instant I recognized the weird writing and detestable illustrations.

"The Lacuna Codex!"

"Ah!" Humor returned to Kasiya's sepulchral voice. "At last I surprise you."

In the hands of a powerful wizard, the rituals contained in the Lacuna Codex could alter the course of history. They were weapons so dreadful that the last prince of Ustalav hesitated to unleash its powers, perishing at the hands of Tar-Baphon before the hero Arnisant finally sacrificed himself to imprison the Whispering Tyrant. After recovering the Codex from that prince's tomb, I entrusted it to the Decemvirate.

And now Kasiya had it.

"What do you think of me now, Count Jeggare? With such power in my grasp, do I still amuse you?"

"Read me a bit."

"What?"

"Anywhere will do. Perhaps that caption under that rather disgusting illustration."

"You test my patience."

"Surely you can read ancient Thassilonian," I said. "If not, this tome is of no more use to you than to a blind beggar."

I raised a riffle scroll, but before I could place my thumb upon its edge, Kasiya leaped over the table and struck me full on the chest.

His icy hand pressed down upon my heart. I slapped the golden mask from his face.

Where once Kasiya's face had been a study in Osirian beauty, it was now a patchwork ruin. The brown skin, once lustrous, now resembled a patch of moldering leaves through which writhed livid worms. His teeth floated in his lumpish jaws, irregular except for the prominent fangs peculiar to blood-drinkers. As I watched, his crooked nose wriggled back into place after my strike had flattened it against his cheek.

Kasiya lashed out again, tearing open my shirt. There on my chest lay the outline of his hand, white fading to the natural hue of my flesh.

"You life essence should be mine. How—?"

I had an inkling of the answer, but the time for badinage had passed. "Arnisant!"

The hound did not stir from his place near my feet. For an instant I felt the panic of imagining he were dead, but his chest moved, and I heard the steady groan of his snore.

Kasiya let out another horrid gurgle. "Your pet will not wake until you are dead. When I have finished with you, I shall let him dine on your corpse."

I snapped a riffle scroll. Kasiya drew an eldritch sign to ward off my spell, but I had not aimed at him.

My magic peeled away the enchantment that kept Arnisant asleep. I pointed at Kasiya. "Arnisant, hands!"

With a scrabble of claws on the floor, Arnisant leaped. Kasiya grasped the hilt of his khopesh while fending off the dog with his empty hand. He shouted and drew back the hand, one finger short.

Kasiya slashed his khopesh toward Arnisant. The blade missed, but he pummeled the hound with the weapon's butt. Arnisant fell back, choking on the putrescent finger. He coughed it up, and the gray appendage dissolved into slime on the floor.

I dropped the expended scroll and drew the Shadowless Sword, thrusting at Kasiya's exposed face.

He fell back with inhuman speed, yet my swift blade scratched his cheek. Black ooze welled up on his mottled skin.

I struck again. He grabbed at my blade, but I withdrew before he could capture it in his unholy grip.

Kasiya retreated, but only one step. He whirled the khopesh above his head, bringing it down in a blinding arc. I stepped back scarcely in time to avoid destruction. The heavy blade splintered my chair.

I unleashed another riffle scroll. Its magic tingled through my sinews. Poised for another attack, Arnisant uttered a querulous whuffle as he felt the spell affect him too.

Kasiya flew toward us, but now Arnisant and I matched him in alacrity. The vampire's sword struck empty air where I had stood an instant earlier. Arnisant blurred behind Kasiya, harrying his heels.

I circled the table, attacking Kasiya's exposed face at every opportunity. His parries struck hard against my blade, but they were hasty—he still feared attacks to his face and eyes. He feinted a leap onto the table but turned instead to cut at Arnisant.

"Arnisant, out!" Kasiya's blade scored a shallow cut across the hound's hip as Arnisant ran back. I stabbed deep into Kasiya's ham. His lunge faltered, but he staggered forward, recovering as abominable energies repaired his severed ligaments.

I pressed the attack. Kasiya retreated into the library stacks. With his free hand, he swept books from the shelves. They crashed over me, the dust of decades blinding me.

The creaking of a high shelf alerted me to the danger I could no longer see. Pushing books through the nearest shelf, I snaked through the towering stack even as it fell upon its neighbor. The massive shelves cascaded one against the other as I rolled back toward the tables at the center of the room. I turned to witness the ruin of the windows as the last stack fell against them, shattering the stained glass.

Beyond the broken window, the pink of dawn colored the eastern sky.

I repressed the impulse to taunt Kasiya. He still had time to kill me, if I were careless. Taking another riffle scroll in hand, I watched the open window, ready to slow his escape with a frost spell. Nothing moved above the roiling dust. Instead, I heard a crackle of flames from the direction of the door.

Kasiya released the fireball. As it flew toward me, it grew from the size of a pea to the circumference of a pumpkin. I leaped for Arnisant, trying to knock the dog flat on the floor.

The blast swept us both across the room.

My head rang with the explosion of dust. Burning pages flapped around us like fiery birds landing on a charred beach.

Kasiya stood before the door, unperturbed by the explosion. Retrieving his mask, he favored me with an ugly, eel-like smile. "This is the first of your punishments, Count Jeggare. Do not dare to hope that it shall be the last."

As he spoke, his features melted. So too did his flesh and garments, dissolving into a greasy cloud that seeped beneath the crack of the repository door.

Scrabbling to my feet, I grabbed the door handle and pulled. Locked.

Heedless of the flames rising around me, I collected my satchel and as many of the materials as I could find in the wreckage of the table. Happily, the scroll I required was one of those I recovered in the debris. I discharged its magic to open the door and stepped out of the smothering smoke into the cool air of dawn.

The hue of "Fire!" rang across the grounds of the Grand Lodge. Servants and Pathfinders poured out of the nearest buildings. A few lugged buckets, demonstrating the efficiency with which they had learned the menial lessons taught to burgeoning Pathfinders—lessons that I, by virtue of my noble birth, had been spared.

"Venture-Captain, you are injured." Timon thrust his bucket into the arms of another man and produced a handkerchief to press against my temple. By his fearful grimace, I saw he was glad of any excuse not to approach the inferno.

I took the handkerchief, grateful for the gesture but uncomfortable at the touch of a servant.

A Pathfinder, I reminded myself. Timon was not always a servant. I shuddered to imagine myself set down so low, a humiliation I had experienced recently. A growing light from the sky arrested my attention.

Another fireball fell toward us. Illuminated in its glow, Kasiya rode upon his now full-sized chariot, drawn by a pack of flying saluki dogs. Beside me, Timon gasped but stood paralyzed by fear.

Frantic, I fumbled with my satchel, eyes searching for the right scroll. My fingers found it, my thumb pressing against its unbound edge, and the blaze engulfed me.

Coming Next Week: Blood and waves in the final chapter of Dave Gross's "Killing Time."

Enjoying this story so far? Check out even more adventures of Radovan and Varian in the new novel Queen of Thorns, available now!

Dave Gross's adventures of Radovan and Count Jeggare include the Pathfinder Tales novels Prince of Wolves, Master of Devils, and Queen of Thorns; the novellas "Husks" and "Hell's Pawns"; and the short stories "A Lesson in Taxonomy," "A Passage to Absalom," and "The Lost Pathfinder," all available at paizo.com/pathfindertales. He also co-wrote the Pathfinder Tales novel Winter Witch with Elaine Cunningham, and has written novels for the Forgotten Realms as well as short stories for such anthologies as Tales of the Far West and Shotguns v. Cthulhu. Dave is the former editor of magazines ranging from Dragon to Star Wars Insider to Amazing Stories, and is currently a writer for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition.

Illustration by Carlos Villa

NPC Codex Art Preview

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

The Pathfinder RPG NPC Codex is set to release on tomorrow, Wednesday, November 21. Each of the NPC Codex's pages features a full-body illustration by one of many Paizo artist favorites. Here's a sneak peek at some new characters to add to your Pathfinder game!

Illustration by Jorge Fares Stage magicians use their skills to entertain nobles in theaters and crowds of commoners on street corners.	Illustration by Scott Purdy There are few things more terrifying than a half-orc barbarian with a double axe.
Illustration by Jason Rainville A gruff, no-nonsense sort, a constable prefers a stern warning to violence, but doesn't hesitate to crack a belligerent nuisance over the head.	Illustration by Chris Seaman Nimble for a dwarf, an iron duelist excels at hit-and-run tactics.

Sarah Robinson
Senior Art Director

Building Your Pathfinder Society Community: GM 101 and Kid's Track

Monday, November 19, 2012

Last month, we offered a blog post that was the foundation of building your community. I wanted to build on that theme and have a series of blog posts that discuss how to contibute to and grow your local Pathfinder Society community.

The first bullet point in that post suggested that you should offer to GM. However, you may feel you aren't experienced enough or don't know the rules well enough to be a "good GM." One thing I have learned in my years of gaming is that often people who want to GM, but who feel too shy or uncomfortable running a table, actually turn out to be some of the best GMs.

Over the past year, our Venture-Captains and Venture-Lieutenants have often said that there is a lack of GMs. This is why I worked with a group of the best GMs in the Georgia area (people I had personal experience playing with and GMing for) to develop a GM 101 course. This course debuted at PaizoCon and was also offered at Gen Con. The feedback from attendees was incredibly positive and it is now time to share the course with everyone. The GM 101 instructional PDF will support the running of GM 101 courses in your area. Even if someone just reads the GM 101 course, there is a ton of great information to be shared.

The course is divided into four lessons, each lasting approximately one hour. These include "Roleplaying: Bringing Scenarios to Life," "Rules: Enabling Awesomeness, Restricting Abuse," "Running the Game: The Science Behind the Art," and "Advanced Topics: When the Unexpected Strikes." These four basic topics will allow new GMs to ease into the role and also feel more comfortable overseeing the enjoyment of a table for a group of four to six players.

One thing the GM 101 PDF refers to in the second half of the course, but that it does not include, is the Deck of Many Situations. This deck allows new GMs who have been through the four building-block lessons above to take those instructions and adjudicate real situations that have occurred at Pathfinder Society tables at local game days and regional and national conventions. I will refer you to several of our Venture-Captains for access to the deck. They have developed different decks, which include situations encountered in their local regions. If you would like to obtain a Deck of Many Situations, please refer to the Pathfinder Society Regional Coordinators page. If your Regional Coordinator does not have a copy of the Deck of Many Situations, he or she will be able to obtain one from another Venture-Captain and provide it to you. Some of the more memorable situations I was able to be a part of at Paizo Con were "warring spouses" and "a child pitching a temper tantrum" (yes, I was playacting the child). It was interesting to see how GMs handled both of those very tricky situations.

The other PDF I wanted to provide for download today was the Kid's Track lesson plans. The lifeblood of our hobby is the next generation. A decade ago, I took my son to his first Gen Con when he was eight years old. There was very little for him to actually participate in or be involved with at that age. Over the years, I had toyed with the idea of creating some kid's games so that young children would have something to do. When I was hired by Paizo, it jumped to the top of my priority list since I had resources available that I had never had before. I reached out to Ontario Venture-Lieutenant Jeff Mahood to help me develop a lesson plan. He has experience with early childhood education and I wanted to gear these lesson plans for kids that were six to twelve years old. What he put together and provided blew me away and I can't thank him enough for his work on it.

With this awesome document in hand, I was unsure how it would go over at Gen Con. I reached out to several store owners and forum members, and received overwhelmingly positive feedback, so I put it on the official Gen Con schedule. We sold out every slot at Gen Con and ran eight unscheduled overfill tables. With the reponse we had at Gen Con 2012, I have my sights on expanding the program even more at Gen Con 2013.

What the Kid's Track lesson plan offers is four lessons on the basics of roleplaying games, broken down by the total minutes spent on each subject, using the Pathfinder RPG Beginner Box to teach those fundamentals. Each lesson builds on the previous lesson and helps a GM teach children as young as six what roleplaying games are and how to play roleplaying games, specifically using the Pathfinder RPG Beginner Box rules. Each lesson plan is followed by the four children playing one of the four Beginner Box Bash Demo adventures.

I hope you find both of these PDFs useful for building Pathfinder Society, and roleplaying in general, in your community. I would love to hear your feedback on how we can make these programs better and look forward to reading your comments.

Mike Brock
Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator

Pathfinder Battles Preview: OMG, It's the Wyvern

Friday, November 16, 2012

Work has been so busy lately I can hardly think straight. So here I am at 4:00 on a Friday afternoon, and I only now realized that I forgot to put together a preview blog for January's upcoming Shattered Star set of Pathfinder Battles prepainted fantasy miniatures!

I want to keep this week's preview short and sweet, and honestly the best way to do that is to focus on one of the set's sweetest miniatures: the Wyvern.

Check out this masterful miniature!

This figure is amazing. I'd place it among the 10 most impressive figures in the Shattered Star set (yes, that means there are still plenty of jaw-droppers we haven't revealed yet). Best of all, this guy is an UNCOMMON.

Watch out, horses!

And here's a nice little size comparison to show what the Wyvern looks like next to a Medium-sized figure, in this case our iconic cleric Kyra!

So yeah, there's that. This Large figure is super-cool, but there are even cooler figures coming!

And there's also big movement behind the scenes on the Pathfinder Battles front. One of the reasons I'm so tired this week is that I've spent most of my waking hours deciding on the contents of the next TWO SETS worth of miniatures for our friends at WizKids, along with more than 100 images for their sculptors to get to work on immediately.

2013 is going to be an absolutely Gargantuan year for Pathfinder Battles!

No preview blog next week, as yours truly will be enjoying turkey with family for Thanksgiving. After that, though, I promise something extra-delicious in Pathfinder Battles Preview Land!

Erik Mona
Publisher

Killing Time

by Dave Gross

Chapter Two: Token of Affection
Radovan

"Stand fast, varlet!"

I could hardly believe my ears. "What did you say?"

"Don't move." The bravo struck a pose and looked down his skinny sword at me.

"That ain't what you said. What did you call me?"

He sneered, probably thinking I couldn't hear his buddies creeping up behind me. When I told the boss I was going out for some exercise, this wasn't what I had in mind. The swordsman looked me in the eye. "Varlet."

"That's what I thought." I crooked a finger. "Why don't you come over here and whisper it in my ear."

He slid a step closer before thinking better of it. He had a good five inches of height on me. Along with the sword, that gave him plenty of reach. In the narrow alley, that gave him one hell of an advantage. Judging from the purses I saw dangling from his belt, it'd been working out for him so far.

I could've put a dart in his eye, but that would've spoiled the surprise for his buddies, who didn't know I knew where they were. Besides, after the past year, I wasn't in much of a killing mood.

"When I hear a word like 'varlet,' I know I'm talking to a special kind of guy," I said. "The kind with a scented hanky in his cuff, maybe a monocle just for show, a box of powdered tobacco to sniff off the back of his wrist. You know the kind of guy I mean. In Cheliax, we'd call you a poet."

"Mind your tongue, hellspawn, or I will give you such—"

"A poet'd say 'thrashing.'"

"—a thrashing— Curse you, you insolent Chel!"

"I've got to hand it to you, though. You Absalom thugs dress better than Egorian river rats." I sniffed at him. "Smell nice, too. What's that, lilac water?"

"How dare you! I am no thug. I am a gentleman. I keep the streets of Absalom—"

"Alleys."

"I keep them clean of scum like you."

I nodded at the purses on his belt. "And charge us for the privilege, yeah?"

For a second he lost his tough and looked past me at his partners. His eyes told me I'd guessed right when I heard their boots scrape the cobblestones: there were two moving in, one on either side. They needed a little more time, so I vamped.

"So you want my purse? What about my fancy new jacket? You wouldn't believe how much it cost. I had it made in a city on the other side of the world, ten times bigger than this little hamlet." I showed off the dragon running down either sleeve, the monkey and the swordswoman tooled on the chest. I imagined the backstabbers checking out the phoenix on the back. "On the other hand, it's a bit wide in the shoulders for a skinny little poet like you. You ever lift anything heavier than that toothpicker?"

"You'll eat those words—"

The guy on my left made his move. I whipped around to put a spur in his belly. Lucky for him, I caught him in his big thick belt. The sharp bone jutting from my elbow didn't perforate him, but it knocked the wind out of him.

The second guy lunged for where I wasn't standing anymore. I threw out my leg in a move my late "master" called Sweeping the Grass. For the first time I realized that name didn't make any sense. Who sweeps the grass? It should've been Sweeping the Porch or the Sweeping the Street or something. Maybe I'd rename it now that the old bastard was gone to Hell and I wasn't. Not yet.

When I took out his legs, the second mook hit the cobblestones hard. He tried to stand but slipped in a pile of garbage, raising a terrific stink before falling again.

While I was dancing with his friends, the gentleman moved in to take a stab at me. I tugged the first goon over by the belt, careful to let his pal's sword miss the important parts. That's the kind of guy I am: considerate of others' feelings. Not that you'd believe it from the guy's yowling.

"Desna weeps." For all I knew, the city guard showed up in Absalom alleys. I was going to have to wrap this up.

The second knucklehead tried to get up, so I gave him a rap on the noggin. The bleeder sat on the alley floor, clutching his belly and wailing.

"Shut up, you, or I'll give you something to cry about." Maybe I didn't want to kill these jerks, but he was testing my resolve.

I grabbed the blades they'd dropped and saw the bloodstains. They'd used these knives recently.

"You aren't just robbers," I said. "You're cutthroats."

Gentleman took a step toward me. I showed him the big smile, and he froze.

"Stand still, knave. I will hold you here to answer to the city guard."

"Seriously? You want to explain these to the city guard?" I threw away the bloody knives and pocketed the stolen purses from the backstabbers.

The point of his sword drooped.

"That's more like it. Now hand over your loot."

The man had no guile. His feint was obvious. Before his point came anywhere near me, I lunged below it, sitting splits in a lunge the aforementioned late master called Monkey Plucks the Peaches.

Gentleman recited his vowels, top of his lungs at first, then weak as a squeaky hinge.

"Drop it." When he didn't, I shook the tree.

The sword hit the ground. Three of the purses followed.

"All of them." I squeezed.

Fingers shaking, he slipped out a platinum coin and tucked it behind his sash before letting the purse fall to the ground.

I collected the money while he cradled his peaches. When I reached for his sash, he tucked an elbow over the coin. I cracked him across the face and took the coin. It was different from the local currency I'd seen. "What's this?"

"A token," he wheezed. "Sentimental value. Please... let me keep it."

Instead of the head of a queen or a bishop, stamped on the face of the coin was a woman performing what the boss would call "an unmentionable act."

For a couple seconds I considered what to do with these lousy killers. Cutting their throats would be a big favor to the neighbors. But I really was sick of killing.

I flipped the coin, slapped it flat on the back of my hand, pretended to make a choice. "Desna smiles on you boys tonight."

I sauntered away until I turned the corner. Then I ran.

∗∗∗

Who could say no to a face like Iolanda's?

According to the fourth guy I asked, the brothel that minted the coin was way across town. Between the boss's purse and the loot I took from the cutthroats, there was no reason to walk. I flagged down a carriage. Settling into the cab, I couldn't stop looking at the coin, rolling it across my knuckles. It'd been a long, long time since anyone'd done something that kind of unmentionable to me.

At the brothel, I tossed the driver the smallest of the stolen purses. He took a peek inside and whistled his appreciation. "Shall I wait for you, sir?"

"Nah, I'm going to take my time."

He tipped his hat as I jumped out.

The bouncers took one look at me and started pushing up their sleeves. I didn't want any more trouble. One of the bouncers was a half-orc with tusks bigger than my spurs.

"Take it easy, fellas," I said. "I got this coin."

They squinted at the token, grumbled a bit, and nodded at the halfling doorman. As I went inside, the slip whispered, "Nice jacket."

I never get tired of hearing that. Some fellas spend all their money on booze or shiver. Me, I like to look sharp. I tipped the slip a gold coin, which didn't seem to impress him much. Once I got inside, I saw why.

The boss, he's probably the richest guy in Egorian, capital of Cheliax, which is pretty much the richest country in the world. That makes my boss the richest guy in the world.

Well, maybe that's not what he'd call "empirically true." But let's just say that the difference between my boss and the actual richest guy in the world is less than the difference between me and somebody else who ain't rich.

The boss is better with the metaphors.

The brothel's salon made the boss's look like a warehouse office. It was all red velvet cushions, tiger-hide couches, chandeliers like all the stars fell down at once, carpet so thick you needed a machete to cross the room, with all the knobs and fixtures made of gold-plated gold. And the girls...

Years back, my old boss Zandros the Fair put me in charge of security for a couple of the Goatherds' houses on Trick Alley. Even after he got jealous and put me back on collections, I spent a fair amount of my free time getting to know the ladies of the lane. Whenever one of the houses brought in a great beauty, the madam always said the new girl was from some far-away land: Osirion, Qadira, Tian Xia, Rahadoum, or Katapesh. Standing in this fancy brothel, I realized they'd all lied.

All those beauties came from Absalom.

The girls were made of all the colors, hair and eyes and skin. There were elf girls with ears as slim as milkweed, and their eyes were jewels. There were slip girls nimble as forest nymphs, three of them chasing each other over the furniture and through the legs of the clients. There were fat girls, skinny girls, tall girls, short girls, a couple of bald girls, and one dwarf girl with biceps bigger than mine. I winked at her. Later on, we were going to talk massage.

Somebody put a cool glass in my hand. I drank it without looking. Fizzy.

"Can I help you find something in particular?" A slim fellow in a white butler's coat stood beside me. When I got a closer look, I wasn't so sure it was a fellow after all.

"I got this coin." I showed it.

"Iolanda. You lucky devil." His or her wink smoothed over my suspicion that it was a crack about my bloodline. Lots of folks mistake the grip of the big knife hanging from the spine of my jacket for a tail, which I don't have—and no horns neither, so don't even start. Not-a-butler pointed up a spiral staircase to indicate a balcony on the third floor. "Up there."

I tossed away the glass and started up the stairs.

From some angles the hair she let spill over the balcony was black as ink. From others, blue as midnight.

People got in my way, but I pushed them aside without a glance. I couldn't look away from Iolanda.

It was her eyes. They weren't blue, not if sapphires are blue. Not purple either, if that's what you call amethysts. They were the color of those stars you think you see some nights, only when you point them out to someone else, they're already gone, dark as the blank sky. But you never forget them.

Iolanda didn't look at me, even after I got close. I tried to follow her gaze, but she wasn't looking at anybody downstairs, although plenty of them were staring up at her. She sighed through lips like ripe plums.

On the way up, I'd worked out a few ice-breaking lines, real charming stuff. When the moment came, I cracked the little smile and said, "I got this coin."

She looked down at me. She didn't quite sniff, but her expression told me she was used to seeing a higher class of client. Still, she took the coin. Her fingernails were painted the exact same shade as her lips. Somebody's got that job, I thought, staring at her lips while mixing that color. Desna smiles on that guy.

"Come." She led me to a bedroom door. "This won't take long."

"Don't be so quick to judge." On the other hand, I thought, I'd been what you call abstinent for over a year. "Let's take our time. I got all night."

She stopped and turned toward me, her voice serious. "You understand what these tokens indicate. You receive only the favor shown."

"Yeah, I know. I just figured..." I shrugged, hopeful.

"Only what is shown, and only for as long as it takes." She gave me a closer look. Her eyes trailed across my jacket. She frowned like she was thinking. I wanted to make her smile.

"How much for the night? I got money."

She named her price. The only guy I knew who could pay it was the boss, and he'd need more guys to carry that purse.

She saw it on my face and raised an eyebrow. "Perhaps there is something else you can do for me. Something that would be worth more of my attention." She trailed a finger along the dragon on my left shoulder. Even through the leather, her touch gave me a thrill.

"What do you want, sweetheart? Just name it."

She smiled.

"A killing."

Coming Next Week: Old enemies reaquainted in Chapter Three of Dave Gross's "Killing Time."

Enjoying this story so far? Check out even more adventures of Radovan and Varian in the new novel Queen of Thorns, available now!

Dave Gross's adventures of Radovan and Count Jeggare include the Pathfinder Tales novels Prince of Wolves, Master of Devils, and Queen of Thorns; the novellas "Husks" and "Hell's Pawns"; and the short stories "A Lesson in Taxonomy," "A Passage to Absalom," and "The Lost Pathfinder," all available at paizo.com/pathfindertales. He also co-wrote the Pathfinder Tales novel Winter Witch with Elaine Cunningham, and has written novels for the Forgotten Realms as well as short stories for such anthologies as Tales of the Far West and Shotguns v. Cthulhu. Dave is the former editor of magazines ranging from Dragon to Star Wars Insider to Amazing Stories, and is currently a writer for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition.

Illustration by Carlos Villa

Mythic Adventures Playtest

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Welcome to the long-awaited playtest of Mythic Adventures. This exciting book, due out in August 2013, gives you the chance to play a hero that is a cut above the ordinary sellsword, more powerful than your average hedge wizard, and able to take on challenges far beyond those of his ordinary contemporaries. Like Hercules and Achilles, these heroes inspire legends with their every deed, facing horrible foes and taking on dangerous quests that most would consider impossible. This playtest is a sample of the rules, giving you all the tools you need to run a mythic game or two right now, as well as the chance to tell us what works and what needs work.

Mythic Adventures is more than an ordinary sourcebook. It offers players and GMs a new way to play the Pathfinder RPG, from the humble beginnings of 1st level, to the lofty realms of power of 20th. You can use these rules to run a campaign where the players are mythic from the first session just as easily as you can use them to run a campaign where they are only mythic for a single game. The mythic rules can be used how you want, at any point in the campaign.

Put simply, the mythic rules allow characters (and monsters) to break some of the fundamental rules of the game. They allow a character to cheat death, to change the outcome of die rolls, and even to act twice in one turn. While mythic characters do get some statistical bonuses to denote their raw potential, much of their power comes from what they can do that others cannot, at least without having quite a few more levels. How many levels is the big question. This is where you come in.

The playtest of these rules is important to help us balance the overall system. These powers and abilities add a lot to the capabilities of characters and monsters, and it’s important to see how much this addition affects the overall power balance of the game. We need you to use these rules in your game, even if for just one or two sessions, and to give us your impression as to how the rules affect the game. While your initial impression from just reading the rules is valuable, actual play experience is by far more useful to our process. When playtesting the rules, please keep the following points in mind.

• All playtest feedback should be posted to the following Mythic Adventures Playtest forums: General Discussion, Player Feedback, GM Feedback, Adventure Feedback.
• Please check the forum for any similar topics before posting, and add to an existing thread whenever possible.
• Please try to read the entire document before posting. You may find that your question is answered in a later section of the rules.
• Remember, we would prefer actual playtest feedback. Use the rules, don’t just imagine how they might work.
• Be civil! Remember that everyone on the forum is here for the same goal, to make a better game. Remember that the experience of others may be different from your own and starting an argument over a differing viewpoint does no service to the playtest. Posters who violate these guidelines will find themselves given a timeout and have offending threads locked.
• Have fun. These rules are designed to add an extra edge of excitement to your game, allowing you to throw over-the-top situations at your characters. Share your stories with us and your fellow playtesters.

Now get out there, grab the document, give it a read, and play! I am looking forward to reading your thoughts, comments, and criticisms about these rules. The playtest will run from now until noon (PST) on Monday, January 14th. See you on the boards.

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer

Evoking Day

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Wow, it has been a while since we had a holiday blog. Well, back by popular demand, we are offering you a new bit of info on a Golarion holiday, as we celebrate our own federal holiday here in the United States—Veteran’s Day. As a veteran myself, I want to send out a heartfelt thank you to veterans of all five services. I know the sacrifice you have made for your country, and without your service and sacrifice, I couldn’t have the cool job I have today. Take a minute to pat yourself on the back and reflect on your decision to unselfishly volunteer years of your life to make this country great.

Developer Adam Daigle gets his first shot at a Golarion holiday write up. He wrote the below description for Evoking Day and you will find a special Pathfinder Society Chronicle sheet you can download and apply to a Pathfinder Society character. Evoking Day is mentioned on page 249 of Pathfinder Campaign Setting: The Inner Sea World Guide.

A holy day to followers of Nethys, Evoking Day is full of vibrant explosions, skillful wielding of spells, and much dancing. Evoking Day is observed on the 18th of Neth, and while this holiday is mostly celebrated in Garund, temples dedicated to Nethys host celebrations throughout the Inner Sea region. Traditional celebrations of Evoking Day have changed over the thousands of years since its first incarnation, but to this day every occurrence of Evoking Day still features a grand meal shared by celebrants during the afternoon and a wondrous exhibition of brilliant and explosive magic once the sun sets. These days, such colorful magical displays are augmented with fireworks of a dozen different colors and patterns.

In temples of Nethys dedicated to revering evocation magic, priests and prominent arcanists participate in spell duels where each contestant stands on a raised platform and takes turns trying to incapacitate her opponent. The magic wielded in theses duels favors the flashy over the dangerous, but clerics of Nethys are on hand to treat any injuries. These duels gather large crowds eager to lend their applause to their favorite contestant.

It is also during this festival when wizards who worship Nethys open their spellbooks to others who share their craft. Wizards normally guard their spellbooks with their lives and covet the eldritch information therein, but on Evoking Day these wizards meet with one another prior to the afternoon feast to share their spells just as they prepare to share a grand meal.

Though Evoking Day is primarily a day of grand magic, those with no spellcasting talent still flock to local temples of Nethys to partake in the shared feast and flashy evening displays of magic and fireworks. Between the meal and into the night, celebrants wear black-and-white robes and perform joyous dances meant to give thanks to the wonders Nethys brought to humankind. These dances are grand affairs involving dozens of dancers all spinning and clapping to the accompanying music as their black-and-white robes fan out around them with each spin. As night descends and the fireworks and magical displays begin, the dancing rises to a climax erupting in shouts and calls to Nethys with each thunderous boom.

Click here to download the Evoking Day 4712 Boon! — 82 KB (zip/PDF) This Boon is no longer available as of 12/17/12.

Mike Brock
Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator

Pathfinder Battles Preview: Water, Water, Everywhere

Friday, November 9, 2012

In what seems like a first for these late fall Pathfinder Battles preview blogs, it's actually not raining outside our Washington State offices as I write this. But don't worry, I'm sure it soon will be. These last few weeks have shown us all the devastating power of nature, so I thought it might make a good occasion to show you two water-themed creatures from January's Shattered Star set of Pathfinder Battles prepainted fantasy miniatures.

I'm speaking, of course, of water elementals.

This set (and the Shattered Star Adventure Path that inspired it) features two different sizes of water elementals, the Medium Water Elemental and the Large Water Elemental. As with the Fire Elementals we've already previewed, water elementals are a staple of Pathfinder RPG play. Making miniatures of our elementals is somewhat problematic, however, as the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary features images that are not really suitable for turning into 3D figurines, and not all sizes are covered by those illustrations, anyway.

In this case, we already faced a similar problem when we put together our Pathfinder Pawns Bestiary Box collection of cardboard pawns. For that set, we enlisted one of our favorite artists, Tyler Walpole, to create brand new images for Small, Medium, and Large elementals of the four common types. I happened to be building the Pathfinder Battles Shattered Star list at the same time, so we asked Tyler to pull double duty on his assignment, creating images that would work for both Pathfinder Pawns and Pathfinder Battles figures.

While the Shattered Star set does not contain Small elementals of any type, it's probably not too big a spoiler to reveal that it does contain Medium and Large elementals of the four main types: air, earth, fire, and water.

WizKids did a great job sculpting Tyler's images into three dimensions. Here we have the Medium Water Elemental, a common figure:

As with all the elementals in this set, this guy is sculpted in clear plastic, so it looks really cool when held up to the light. The Medium Water Elemental looms over other Medium creatures, casting an imposing shadow upon his enemies.

Speaking of imposing, it's pretty hard to imagine a cooler Large Water Elemental than this:

The clear effects are more pronounced on this Large figure, which really pushes the envelope on what can be considered Large in the Pathfinder game. Even action figures would have reason to fear a drowning at this "miniature's" hands.

Don't believe me? Check out what both of these figures look like on my desk facing of against our Medium iconic fighter, Valeros. I hope he brought his swimming trunks!

That's it for this week. See you here in seven days for more cool reveals from the upcoming Shattered Star set!

Erik Mona
Publisher

Illustration by Mathias Kollros. Widescreen version here.

Q&A With Dave Gross

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Last wednesday marked the release of Dave Gross's new Pathfinder Tales novel, Queen of Thorns! Starring his trademark characters Radovan and Jeggare, Queen of Thorns takes the half-elven Pathfinder and his hellspawn bodyguard deep into the isolated forest kingdom of Kyonin, where long-lived elves spin political webs longer than human lifespans and demons struggle to expand their foothold in the mortal realm. We took a few moments to ask Dave questions about his newest novel and the writing process.

What inspired Queen of Thorns? Radovan and Jeggare have obviously been around for several years now, but how did you come up with the other characters and plot for this particular novel?

In all the R&J novels, I first think of what aristocratic characters Jeggare can meet, and then what low-lifes Radovan can rub elbows with—not that it’s a good idea to rub elbows with Radovan. So the first character I knew I wanted to include was Queen Telandia.

After that, I wanted to show that elves aren’t all the same, so I chose one who represented the goddess Calistria (Kemeili), another who is the epitome of a ranger (Caladrel), and a third who was an outcast among her own people because she grew up among humans (Oparal). Then, because gnomes are a small but important element of Kyonin’s population, I included Fimbulthicket.

After thinking of the types of elves and gnome I wanted, I considered what each of them might want under the circumstances that I imagined Kyonin faced. That’s how the plot began to take root.

I knew from the start that I wanted this to be a quest for the truth behind Jeggare’s enigmatic past. I’ve dropped some hints about both his mother and father, but he grew up among her people, and the elves remained largely a mystery to him.

At the same time, I want to make each novel equally about Radovan, and since Kyonin is infested with demons, I knew it was time to make a great big revelation about Radovan’s true nature. Thus, both characters ultimately face themselves before the end of the book.

What part of Queen of Thorns was the most fun to write? What was the hardest?

Pretty much any of the nude scenes was huge fun, because I find nudity not only sexy but also hilarious, especially when Radovan is the one who’s naked. But really any of the humorous exchanges, the quarrels, the misunderstandings are all great fun to write. I can’t say that the novel is a comedy, but there’s certainly plenty of humor in it, and that’s some of the easiest and most fun material to write.

While I enjoy writing action scenes, I’ve written so damned many of the things that sometimes I just stare helplessly at the blank Word screen in hopes that my forehead will begin to bleed and I can come up with something different from all the fight scenes I’ve written before. Sometimes that’s just not possible, but I can tilt the action slightly so it seems fresh even though I’ve done similar fights in past. I need to make it fresh for me or else I can’t imagine it’ll seem fresh to other readers.

Other than Radovan and Jeggare, which character in this book is your favorite?

This is extremely difficult to answer because each of the major supporting characters was my favorite at one time or another. Kemeili was an early favorite because of her sass and volatility. Caladrel grew on me a lot more than I’d initially expected, because he’s such a "bro" compared with the odd-couple of Radovan and the count. Fimbulthicket always delighted me because of his unusual condition and because of his connection to the Green as a druid. In the end, I think Oparal is the character I grew most fond of, both because her struggle is often the hardest on her and because even when she’s wrong, she’s right—which makes more sense after you read what she goes through.

Complete this sentence: "This will be your favorite Pathfinder Tales novel if..."

"...if you like elves, gnomes, demons, fey creatures, ancient archeological sites, and gigantic revelations about the main characters."

What do you find most interesting about Kyonin, the book's setting?

While we give each other a hard time, James Sutter and I have massively overlapping tastes. He wrote the Kyonin article that formed the bulk of my "research" on this novel, and it’s because I loved that material so much that I so desperately wanted to set a story in Kyonin. Again, it’s hard to point to a single thing, but the element of Kyonin that most appeals to me is that the elves abandoned the place and came back thousands of years later. There’s stuff in the forest they don’t even remember, and other stuff they’ve forgotten how to use. To them it’s as dangerous as it is potentially useful—even moreso to outsiders like Varian and Radovan.

What makes elven society so different from human society, and how did you go about trying to show that in this book?

I think the key to most non-human species in Golarion or any fantasy setting is that they are—let’s not kid ourselves—basically human. Otherwise we couldn’t sympathize with them the way we need to do. But elves and dwarves and gnomes all emphasize certain elements of human characteristics.

One way—surely not the only way—to look at the elves is through the gods they worship. Some are devoted to the Green, or nature. Others worship Desna, who Count Jeggare sees as the Tender of Dreams while Radovan calls her Lady Luck. But the god most often associated with the elves is Calistria, with her three aspects or "stings": guile, lust, and revenge. While the inquisitor Kemeili is the one most obviously associated with the goddess, you also see Calistria’s "stings" in most of the other elven characters. The exception is the paladin Oparal, who grew up away from her people and who has adopted a different set of values.

Showing off the lust aspect is easy, since elves are often seen as sexual creatures. The guile is also pretty familiar to readers who think of elves as stealthy rangers or subtle thinkers. The revenge element seems a little unusual for the elves of other settings, but I kept it in mind until the last few chapters of the novel.

Queen of Thorns has a dragon as a key character—how do you go about writing a "monstrous" character, especially one so old and powerful?

I suppose I tried to do a little of that through description, but mostly I relied on dialogue and the reaction of other characters to her. Rough and tough as he is, Radovan doesn’t usually scare easy, but he’s sure he’s one wrong word away from death every time he talks to the dragon.

Of course, when the fighting starts, what a dragon is able to do against dozens or even hundreds of opponents is pretty terrifying. Unfortunately for her, she’s got a lot more than hundreds to deal with, and ultimately I don’t think she’s the scariest presence in the book, although she’s darned close.

If you could have Radovan and Jeggare fight or fall in love with any character from another author's Pathfinder Tales novel, who would it be and why?

I look forward to the day when Radovan meets Ellasif from Elaine’s Winter Witch. I don’t think it’ll go well for him whether it’s a fight or a frolic. Jeggare might have an interesting relationship with Howard’s Elyanna, but I doubt it would be romantic. She’s not aristocratic enough for him, and I imagine he’s far too snooty for her. If they fought, she’d win in any physical contest, but I have a feeling he might outsmart her.

If you had to pick actors to play the main characters of Queen of Thorns, who would they be?

After musing over deceased actors like Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett, I’ve turned toward Michael Fassbender as the man who should play Count Jeggare. It’s more difficult choosing an actor for Radovan. For attitude, I like Stephen Graham (Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire), but for presence I like Vic Wertz’s suggestion of Ray Stevenson, even though he’s about a foot too tall.

Meg Chambers Steedle (Boardwalk Empire) would make an interesting Kemeili. Jeffrey Donovan (Burn Notice) for Caladrel. Gina Carano (Haywire) is Oparal. Maybe a digitally reduced Giovanni Ribisi (Avatar) as Fimbulthicket. Arnisant, of course, would play himself.

Check out Queen of Thorns, now available in paperback or ePub format! Also, join Dave Gross in a live web chat at 7 PM Pacific Time TONIGHT, November 8th!

Killing Time

by Dave Gross

Chapter One: The Night Visitor
Varian

The old servant fumbled with the keys. The glow of the lantern transformed his gnarled hands into dried roots.

At my side, Arnisant growled a warning. The instant I touched the Shadowless Sword, a gloved hand covered mine in a gesture doubtless intended to reassure me. Instead, the unwelcome touch raised the hairs on my neck. My pulse remained calm, however, a reminder of the strange transfiguration of my lately sundered heart.

Invisible a moment earlier, a woman glanced up at me. The shadow beneath her voluminous hood offered no impediment to my half-elven vision, yet I perceived only a platinum mask inlaid with blue gemstones. I had seen that mask only a few hours earlier, on one of the Decemvirate, the anonymous inner circle of the Pathfinder Society.

I showed Arnisant a hand sign. The wolfhound's growl ceased.

"I'll take those, Timon." The woman released my hand and reached for the lantern and keys.

I recognized the servant's name. As he surrendered the lantern, I saw that the wrinkles on his face and hands were the result not of age but of horrific burns.

"Timon of Korvosa," I said. "The Timon who stole the captain of the Sable Company's steed. The Timon who eloped with Chief Redmuzzle's daughter."

He bowed, stiff from his wounds but with a crooked smile acknowledging his pleasure at the recognition.

"Eloped?" The masked woman fidgeted, keys rattling, light bobbing. "Wasn't Chief Redmuzzle a goblin of the Mushfens?"

"The marriage was strictly a matter of self-preservation," said Timon.

"But goblins hate humans."

"Shortly before encountering Redmuzzle's tribe, I ran afoul of a marsh witch—"

"Green Sobeska!" I recalled his decades-old report in the Pathfinder Chronicles. "From the hag you retrieved several fragments of the tablets of Xanderghul. She transmogrified you into a goblin as you fled her grotto."

"I am flattered that you remember, Venture-Captain."

Timon's use of my Society title pleased and irritated me in equal portion. After my infuriating audience with the Decemvirate, I remained uncertain of my status. In my long absence, they had reassigned all of my field agents to others, leaving me a venture-captain in name only.

"Thank you, Timon." The woman's cool tone indicated dismissal.

For a moment I wished Radovan were with me so that he might slip a few coins into the retired Pathfinder's withered hand.

As Timon withdrew, the woman brushed past me and opened the door. Before I could identify her perfume—something Qadiran—the mingled scents of old paper, parchment, and leather poured out of the building. The woman snapped her fingers. Two rows of yellow lamps flickered to life along a pair of long reading tables.

Ranks of bookshelves surrounded the tables. Like tombs in a catacomb lay thousands of old, damaged, or misfiled volumes of arcane and mundane lore. The curators of the Grand Lodge's many libraries would determine which to restore for general use and which to retire.

I felt a pang of sympathy for the forgotten books and for Timon.

"Are you sure you wouldn't rather use one of the libraries?" she asked.

"I enjoy the solitude."

"It's better for sulking, isn't it?" She saw the effect of her remark in my posture. "No, no, I'm sorry, Varian. That isn't how I meant to begin. Here, I brought you a gift in honor of your long-awaited return from Tian Xia."

She produced a goblet from beneath her cloak. I stifled my annoyance at her familiar address, made all the more infuriating by her own anonymity. Since my return to the Grand Lodge, no one but Timon had addressed me as "Venture-Captain." In default of that title, anyone less than a prince should address me as "Your Excellency," or at least as "Count Jeggare."

She set the goblet on a reading table and produced a pair of bottles. The curling labels seized my attention: the wine came from my own vineyards in Western Cheliax, two of the finest vintages ever produced in the Inner Sea.

Decades earlier I had sent such bottles to certain of my field agents, who reported their excursions to me for fact-checking, annotation, and ultimately submission to the Decemvirate for potential inclusion in the Pathfinder Chronicles. Could this woman be Medesha? Khirsah? It should not surprise me to learn that either of those talented women had entered the Society's innermost circle.

I studied what little I could see beneath the mask: sea-green eyes, coral lips, and a long, fair chin. The enchantments of a Decemvirate mask could very well extend beyond the features it covered, even disguising the wearer's voice. Perhaps the masked stranger was not a woman, perhaps not even human.

As she poured the wine, I noticed that the corks of both bottles had been previously drawn and reinserted.

"You will join me, of course."

The Decemvirate has a flair for the dramatic.

"I hoped you would ask." She produced a second goblet from beneath her cloak. She filled both vessels and allowed me to choose.

Her gesture only heightened my caution, despite the seeming absurdity that a member of the Decemvirate would poison me on the grounds of the Grand Lodge. I chose the goblet nearest me. As I nosed the wine, she lifted the other goblet and said, "To old friends."

"Whoever they are." I put the goblet to my lips to cover my sarcasm.

The wine covered my palate with ripe cherry balanced with a hint of black olive and tobacco. After a moment's savor, I let the wine trail down my throat, relishing its decades-mellowed character.

The woman admired her goblet before setting it down. "Patience has its rewards."

By her tone, I knew she had prepared that remark.

I gestured for her to sit, taking the chair opposite as Arnisant settled at my foot. He laid his head upon his crossed forepaws and closed his eyes.

"Believe me when I say I understand your frustration," she began. Uttering my thoughts on that proposition seemed impolite after accepting a drink, so I smiled. "All right, I can't possibly understand your frustration. But I can imagine that you feel you deserve an explanation."

"And you feel I do not deserve one?"

"I'm not saying that. I'm saying you must trust that we know what we are doing."

"What I know is that I accepted, without explanation, a mission to retrieve this Celestial Pearl." Even as I named the artifact, I felt the cool pulse of half of its former contents within my breast. My brief death and subsequent resurrection by virtue of the dragon's heart was one of several intentional lacunae in my report to the Decemvirate. "During my absence, no effort was mounted to aid or rescue me and my—"

"We had no message from you."

"So you say. I sent three before misadventure prevented further communication."

"So you say." She drained the rest of her wine and refilled the goblet as I seethed. Once again, I noticed the eerie calm of my heartbeat even as the muscles in my neck drew painfully tight. "The truth is that I believe you, Varian. Others do as well. What I don't believe is that all the wizards of the Grand Lodge are lying about receiving no messages."

"It takes only one to sow deceit."

"Your concerns are noted. And..." She looked toward the door and peered into the darkness between the book stacks. Beside me, Arnisant lay still, breathing steadily. Surely he would have scented any intruder, so I took her gesture for more mummery. "The oaths of the Decemvirate are more demanding than those of the Society at large."

"If nothing else, my tenure in the Society should afford me the courtesy of an explanation. What was the purpose of my fetching the Celestial Pearl? Why can I not see the Lacuna Codex? Why will no one explain—?"

"I'm sorry, Varian. Already I've told you more than I should. You must place your faith in the judgment of the Decemvirate."

"As Eando Kline did?"

She sighed. "I knew you would throw that in my face."

"The machinations of the Decemvirate seem to be driving away the most promising members of the Society even as others retire."

"Kline's mistake was to place his judgment over that of the Decemvirate."

"Was that a mistake?"

"You don't have all the information."

"Perhaps if I did—"

"It is strictly need-to-know—"

"I am a Pathfinder. By definition, I need to know."

She made a silent snarl, a gesture reminding me of Radovan's big smile, except for her perfect white teeth. I raised an eyebrow, half amused at the image she presented.

She let out a sigh and shook her head. "Try to resist the impulse to have the last word tomorrow. You might get it."

"Perhaps tomorrow I will want it."

"I beg you not to follow Ollysta's example, Varian. Don't throw away a long and distinguished career for the sake of pride."

"Honor."

"Semantics."

"Only to someone who has forgotten the difference."

She pushed back from the table, jostling the bottles and goblets. "Enjoy the wine. Timon will return later to unlock the door."

As she walked away, I took her advice and resisted the impulse to have the last word. When she slammed the door shut behind her, I opened my satchel.

Arranging my remaining riffle scrolls, I set out a pot of ink, two compartmentalized boxes full of various material essences, dozens of blank riffle scrolls, a blank journal, another half-filled with my notes and sketches from Tian Xia, and my latest grimoire.

It was to fill the latter volume that I had come to this repository. While I had learned many new spells during my time at Dragon Temple, I wished to add others to my repertoire now that I was no longer an armchair arcanist but a practicing wizard.

Draining my goblet, I selected a riffle scroll and raised the cup. With two fingers I pinned a riffle scroll against the heel of my palm and thumbed the edge. The pages zipped past with a satisfying burp. Arcane light surrounded the goblet.

Holding it high, I searched the stacks for the tomes I sought. The organization was more or less as I remembered. Soon I returned to the table with three books of spells.

For a few minutes I indulged the nostalgic reflex, lingering over the names and annotations of the Pathfinder wizards who had fallen in the field. Two had once reported to me as their venture-captain. The other had been a friend, one whose humorous letters I could recite almost verbatim.

After pouring another goblet of wine, I set to work. Hours later, I had inscribed several long-desired spells. As I finished copying an interesting illusion, I lifted the second bottle to find that it, too, was empty. A wave of fatigue fell over me. I shook my head, and the feeling passed.

Arnisant distracted my thought with a loud and abrupt snore. Placing my toe against the dog's ribs, I reconsidered jostling him but instead withdrew my foot. Like Radovan and me, he had endured a long, arduous journey. The loyal hound deserved his rest.

"A loyal dog does deserve his rest." A liquid voice echoed my thoughts as a masked man stepped into the lamplight.

He wore a mask of hammered gold painted with enamel at brows, lips, and beard. Beneath jeweled arm rings, crisp linen wound tight around his arms. He wore a breastplate of compressed peacock feathers and a pleated scarlet kilt. From one hip hung a khopesh in a jeweled half-sheath. From the other dangled a pair of bound books and a miniature chariot of elm, ash, and sycamore. Scents of myrrh, sandalwood, cedar, and attar of roses flowed from him.

The stranger's obscured face rose in an imperial gesture, and he said, "Although you are a most disloyal dog, Count Jeggare, you too shall have the rest you deserve—a final rest."

Coming Next Week: Brawls and brothels in Absalom's seedier districts in Chapter Two of Dave Gross's "Killing Time."

Dave Gross's adventures of Radovan and Count Jeggare include the Pathfinder Tales novels Prince of Wolves, Master of Devils, and Queen of Thorns; the novellas "Husks" and "Hell's Pawns"; and the short stories "A Lesson in Taxonomy," "A Passage to Absalom," and "The Lost Pathfinder," all available at paizo.com/pathfindertales. He also co-wrote the Pathfinder Tales novel Winter Witch with Elaine Cunningham, and has written novels for the Forgotten Realms as well as short stories for such anthologies as Tales of the Far West and Shotguns v. Cthulhu. Dave is the former editor of magazines ranging from Dragon to Star Wars Insider to Amazing Stories, and is currently a writer for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition.

Illustration by Carlos Villa

NPC Codex Preview: Animals Can't Vote

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

The NPC Codex is just 2 weeks away, and it's time to talk about an often-forgotten, underprivileged group of creatures: animal companions!

In addition to featuring hundreds of complete NPC stat blocks, this book presents 45 fully statted animal companions, generally two or three for each effective druid level. An asterisk (*) after an animal companion's name indicates that only druids (not rangers) can select that type of companion.

The druids in the NPC Codex are built with a nature domain instead of an animal companion, but it's a simple matter to replace the domain spells and domain granted powers for an animal companion. Likewise, the rangers are built with nature bond (companions), but as that has no effect on the ranger's stat block, it's easy to replace that ability with an animal companion.

Because animal companions have the same stats whether the character is a PC or an NPC, you can even use these animal companion stat blocks for your PCs.

Remember, it's election day in the US—vote, because animals can't!

Sean K Reynolds
Designer

Pathfinder Society in South Africa

Monday, November 5, 2012

Time to offer you a blog post from one of our farthest-flung Pathfinder Society lodges in the world. From what I have been told, there has not been much of any kind of organized play, outside of Magic: The Gathering, in South Africa ever. When I saw one of our RPG Superstar hotshots was running Pathfinder Society there, I knew I had to reach out to him. I can’t say I ever expected to have Pathfinder Society coordinated anywhere on the African continent, except maybe in Egypt, so I was thrilled when Jerall accepted the Venture-Captain position after a series of emails.

Without further ado, I present to you Jerall’s report on Pathfinder South Africa.

South Africa is home to a varied mix of peoples, cultures, and eleven official languages. It is a strange country with a blend of beautiful natural spaces, burgeoning metropolises, and incredible wealth alongside abject poverty.

South African roleplayers are an eclectic bunch, each bringing a unique collection of experiences to the table. People from all over the world, including, historically, greater Africa, Asia, and Europe, have settled in South Africa—not too dissimilar from a real-world Absalom. It’s in this space that my fellow volunteers and I hope to grow the South African Pathfinder Society Lodge.

Earlier this year, Mike Brock noticed that we had begun reporting a few South African events each month. Mike contacted us through our event organizer email addresses and, a few emails later, we were well on our way to formalizing and growing Pathfinder Society Organized Play in Cape Town, and later Durban, and even ICON 2012, South Africa’s biggest convention in Johannesburg.

Classified as megadiverse, South Africa is a large country, encompassing nine different provinces, featuring eight major terrestrial biomes, and over 1.2 million square kilometers. At the moment, my two Venture-Lieutenants and I are focusing on three areas in particular: Cape Town and the Western Cape, Durban in Kwa-Zulu Natal, and the Gauteng province, which includes both Pretoria and Johannesburg.

Roleplaying has a long history in South Africa, with our older conventions well into their second or third decades of existence. Traditionally though, any sort of gaming was only available to a rather small percentage of our total population. A few years ago, we saw many of our small game retailers shutting their doors. Now, however, South Africa is experiencing some sort of gaming renaissance with video-, board-, card-, and roleplaying gaming seeing a major upswing. New distribution channels are opening up regularly and gaming is slowly becoming cheaper and more accessible to a larger portion of our population. These days, you’ll even see numerous social outreach programs built around gaming—something that I’d like to see happen with Pathfinder Society South Africa too.

I organize and run a game day on every second Saturday at Fanaticus Hobbies and Games in Cape Town. In Durban, my Venture-Lieutenant, Paul, organizes and runs a game day once a month at the brand-new The Unseen Shoppe. At the moment we’re still a bit small—Cape Town sees about two tables per game day; Durban, one. The stores are particularly supportive, offering free use of their venues.

Of course, I’d like to see Pathfinder spread throughout the country. In Johannesburg, I have managed to arrange space at stores there, but we sorely lack for GMs in Gauteng. If you know of any Gauteng GMs looking for some help in setting up a regular game, send me an email and I’ll see if I can help kick off some regular games there. In fact, if you know of (or are) a GM, anywhere in the country, drop me a message and I’ll see about getting you started.

To find out more about the Durban scene, contact Paul at pathfindersadbn@gmail.com. For Cape Town, contact me at pathfinderza@gmail.com.

Jerall Toi
Venture-Captain, South Africa

Thank you to all of the VCs and VLs for kick-starting an awesome Pathfinder Society Lodge in South Africa. I look forward to the additions of new Venture-Captains and Venture-Lieutenants in other regions of the country and watching Pathfinder Society grow strong. Keep up the awesome work!

Mike Brock
Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator

Pathfinder Battles Preview: It's Raining Cats and Frogs

Friday, November 2, 2012

It’s been raining cats and dogs here in Seattle lately, so I decided to take that as inspiration for this week’s preview. And since I don’t have a great photo of the set’s two awesome canine figures yet, I’m substituting a frog-like thing instead to preserve the delicate rhyme structure of my pun.

I speak, of course, of the Boggard!

Boggards have been with Pathfinder for a long time, and finally get their due in a major way as antagonists in the second and third volumes of the Shattered Star Adventure Path. Because we put this set together well before the Shattered Star campaign was written, we actually used a piece of art from an early boggard appearance in the Kingmaker Adventure Path, but we liked him so much we figured he could play double duty for the Shattered Star miniatures set. He’s a common, so you’ll soon have plenty of Boggards in your collection to menace the swamps of your campaign world.

And since no frog is complete without its cat (did I just make that up?), here’s a look at the next cool miniature in the set, the Catfolk Rogue!

This lithe cat-burglar feautres in The Asylum Stone, by Paizo’s own James L. Sutter. The adventure takes place in Kaer Maga, Varisia’s very own wretched hive of scum and villainy, where weird creatures rub shoulders with elves, humans, and worse. Catfolk, which we first introduced in Bestiary 2 to much popular acclaim, seemed like a natural fit for that environment, and here she is, ready to pounce into your miniatures collection. The Catfolk Rogue is an uncommon figure.

Both of these animalistic figures have amazing paint details for their rarities. The Boggard is easily among the very best commons we’ve yet produced (if not the very best common) in both sculpting detail and paint application, and the Catfolk Rogue features tons of paint steps like fur stripes, skin gradient, and amazing eyes that elevate her to more than just a cat-headed lady.

We’ve now approved every figure in the set, and we’re well on our way to the Shattered Star set’s scheduled January release!

See you next week!

Erik Mona
Publisher

From the Publisher: Changes Are Coming!

Friday, November 2, 2012

As we move into the last two months of 2012, the editorial staff is hard at work on the playtest for next year’s Mythic Adventures, the warehouse staff is eagerly awaiting the arrival of our big winter hardcover, the NPC Codex, and the web team is cranking away at the exciting new Paizo Game Space virtual tabletop. Everyone has smiles on their face as they complete major tasks for 2012 and as they begin to think about what’s coming in 2013.

The management and finance teams, in the meantime, are hard at work finalizing 2013’s budget. This multi-month process involves solidifying the editorial schedule for the year, making go or no-go decisions on marketing programs, new employee hires, and everything else with a cost associated with it. While we always remain open to new opportunities on short deadlines, when the budget for a year closes, you end up with a good snapshot of every product, employee, convention, or other initiative we plan to do in the year. It’s a time when things get locked in, and when decisions can no longer be put off into the future.

As a result, it’s the best time to make important changes to Paizo’s product lines and general strategy. Since we’re about to put the lid on the 2012 budget, I wanted to take some time here in the Paizo Blog to speak with my “publisher voice” and let you in on a few important developments that are scheduled to hit in 2013.

Branding Changes for GameMastery

Paizo’s line of GameMastery accessories dates back to the time before Pathfinder, when we were a magazine publisher just dipping our toes into the RPG game publishing field for the first time. The maps and card products released under the GameMastery line were designed to work with any fantasy RPG, and we wanted a name for the line that suggested the widest appeal to the widest number of customers, regardless of what system they played. Since its launch, we’ve released more than 100 Map Packs and Flip-Mats, and dozens of Item Cards, Face Cards, and other card-based accessories to help you run your campaigns.

Card and map subscriptions are at an all-time high, and the design department keeps finding ways to make each release improve upon those that came before it. We have plenty of terrain types, dungeon maps, and other settings yet to go, and if anything the rate of card sets will increase in the future. We now plan to produce a set of Item Cards and Face Cards for every Adventure Path we publish, with additional rules-oriented releases similar to Chase Cards, Condition Cards, and the Critical Hit deck in development as I write this.

As time has gone on, and as the Pathfinder RPG has become not just a dominant brand here at the Paizo offices but also in the game industry in general, more and more of our GameMastery accessory releases have started to tie into Pathfinder adventures or the Pathfinder rules themselves. As a result, we’ve decided to retire the GameMastery brand, and beginning in February of next year, GameMastery Map Packs, Flip-Mats, and Card releases will come out under the Pathfinder brand.

This change allows us to reexamine how we package our maps, and gives us the chance to improve them to make using the products easier. For Flip-Mats this means packaging the maps with a wrap-around cover similar to the one used for our Pathfinder GM Screen, which gives us more space to preview what the maps look like, highlight key features, and (really importantly) to allow customers (and retailers) to shelve their maps “spine out” for easier sorting. Map Packs will feature a similar packaging metamorphosis, and will now come in a small box for easier storage and display.

Many (even most) of Pathfinder Map Pack, Flip-Mat, and Card releases will still be “rules agnostic” and suitable for use with a variety of systems, but the truth is that the Pathfinder brand has a cachet with buyers, distributors, and customers that GameMastery does not, and this change will allow us to get our products into a wider network of stores. When they make it into those stores, they’ll also be shelved with other Pathfinder products, making it easier than ever for Paizo fans to find what they’re looking for.

Pricing Changes

A close look at our budgets has convinced us that we need to make some price changes on some of our product lines to keep up with rising production costs. Starting in February 2013, Pathfinder Map Packs and Pathfinder Flip-Mats will rise in price from $12.99 to $13.99.

Also starting in February, the monthly Pathfinder Adventure Path volumes, which have held steady in price for 66 consecutive volumes, will increase to $22.99 (subscribers will pay the new discounted price of $15.99, plus their other subscription benefits like the Pathfinder Advantage discount and free PDFs). Additionally, the monthly Pathfinder Player Companion line will shift from $10.99 to $12.99.

This is the first time we have ever raised prices on the Adventure Path, and we agonized over the decision. In truth, we probably should have raised the price a few years back when the cost of paper and printing increased with inflation and increased global demand at the end of 2008, but we wanted to hold the line as long as possible. We must do it now to keep the high standard of quality we publish each month, and we hope that you’ll find the few extra bucks well worth the investment.

Keep your eyes on the Paizo Blog for more updates about upcoming products and exciting new releases for 2013. It promises to be a huge year for Paizo and the Pathfinder RPG, and we can’t wait to share some of our exciting plans with you.

Your support has been integral to the Paizo story these last 10 years, and we look forward to sharing the next 10 years with you!

Sincerely,

Erik Mona
Publisher

P.S.: Look for your regularly scheduled Friday Pathfinder Battles miniature preview blog right here later this afternoon.

Paizo Publishing's 10th Anniversary Retrospective—Year 8 (2010)

Following Up on Our Success

Thursday, November 1, 2012

This blog entry is the ninth in a series of blogs commemorating Paizo's 10th anniversary.
Click here to read the first installment.

Before it was even released in August 2009, the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook was already the single best selling product Paizo had ever produced, and October's Bestiary immediately captured the number two slot. The stunning sales numbers made it very easy to see why many companies fall into the trap of producing too many rulebooks for their games—it's very tempting to go back to that well for another drink.

But Ryan Dancey and I had spotted that trap in 1999 when we were at Wizards of the Coast, analyzing the recently acquired TSR business. Putting out rulebooks every month or two quickly overwhelms your audience. And once customers decide that they can't keep up with new releases, they begin making choices about which books they need and which ones they can do without, which means you sell fewer copies of even your most popular books. And fewer copies means lower print runs, which means higher unit costs, which means lower margins. And even worse: when customers start skipping releases, it becomes easier and easier for them to stop buying your products altogether.

On the other hand, if you publish new books too slowly, players who exhaust content quickly will begin to feel that their needs aren't supported, and they'll start looking for other game systems. And players left waiting too long for their favorite rules subsets will also get discouraged. You have to strike a balance.

Ryan and I decided that the magic number for major hardcover rulebooks per year—the number that would keep the most customers satiated but not overwhelmed—was probably three. That was part of the plan we were going to implement for D&D Third Edition at Wizards, but the two of us didn't last long there after the launch, and the management team that replaced us had different ideas.

So when it came time for us to formulate a strategy for the Pathfinder RPG line, I went back to our plan from ten years earlier. I pitched my team here at Paizo on it and was surprised how quickly everyone came on board. Then came the hard part—if you only have three products a year, what should those products be?

First, we came up with a timetable—there would be one release in the spring, another at Gen Con in August, and a third at the end of the year, close to the holidays.

The iconic summoner's eidolon looks a bit different in this early sketch by Wayne Reynolds!


Advanced Player's Guide approvals!

Pathfinder Society was growing by leaps and bounds, and the experience that Erik, Jason, and I had with the RPGA suggested that we might want to release our most rules-heavy books at Gen Con. We also knew we wanted to do one monster/adversary book each year for the foreseeable future, and because the Bestiary came out at the end of the year, we decided to schedule future ones in the winter slot.

That left the spring release, which we would keep flexible. We had a lot of ideas for books that didn't fall into the other two categories, and this spot would be the perfect place to put those. Our first spring release was a pretty easy choice. Because we had published all of our core rules in a single book, there wasn't a direct equivalent to D&D's DM's Guide, but we still felt a need to do a book aimed at Game Masters, giving them advice and tools for becoming an expert GM and elevating the experience for their players. To create this book, we tapped into the expertise of some of the best designers in the history of gaming, and they shared their tips and secrets. The GameMastery Guide came out in May 2010, and has been doing very well for us ever since.

For the first Gen Con after the release of the Core Rulebook, we needed to have something sexy that would allow us to show some design chops... something that would give Pathfinder RPG players new toys to play with. We sat in a conference room for about three hours and talked about character types we'd seen in fantasy books and movies, or played in other fantasy games. Then we talked about how we could build those characters using the Pathfinder rules. We could build many of those roles by tweaking existing classes in the Core Rulebook; this was the genesis of our archetype system, my favorite thing to come out of the book we ended up calling the Advanced Player's Guide. Archtypes allowed a myriad of character ideas to blossom forth, many of them very niche, without having to flood the landscape with a bunch of new classes.

But there were some roles that we felt we couldn't do justice without creating whole new classes. In the end, six new base classes rose to the top for the APG—the Alchemist, the Cavalier, the Inquisitor, the Oracle, the Summoner, and the Witch. Not only would these new base classes allow us to show off what the Paizo design staff could do, but they also gave players something new to dig into. We filled out the APG with a ton of new content, expanding nearly every part of the existing game.

Our third hardcover rulebook of the year was the Bestiary 2. In this installment, we wanted to provide Pathfinder RPG versions of many of the popular 3.5-era monsters that hadn't made it into either the first Bestiary or the Bonus Bestiary that we did for Free RPG Day 2009. We also wanted to flesh out outsiders, and provide an array of creatures of every alignment. So you saw a number of Aeons, Agathions, Angels, Archons, Azatas, Daemons, Demons, Devils, Elementals, Inevitables, Proteans, and Qlippoths in the book.

Wes and James playtest some of the kingdom building rules for Kingmaker.

For the Adventure Path line in 2010, we went a little bit outside of the box. The previous year saw the urban campaign Council of Thieves kick off the Pathfinder RPG era, and we wanted its successor to steer clear of that territory. So with Kingmaker, we tried something we'd never done before: a true sandbox AP. Our APs usually have a very solid and somewhat direct storyline, but in Kingmaker, the plot became more of a framing device for the true story: that of the characters forming and building their own kingdom. Each adventure had a number of mini-adventures that could be played in any order or skipped entirely. Players could create kingdoms large or small, passive or aggressive, dictatorial or democratic, or anything else they envisioned. We were a little apprehensive about the response to this type of AP, but Kingmaker has become one of the most successful APs of all time, rivaling even Rise of the Runelords in popularity.

We also added a whole new Pathfinder line in 2010: Pathfinder Tales. We had previously made a valiant attempt to get into the fiction business with our Planet Stories line of pulp fiction, but the book market never quite seemed to embrace the line, and sales were never strong. Erik Mona was the passion and vision behind Planet Stories, and it was a line he personally loved very much, but I felt that if we were going to put time, money and effort into a line, we should do it with books that helped support our other products.

TSR had built quite a nice business with their Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms fiction lines, and Games Workshop had more recently built a successful line of novels around their Warhammer line; it seemed that the book trade was more receptive to new gaming fiction than it was to bringing back long-lost classics. Thus was Pathfinder Tales born. For our first couple of novels, we wanted authors who would be familiar names to fans of gaming fiction, and to bookstore buyers as well. We chose two Forgotten Realms authors, Dave Gross and Elaine Cunningham, to launch the line. Dave's book Prince of Wolves arrived at Gen Con, while Elaine's Winter Witch was a holiday release. They didn't quite blast to the top of the bestseller lists, but sales were much stronger than Planet Stories had been, so we felt cautiously optimistic going forward.

2010 also gave me a chance to bring back a variation of the very first product I was ever involved with in the game industry! In 1987, my first company, Lion Rampant, came out with Whimsey Cards—a product that allowed players to insert their ideas into roleplaying games in a structured way. The rights to Whimsey Cards themselves are owned by other folks, so I modified the basic idea a bit, adding an optional Pathfinder RPG-based mechanic, creating Plot Twist Cards. The response has been great; we're currently in our second print run. Sometimes oldies are indeed goodies.

We also revisited another oldie but goodie in our boardgame line. Kill Doctor Lucky was—and still is—our best selling boardgame, so we extended that line with a deluxe edition of Cheapass Games' Save Doctor Lucky prequel. Where KDL is all about trying to get Doctor Lucky alone in a room so nobody can see you bump him off, the goal of SDL is to make sure that everyone sees you perform the heroic deed of saving an old man from a sinking ship. It features a game board that gets smaller as the ship slips under.

At the 2010 ENnie Awards, Paizo won 11 golds and 1 silver. The awards received were:

• Best Adventure: Gold Medal to Pathfinder 31: Stolen Land.
• Best Aid or Accessory: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: GM Screen
• Best Art, Cover: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Bestiary
• Best Art, Interior: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Core Rulebook
• Best Cartography: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Chronicles: City Map Folio
• Best Electronic Book: Silver Medal to Pathfinder Society Scenario 29: The Devil We Know Part 1: Shipyard Rats
• Best Free Product: Gold Medal to Advanced Player's Guide Playtest
• Best Game: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game
• Best Monster/Adversary: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Bestiary
• Best Production Values: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Core Rulebook
• Product of the Year: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game
• Best Publisher: Gold Medal

Wes Schneider and James Sutter look down on the Paizo offices after their attempted escape was foiled.	The Paizo staff gets together to paint miniatures during lunch!	The editorial whiteboard lays out a week's priorities!	The editorial staff takes their first look at the big Pathfinder map Erik printed out for the Inner Sea Poster Map Folio.

With all of the success Paizo was having in 2010, it felt like we were living charmed lives. That all came crashing down in October when we lost Dave Erickson. At 63, Dave was our oldest employee. He joined the Paizo team in 2002, not even a year after we started, and took over the finance department, freeing me to focus my efforts on making the company more profitable and keeping it alive. Dave and I worked side by side on Paizo's finances. Dave designed reports that allowed Erik, Vic, Jeff and myself to analyze what was working well and what wasn't—insights that were invaluable to a small, struggling company like Paizo. Dave also wasn't afraid to sit down face to face with government auditors, each time sending them away with money due in Paizo's favor. He was a loyal and honest man, and someone I trusted implicitly.

The call came on the Tuesday after the Columbus Day weekend. I was refreshed from the long weekend and ready to tackle whatever came. I wasn't prepared for that call, though. Through tears, Dave's wife, Olga, let me know that Dave had passed away in his sleep during the weekend. I was crushed. Devastated. Dave had just started to plan his retirement, intending to spend his golden years with his wife. Now he was gone, just like that. Dave's death showed us all how fragile life could actually be.

A company Paizo's size doesn't have a ton of redundancies, but thankfully, I had hired Chris Self in 2008 with the idea that he would take over Finance in a few years when Dave retired. I had sent Chris to start accounting school just months before Dave passed, and he'd worked with Dave enough to fairly seamlessly take over the department a couple years ahead of schedule.

Here's my favorite Dave Erickson story: During Dave's first few months at Paizo, I quickly learned that if there was a discrepancy between what I thought the numbers should be and what Dave thought they should be, Dave was almost always right. Well, on one occasion, I finally figured out that I was right for once, and I burst into Dave's office, brandishing a sheaf of paperwork with all my figures, shouting "In your face, Erickson!" To say that he was surprised is an understatement.

Another negative for 2010 was the ongoing "edition war." The online arguing between fans of D&D 4th Edition and the Pathfinder RPG goes all the way back to our announcement of the Pathfinder RPG, but it took on new fervor in 2010 as 4E floundered a bit and Pathfinder challenged it in the marketplace. I need to make one thing clear—Paizo never wanted anything to do with the edition war. We weren't trying to take down D&D ; we were just trying to make a game that we enjoyed and that allowed us to tell the stories that we wanted to tell. I would be lying if I said we didn't enjoy the passion and loyalty of our customers defending their game—it was very flattering... but we really hoped that the edition war would just go away so everyone could enjoy their favorite game without attacking the other.

This will be news to most readers: By the end of 2010, the Pathfinder RPG had already overtaken D&D as the bestselling RPG. It would take almost half a year before industry magazine ICv2 first reported it, and several quarters more before some people were willing to accept it as fact, but internally, we already knew it was true. We'd heard it from nearly all of our hobby trade distributors; we'd heard it from buyers at book chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders; we could see it using industry sales trackers such as BookScan; we were even regularly coming out on top on Amazon's bestseller charts. Each individual market we sold in had us either tied with or outselling D&D, and none of those sources counted our considerable direct sales on paizo.com. Put all of those things together, and it was clear: Pathfinder had become the first RPG ever to oust D&D from top spot. It wasn't our goal, but here we were. And as we started planning for 2011, we knew that if we were going to be the industry leader, we were going to have to step up our game and act like a leader. 2011 would be our first chance to show what we could do with that position....

Employees who started in 2010 (in order of hiring date):
Judy Bauer, Copy Editor
Matt Vancil, Warehouse Personnel
Mark Moreland, Developer
Andrew Vallas, Graphic Designer
Hyrum Savage, Marketing Manager
Liz Courts, Customer Service Representative
Kunji Sedo, Staff Accountant
Stephen Radney-McFarland, Designer

Employees who left in 2010 (in order of their end date):
James Davis
Joshua Frost
Dave Erickson

Lisa Stevens
CEO

How Paizo 8 My Head

My relationship with Paizo began in 2007, when I subscribed to Dungeon one issue before the announcement that the magazines were going away. I basically wrote the timing off as bad luck, and decided to try to make the most out of the few issues I'd get before the end. I opted for the Pathfinder subscription instead of credit, primarily because I'd planned on mining Dungeon for ideas for a homebrew campaign and figured I could mine this new Golarion world for ideas too. In August 2007, I got my first issue of Pathfinder, glanced through it, and filed it on the shelf because I didn't think any of it would be useful for the campaign I was running at the time. I did the same for the next few issues. In the fall, I joined a group playing the Savage Tide Adventure Path, and my mind was no longer in GM space. But my involvement in this Adventure Path made me much more aware of Paizo as a company, and of the quality of work the editors on Dungeon (and likely, I assumed, Pathfinder) put out. So I started lurking on the messageboards and reading the Pathfinder books I'd been getting, but I still wasn't sold. Fourth Edition had been announced, and I was playtesting that with some of my friends who'd freelanced for Wizards of the Coast in the past. I was hyped for the new edition, and because I was invested in my Savage Tide group, I was quickly learning as much about the campaign's Greyhawk setting as I could. I didn't have time for another campaign setting when I had 30+ years of canon to catch up on in the world in which I was already playing.

Then the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game announcement came out, and my gaming group was all abuzz about the waves Paizo was making. I got the Alpha and started reading all those books I had on my shelf. I was thoroughly hooked. Here was a chance for me to be on the ground floor, not just of a new edition of the game that I was already familiar with, but also of a campaign setting that was only a few months old. I don't know what day it was, but I drank the Pathfinder Kool-Aid sometime shortly after the big announcement. I made my first paizo.com messageboard post on March 31, 2008, in which I said "I am getting ready to dive into Golarion myself." And did I ever follow through!

Razmiran Faith Barge Union #107 wins the PaizoCon trivia contest... again!

Around that time I joined a small group of folks working on the daunting task of cataloguing all the information about the Pathfinder Chronicles campaign setting (as it was called at the time). The PathfinderWiki was founded on March 8, 2008, and I quickly joined up, and am often miscredited as being the wiki's founder even today. My involvement in the project became something of a full-time hobby, and the countless hours I spent adding and editing content on there gave me a depth and breadth of knowledge about Golarion that rivaled even Paizo employees. I attended PaizoCon 2009 and helped my team, Razmiran Faith Barge Union #107, win the annual trivia contest, in no small part because of the work I'd done on the wiki.

At Gen Con a few months later, I approached Sean, Wes, and Josh independently and asked if I could write for Paizo, as I felt I'd displayed my knowledge of the setting and had a whole website of material I'd written about the world to show my writing talents. A few weeks later, I was working on a portion of Gnomes of Golarion, most of the Kingmaker Player's Guide, and a Pathfinder Society Scenario, all of which couldn't have come at a better time for a recently unemployed filmmaker. Once the freelancing started, it didn't seem to end as long as I met my deadlines, turned in my best work, and kept asking the folks at Paizo for more. A few weeks before PaizoCon 2010, I got an unexpected call from Erik (incidentally, while I was exploring Delvehaven as a player in a friend's Council of Thieves campaign). He asked if I was coming to PaizoCon (duh!) and if I had plans afterward (I didn't). I soon did, however, as he offered me a contract to work in the Paizo offices for a week following the con helping build the Inner Sea Poster Map Folio. I detailed my brief time as a Paizo employee in a guest blog at the time.

What that blog doesn't tell you, however, is that on the last day of the contract, Lisa, James, and Erik pulled me into Lisa's office to talk about how I felt the experience had been, how I liked working with the rest of the editorial team, and ultimately what I thought about working for Paizo full time. I thought hard about my response for about 3 seconds before accepting the offer. It took me another two months to get myself moved from New York City to Seattle, but once I started, it wasn't long before I was in charge of development of two product lines and making a sizable contribution to the very world continuity whose chronicling caught Paizo's eye in the first place. Now, two years later, I'm still amazed on a weekly basis that this is my real-life job, and that I get to work for such a great company and with such a fun and inspiring group of coworkers. It's a lot of work, for sure, but I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing instead.

Mark Moreland
Developer

Liz Courts can't suppress a smile while looking through her new copy of Wayfinder!

"Who are these people, and what are they doing to my magazines?!"

Yeah, that was my first thought when I saw somebody else's logo plastered on the credits of my two favorite gaming magazines. I had just recently gotten back into gaming after a post–high school hiatus and life settled into a 9 to 5 routine. Lured in by the release of Third Edition and the Oriental Adventures supplement (and new dice, because new game = new dice), I immediately said to myself, "So what kind of adventures are out there for this system?"

High on the creative spark that often comes with a new game system, and yearning to see what other people had come up with, I picked up Dragon 288 and Dungeon 84 from Gambit Games in Bend, Oregon—I miss that place!—and was blown away by what was between its slick, glossy covers. Clearly, these were not the black-and-white productions of my youth, but for all of its sweet, candy-colored coating, did it satisfy?

I need not have worried. Month after month, I begged the store owner to stock these magazines to feed my habit—er, game mastering creativity. Somehow, the minds behind the magazine knew exactly what I was looking for in my game, knew that I needed it now (hungered for it, even), and I knew that I would gladly fork over the cash to keep quality game material coming. Yet I didn't venture on to the place that would become like a second home to me until almost four years later, during a period of idleness at work (you know you're doing that... right now). I found a messageboard community of like-minded gamers who had been playing long enough to know what chits were, who remembered when elves were a class, who knew the difference between githyanki and githzerai, and who were passionate about the game.

Did I mention that some of these were the writers, as well as the staff—the people who had made the magazine that helped lure me back into running a game three nights a week, arming me with a crowbar to pry open and shove in awesome gaming material like new alchemical items, chronomancy, and ghost elves into my campaign?

Through the Paizo messageboards, I met the staff, as well as a group of writers who gave me my first writing job (hello GM Gems), but there are a few things that could not have happened without talking and meeting people through the boards, and these are things that have not gone quietly into the night. They've managed to stick around for a bit, and I'm happy to say I've had my fingers in them, even if it was just the teeniest bit of my pinky finger.

First up: PaizoCon. (You may have heard of it.) Tim Nightengale bore the brunt of organizing the first unofficial PaizoCon, but even then, we referred to each other as Fellow Dictators as we plotted and planned ways to give thanks to the hardworking Paizo staff. (The fan award that I whipped up still hangs in the office today.) Second: the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook! Wes Schneider contacted me and a few other folks (Tim Connors, Adam Daigle, and Greg Oppedisano) to do some quick formatting alterations for magic items and spells. (My first "real" Paizo writing credit came later in "Infestation," the side trek adventure in Pathfinder 18.) Finally, the one that I am the most proud of to this day: the creation of the fan-created and fan-run Wayfinder magazine. When Paizo announced their Community Use Policy, I knew that I had to do something with it. Wayfinder is that thing, and it remains such a great way to get your toes wet into the world of roleplaying game publishing—and you get to play in the Golarion sandbox!

Skeptic, fan, superfan (yup, charter superscriber and all), freelancer, friend, and finally, employee, my relationship with Paizo ended up being the culmination of a lot of hobbies and interests all rolled up into a golem-shaped package. That step between "friend" and "employee" had a moment of "Am I going to fit in here?" though, that same sort of nervousness that you got on the first day of a new school. They knew my name, they knew my penchant for offloading my home-baked cookies at their offices pre-PaizoCon, but... still.

I was a fool for even worrying about it. After quietly starting in Customer Service, I got Cosmo's "you are the meat shield" introduction and was able to skip over all of the tedious "learn about the company's products" portion of a customer service job. (I believe Cosmo said something to the effect of "Well, this makes it a lot easier.") The moment that made me ask myself why I didn't do this sooner is when I was delivering the mail downstairs and Jason Bulmahn asked "...Do you work here now?"

The best way that I can describe working at Paizo is this: imagine all of your high school friends in one place, with the same overlapping interests, whether it's early Minoan art, the latest Studio Ghibli movie, the pros and cons of the latest sci-fi movie, or tapping into the depths of cryptozoology among the editorial staff. Really, it's not so much of who's a geek or not—because we all are here—it's a matter of degree.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Liz Courts
Webstore Specialist

Weighing Dragons

I came to work at Paizo by chance. My previous editorial experience was mostly in textbook development, but when the economy—and textbook industry—crashed, I moved to Seattle and started retraining in technical editing while freelancing to pay the bills. In December 2009, I was visiting my family in Wisconsin, fending off unsubtle suggestions to consider engineering as a more stable career path, when I got word through the gchat grapevine that Paizo was looking for an editor who was familiar with RPGs. Hello, me! Suddenly all of those years spent gaming from junior high through college and into grad school were a job qualification; I quickly added the dozen or so games I'd played to my resume and sent it off.

A few days later I had a phone interview with Erik and Wes—as it turns out, there are wrong answers to the question "What was the last fantasy book you read?", but not being a Twilight fan, I cleared that hurdle, among others. Then on New Year's Eve, I submitted an editing test. Because Seattle is a very small world, I bumped into Sutter at a party later that night. He gave me reason for cautious optimism, giving my new year a promising start!

Ten days later I started at Paizo as a contract editor. Wes, Chris, and Sutter handed me the style guide (a mere 40 pages long at the time), then threw me into the deep end with a pass on the GameMastery Guide and the second half of the Season 1 Pathfinder Society Scenarios. It was already the Gen Con crunch, and the pace was hectic—and then after work I'd dash to my technical editing classes to dissect software tutorials, nuclear accident reports, and medical device instructions (I know WAY more than I want to about femur traction splints). Needless to say, I didn't have a lot of free time for reflection. But one day while chatting with my classmates about our respective jobs and internships, I mentioned that I'd fact-checked the weight of a dragon that day. Jaws dropped. Their reactions confirmed my suspicion that this was definitely the most fun editing around! I wanted so badly to stay on—I threw myself into my work, offered to take on more when I could, and even moderated my hard-line stance on commas to better match Paizo's style.

A couple months later when my contract ended, I was offered a full-time position, and was so elated! It's been over 2 years now, with some stressful times along the way, but despite the fact that my wonderful coworkers seem to think it's a personal challenge to slip details into adventures that make me go fetal with horror, I love my job more than ever.

And you know what? My dad, who'd subscribed to Dragon since I was a toddler, is finally off my back about engineering!

Judy Bauer
Editor