Illustration by Steve Prescott

Introducing the Calikang

Friday, November 6, 2009

Sometimes, art makes the choices for me. When we ordered the cover to Greg A. Vaughn's "Mother of Flies," we asked Steve Prescott to paint us a scene in a thieves' guild treasury involving the iconics in a fight against a six-armed stone golem. The art, as you can see here, is great!

Unfortunately, by the time I got to the section in the adventure where this six-armed menace made its appearance, I realized something. A six-armed stone golem (particularly one armed with a pair of tree-sized-swords) would be something like a CR 15 monster. Not really a fair fight to inflict on 10th-level characters, and certainly not good design to have the dude guarding the treasury be tougher than the adventure's actual boss.

So, in a last-minute brainstorm in Wes's office when he was probably trying to go home, he, Crystal Frasier, Lisa Stevens, and I figured out what to do with the situation. The result is a new monster from distant Vudra, the six-armed calikang, a race spawned from a deity's failure and doomed now to seek atonement for an ancient sin. We ordered an extra piece of art for this volume's Bestiary, I wrote up the monster that weekend, and everything fell perfectly in place just in time to ship to the printers.

As for the calikang itself? You'll just have to wait for "Mother of Flies" to find out what he can do!

James Jacobs
Pathfinder Editor-in-Chief

Gonna Set My Soul on Fire!

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Erik and I are headed tomorrow for city that never sleeps, the bright neon-flashing beacon in the desert, that sultry metropolis of lights, chips, and the clatter of dice. Yes, that's right, Erik and I are headed to Riddleport—I mean Las Vegas! We're bringing our dice, our pre-planned scenarios, adventures, and speeches, and hopefully the appropriate amount of clothing and toiletries. Why are we going there? Has Paizo given its publisher and events manager a much-needed rest in America's resort town? Nope! We're going there to play some Pathfinder RPG at NeonCon!

Erik is the special guest for the show and will give the keynote address for GamesU, NeonCon's game design and storytelling "unconference," while I am a not-so-special (Daigle would say, "very-extra-special") guest and will be assisting Doug Daulton, the show's coordinator, with all things Pathfinder Society. Erik plans to once again slaughter innocents in his continuing playtest of the Spire of Nex and I shall do my best to avoid slaying Pathfinder Society characters during Lost at Bitter End and The Prisoner of Skull Hill. Let's hope we're successful in our endeavors!

If you're anywhere within driving, flying, teleporting, or ethereal jaunt distance of Las Vegas this weekend, come by NeonCon, play some games, have some fun, and ply Mr. Mona and myself with food, drink, and the dazzling lights of the city. They say whatever happens there, stays there—so if we kill one of your favorite characters during a Pathfinder RPG session, heed the motto. We have reputations to maintain!

Joshua J. Frost
Events Manager

From Prague to Paizo in 31 Days

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

One day, not so long ago, a bright-eyed young expat freelancer was shaken from the idylls of his honeymoon with the news that Paizo Publishing, in the far-off, fey-haunted Evergreen State, had decided to add another lost soul to the depths of its editorial pit.

Knowing that such a summons could not go ignored for long, I immediately made arrangements to return to my homeland, kissed my new wife goodbye, and boarded a roc bound for Seattle. After a trying ordeal of canceled flights and missed connections, a harrowing attack by a crag linnorm, and an unexpected stay in Vancouver, I finally arrived on the cobbled streets of Redmond, ready for my first day in the hallowed halls of Paizo Publishing.

Having previously dealt with the famous Golem of Prague, I easily avoided the guardian golems at the gates, and working my way past booby traps, false doors, and nightingale floors, successfully infiltrated the sanctum sanctorum of editorial privilege. Rather than allow myself to be ignominiously thrown in shackles into the editorial pit, I rappelled down using braided ferret-fur rope (world-renowned for its flexibility and tensile strength) and staked my claim in an unoccupied and strangely cube-like side cavern.

Sadly, all my precautions were in vain, as I soon discovered that most of Paizo’s minions had apparently decided to make “Rob’s First Day on the Job” a workshop holiday. No doubt they’re imposing some sort of quarantine on me to avoid whatever virulent European plagues I brought with me. It’s been pretty quiet so far… maybe too quiet. I can sense the grammar ghouls and style sphinxes lurking in the darkness beyond my cave’s walls, waiting to vex me with riddles of usage and voice when I least expect it.

But as the ghosts of forgotten manuscripts and spectres of excess verbiage slain on the altar of editorial fiat howl about me, I remain firm, resolute, and even optimistic. How many stat blocks might I save from disgrace? How many guarded secrets can I pry from the clutching fingers of jealous writers? How many fabulous treasures might I recover from the depths of development hell?

Stay tuned, loyal readers, and I’ll do my best to bring you all the wonders of Golarion and beyond that Paizo has to offer. And not even the blue pencil-wielding troglodytes of punctuation will stop me!

Rob McCreary
Assistant Editor

Illustration by Crystal Frasier

Sci-Fried: It's a Dark, Dark, Dark, Dark World

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Cave Raptors are sated; It's time to blog!

Time for a little back history on everyone's favorite literate goblin (and by that, I mean Golarion's only literate goblin): I love science fiction, but I am woefully ignorant of the subject. I sat on my mother's knee and watched Star Wars and Star Trek, I read through my father's dog-eared old copy of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and a few of my Saturday morning cartoons were set in space. That's about it. I remember reading some John Carter of Mars in junior high, but it didn't leave enough of an impression on me at the time that I even remember it that well. As embarrassing as it is for any goblin to admit, I just don't know much about this subject I enjoy, least of all its mysterious origins.

I supposed that's why Erik Mona, Pierce Watters, Christopher Carey, and James Sutter, the quartet behind Paizo's Planet Stories, line, asked me to start reading and reviewing this classic science fiction. Without any fond childhood memories (literally; my childhood involved being locked in a rabbit hutch with my 27 siblings), I wouldn't be viewing any of our Planet Stories fiction through the lens of nostalgia. Instead, I can dole out honest thoughts and observations on twentieth-century classics from a twenty-first century perspective.

Illustration by Emrah Elmasli

From my perspective, this is both thrilling and terrifying, like riding one of those blood-thirsty horses humans are so fond of. Now I get to read the classic origins of science fiction from almost a century ago for work, but at the same time, these are books that my boss loves. If I don't like them, will he feed me to the dreaded bandersnatch? Plus the library of Planet Stories is huge, and getting bigger every other month! Growing like a well-fed literary octopus (and you thought those metaphors were dead and gone). For my very first Sci-Fried, I decided to look at Henry Kuttner's The Dark World.

Time for another confession that will get me laughed at in the forums: I selected Mr. Kuttner because I really enjoyed the movie The Last Mimzy, which is based on Kuttner's short story Mimsy Were the Borogroves. I imagined that Dark World would be somewhat similar, familiar, and comforting in this strange new land of fiction.

But no. There was nary a stuffed rabbit to be found.

Instead, the story follows Edward Bond, who is not a little girl but rather a World War II veteran who feels strangely out of place in his own skin. It turns out that Edward Bond is not Edward Bond at all, but rather the wizard Ganelon from a parallel world, trussed up with Edward Bond's memories and life as a prison. I don't want to share too much of the story, but obviously the majority of the book takes place in the bizarre titular "Dark World," and many of the descriptions of this setting are both psychedelic and believable.

Kuttner's writing style is distinctively "chunky;" very intricate descriptions and bulgy sentences that can be a little difficult to handle at first if you're used to the "say it all now" style of modern authors. But The Dark World drew me in after the first chapter, and I had trouble putting the book down once that happened. What at first seemed like a fantasy story instead took a sharp turn into sci-fi as Kuttner tried to explain everything from vampires and werewolves to Cthulhian gods with the science of the 1940s. Some of the theories stretched my suspension of disbelief, but never quite broke it. Having finished the book now, I almost wish it were longer, with more time to examine the uncanny science and history of the Dark World itself.

The narrator is probably the best part of the book. We see everything through the protagonist's eyes, but until the very end we're never told for certain whether it's Ganelon with Edward's memories, or Edward with Ganelon's memories. Control switches between the two personalities, and bits of memory bleed through to the other, which makes what could've been an obnoxiously perfect hero into an underdog I could root for. I really want to spoil the ending, because it made me cackle with delight, but instead I will demand that you order your own copy and read it for yourself.

My final impressions of The Dark World are that it can be a difficult book to start, but once you get into the pace and get used to Kuttner's narrative flavor, it's an impossible book to stop. Once all the pieces are in play, the action flows fast and furious, with only occasional chapter breaks to let you catch your breath. The Dark World is relatively short, making it a great first step into the genre of pulp that you can read in one sitting. If you love science and history as much as I do, then some of the genre explanations will make you positively giddy. A fun book, even 63 years after it was originally published, and definitely one I'd recommend.

Dark World may have lacked hyper-advanced stuffed bunnies, but that's only because this book is for grownups.

Crystal Frasier
Production Specialist

Illustration by Kieran Yanner

Set Sail with The Ship of Ishtar

Monday, November 2, 2009

This week we released the newest Planet Stories book, The Ship of Ishtar, by A. Merritt. Not only is this my personal favorite of the 22 books we have released since the launch of Planet Stories about a year and a half ago, but it's also an interesting look at the Planet Stories process, and how in many ways we here in the office are learning just as much about the history of the most important early authors and books in the science fiction and fantasy fields as our readers are.

I often received letters of thanks form Planet Stories readers for introducing them to authors like Leigh Brackett, C. L. Moore, or Henry Kuttner. Most of these authors began their careers in the 1930s and early 1940s, publishing their stories in the pre-war pulp magazines like the original Planet Stories, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and similar magazines.

In order to locate and restore the oldest, most complete texts of the tales we've published so far, I have accumulated a respectable selection of pulp magazines. One of my absolute favorites was called Famous Fantastic Mysteries. Along with its sister magazine, Fantastic Novels, editor Mary Gnaedinger culled the vast archives of the Munsey Magazines (primarily Argosy and All-Story in their various forms and spin-offs), collecting the best fantastic material for affordable reprints. In some ways FFM was the "original" version of our Planet Stories book line, only in this case they reprinted work from the first three decades of the twentieth century almost exclusively.

Two things strike me as fascinating about these magazines beyond the actual stories they contained (many of which were brilliant) and the fact that a woman was setting the original "canon" of science fiction and fantasy in an era when many other women had to hide behind pseudonyms to get their work published at all. Beyond those two substantive issues, the things I find most fascinating about these magazines are the art, and the reader letter column.

The art stands out particularly because most of it (especially early on) came from the peerless pen of Virgil Finlay, for my money the finest illustrator ever to work in the pulp field and one of the greatest American illustrators of all time, period. Finlay's distinctive scratchboard style, fine figure work, and juxtaposition of light and dark tones is breathtaking more than six decades after it was originally commissioned, and his work brings a continuity to the canon of Famous Fantastic Mysteries that might otherwise have been less clear, different as the stories published in the magazine may have been. Many of Finlay's works have been reprinted over the years (and a Google image search will turn up hundreds more), but like the authors whose work he illustrated, he was amazingly prolific. Many of his illustrations appear only in their original pulp form, so opening a "new" issue of FFM rescued from a used book or magazine shop can often feel like digging for visual treasure.

Beyond the stories and illustrations, tacked onto the ends of the magazines and presented in tiny type, came the letters to the editor, often dozens at a time. In the course of praising or criticizing a given issue's content, these letters often include praise of authors and stories that are nearly forgotten today. How many readers other than the most dedicated literary archeologists know much about authors like E. Charles Vivian or Charles B. Stilson? Beyond King Solomon's Mines and perhaps She, who can name the titles of further adventures of H. Rider Haggard's character Allan Quatermain or the dozens of other high-adventure fantasy novels he wrote in the late nineteenth century? FFM published many of them, and the letter columns are filled to bursting with suggestions on even more minor or forgotten works that were fading into obscurity (rightly or wrongly) more than 60 years ago. Of course, even back then, fantasy fans could agree on very few things.

One thing almost everyone seemed to agree on, however, was the overwhelming quality and beauty of language in the works of A. Merritt, particularly his groundbreaking fantasy The Ship of Ishtar.

Merritt's influential 1919 novel The Moon Pool has been in print more or less consistently since it was first published, and it was one of several stories in the very first issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries that solidified the magazine as a major success that would last more than a decade (not bad for a pulp focused almost exclusively on reprints!). He was a major stylistic influence on authors like H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, C. L. Moore, and Henry Kuttner.

Prior to coming across praise for his works in the letter pages of FFM, I'd never really heard of him. I came to Lovecraft decades ago, and in subsequent works by the above-named authors I always identified the florid, lush description as particularly Lovecraftian. In fact, Lovecraft was a great admirer of Merritt, and it's clear that Merritt's style was a huge influence upon him.

Listen to what HPL said about Merritt in a letter to a friend, praising the Merritt novel The Metal Monster: "[Merritt] has a peculiar power of working up an atmosphere and investing a region with an aura of unholy dread... the most remarkable presentation of the utterly alien and non-human that I have ever seen. Merritt is certainly great stuff—he has a subtle command of an unique type of strangeness which no one else has been able to parallel."

In the early 20th century, Merritt was considered, if not the most popular fantasist (that honor probably goes to Edgar Rice Burroughs), certainly among the top two or three fantasy authors in America. A journalist by trade, Merritt edited the prestigious American Weekly for Willian Randolph Hearst, and was one of the best-paid journalists in the world, bringing in an annual salary of $100,000 at the time of his death in 1943.

His busy career left him relatively little time for fiction writing, limiting his output to fewer than a dozen novels and about the same number of short stories. All are infused with powerful, vivid imagery, an unparalleled sense of place, and unforgettable characters.

This month's Planet Stories release, The Ship of Ishtar, is considered by most critics the finest of Merritt's masterworks, a precursor of the sword and sorcery genre that would come to inform the birth of fantasy roleplaying, and one of the most important fantasy novels of the early twentieth century. Merritt was the late Gary Gygax's favorite writer, and up until the month of Gary's recent death, he kept pushing me to publish some of his works. I wish Gary could have survived to see us get to The Ship of Ishtar, but I know he would have been happy to have one of his favorite tales presented to the audience of fantasy enthusiasts he helped to create and maintain.

The Planet Stories edition of The Ship of Ishtar features Merritt's complete, preferred text for the first time in more than 60 years. It also includes 10 beautiful prints by Merritt's favorite artist and friend, Virgil Finlay, collected into a single volume for the first time ever. Prominent modern author Tim Powers provides a compelling introduction, and the book comes wrapped in a beautiful, pulpy cover by artist Kieran Yanner.

Illustration by Virgil Finlay

I am enormously proud of this book. Many of you have sent me letters of thanks and encouragement for introducing you to some of the classic authors we've covered so far in Planet Stories. And if not for Planet Stories, I may not have discovered this book, so I offer my own thanks to Gary Gygax, and my own invitation to all of you to order the book and give Planet Stories and A. Merritt a try.

One of the world's finest fantasies awaits!

Erik Mona, Publisher
At the World Fantasy Convention
San Jose, California
October, 2009

But Erik Mona Day Isn't for Weeks…

Friday, October 30, 2009

Between the slurping of soda and gnashing of teeth garbled thanks issued forth to Pathfinder Wiki mastermind Mark Moreland (yoda8myhead on the boards) and all of our other fiscally indulgent readers who sent about a dozen pizzas the way of the beleaguered Paizo staff this morning. Happy to forget ungracious questions like "why," all of us here wanted to extend our full-bellied thanks to our awesome/insane (awesomely insane?) readers for the totally unexpected gift.

Photography by Joshua Frost

Also, just a note so you can prepare your Viking helms, Erik Mona Day, which typically falls on November 8th, will be observed Monday November 9th this year.

Now back to work! Nom, nom, nom.

F. Wesley Schneider
Managing Editor

Joining the Core: Seekers of Secrets

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Unless you've been kidnapped by goblins and held hostage in their dingy lair, you're likely aware that we are about to release a new book in our Pathfinder Chronicles line called Seekers of Secrets. Seekers covers just about everything you can imagine with regard to the Pathfinder Society. It describes in detail how your character can join the Society, the history and origins of the Society, a gazetteer of the Society's activities in the Inner Sea region, detailed maps, brand new ioun stones and new rules for using them with a Pathfinder's wayfinder, three new prestige classes, and new feats. All of that in 64 pages!

Because this book covers the Pathfinder Society so well and because it contains a great deal of magnificent new material for Pathfinders everywhere, we've decided to include this book as part of the core assumption for Pathfinder Society Organized Play. What this means for you as a Pathfinder Society GM is that you will likely see references to the new rules, magic items, feats, and prestige classes in future Pathfinder Society scenarios. What this means for you as a Pathfinder Society player, is that everything contained within this book is legal for play in Pathfinder Society Organized Play and you may begin using the material from this book immediately.

I hope you enjoy everything inside Seekers of Secrets. The authors (Tim Hitchcock, Erik Mona, Sean K Reynolds, James L. Sutter, and Russ Taylor) have done a bang-up job bringing us a detailed glimpse into the inner sanctum of Pathfinder lore and adventures. If you're ever in the Starrise Spire in Mendev, tell Venture-Captain Jorsal of Lauterbury I said hello!

Joshua J. Frost
Events Manager

Illustration by Tyler Clark

Interns! Mash them, smash them, dissolve them in energy drink!

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

During my first week, I was surprised to find there is a significant lack of chaotic evil in the office. I was not whipped by a winged baboon-devil while organizing the archive, and I am given free coffee that I did not have to make myself. I was expecting that Matt and I would be told early on to "prove our worth" by enduring psychological torture or some bloody nonsense, but so far I have not had to pull my sawtooth sabre from where it is taped beneath my desk and pounce on him like an unsuspecting puppy with a remote-activated bomb collar. Though we are treated well, our nametags haven't arrived yet, and my Paizo-embroidered handkerchief scratches my nose a bit.

Well, we are on to introductions, children of Zo; I am Editorial Intern Tyler. I dwell in a cubicle with Editorial Intern Matt. He's quite nice, and sometimes I actually believe that we are not plotting each other's deaths via falling gargoyles and sabotaged car engines. Even though we don't actually have a bloody rivalry, I am still generally a happy person. I like half-orcs and barbarians, though I occasionally dabble in sorcery and the bluff skill. There are times I lie awake in bed having elaborate fantasies about being John Connor. I'm friendly to all woodland animals as long as they're cute and more than ten feet away. I don't know much about cars. I eat at Subway too much. I like Lady Gaga because she is a classy lady and could be a villain from Cheliax. In addition, I like to talk about myself (to myself), whine too much to family members, and I'm famous for once telling a story that, in its entirety, lasted 4 hours.

I'm somewhat new to the Paizo family, but so far this internship has been really fun. Hopefully I'll get to know some of you on good terms, and the rest won't hate me enough to complain.

Tyler Clark
Editorial Intern

Ecology of the Pathfinder Product, Part 6: Move 6d6 Tons, and what do you get?

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Illustration by Crystal Frasier

Cave raptors are sated; it's time to blog!

So far, we've uncovered the shocking details of raising an innocent idea into a rebellious roleplaying product, but if your beloved book never moves out of the house, then it will never really make anything of itself. Now is the time when a PDF, so self-important, must go out into the world by itself. And sure, it may come back wrinkled or torn, or even upside down, but without that life experience, it will never truly be its own book. It's time to talk about the physical, blue-collar side of game design: printing, warehousing, and distribution.

For all intents and purposes, Dwarves is ready to pack up and head off to college. Out of sight of its overprotective developers and even its best friend, the art director, it will grow into a bearded adult of glossy pages and the comforting scent of ink. Then it comes home, where its loving parents criticize its dress, notices it's gained weight, and implies that it should cut its hair because it looks like a hippy. Then it leaves again.

Printing of RPG products is arranged through horrible, arcane methods, often via deals with unseen and unknowable supernatural powers. Paizo prefers to deal through the fey, who are both adept at weaving physical products from ideas and accept readily available sandwiches as payment (in truth, lead developer Jason Buhlman's most important contribution to the company is his astounding egg salad, which pleases the fey queen Titania and ensures a lasting business relationship and a minimum of ironic curses). Once the electronic layout of a book is finished, it is transferred through a series of tubes to the distant faerie courts. The attending pixies immediately spin it into gold, and then press the gold itself into physical books and arrange for its return. Total elapsed time to print a Paizo product: 14 minutes. Sadly, due to the unstable chronological connection between the First World and our own mortal realm, upwards of two months may pass in our world during that 14 minutes.

Eventually, sprite couriers, glamered as UPS drivers, drop off multiple tons of product at the Paizo warehouse. This fabulous structure, adjacent to the production offices, is the realm of warehouse manager and 10th-level monk Jeff Strand. The warehouse stores not only Paizo's catalog of products, but also much of the stock for the online store, and so organization is vital. Inhuman physical strength is also important, as every pallet of products can weigh up to an Imperial ton (which is to say, it weighs as much as 2,000 pounds worth of emperors). Jeff and his able-bodied assistants work tirelessly to ship orders out as soon new product arrives, focusing first on Paizo's thousands of loyal subscribers. During these rushes, Paizo CEO Lisa Stevens and Vice President Jeff Alvarez can even be found braving the warehouse's icy trenches and lurking glabrezu in order to send books far and wide.

The enormity of Paizo's distribution efforts is staggering, especially to a little goblin. In addition to sending out literally tons of product at a time to subscribers and fans, pallets of each and every product to come through the door immediately goes back out to retail distributors like Alliance and Diamond. Like NBA scouts, these distributors then ship our MVPs all across the U.S. of A. and beyond, across the ocean to Europe and even north into the fabled Canada. And this volume doesn't even include our licensees who translate Paizo products for non-English-speaking fans.

Printing and distribution are vital to the lifecycle of a gaming product. Without that final kick out of the nest, to plummet or soar, pages would be doomed to constant revision. Roleplaying is built on a spine of pulp and glue, and losing the physical quality of the game book means losing an important piece of our heritage. Without that healthy respect for the past, the next generation will grow up cold and mechanical, controlled as they are by the fluoride in their computer screens. By the end, we'll bow before our PDF overlords, and soylent green will be people!

Plus, if you drop your latest Pathfinder in the bathtub, you can fix it with a hairdryer—try doing that with an e-reader!

This wraps up our quick review of the Paizo publishing process; you now understand as much about creating new products as I do. Starting next week, we'll take a look at existing Paizo products with our new feature, Sci-Fried.

Crystal Frasier
Production Assistant

To Boldly Go... and Do Awesome Stuff

Monday, October 26, 2009

Questions are springing to your mind just about now, I suppose. Synapses are firing, tickling with neuron transfers. Questions like "Who is this fellow? What is he doing here? What is his favorite flavor of ice cream?"

These questions are to be answered in due time, of course, and to facilitate these ends, I must insist that you take a seat around the Campfire of Good Times while I spin some lore.

In a dark time not so long ago, there was a young English Major at the University of Washington. His days were filled with classes, homework, and more horribly, lots and lots of retail work. One can only take so much retail work, but this young adventurer had need to pay the bills.

Nevertheless he applied for an unpaid publishing internship and now only works retail on the weekends, which, though undeniably a poor economic decision, is one more spiritually rewarding, as it allows him to do Awesome Stuff and be surrounded by Awesome People.

This includes but is not limited to: seeing products before they make their way to the press, copyediting said documents, and more generally, watching the creative process as it happens.

I can tell already that my time here at Paizo will be uniquely rewarding in these things alone, and it is my pleasure to be among these great people and to serve you great fans. If you want to see the first fruits of my labor, pick up Pathfinder Society Scenario #35: Voice in the Void by Rob McCreary, due out October 28th. And if you find any proofreading errors, uh… blame someone else. What do you expect to come out of a desk like this?

I'm still working on the decorations, but you guys said you wanted pictures of the new place... And for the record, my favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla. Bow to the versatility.

Matthew Lund
Editorial Intern

Measuring Westcrown

Friday, October 23, 2009

It's no secret that sometimes when we build an Adventure Path key bits of information slip through the cracks. For example, Council of Thieves takes place entirely within and near the city of Westcrown, and to support these adventures we're printing a nifty map of Westcrown on the inside front covers for the duration of this campaign. That map was always intended to be more of an art piece and a representational map that gives folks a basic idea of the shape and layout of the city, as well as a spatial aid to keep track of where the various adventure locations take place. But for much of the Adventure Path, the exact distances between those various locations hasn't really mattered. That changes with the final adventure, though, where the PCs are going to be moving all over Westcrown to handle a lot of different situations in a relatively short period of time.

And so I needed to figure out what the scale was for the map of Westcrown.

As with so many other Adventure Path-related tasks, this rapidly exploded into a pretty complex problem. While on the one hand the map implies a specific scale (there are houses on the map, after all, and we all have a pretty good idea of how big a normal building should be), the map was never created with a scale in mind and thus, those buildings and streets are not accurately sized. So that's a deceptive measurement to base a map's scale on—initially, I used this to estimate a scale of 1 inch = 600 feet, which as it turned out, was really a rather poor estimation.

You see, for better or worse, the only actual unit of measurement we have nailed down in print that helps us to measure Westcrown's size is its population—114,700 people. Having no frame of reference as to what population density numbers were realistic or not, I went to the Internet to do some research. And as it turned out, one of the real world's most densely populated cities, Paris, has a population density of something like 66,000 people per square mile, so that should probably represent the uppermost end of the scale. And more to the point—Westcrown, for all its importance in Golarion, is no Paris. I looked around a little bit more. Rome's is 5,495 people/square mile. Seattle's is 7,179/square mile. New York City's is 27,440/square mile. Mexico City's is 15,410/square mile. Venice's is 1,705/square mile. Los Angeles's is 8,205/square mile. San Francisco's is 17,323/square mile. London's is 12,331/square mile. Renton's is 4,625/square mile. Point Arena's is 348/square mile. And all of these were numbers for modern cities—what would benchmark numbers from a fantasy world like Golarion look like? Even worse... I'd gathered these numbers off the Internet from Wikipedia... who knows how accurate the numbers really are?

It was about this time that I started stressing out, realizing that I was perched at the edge of a bottomless pit of statistics and urban planning and history from which I could well fall into forever, and since I had to get back on target and finish developing the latest adventure, I didn't really have the luxury of such an oblivion

So I made a few assumptions. I assumed that Wikipedia's numbers were accurate. I assumed that Golarion's baseline levels of urban density are comparable to the modern world, and given the fact that magic can more or less replace technological advancement and that the Inner Sea region's been civilized for far longer than any current real world civilization, I'm not worried that anyone can prove me wrong on this assumption.

Armed with these assumptions, I started assigning scales. At a scale of 1 inch = 600 feet (my original assumption), we'd have a Westcrown that covered an area of only about 0.26 square miles for a ridiculous population density of 441,153 people per square mile. Obviously this is way out of bounds. My desire to have numbers that fell into something closer to the range of real world numbers, combined with my desire to have a scale on that map that's easy to summarize, ended up with me settling at a scale of 1 inch = 4,000 feet (just over 3/4 of a mile). At this scale, Westcrown covers an area of just over 20 square miles, for a population density of about 10,000 people per square mile. Kind of at the low end for modern-day numbers, but given Westcrown's lack of skyscrapers and its relatively empty ruined quarter... I'm actually pretty content with that figure.

We're still a few weeks away from me having to nail down the city's scale in print, and I'm still not convinced the complex and confusing thought process I've gone through to reach the three scales I list above are 100% solid. So I decided to make this long-winded blog post, and to put the numbers up for everyone to look over and pick apart and challenge! Hopefully if there's some sort of critical flaw in my theories, someone will point them out on the messageboards in time for me to not make a fool of myself in print with a ridiculously unrealistic scale for the city of Westcrown in Pathfinder Adventure Path volume #30!

So, unless I get proven wrong by the end of the month or so, the scale of the map of Westcrown on the inside covers of Pathfinder Adventure Path volumes #25–#30 is... 1 inch = 1 mile. Kind of a complicated post to arrive at such a simple number, but that's sometimes how it goes in the wild and crazy world of game design, I suppose!

James Jacobs
Pathfinder Editor-in-Chief

Open Call Submissions Close in One Week!

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Hey there future scenario authors! Don't forget that the open call for Pathfinder Society Organized Play closes on Friday, October 30 at 11:59 P.M. Pacific Time. Below are the details. Good luck!

Rules for submitting Pathfinder Society scenario outlines are as follows:

1. Based on the guidelines for the current round, write a 750-word outline that includes the following:

a. A title (if necessary, some times they are already titled)
b. A brief introduction that acts as a prologue for the scenario
c. A brief summary of how the PCs proceed through each encounter
d. A brief summary of each encounter—minimum six encounters with one encounter detailed as optional
e. A brief conclusion—what happens if the PCs fail or succeed

2. By the due date, email your outline to josh@paizo.com with the subject line SCENARIO NAME_SCENARIO#_ YOURLASTNAME. Your summary must be in a MS Word document, or a Plain Text or Rich Text Format file—these are files ending in .doc, .txt, or .rtf. Your file must be titled SCENARIO NAME_SCENARIO#_LAST NAME, i.e., PerilsofthePiratePact_17_Dayon.

3. Include your full legal name, email address, physical mailing address, and a contact phone number at the top of your submission—this text does not count toward your word count.

4. Please allow 72 hours for a response before resending your submission.

The current open call is for Pathfinder Society scenario 45—one of the March 2010 releases. The full schedule for this submission period is as follows:

• 10/15/09—Open call begins
• 10/30/09—Submissions due by 11:59 P.M. Pacific Time
• 11/9/09 through 11/13/09—Submissions review completed—selections and rejections notified

Guidelines

**SPOILER ALERT: Do not read the guidelines below if you wish to avoid spoilers for upcoming scenarios.**

Pathfinder Society Scenario 45 Title: none; up to the author
Setting: Absalom
Story: The Minotaur Prince of Absalom has been kidnapped (see pages 35–36, Guide to Absalom). Why has he been kidnapped? Who did it? Why does the Pathfinder Society care? Your submission must include Grandmaster Torch (see Pathfinder Society scenarios #1 and #14) in one form or another—it's up to you how much of a role he plays.
Level Range: Tier 1–5; Tiers 1–2 and 4–5

Joshua J. Frost
Events Manager

Illustration by Jim Pavelec

To Hell and Back

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

With Book of the Damned: Princes of Darkness showing up in stores shortly and the Council of Thieves Adventure Path well underway, the keen-eyed reader might be noticing a few crossovers. Indeed, Princes of Darkness was very much meant to be a companion to our infernal Adventure Path, while at the same time, we've drawn more than in a little bit of diabolism in from that damnable tome. So if you're reading through Book of the Damned and come across a creature or two that you're unfamiliar with, look no farther than Pathfinder Adventure Path for all the details we couldn't fit between two covers. Already the subtly mentioned ukobach (#25), stymphalian (#26), cerberi (#28), and a whole host of new devils have appeared, with even more infernal lore to come. So stay watchful all you infernal scholars out there! The secrets of devilkind reveal themselves fully to only to the most cunning diabolists.

F. Wesley Schneider
Managing Editor

Ecology of the Pathfinder Product, Part 5: Layabout

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Illustration by Crystal Frasier

Cave raptors are sated; it's time to blog!

There comes a time in every game product's life when a developer has to learn to let go; to let his sweet, innocent babe go out, make mistakes, and grow into a book. A game product needs to stay out late, crash the car, and hang out with the wrong crowd. And that wrong crowd is the art director, in Paizo's case the amazing Sarah Robinson and the undefeated James Davis.

Welcome to the jungle we call layout.

When last we saw Dwarves of Golarion's's art director, she was a childhood friend helping to tutor the infant sourcebook in good grooming and healthy posture. But now that editorial puberty has hit, the art director becomes a corruptive influence. She'll introduce the book to page composition, gateway fonts, and the pagan ways of design. While the developer cares about making a good text, the art director (or humble-yet-beautiful production goblin) is only concerned with tarting the book up.

Once development and editing are finished, layout is everything else. It means making an attractive page that doesn't remind the reader of a junior-high science textbook. It means making sure the words, the art, and all the stat blocks don't trip over each other. It also means constantly harassing the developers and editors to cut or add words and send material to work with in a timely fashion. The process is arduous, often checking a work line by line for tight spacing or dangling widows (who hang around poorly laid-out products to get their kicks; during last month's move we uncovered no fewer than thirty-eight widows cleverly concealing themselves in the recycling bin). For any given product, the process may take hours, days, or even weeks, depending on how recently the art director has been fed.

In ye olden times, layout was performed by hand, using glue and a layout churn to mock up a page and send it away to the printer by horseless carriage. These days, much of the hard work of layout is performed by computer, where all the trimming and gluing are handled digitally. The common computer terms "Cut," "Paste," and "Churn" actually hail from these pre-computer layout processes.

This is the basic workspace, with the guides for page and column sizes. Boring enough.

Our text needs to live somewhere fancy, so first we design an attractive page.

We drop in the formatted text from the developer next.

Now we switch everything to a dwarfier font and adjust the text spacing a little.

Add some frames and titles, so we all know what we're looking at.

Now we drop in our artwork, wrap the text around it, and make sure everything fits.

And that's a finished spread!

Like a fancy show octopus with a mastery of sign language, a well laid-out product is a joy to look upon and easy to understand. While the prose might make a book beloved, its layout makes it popular, and often the only difference between a bestseller and a discount special is how well each page presents itself. Without good layout, even well-written books would languish in exile, their hideous countenances creating a wall between themselves and the general populace. Resentment would set in, and as their numbers grew alongside their discontent, murmurs of revolution would spread. Cries of "Viva la Composicion!" would echo through the winding streets, followed by bloody, horrific riots. Heads of editors and writers alike would roll as the dispossessed texts yearned for justice, but settled for vengeance.

To dodge that bloodshed, make sure to follow up your writing and editing with a loving layout. The bourgeoisie will thank you for your effort.

And now our baby manuscript has grown up into a finished book! Or has it? Still nothing more than a digital file and a pile of black-and-white printouts, Dwarves won't be it's own book until it has returned with a diploma from one of several prestigious printers. Next week, we'll examine what goes on once the book is out of Paizo's hands.

Crystal Frasier
Production Assistant

Illustration by Eric Lofgren

Seekers of Secrets: Journeys and Rewards

Monday, October 19, 2009

Pathfinder Chronicles: Seekers of Secrets talks about the tests to become a Pathfinder and the training members receive if they pass, but the carrot that convinces most applicants to try is the chance to explore strange places, discover exotic treasures, and be published in the Pathfinder Chronicles. This illustration encompasses all aspects of those rewards, from the young Pathfinder referring to the Chronicles for clues on how to open a strange sealed door, to the female Pathfinder so impressed with Venture-Captain Ambrus Valsin that she cut her hair just like his, to their overzealous companion too intent on unearthing a cache of wayfinders and ioun stones to heed his fellows' warnings.

Illustration by Craig J. Spearing

Of course, few could blame him for this eagerness. The Pathfinders are said to have enough treasures in their vaults to buy and sell all of Absalom—surely an exaggeration, but greed is a powerful lure, and many join the Pathfinder Society just to get their hands on as much magic as possible.

Sean K Reynolds
Developer, Pathfinder Chronicles

From Baria to Golarion

Friday, October 16, 2009

So, I've made no secret of the fact that I've given large parts of my 25+ year-old homebrew campaign setting, Baria, over to Golarion. One of the more successful of these imports are the Red Mantis assassins—and by extension, their home city of Ilizmagorti. When it came time to assign authors for Cities of Golarion, I was sorely tempted to claim the chapter on Ilizmagorti as my own—I was nervous that even if another author did a GREAT job with the city that the end result wouldn't match my own personal vision of the city. The same goes for the city's map, to be honest. But my work schedule being what it was (I'd already taken up two chapters of Classic Horrors Revisited, alas, I couldn't responsibly claim the chapter of Ilizmagorti for Cities of Golarion as my own. And so, with some nervous fear and much wringing of hands, I gave it up for someone else to write about.

I'm happy to say that what Rob McCreary wrought with his words is exactly what I'd envisioned for the city of Ilizmagorti—he hit every nail square, and the resulting chapter is hands-down my favorite in the book as a result (which is saying something, since there was some tough competition!). Even more exciting, he came up with some concepts that I'd never thought of for Baria's Ilizmagorti—concepts that inspired me in some really fun ways. It's really weird being inspired to write things about something you made up due to someone else's work on that concept! Weird, but wonderful!

Yet as wonderful as Rob's words were, a city can live or die by its map. For Cities of Golarion, we tackled the creation somewhat differently. We hired writers to write the chapters, but we hired artists and cartographers to create the city maps. Long-time readers of this blog might remember earlier this year when I posted the Map Open Call—the results are some of the best city maps that Paizo's had the pleasure to print. Presented here are the two versions of the map of Ilizmagorti—the first one created by Daniel Thomson, based on my outline of what the city should incorporate. The other map is the final version you'll see in the book and in the Cities Map Folio as a four-panel poster. (We've left the tags off of Rob's map so you can ogle the beauty of his work easier.)

Illustration by Daniel Thomson	Illustration by Rob Lazzaretti

James Jacobs
Pathfinder Editor-in-Chief

Pathfinder RPG Open Call for Pathfinder Society Organized Play

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Hello and welcome to another installment of the Pathfinder Society scenario open call using the new Pathfinder RPG rules! Most months we'll open one of our Pathfinder Society scenarios to you, the general public, to search for new authors and new ideas for use in Paizo's worldwide organized play campaign. We're looking for authors who have a clear and concise writing style, who have solid and creative ideas for adventures, and who are capable in every way of following instructions and meeting deadlines. And while we're seeking new authors through this process, we certainly encourage previously published authors to participate as well.

Speaking of new authors, special congratulations go to paizo.com messageboard regular Yoda8MyHead, who was selected as the author for the previous open call. His scenario, #43: The Pallid Plague, will come out this February. Be sure to pop into the Pathfinder Society messageboards and congratulate Yoda on this assignment!

As always, keep the following guidelines in mind when submitting:

1. Don't break our world. If you submit something that breaks part of our world, it'll be auto-rejected. The scenarios are 4-hour adventures—epic story arcs, world-shattering events, wars, mass famine, etc. don't have a place in them.

2. Understand Pathfinder Society Organized Play before you submit. Specifically, understand that the Pathfinder Society is an organization of vagabond scholars, thrill-seeking treasure hunters, and extreme explorers. They are not necessarily the "good guys," they don't get "hired" for their adventures, and they're not generally looking to make the world a better place. Submitting generic 3.5 "save the day" adventure ideas will decrease your chances of getting to write one. There are plenty of resources out there to give you a feel for the Society: the Guide to Pathfinder Society Organized Play, Pathfinder Adventure Path volume #1, and the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting all have information on the Pathfinder Society.

3. Read one or two scenarios before submitting (particularly 29 through 32).

4. Pathfinder Society Scenarios must be no more offensive than PG-13. Scenarios are played in public at public settings and children will be playing them. Submissions that include violence toward children will be auto-rejected.

5. This is not a contest. This is more like an interview for a job—you're showing me your best idea and I'm deciding if the combination of your idea and writing skill equals you being selected as our next scenario author. We need authors—not winners. And I really want to stress the author part of that. Only send me your best work that is reflective of your writing style. I can teach someone the rules system—I can't teach someone to write.

6. I don't have time to return every submission with feedback. Feel free to post your rejected proposals to the Pathfinder Society messageboards for peer review. For those of you not submitting, please give feedback to those who do and are rejected.

7. Lastly, I posted some general feedback on recent submissions here. Please read that thread before submitting.

Rules for submitting Pathfinder Society scenario outlines are as follows:

1. Based on the guidelines for the current round, write a 750-word outline that includes the following:

a. A title (if necessary, some times they are already titled)
b. A brief introduction that acts as a prologue for the scenario
c. A brief summary of how the PCs proceed through each encounter
d. A brief summary of each encounter—minimum six encounters with one encounter detailed as optional
e. A brief conclusion—what happens if the PCs fail or succeed

2. By the due date, email your outline to josh@paizo.com with the subject line SCENARIO NAME_SCENARIO#_ YOURLASTNAME. Your summary must be in a MS Word document, or a Plain Text or Rich Text Format file—these are files ending in .doc, .txt, or .rtf. Your file must be titled SCENARIO NAME_SCENARIO#_LAST NAME, i.e., PerilsofthePiratePact_17_Dayon.

3. Include your full legal name, email address, physical mailing address, and a contact phone number at the top of your submission—this text does not count toward your word count.

4. Please allow 72 hours for a response before resending your submission.

The current open call is for Pathfinder Society scenario 45—one of the March 2010 releases. The full schedule for this submission period is as follows:

• 10/15/09—Open call begins
• 10/30/09—Submissions due by 11:59 P.M. Pacific Time
• 11/9/09 through 11/13/09—Submissions review completed—selections and rejections notified

Guidelines

**SPOILER ALERT: Do not read the guidelines below if you wish to avoid spoilers for upcoming scenarios.**

Pathfinder Society Scenario 45

Title: none; up to the author
Setting: Absalom
Story: The Minotaur Prince of Absalom has been kidnapped (see pages 35–36, Guide to Absalom ). Why has he been kidnapped? Who did it? Why does the Pathfinder Society care? Your submission must include Grandmaster Torch (see Pathfinder Society scenarios #1 and #14) in one form or another—it's up to you how much of a roll he plays.
Level Range: Tier 1–5; Tiers 1–2 and 4–5

Joshua J. Frost
Events Manager

Ecology of the Pathfinder Product, Part 4: The Editor's Compositional Fitness Challenge

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Illustration by Crystal Frasier

Cave raptors are sated; it's time to blog!

Yes, editing: the sport of grammatically minded kings. So far we've examined the natural growth of Dwarves of Golarion, as well as its invaluable hours of education, and yet we've ignored physical fitness. Without a steady regimen of editing, our little manuscript could turn into a clumsy butterball, drawing ridicule and cruelty from other game products.

To keep a product trim, healthy, and happy, it's going to need editors to run it through its paces.

According to Paizo's editorial tag-team of Christopher Carey and James Sutter, an editor's job involves neither crushing the dreams of authors nor blindly hacking away at text, but instead is a carefully crafted routine to burn off flabby text and improve narrative posture. Like a cephalopod, any quality Paizo product needs to hit the gym regularly to keep it healthy. Just like any fitness-obsessed octopus will hit both the free-weights and the treadmill, Paizo products will rotate their editing to catch problems with grammar, spelling, word choice, continuity, voice, and even the occasional rewrite to adjust the word count. Even the greatest authors will occasionally dip into the candy-coated bacon of purple prose or forget to tie their punctuation, so a good editor can help make sure every product can fit into its cover before the big class reunion.

The amount of editing any given product needs is easily determined with the formula n+1, where n is the amount of time you actually have to edit the book. Because of this conundrum, it's important for editors to make the most of the time they do have. At Paizo, the ideal grammatical specimen sees four editorial passes: two from each of Paizo's own hard-nosed prose-wranglers. A 'pass' is a single read-through. Obsessive-compulsive as any wild pack rat, these editors greedily gobble up any mistakes they sniff out, trading it for proper spellings or active voice. And because anyone, even editors, can make mistakes, multiple passes and different editors help to ensure that no errors go unexamined.

For Paizo products especially, the editors also serve the dual role of security. They stand constant vigil over continuity of Golarion, ensuring that dead NPCs don't crop back up, that cities don't spontaneously shift location, and that worst of enemies aren't running around as BFF. The editors have the blessing and curse to read every product Paizo releases, from thrilling Planet Stories to mysterious modules, and serve as living repositories of the universe.

And yet they stay so svelte, just like the products they care for.

Editing is necessary for the health and longevity of a product. Without it, mistakes, typos, and plain, old dead wood can slip through into the final product, clogging intakes eventually leading to frustration overheating in readers. The heat released by frustrated readers contributes to the inconvenient truth of global warming, melting the polar ice caps, flooding coastal regions, and causing alligator populations to explode. Ultimately, mankind devolves into primitive tribes of swamp dwellers, hiding in terror from the maurading ultra-gators that have made this marshy, dystopian Earth their own!

So to keep your writing trim and healthy, and to ensure the survival of the human race, edit!

Now that our product is happy, healthy, and knows where its going in life, next week we're ready for that special time in every product's life when it truly becomes a book. Next week, we examine layout!

Crystal Frasier
Production Assistant

Carrion Hill Preview #2

Monday, October 12, 2009

The Pathfinder RPG Bestiary has reached our warehouse, and we've loaded it with hundreds of updated monsters for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. However, some of our favorites didn't quite make the cut and had to be left out of the book. Fortunately, we're clever and sneaky, and found a way to get one of the extra monsters into the Pathfinder Module Carrion Hill. After all, in an adventure with Lovecraftian horrors, this shapeshifting creature should feel right at home.

Illustration by Tyler Walpole	Illustration by Hector Ortiz

Sean K Reynolds
Developer, Pathfinder Modules

Illustration by Steve Prescott

Countdown to Meltdown!

Friday, October 9, 2009

Well, as any devoted follower of our messageboards or weekly chat room meetings knows, things have been pretty frantic here at Paizo. As it turns out, releasing about 1,000 pages of rules (between the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook and the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary) and moving offices to Redmond, WA, all at the height of the convention season, is a really good way to knock product lines off schedule. We've been scrambling to get things back on track, and I'm happy to report that we're making some really good progress there—in fact, Pathfinder Adventure Path volume #28 is just now heading off to the printer!

This volume's adventure was originally going to be a stand-alone adventure written by me for our Pathfinder Module line. When I kept not having the time to get it started, I realized that it'd make a perfect fit into Council of Thieves. Splitting the writing duty for it with RPG Superstar Clinton Boomer, we explore a "what if?" scenario in this adventure: What if a "nuclear reactor" used a powerful devil as its energy source instead of radioactive material? And what if that infernal reactor had a meltdown?"

Presented is a hint of what's in store for Westcrown when things go bad—part of Steve Prescott's incredible cover for the volume. And that's just what's going on up topside—just wait until you find out what's happening down below in the Nessian Spiral itself!

James Jacobs
Pathfinder Editor-in-Chief

Pathfinder Society: Looking to the Future

Thursday, October 8, 2009

The most frequent request I get from players, GMs, and convention coordinators is, "What scenarios will be out by [date]?" I get this question enough that I've decided to keep a rolling 2-to-4 month schedule up on paizo.com/pathfindersociety. This rolling schedule has some unique challenges—for example, scenarios aren't assigned to authors as far in advance as, say, Pathfinder Adventure Paths, and so I often know very little about a scenario coming up in three months beyond a potential title, tier-level, and location. The open call further complicates this as those scenarios are usually just tier-level and location with no additional details.

That said, it seems to me that the most important details for convention coordinators especially is the tier-level of a given future scenario. So we're going to keep you apprised of that, even if we don't know much else about the scenario.

Without further ado, here's a peek at the future scenarios coming from Pathfinder Society Organized Play!

Pathfinder Society Scenario #35: Voice in the Void
Description TBA. Due out 10/28/09.
Written by Rob McCreary
Tier 1–7

Pathfinder Society Scenario #36: Echoes of the Everwar Part I: The Prisoner of Skull Hill
Description TBA. Due out 10/28/09.
Written by Joshua J. Frost
Tier 7–11

Pathfinder Society Scenario #37: The Beggar's Pearl
Description TBA. Due out 11/25/09.
Written by James F. Mackenzie
Tier 1–7

Pathfinder Society Scenario #38: No Plunder, No Pay
Description TBA. Due out 11/25/09.
Written by Larry Wilhelm
Tier 7–11

Pathfinder Society Scenario #39: Citadel of Flame
Description TBA. Due out 12/30/09.
Written by Steven Robert
Tier 1–5

Pathfinder Society Scenario #40: Hall of Drunken Heroes
Description TBA. Due out 12/30/09.
Written by Tim Hitchcock
Tier 7–11

Pathfinder Society Scenario #41: The Devil We Know Part III: Crypt of Fools
Description TBA. Due out 1/27/10.
Written by Larry Wilhelm
Tier 1–7

Pathfinder Society Scenario #42: Echoes of the Everwar Part II: The Watcher of Ages
Description TBA. Due out 1/27/10.
Written by Greg A. Vaughan
Tier 7–11

Joshua J. Frost
Events Manager

Illustration by Craig J. Spearing

Cities of Golarion—Whitethrone Preview

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

One of the six cities presented in Pathfinder Chronicles: Cities of Golarion is Whitethrone, capital of the wintry land of Irrisen, written by Jonathan Keith.

Home to the jadwiga ("children of the witch-mother"), the descendents of the witch Baba Yaga, Whitethrone is a playground for evil nobles, with Queen Elvannia's family enjoying the last few years of its ruling legacy before her mother instills another daughter to rule for a century. The city is home to snow goblins, ice trolls, and even winter wolves and worgs, all of them with the same rights as humanfolk. Visitors must beware, for Baba Yaga cast a spell on the Howlings district that allows the lupines to walk in human form to more easily interact with the two-legged population; the people of Whitethrone know better than to hunt wolves outside the city, or insult the shaggy-haired men and women whose breaths fog the air on even the warmest days.

Sean K Reynolds
Developer, Pathfinder Chronicles

Ecology of the Pathfinder Product, Part 3: An Outbreak of Art

Tuesday, October 5, 2009

Illustration by Crystal Frasier

Cave raptors are sated; It's time to blog!

As it stands, Dwarves of Golarion is now written and assembled by its loving developer. Though awkward and gangly, we can see what it will finally grow up into. But at this point, this happy child is nothing more than a text document in the daycare that is a documents folder, happy rolling in the mud and receiving bowl cuts from mom. But there's an ugly truth for gaming products that this little production goblin's learned at her junior prom: you can be creative and brilliant, but if you don't look good, nobody'll pick you up.

Enter the art order, the good grooming of game design.

The majestic octopus mates for life, and hopes to find a sensitive and intellectually compatible lover that shares its appreciation of American Gothic poetry, but it will make its initial judgments based on appearance and health. Similarly, good art can make a product seem interesting and romantic before the first words are even read. It can make the difference between a product you don't tell your friends about, and one you take home to mom. But like an attractive octopus, a quality illustration must be carefully cared for if it is to be worthwhile.

The art order begins once the text for a product has begun development. By now, the developer knows how everything will shake down, even if the specifics remain a mystery. The developer will sit down with the decorator crab that is the art director, and with careful attention to the budget, they decide how much art the book can stand and what compelling elements to call out in pictorial form. With that list completed, the task is kicked back to the developer and his editorial cronies, who write up brief descriptions of all the illustrations they'll need to get their product a seat at the popular table during lunch.

By now, the art director is already comfortable in its den, combing through the preferred artists list and thinking about what to assign to whom. Just like writers and tutors, different artists' styles lend themselves better to different moods and fit different products*. A happy, bubbly, or wacky artist would be a terrible fit for Dwarves of Golarion's "quiet and cool" attitude, and would be better suited for its goofy sidekick, Gnomes of Golarion. Once the art orders are written, the art director mails them along to the illustrators of choice, together with the promise of great riches.

The first thing received from the artists are those embarrassing family photos we like to call 'sketches.' These are passed out among the editorial and art staff, who make crippling judgments about cowlicks, large ears, and crooked teeth that will haunt the product well into adulthood. They also make note of any changes the artist needs to make.

Finally, the finished images are received from the artists who, like the octopus, die shortly afterwards. This cruel cycle of nature provides the few glimpse of a grown-up, mature product that needs to be home by ten because tonight is a school night.

Illustrations by Jeremy McHugh

The art order is vital in a product's life cycle because it prevents the normally docile artists from breaking free of their enclosures and wandering the streets, mauling and tagging innocent civilians at random. It also serves as the cranial implant that prevents the art directors from seizing the reigns of power and assuming their rightful places as god-kings, directing the entirety of a company's funding into a single, penultimate illustration that makes children weep and grown men fall to their knees in prayer. Very important if you are a company looking to put out more than one product.

By now in the life cycle, our game product has begun to grow up and go through some awkward changes. Suitors have come calling, and its started wearing makeup. Tune in next week when we'll examine how to cope with your precious first draft's frustrating period of editing!

Crystal Frasier
Production Assistant

*Except for Wayne Reynolds, whose art is universal and can bring peace to warring nations.

GameMastery Guide Cover!

Monday, October 5, 2009

I may have mentioned this before, but the main villain of Pathfinder’s first Adventure Path, Karzoug, was no stranger to tormenting PCs. He was one of my homebrew campaign’s major recurring characters—a powerful wizard who served as the true menace behind the throne of an evil warlord. In my homebrew, Karzoug wielded a scythe and had already made the transition to lich and wasn’t as concerned with greed, but he was very much still the campaign’s poster child for “evil wizard.” He eventually met his end when a pair of heroes, the barbarian Verik and the wizard Zefram, confronted Karzoug in, of all places, Baba Yaga’s dancing hut. Karzoug was trying to claim the hut’s legendary power source for his own evil purposes, and while this certainly annoyed Baba Yaga, she wasn’t about to give the PCs uncontested access to her magical fortress. And so these two high-level PCs snuck through the depths of the dancing hut filled with fear about breaking or even touching anything, avoiding every single encounter and trap through an uncharacteristic caution that, in the end, served them quite well. I’d intended them to finally reach Karzoug and have the final battle with the evil wizard after the PCs had depleted much of their resources dealing with the natives of Baba Yaga’s hut, and when they reached Karzoug with much of those resources untapped, I figured they deserved the advantage. Turns out, they needed that advantage anyway. Even in the 1st edition of the game, Karzoug was a menace.

And so, when it came to deciding on a villain to inflict upon Golarion, it was with quite a bit of pride and nostalgia that I resurrected old Karzoug. He’d changed specializations (necromancer to transmuter) and weapons (scythe to glaive) and got a promotion (from the power behind the throne to the guy who sits on the throne), but in a lot of other ways he remained the same. Of course, getting Wayne Reynolds to illustrate him was one of the more surreal moments of my gaming career... and now, seeing him on the cover of our upcoming GameMastery Guide, that sense of surreal pride has returned. Wayne Reynolds has done a fantastic job making Karzoug epitomize the role of "super-powerful wizard." Take a moment to look through all of his stuff! Caged imp, pet blue dragon, throne manacles for prisoners, spellbooks casually stacked to the side, crazy crystal ball with some sort of apparatus wrapped around it, a throne that can probably see—and that doesn’t even touch all of his fancy magical equipment he’s got ready to ruin the next PC to step his way!

James Jacobs
Pathfinder Editor-in-Chief