Pathfinder backgrounds

Monday, April 30, 2007

And now, by popular request... Pathfinder desktop backgrounds! While a desktop is obviously a totally different size than a book, and certain design elements are still being finalized, these three images are perhaps the best preview to date of what the first three Pathfinder covers (including the alternate cover for volume 1) will actually look like. So while you're waiting for "Burnt Offerings" to release, why not download one of these and throw it up as your wallpaper? After all, as far as we're concerned, everyone could use a little more Wayne Reynolds art in their lives...

Desktop #1: 1024x768, 1280x960

Desktop #2: 1024x768, 1280x960

Desktop #3: 1024x768, 1280x960

James Sutter
Assistant Editor, Pathfinder

...And the Dragon Comes in the Niiiiiight!

Friday, April 27, 2007

Just wanted to drop by and give you all a sneak preview of some brand new cover art we got in just in time for the weekend. They say a picture's worth a thousand words, but I'd wager that this one's worth about 22,000... which, incidentally, is how long Jason Bulmahn's W1: Conquest of Bloodsworn Vale module will be when it's all finished. In this 32-page adventure, heroes will be pitted against twisted, evil fey as they fight to reclaim Bloodsworn Vale and reestablish overland trade routes between Varisia and the world beyond. But as this beautifully executed painting from WETA and Savage Tide alumnus Warren Mahy shows us, evil fey are just the beginning of the adventurer's problems....

James Sutter
Assistant Editor, Pathfinder

Ye Gods!

Thursday, April 26, 2007

When we decided to set both Pathfinder and the GameMastery modules in the same unique campaign world, one of the first issues we as a staff had to tackle was the pantheon. As Pathfinder Editor-in-Chief James Jacobs regularly points out, without compelling deities, the game is much less fun—and not just for clerics. Before you can know anything about a person or culture, you have to know who's pulling the strings (or who they think is pulling them, anyway). Judging by the response to our "What do you want to know about Pathfinder?" thread on the messageboards, most of you feel the same way.

Since gods are so central to a campaign setting, everyone on the design staff (and a fair number of people who technically aren't) had an opinion. Many were the long Friday afternoon meetings spent hotly debating whether the goddess of love is necessarily good, or whether she should be given the Trickery domain. Whether the gods created the people, or the people, through their belief, created the gods. Whether druids needed a god, and if so, whether or not clerics could worship it. How to make a home-and-harvest god cool enough that people would actually want to play a cleric of one. In the end, however, the chaff was blown away, and our exhausted team found itself staring at a list of twenty core gods, with the provision that the door would be left open for numerous lesser deities as things evolved. And while most of the names and many of the concepts were admittedly swiped wholesale from the exhaustively documented (we're talking hundreds of pages) pantheon of Jacobs' homebrew game world, the resulting list bears each of our marks.

While the full pantheon will be presented in detail in the Rise of the Runelords Player's Guide, which will be available for purchase and free online download this summer, we wanted to preview part of it here on our blog first. Presented below is a brief snippet on the six gods worshipped most frequently in Sandpoint, the location of the first Rise of the Runelords adventure.

Erastil, Old Deadeye
LG god of farming, hunting, trade, and family
Domains: Animal, Good, Law, Plant
Favored Weapon: longbow

Sarenrae, the Dawnflower
NG goddess of the sun, redemption, honesty, and healing
Domains: Fire, Good, Healing, Sun
Favored Weapon: scimitar

Shelyn, the Eternal Rose
NG goddess of beauty, art, love, and music
Domains: Air, Good, Luck, Protection
Favored Weapon: glaive

Desna, Song of the Spheres
CG goddess of dreams, stars, travelers, and luck
Domains: Chaos, Good, Luck, Travel
Favored Weapon: starknife

Abadar, Master of the First Vault
LN god of cities, wealth, merchants, and law
Domains: Earth, Law, Protection, Travel
Favored Weapon: crossbow

Gozreh, the Wind and the Waves
N god of nature, weather, and the sea
Domains: Air, Animal, Plant, Water
Favored Weapon: trident

Of course, any good pantheon requires far more than a list of domains, and each one of these deities has his, her, or its own quirks and backstory that will be explored in lavish detail in Pathfinder's supplementary material... but more on that later. Stay tuned for further god-related updates in the coming weeks, and as always, we'd love to hear your questions and comments on our messageboards.

James Sutter
Assistant Editor, Pathfinder

Hail To The King

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Kobolds have been around for a long time. From the ratlike little dog-men of the early editions, to the more recent incarnation as draconic lizards, these guys remain one of the game's favorite foils. Usually depicted as sneaky, conniving trap-makers, they also have a history of being cute, pathetic monsters struggling to find their place in the dungeon, usually at the bottom of the local food chain. When we went looking for an iconic monster to kick off our line of 32-page modules, the kobold was an easy choice.

We couldn't just settle for the traditional kobold, though. Not when we had the chance to do so much more. When we asked Senior Art Director Sean Glenn to redesign the stale old monster and give it a fresh look, what we got back exceeded all of our expectations. (Sean, for his part, readily admits to sending Sam, the World's Ugliest Dog, along as reference. Can you see the resemblance?) Meaner, nastier, and definitely more evil, these guys have that special something that sets them apart from the pack. They have style. To give you an idea, here are some of the kobolds from "Crown of the Kobold King."

The reign of Merlokrep, first of his name, all-mighty Dragon King of the Truescale Kobolds, has suffered misfortune from the day of his coronation. But the sturdy resolve that saw him through the murder of his eighteen siblings and cleared his path to the throne has held his tribe together through the accidents, attacks by their new monstrous neighbors, and the king's own homicidal outbursts of rage over both. Merlokrep is always happy to offer visitors an honored place as Great Sacrifices to the Crown, ready to wine and dine them before ripping them open and pulling out their hearts.

Vreggma, Chief Consort and Only One Allowed to Nag-Nag His Greatness, loves to gaze at her own reflection. Her continued pursuit of shiny good-good causes an endless amount of trouble for her King, resulting in a third of her tribe perishing in haphazard mining excavations over the years. She immediately attempts the coquettish seduction of anyone that enters her lair, but if her advances are rebuffed or her collection of shiny good-good is threatened, she flies into a spitting rage that belies her sweet veneer and attacks viciously.

Jekkajak, called by many "He Who Forgets More Than You or He Knows," is the Truescale's shaman. His mysterious prophecies are taken very seriously by the rest of the tribe, at least when he is awake. Jekkajak is a walking corpse of a kobold, whose withered old white scales are stretched tight over bone. His puny skeletal snout contains a lone tooth and constantly dribbles drool. His milky eyes focus intermittently on his surroundings.

Merlokrep's cruel mining foreman, Lekmek, works a gaggle of slaves to death in search of "shiny good-good" for Vreggma. Sadly, gold is not on the menu in his glum mines, whose walls are riddled instead with veins of iron ore. Vreggma's displeasure at the lack of gold is the source of many headaches for Merlokrep, who in turn takes out his frustrations on Lekmek. The foreman vents this mounting aggravation through harsh beatings administered to his digger-slaves on an hourly basis.

Finally, its never really made sense that all kobolds should be brownish gray. Since there are five colors of chromatic dragon, we created five differently colored kobolds. But when we got the art back from our artist, we discovered that we had not five, but six colors. Which begs the question: what do we do with this guy?

If you've got an idea, post it to our messageboards and let us know!

Jeremy Walker
Assistant Editor, GameMastery

The First One's On Us

What's better than a high-quality, full-color, 16-page adventure? A free one, of course!

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

On June 23rd, gamers celebrate a whole new holiday just for us: Free RPG Day. On that Saturday, gamers across the country can stop by their friendly local game shops and pick up free roleplaying products. Seeing how much we love free stuff here at Paizo, we couldn't help but get involved. Come the 23rd, the first GameMastery Module, D0: Hollow's Last Hope, will be available for free at these stores.

When we first heard about this event, we were pretty excited, but pulling it together in time turned out to be a real challenge. While we kicked around several ideas, we quickly decided that, since D1: Crown of the Kobold King is for 2nd-level parties, it only made sense for us to get players to that level with an introductory adventure. In fact, the plot of Crown seemed to beg for it, as the adventure takes place in a forbidding forest and a ruined dwarven monastery but doesn't spend a lot of time getting the PCs there. But therein lay a new roadblock—we didn't want the free adventure to be mandatory for full Crown enjoyment, and vice versa. So we thought hard, and hit upon a unique plotline for Hollow's Last Hope—the quest for a plague cure—that could stand alone and still allow DMs of Crown to strip out the free adventure's plot and tack the extra encounters seamlessly onto the beginning of D1.

Once that was figured out, the biggest hurdle became the time crunch. Because we found out about Free RPG Day late in the game, we all—particularly Wes Schneider and me, who teamed up to write it—had to pull together and work hard to get the writing, art, layout, etc. finished in half the time normally allotted for such a project. (And believe me, the work difference between a 16-page module and a 32-pager isn't as large as you'd think.) But in the end, we didn't cut any corners, and managed to put together a product that looks as great as it reads—cartographer Chris West and the artists over at UDON continue to astound us with their work, particularly on such short notice.

As for what you can expect to find in the module itself, I won't spoil things too much, but manipulative worgs and animated cauldrons that dance around and swallow people whole sound like fun to me. We also made a concerted effort to sprinkle the module liberally with details tying in with Crown of the Kobold King, as well as tidbits that'll go farther toward building up our game world. For instance, though the hut you search in Hollow's Last Hope belongs to a relatively low-level witch, rumor has it that she actually studied under a much more notorious hag from the north... someone whose name you might just recognize...

For more information on Free RPG Day, go to www.freerpgday.com. If you somehow miss out, check back here soon for more information on how to score your own copy of the module.

Jason Bulmahn
GameMastery Brand Manager

Raising The Runelords

or, "How To Recover From a TPK and Make It Look Like You Planned It All Along"

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Once upon a time, I was running one of my favorite adventures, White Plume Mountain, for my players. They messed up good, got split up, and ended up all being dominated by a certain vampire charged with guarding a certain hammer. Now, I didn't want to admit I had a TPK on my hands, so I took a cue form another favorite adventure, "The Mud Sorcerer's Tomb," and introduced a whole ancient society of primeval necromancers over the span between game sessions, and next time we gathered, I had the now-dominated PCs sent by their new vampire lord to release the first of several slumbering wizards from a forgotten age. They let one out, but then escaped their charm and spent the rest of the campaign trying to undo what they'd done. But the idea was too cool to let my players fix. They defeated one of the ancient wizards, but once one woke up, the others came back in a chain reaction. Today, my world has several new nations ruled by these reborn necromancers, all because back in college a few friends of mine blew their saving throws.

And now, that fateful happenstance extends to Pathfinder. The ancient Runelords of Thassilon have developed into their own unique force, but they certainly owe their conception to that fateful day deep under the game's most famous volcano. Reproduced below are some of my notes on the nature of the Runelords and Thassilon. Warning for those who plan on playing in the Rise of the Runelords campaign: serious campaign spoilers ahead!

The Runelords

In the first Pathfinder blog post I mentioned how we needed to build a new region to set Rise of the Runelords in. In fact, it's more complicated than that. We actually had to create TWO regions. The first of these is Varisia, the realm in which the new Adventure Path takes place. The other is Thassilon, the ancient empire that once sprawled across much of this corner of the world. An empire that was, at its height, ruled by seven powerful wizards known as Runelords.

Thassilon was a sprawling empire that covered an area about as large as the western half of the United States. The Runelords were maniacal arcanists who used magic to fuel their own decadent vices. They forged alliances with dragons and enslaved giants by using secrets of rune and glyph magic stolen from the aboleths. With their enslaved giant armies, the wizards of Thassilon built massive tombs, enormous magical constructs, and staggering monuments that survive today, mute testimonies of a mysterious age long past. Yet as all evil empires must, Thassilon fell. The reason for this fall remains a mystery, but as the end drew near, the seven Runelords retreated into the depths of their greatest monuments, entombing themselves with orders for their minions to release them later to reclaim their empire. Alas, Thassilon's minions were enslaved or slaughtered. No one was left to waken them, and so the wizard kings of Thassilon slumbered for countless ages. Virtues of Rule, Sins of Magic

At Thassilon's dawn, the Runelords held that wealth, fertility, honest pride, abundance, eager striving, righteous anger, and well-deserved rest were the seven virtues of rule—rewards that one could enjoy for being in a position of power. But the Runelords soon abandoned the positive aspects of these traits, instead embracing greed, lust, boastful pride, gluttony, envy, wrath, and sloth as the rewards of rule. Today, long after the fall of Thassilon, the original seven virtues are held as the great mortal sins, although only a few scholars who have studied ancient Thassilon know of their true sources.

The Runelords' magic was closely tied to these seven categories, to such an extent that they developed their own schools of magic. All of the Runelords were specialist wizards. They recognized seven schools of magic (lumping divination magic into the universal school), and each school was associated with one of the seven sins. A Thassilonian wizard selected one sin when he became a specialist, and that determined his prohibited schools, as detailed below.

Envy
Focused on the suppression of magic other than your own.
Specialty: abjuration
Prohibited Schools: evocation and necromancy

Sloth
Focused on calling agents and minions to perform your deeds for you, or used magic to create what you needed as you needed it.
Specialty: conjuration
Prohibited Schools: evocation and illusion

Lust
Focused on using magic to control and dominate others to force them to satisfy your desires, and in the control of other creatures' minds, emotions, and wills.
Specialty: enchantment
Prohibited Schools: necromancy and transmutation

Wrath
Focused on the destructive powers of magic, and the use of magic to channel destructive forces.
Specialty: evocation
Prohibited Schools: abjuration and conjuration

Pride
Focused on using magic to perfect your own appearance and your domain through trickery and illusions.
Specialty: illusion
Prohibited Schools: transmutation and conjuration

Gluttony
Focused on the use of magic to manipulate the physical body in order to maintain an unending thirst for continued life.
Specialty: necromancy
Prohibited Schools: enchantment and abjuration

Greed
Focused on the use of magic to transform things into objects of greater value or use, and for the enhancement of the physical self.
Specialty: transmutation
Prohibited Schools: enchantment and illusion

The Big Bad End Guy

Although Rise of the Runelords touches upon many different aspects of the ancient empire of Thassilon and its evil rulers, we knew from the start that we wanted to focus on one Runelord as the main bad guy for the campaign. Not only is it better to have a single villain for PCs to obsess over and hate, but by leaving the other six Runelords more or less undeveloped, we're leaving lots of room for further expansion to this Adventure Path and our campaign setting as a whole. We also knew that, in order to realize his evil plot, this Runelord would be harvesting the souls of creatures that had succumbed to his favored sin.

But still—which sin to pick?

Wrath seemed like the obvious choice, because who can't get behind an explosion-launching bad guy who has fire for blood and lightning for hair? (That's probably a little over the top, but you get the idea.) Wrath certainly fit well with the giants we wanted to use, but it broke down when you applied the themes to the second adventure, which requires a group of murderers who are murdering prominent citizens. If we went with wrath, they'd just be killing themselves off.

So then we looked at lust. Also a great sin to build a villain off of, and it certainly works well with the second adventure in a Jack the Ripper sort of way. But then we get back to our giants. These guys are huge menacing brutes. Not really known for being sexy and what not. So lust was out the window too (though it shows up in the GameMastery module Seven Swords of Sin).

That was when we hit upon greed. With the Runelord of greed, we had a big bad end guy who had a built-in way to tempt and gain his minions; he was filthy rich. Giants are certainly easy to see as greedy, and having our murderers stalking and killing merchants and politicians (and maybe even adventurers like the PCs!) worked perfectly. It also gave us some interesting options when designing his look. Gemstones embedded in his knuckles and forehead! Tattoos made out of gold! And if we do our job right, and our Runelord of greed ends up being a really effective villian, you get to see the looks of worry on your players' faces when, at the end of the Adventure Path, you remind them that there are six more Runelords still out there. Runelords associated with far more violent sins than greed…

And that's how we ended up with Karzoug, Runelord of Greed, becoming the first megavillian of Pathfinder. That's him up near the top of this page. He's lookin' pretty good for a guy who's probably over a thousand years old, eh?

James Jacobs
Pathfinder Editor-in-Chief

Monsters Are to Pathfinder What Icing Is to Cake

Monday, April 23, 2007

I've made no secret of my obsession for new monsters. I love them. I can never get enough of them. Will I ever use all the monsters I've collected through my decades of RPG enthusiasm? Absolutely not. But I wouldn't give up any of them.

Unlike magic items or spells, new monsters are things that a GM can introduce into a game without fear that they'll disrupt a campaign. If they prove too lame (as was the case of my home campaign's flying, slavering eradu—a sort of warthog-shark intended to be the "new bulette," but who ended up being glass-jawed, one-hit loser), it's easy enough to never use them again. But once your PCs get your hands on things like new spells and new magic items, it's much harder to back them out of the campaign without a lot of tears and thrown dice.

With Pathfinder, we're embracing the new monster completely. Every volume will feature a bestiary that spotlights roughly six new monsters. Some of them will have roles in that month's adventure while others might just be there to add flavor to our new campaign setting. A few might even be previews of an Adventure Path years down the road. Some will be drawn from real-world myth, some from cryptozoological reports, and some wholly from the minds of our authors. Hopefully we'll all have some new favorite monsters in the months to come!

But talking about monsters isn't enough. We don't have art in yet for the six new monsters that are going to be in the first volume of Pathfinder to support the first adventure, "Burnt Offerings," but we do have descriptions of them. And while names of these monsters are placeholders in many cases, their descriptions are locked in. Check them out! (Warning: as with most of these blogs, spoilers below!)

Attic Whisperer

This undead thing resembles a child's skeleton with the paws and grinning skull of a fox. It is gray and covered with cobwebs, and dust falls endlessly from its mouth. It holds a ragged stuffed child's toy, its eyes pierced by pins, in its skeletal, fox-like hands. The creature is dressed in a small sleeping gown that looks like it was partially burned in a fire, as if it were the remains of a child who had died in bed.

Giant Gecko

There are two breeds of giant gecko in Varisia. The first is the size of a small horse or pony, maybe 8 feet long from head to tail. His eyes are bright blue and his body brightly colored. His open mouth holds hundreds of fangs, and his feet have large flat toes.

The second breed is much larger and more muscular, running about 14 feet long from snout to tail tip. This gecko has horns and a ridge of spines running down its back. Its eyes are bright red, and green smoking drool drips from its mouth, indication of its venomous bite.

Goblin Dog

While goblins ride worgs, wolves, and giant geckos when they can get them, most goblins are stuck with these disturbing mounts. Shaped like a limber greyhound but with a feral, ratlike face and tail, goblin dogs share their masters' hatred of real dogs. Their front two paws are tiny, black, ratlike hands, and their attitudes are all snarls and froth.

Goblin Snake

This strange snakelike monster is about 6 feet long and coiled around the roots of a tree that hang down from the roof of a cave. The snake has a black body with a thin racing stripe down its flank. Its back is a ridge of tiny horns. Its head is actually that of a goblin, but with a forked tongue and no ears. It has wide white snake eyes and a large mouth with two large viper fangs in the front. Some sages hold that goblin snakes are atrophied, deformed nagas, while most goblins believe that they're reincarnated heroes sent back to this world to punish goblin enemies.

Runespawn

Humanoid but deformed, the runespawn is an emaciated horror with unnaturally long arms and legs. Its hands each have two talon-tipped fingers and a thumb, and their legs bend like those of a dog. It's dressed in tatters and rags that expose much of its skin; veins bulge all over their bodies, forming dark blue or red patterns that look like twisted runes. Their flesh is pale and hairless. The runespawn's heads are curiously elongated. They have only a pair of slits for a nose, and their eyes are bulging and red, with no visible eyebrows. Yet for all this horror, their mouths are the most disturbing, for their lower jaw splits in half at the chin into pedipalps that end in tiny three-fingered hands that writhe about, eager to feed delicious morsels into an open gullet with a lolling tongue.

Sandpoint Devil

This critter is heavily inspired by the northeastern U.S. legend of the Jersey Devil. The Sandpoint version of this monster is a horrible horse-like creature with a fang-filled mouth, large bat wings, and a reptilian tail. Rumored to have been birthed by a woman cursed by Lamashtu, goddess of monsters and madness, the Sandpoint Devil is one of the most famous local legends. Despite long-standing rewards for its capture, it has never been caught. But when hunters and travelers go missing, chances are you'll hear tell that the Sandpoint Devil got them.

James Jacobs
Pathfinder Editor-in-Chief

   

Attention To Detail: The Story Behind Pathfinder's Supporting Material

Saturday, April 21, 2007

When coming up with the format for Pathfinder, one of the biggest questions we faced as a team was, "Okay, adventure path, check—but what else is going to be in there?" While we knew that the adventure that is the heart of each volume would grab people, that only accounts for a bit over half of each book. Something that's hard to grasp until you're actually staring down the barrel of a pagination is just how massive each one of these books is going to be—without in-text ads to eat up space, almost a hundred pages is a daunting amount of white space. What were we going to put there?

Ideas flowed fast and furious, and many of them quickly crashed and burned. Everything from familiar content like appendices of magic items and reports on current gaming news to outlandish proposals like a miniature Adventure-Path-related comic book in every issue (my own misguided suggestion, and an undertaking only slightly less expensive than putting a man on Mars). In the end, however, we came up with two guiding principles for all "back matter" (as we've taken to calling the supplementary pieces).

1. Everything in an issue of Pathfinder must be actively useful to a DM running the Adventure Path.

2. At least some of it needs to be fun and useful for players as well as DMs.

While one of the nice things about the Pathfinder format is that supplementary pieces have the luxury of being more free-form with their structure, much of the back matter in Pathfinder falls into one of the following general categories.

Cities and Regions: One of the strongest selling points of Pathfinder, in my mind, is that it gives you literally EVERYTHING you need to run a campaign. While we of course encourage people to adapt the Adventure Path to their own homebrew campaign worlds—some of us at the office are doing the same thing—we also think it's important to make the setting itself as compelling as the plot. In Rise of the Runelords alone, we have three extensive city write-ups detailing cities that the PCs will visit in the course of their travels—Sandpoint, Magnimar, and Xin-Shalast. These aren't just town stat blocks—these are massive affairs filled with locations, NPCs, backstory, encounters, and maps of surpassing intricacy and beauty. (You'd think I was exaggerating, but when Wes Schneider brought in the map he'd drawn of the city of Magnimar, site of the second adventure, I would have sworn he'd traced it off of Google Maps... there was simply too much detail. When asked how he managed it, he shrugged and replied, "latent obsessive-compulsive tendencies, I suppose.") In addition, we'll also have a large-scale map of the entire region of Varisia, in which Rise of the Runelords takes place, with write-ups for dozens of locations that simultaneously help flesh out the world and give you instant story starters for additional adventures. (I don't know about you, but I'm always a huge fan of provocative regional maps that give you just enough flavor to get your mind going, then turn you loose.)

Ecological Write-ups: Designing a new setting and working under the OGL means that we have the opportunity to introduce new monsters and re-imagine classic ones. (If you want a taste of where we're headed, scroll down to the last blog post on the goblins in our world.) In Rise of the Runelords, we plan to reveal our vision for stone giants and dragons in depth, taking things beyond a mere MM entry and showing you their society, their beliefs, their insides... in short, everything that makes them tick. Because while a good illustration can make a monster intriguing, it's how they think (and how you play them) that makes them great adversaries.

Gods and Demons: Similar to my feelings on monsters, I think that gods and demons (somewhat interchangeable terms in our world) are the most fun when they have engaging stories. Several times in each Adventure Path, we'll pick one of the gods or demons from our campaign setting and give you an in-depth look at everything about them, from their story and stats to their worshippers and heralds. For the first path, that'll be Desna, Song of the Spheres and patron of gypsies, and Lamashtu, the Goddess of Monstrous Birth.

Additional Encounters: What if your party skipped half the encounters in part of an adventure, or heads off in a direction you hadn't expected? Additional encounters in the region, conveniently tied to the Adventure Path, can help save you a lot of scrambling.

Bestiary: One of the few supplementary sections guaranteed to be in each issue, the Pathfinder bestiary will contain a number of brand-new monsters each month, both actively involved in the adventure and unrelated but thematically tied. For a sneak preview of what sorts of creatures you can expect to see in the first volume, keep watching this blog!

NPCs: It takes more than just a stat block to make a fun NPC, and whenever possible, Pathfinder will present the supporting cast—both heroes and villains—in an expanded format designed to be easily to cut-and-pasted into other adventures.

Pathfinder Journal: One of the other constants in the back matter, the Pathfinder Journal will explore a new aspect of our campaign setting each month and help tie together elements of both Pathfinder and the 32-page GameMastery Modules, helping to increase cohesion and give you even more options for expansion.

Miscellaneous Crunch: Ah, the joy of the miscellaneous category! Here you'll find everything from new spells, rules, and feats tied to sin magic (a magic system tied to the seven deadly sins and utilized by the Runelords) to pieces on how to run and maintain your own keep or castle.

History: I'm sure that by now you're probably getting the general gist of the Pathfinder ideology, but the history of a game world is just as important—and potentially inspiring—as it's geography. A chance for us (not to mention some of the biggest names in the RPG business) to shade in the historical background of our world? Yes, please!

Pre-generated Characters: Never again will you have to worry about players forgetting their character sheets at home. Each volume of Pathfinder will feature pre-generated characters based on Wayne Reynolds's stunning depictions of the Paizo iconics, allowing you and your party to grab the book and jump straight into the adventure with a minimum of prep time.

Whew! Keep in mind that those are only a few of the broad categories you might find in each volume—as I mentioned before, one of the things that excites me most about Pathfinder personally is our freedom to run the pieces that need to be run, regardless of whether or not they fit in with an established section. To build something from the ground up and have the authority to experiment is a glorious thing, and I believe strongly that when an author says, "how detailed should section XXX be?" and we can answer, "as much as it needs to be," everyone wins... especially the reader.

James Sutter
Assistant Editor, Pathfinder

Cover illustration for volume 1. Click to enlarge.

Reinventing The Wheel

Friday, April 20, 2007

Originally, the main menace in "Burnt Offerings," the first Rise of the Runelords adventure, was going to be a tribe of kobolds, because let's face it—everyone loves kobolds. So much so, in fact, that they ended up being the bad guys for the first GameMastery Module, which hits the shelves two months before "Burnt Offerings." Which is cool for Crown of the Kobold King, but left "Burnt Offerings" without a pint-sized menace.

Enter Wayne Reynolds.

The decision to have Wayne paint the first dozen covers for Pathfinder had the exciting side effect of making Wayne the one to design the look for our goblins. "Make our goblins look almost as cute as they are scary," we told him, and he more than accomplished that goal with a swarm of flat-headed, toothy, red-eyed monsters wielding crazy jagged swords (which Editor-in-Chief James Jacobs immediately named "dog-slicers" because, as you'll see below, goblins hate dogs!). Based entirely on their look, Jacobs—who's also the author of "Burnt Offerings"—was able to come up with all manner of weird goblin affectations (the current staff favorite being the song they sing while marauding). Based on what Wayne did with goblins, we're all understandably excited to see his designs for our stone giants, ogres, and dragons... which you'll of course find sneak previews of right here.

Ten Fun Facts About Goblins

1: Horse Hate: Goblins excel at riding animals, but they don't quite get horses. In fact, their hatred of all things horse is matched only by their fear of horses, who tend to step on goblins who get too close.

2: Dog Hate: Although goblins raise horrible rat-faced doglike creatures to use as mounts (and ride wolves or worgs if they can get them—goblins are quick to explain that wolves are NOT dogs), their hatred of ordinary dogs nearly matches their hatred of horses. The feeling is mutual, so if your dog's barking at the woodpile for no reason, chances are good he smells a frightened goblin hiding in there somewhere.

3: Goblins Raid Junkyards: Garbage pits, gutters, sewers… anywhere there's garbage, you can bet goblins are nearby. They're weirdly adept at crafting weapons and armor from refuse, and are fond of killing people with what they throw away.

4: Goblins Love to Sing: Unfortunately, as catchy as their lyrics can be, goblin songs tend to be a bit too creepy and disturbing to catch on in mainstream society.

5: They're Sneaky: An excited or angry goblin is a noisy, chattering, toothy menace, but even then, they can drop into an unsettling silence in a heartbeat. This, matched with their diminutive size, makes them unnervingly adept at hiding in places you'd never expect… stacks of firewood, rain barrels, under logs, under chicken coops, in ovens, etc.

6: They're A Little Crazy: The fact that goblins think of things like ovens as good hiding places reveals much about their inability to think plans through to the most likely outcome. That, and they tend to be easily distracted, particularly by shiny things and animals smaller than them that might make good eating.

7: They're Voracious: Given enough supplies, a goblin generally takes nearly a dozen meals a day. Most goblin tribes don't have enough supplies to accommodate such ravenous appetites, which is why the little menaces are so prone to going on raids.

8: They Like Fire: Burning things is one of the great goblin pastimes, although they're generally pretty careful about lighting fires in their own lairs, especially since goblins tend to live in large tangled thistle patches and sleep in beds of dried leaves and grass. But give a goblin a torch and someone else's home and you've got trouble.

9: They Get Stuck Easily: Goblins have wiry frames but wide heads, and live in cramped warrens. Sometimes too cramped.

10: Goblins Believe Paintings and Writing Steal Your Soul: The walls of goblin lairs and ruins of towns goblins have raided are littered with pictures of their enemies. They never draw pictures of goblins, though—that's mean. Writing steals words out of your head. You can't get them back.

The Goblin Song

Goblins chew and goblins bite,
Goblins cut and goblins fight,
Stab the dog and cut the horse,
Goblins eat and take by force!

Goblins race and goblins jump,
Goblins slash and goblins bump,
Burn the skin and mash the head,
Goblins here and you be dead!

Chase the baby, catch the pup,
Bonk the head to shut it up!
Bones be cracked, flesh be stewed,
We the goblins—you the food!

-The Pathfinder Staff

Cover illustration for volume 2. Click to enlarge.

What's Pathfinder All About?

Thursday, April 19, 2007

By this time, you've probably heard all about Pathfinder, Paizo's brand-new Adventure Path series. (If you haven't, of course, you should drop whatever you're doing and go check out paizo.com/pathfinder.) Yet even now that you know what's going to be in Pathfinder, you're probably wondering what it's all about. The vision behind it. Where its heart's at. And to answer that, we've brought in James Jacobs, Pathfinder's Editor-in-Chief. Says James:

"Pathfinder's at once the most exciting and the scariest thing I've worked on here at Paizo. On one hand, it's a chance to dive headfirst into a brand-new world and craft a story from scratch for you to run your players through. And on the other… it's a chance to dive headfirst into a brand-new world and craft a story from scratch for you to run your players through. There's no convoluted canon or established game history to work around and make sure that we've got right, but that also means there's no awesome nostalgia or tradition to build off of. We have to start completely from scratch... right?

"Well, not quite. There are still an awful lot of classic monsters and other material we can use in the SRD. And while we can't really build directly off of established canon, we can certainly draw upon themes from the early days. We can also do the same thing that Gygax, Kuntz, Arneson, and the others did back at the game's dawning—we can draw upon real world myth. So as you read through Pathfinder's first Adventure Path and begin to uncover the sinister conspiracy that has driven the stone giants of the Storval Plateau to war, you might also see a few familiar names and themes from real-world myth popping up now and then, like Lamashtu, Baba Yaga, the seven deadly sins, and even Asmodeus.

Welcome to Varisia!

"The first step to building a new Adventure Path was a doozy, though For Pathfinder, we didn't have the luxury of a pre-existing game world to set our campaign in. Before I could even start writing the first adventure to Rise of the Runelords, I needed a world to set it in.

It all started with Erik Mona building up an enormous T-shaped map over the course of several sheets of graph paper. What he ended up with was several continents; way too much room for a single campaign. So I chose one relatively small (small as in "about the size of California") section of his map and started filling in the blanks. At the same time, the rest of the Pathfinder team—F. Wesley Schneider and James Sutter—and I began to work out the plotline for the inaugural Adventure Path: Rise of the Runelords. To a certain extent, the shape of this new region was dictated by the plot we came up with: we needed a mountain range to rival the Himalayas, a vast cliff face stretching hundreds of miles, and remnants from an ancient empire.

The result is the realm of Varisia.

During the course of Rise of the Runelords, we'll visit six major locations on the map of Varisia, including two cities, two legendary mountains, a fortress of giants, and a lost city. Yet those account for only six dots on a map—at current count, Varisia's got approximately 40 locations (including cities like lawless Riddleport and ruins like sinister Brinewall) and 20 sub-regions (including the inhospitable Mushfens, haunted Ashwood, and the giant-ruled Storval Plateau) waiting to be explored. Some of these might get some exposure in Rise of the Runelords, others will be the focus of GameMastery modules, and some are destined to be the stars of future Pathfinder Adventure Paths. But the point isn't to build just what we need for the next few Paizo releases—there's enough adventure in Varisia to set dozens of campaigns.

"Over the next several days, I'll be revealing more about Varisia, Rise of the Runelords, and other exciting developments on the Pathfinder front here on this blog. Want a taste? Then check out these notes I've jotted down for one of those mysterious locations on the regional map of Varisia—the remote island of Chorak's Rest.

Chorak's Rest

Although the Varisians have no name for this tiny and remote island, the giants of the Gnasher Mountains do. They call the place Chorak's Rest, after the legendary warlord said to be buried in a great tomb there. The giants of the Storval Plateau were not always the barbarians they are today; this much is obvious from even a brief perusal of the texts stored in the History Wing of the Great Library of Magnimar. Yet the giants of Chorak's Rest seem to have retained more of the old ways than their brutish cousins in the Gnashers. Whispers hint that these island giants are the descendants of King Chorak's honor guard, and that they've remained guardians for the past several centuries, preventing approach to the island by giant and human alike. Boats attempting to land on the island are quickly bombarded with boulders and spears, and aerial approaches are shot down with massive ballista bolts carved with strange runes or blasted from the sky by bolts of lightning. Yet for all these defenses, none have approached close enough to determine what, exactly, is behind this prodigious defense. What awaits the lucky (unlucky?) souls who finally manage to reach the island's shores is unknown, but many treasure seekers are sure it would be well worth the trouble.

For daily news breaks, sneak previews, and behind-the-scenes insight into Pathfinder, the GameMastery product line, and other Paizo projects, stay tuned to this blog!