Although I can't quite yet show off the actual rules you'll be using in the Kingmaker Adventure Path quite yet, I can show you how they look in play. Presented below is an excerpt from Merisiel's diary as she oversees the foundation of a brand-new kingdom in the mysterious Stolen Lands. NOTE: Merisiel's probably not the best choice in this group for a nation's ruler, but sometimes that's just how politics work. As time permits, I'll post a few more diary entries to this blog's messageboard thread so we can all learn from Merisiel's triumphs and failures. Certainly there'll be more triumphs in her future, yes?
1 Pharast: So it looks like I'm in charge. Queen Merisiel. I like the sound of that. Although, as Seelah is so fond of pointing out, I'm technically a baroness until this new nation of mine grows large enough. I'm still gonna be calling myself queen in these pages. Seelah's gonna be the general of my armies (she volunteered!), and I put Lem in charge of keeping an eye on the citizens to make sure they're loyal as the spymaster. And of course Kyra's our high priest. All the other leadership roles, for now, go to some of the other locals we've allied with during the past several months of exploring the Greenbelt. We'll see how they work out, I suppose—none of them seem particularly talented, but hopefully they'll grow into their jobs? And if they don't, I can fire them. I'm the queen, after all. Anyway, we've managed to claim a pretty sizable area around this old ruined castle that bandit lord was using as a hideout. The ruins should work pretty well as a new castle, once it gets patched up. We've started clearing the area around the ruins to serve as a good place to build up a town. I'm thinking of calling it Owlbearton, after that bandit's pet owlbear that nearly bit off Lem's ear, but Seelah says that's a stupid name. I told her that if she comes up with something better we'll call it that, but so far all her ideas suck. Surprise, surprise. So for now, Owlbearton it is! We've even built some roads around the place! It's gonna be a city in no time! Especially now that I've got some deliciously heavy taxes coming into the treasury! Who woulda guessed that taxes could be something to be happy about? So far, those taxes more than paid for the roads and land clearing and stuff. Not the rebuilding of the castle, though. That's expensive, as it works out. And while Lem says that the locals are complaining that all I'm doing is lying around and taking it easy while they pay for my little project, and while Kyra says she only barely managed to talk a group of farmers out of marching up to the castle to tear it down and (their words) "git back what we done paid for from that spendthrift pointy-eared harlot!" I'm not worried. Once they see how excellent this castle looks when it's all done, they'll all forgive me. I'm sure of it!
Announcing PaizoCon 2010's Guest of Honor: Wayne Reynolds
Thursday, February 25, 2010
I'm pleased to announced that PaizoCon 2010's Guest of Honor is Pathfinder Roleplaying Game cover artist Wayne Reynolds! Reynolds has contributed iconic covers for Paizo projects going all the way back to Dragon and Dungeon magazines. His character design and exciting compositions have been instrumental in shaping the visual appeal of Pathfinder, and we're thrilled that he will be traveling from his home in the United Kingdom to join us for three days of gaming fun at PaizoCon 2010! Join Wayne for a tour through some of his famous covers, get him to sign your Pathfinder books, and get a chance to purchase a personalized sketch from Pathfinder's master artist, only at PaizoCon 2010!
PaizoCon 2010 takes place this June 18–20 at the Coast Bellevue Hotel just outside Seattle, Washington. You can pre-order your tickets
right here at paizo.com to make sure you get a chance to attend this exciting event. Last year's inaugural PaizoCon was, in the opinion of a great number of attendees, one of the very best, friendliest, and fun conventions ever, and this year's offering looks to be even better! Attendance is limited to 500 gamers and the event WILL sell out, so be sure to purchase your tickets as soon as you are certain you can attend.
We've also confirmed our first slate of special guests, which in addition to the ENTIRE Paizo Publishing staff includes:
Wolfgang Baur: Editor and publisher of Kobold Quarterly, Wolfgang is a TSR and Wizards of the Coast veteran with a slew of Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder credits over his remarkable career. Since its launch, Kobold Quarterly has become the most important tabletop gaming magazine in the industry, regularly covering Pathfinder news and events.
Tom Beckett: Director of the Theater Arts department at Portland's DaVinci Arts Middle School, Tom recently staged a theatrical production of "Burnt Offerings," the adventure from Pathfinder Adventure Path #1. He'll have video, props, and even actors from the production on hand at PaizoCon. Come on by and get a chance to hold your very own dogslicer!
Don Early: A founding member of Dead Gentlemen Productions, Don has served as producer for many Dead Gentlemen features, including the smash hit gamer film The Gamers, Demon Hunters: Dead Camper Lake, and the feature-length The Gamers: Dorkness Rising, in which he appeared as a mummy. Don will host a special screening of Dorkness Rising for Paizo fans.
Corey Macourek: Corey's digital cartography has been with Paizo since the launch of the GameMastery line. He is the artist behind GameMastery Map Packs and Flip-Mats, and he has contributed graphic design, illustration, animation, and soundtrack work for clients like Paizo, Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, Lucasfilm, Cartoon Network, the Sci-Fi Channel, and DC Comics.
Greg A. Vaughan: One of the most popular and skilled adventure writers in the gaming business, Greg Vaughan has made major contributions to both the Pathfinder and Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying games. His Paizo credits include Spires of Xin-Shalast, Into the Haunted Forest, River into Darkness, The Impossible Eye, Shadow in the Sky, and Mother of Lies.
Events
Though we're still weeks away from opening PaizoCon 2010 events for registration, here's a small sample of what we're planning to offer.
Advanced Player's Guide Preview Banquet, with new revelations of upcoming products, a look at the actual Advanced Player's Guide book, a tour of its contents with author Jason Bulmahn, a giant Pathfinder trivia contest, and food so good you won't believe you're eating in a hotel! Pre-order your banquet tickets here.
Video presentation of the da Vinci Arts Middle School theatrical production of the very first Pathfinder adventure, "Burnt Offerings," complete with in-person director commentary, props, and actors from the production.
More Pathfinder Society scenarios than you can shake a +1 holy stick of flaming burst at.
Pathfinder Fiction seminar, Planet Stories seminar, and a Fiction Workshop.
Pathfinder Society contributor workshop.
Rob McCreary GMs his Free RPG Day adventure, Master of the Fallen Fortress.
Sean K Reynolds' "Suicidal Strikeforce" and "Angelic Armageddon" events, several Sean-led miniatures painting workshops, and many developer seminars that give you a glimpse behind the Pathfinder Chronicles curtain.
Jason Bulmahn's "Fight Club 2: The Revenge" and "Cursed Lot 3: Curses for Everyone!" as well as several Pathfinder RPG seminars.
The continuation of F. Wesley Schneider's terrifying "Beyond the Gates of Bastardhall," his dread adventure set in the spooky counties of Ustalav.
James Jacobs's "Unspeakable Futures—Knights of Dagon," "Call of Cthulhu—The Prodigy of Death," and a Serpent Skull Adventure Path preview session.
A GM-focused city-building workshop led by James Sutter and other members of the Paizo staff.
Erik Mona's "Spire of Nex" convention-exclusive series continues!
24 hours of open gaming (board games, RPGs, TCGs, you name it!)
...and much more!
So be sure to pre-register to secure your spot as an attendee of PaizoCon 2010! We're excited to have you visit us in Seattle, and we can't wait to throw some dice with you in person!
It's time to narrow down the 8 remaining contestants to just 4! The eight semifinalists have designed and mapped a Golarion location with an encounter featuring the monsters designed in the previous rounds! Guest judges and master cartographers Corey Macourek and Robert Lazzaretti have regular judges Clark Peterson of Necromancer Games, Wes Schneider, and Sean K Reynolds in reviewing each entry. Your votes will determine the four contestants who will compete in the final round of RPG Superstar 2010, battling to win a commission to design a Pathfinder Module to be published by Paizo!
I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point along the way, the owlbear kind of ended up being the official Kingmaker mascot. Sure, the PCs will be facing evil fey, lizard and frog men, undead monstrosities, bandits, trolls, giants, dragons, and worse during this Adventure Path, but they'll also be facing a lot of owlbears. Some of which are really rather memorable.
Anyway, once we realized how owlbear-riffic this Adventure Path was going to be, we decided to open each one of Kingmaker's forewords with illustrations of the life and death (mostly death) of the River Kingdoms' unluckiest owlbear. There he is in the illustration above, wandering through the primeval woodlands of the Stolen Lands without a care in the world. I'm not going to name him, because that would just make the next five months of what happens to the poor guy depressing.
For now, though, he's at home in his element, with no idea of the pain and humiliation to come. What has cruel, cruel fate got in store for this poor, innocent owlbear? Tune in to this blog next month to find out!
We've had the cover for Pathfinder Adventure Path #32: "Rivers Run Red" (written by our own Rob McCreary) up for sometime now, but it bears another mention, as this cover sees the climax of a long and interesting evolution. It's little surprise that we were only three months into the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path—and Pathfinder's life in general—when it came time to order art for our first troll. How to handle this got a little tricky, though, as it's important to us that our creatures walk the line between familiarity and distinctiveness when it comes to earlier incarnations of the game. What we ended up with was the gnarled, lanky, long-nosed fellow from "The Hook Mountain Massacre". Neat! And totally a cool piece of art. But definitely nothing ground breaking.
Illustration by JZConcepts
Several months later, against all odds, we found ourselves ordering a cover for a Bestiary. Attempting to follow in the tradition of the "a whole bunch of monsters about to getcha!" covers from classic gaming bestiaries, we wanted a swarm of little monsters, one or two medium monsters, and a big monster. Creature ideas went around and around, then sketches did their circles, and what we ended up with was goblins, a maralith, and WHAT THE HECK IS THAT! OMG, that's a TROLL! Awesome! You don't get an incredible Wayne Reynolds cover and then say, "That looks amazing, but could we get this guy to look a little ganglier." This was our new look for the troll.
Illustration by Wayne Reynolds
Flash forward a few more months and we're ordering Kingmaker covers. So we want a cool bandit and a sexy fey and a barbarian dude and a—hey, how 'bout a troll boss! Okay, that'd be cool. And thanks to Vincent Dutrait, here he is.
Illustration by Vincent Dutrait
So our trolls have come a long way over the course of the past few years, but without a doubt, things are settled now. And if that nasty claw-claw-bite wasn't enough to send your PCs running for their alchemist fire, just wait for "Rivers Run Red" to see all the nasty tricks Chief Hargulka has in store for the Stolen Lands.
Looking back, trolls actually had it pretty easy. You should have seen the backstage identity crisis the ogre had before its debut. But that's a story for another day…
This week Paizo posted new product descriptions for dozens of products to be released in the third trimester of 2010, including new hardcover books, a revision of the Pathfinder Campaign Setting, and a brand new line of Pathfinder novels!
We've been hard at work on these items for months, and even though you'll have to wait until at least September before they hit your game table, we're thrilled to finally be able to discuss some of this stuff in public. The suspense has been killing us!
Folks are already discussing some of our new releases on the paizo.com messageboards, but as the commentary has been flying fast and furious over the last couple days, I figured it might be helpful to post a broad overview of our new offerings here on the blog, with direct links to the products in question.
So without further ado, let's plug ourselves into the future-caster time machine and take a journey forward to September through December 2010. Bring your dice and a few character sheets. You're going to need them!
PATHFINDER FICTION
The biggest announcement is a brand new line of Pathfinder novels written by some of the biggest names in fantasy fiction! The first book, Winter Witch, by New York Times best-selling author Elaine Cunningham, explores the tale of a barbarian shield maiden who ventures from Varisia to the winter-locked land of Irrisen to rescue a possessed sister—and the canny young cartographer who follows her into that haunted land. The book formally releases in September, but we'll have copies on hand at this year's Gen Con Game Fair as a special preview. October sees the release of Prince of Wolves, by former Amazing Stories and Dragon editor Dave Gross, which revisits the Pathfinder agent Varian Jeggare and his tiefling assistant Radovan, last seen in the Pathfinder Journal section of the Council of Thieves Adventure Path. Additional novels will follow in 2011 from well-known authors including Paul S. Kemp and other familiar faces. Stay tuned for more info!
NEW HARDCOVERS
Following up on the forthcoming GameMastery Guide
and Advanced Player's Guide, 2010 will see the release of one more hardcover rulebook in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game line: Pathfinder RPG Bestiary 2! Like the first Bestiary, Bestiary 2 will include more than 300 monsters for use with the Pathfinder RPG, including old favorites like the hippogriff and new planar creatures like the aeons and proteans. This book will cover most of the standard monsters from the history of the game that we couldn't fit in the first Bestiary, as well as tons of other great monsters you've never seen before. Each monster will receive a full page or a 2-page spread, using the same format as the original book.
Supplies of the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting hardcover are dwindling faster than we can count, so in September we'll release a revised edition in the form of the Pathfinder Campaign Setting World Guide: The Inner Sea. Fully updated to the Pathfinder RPG rules and with expanded coverage of nearly every nation, the latest version of this book contains a new cover from Wayne Reynolds, an updated map, fixed errata from the first edition, and more than 300 pages packed with tons of information about the lands, peoples, beliefs, and cultures of the world of Golarion. Paizo Creative Director James Jacobs is giving this project his personal finish, making sure our campaign setting book is a solid bedrock of our publishing operation for years to come. We're really pleased with the early development of this book, and think it will be an ideal resource for all Pathfinder players and game masters.
PATHFINDER CHRONICLES
In addition to the revised campaign setting, in late 2010 we'll release the Inner Sea Map Folio, a massive 32-panel map of the Inner Sea region containing all "canonical" locations from every Pathfinder product published to date! This monster is sure to brighten up the gaming room or man-cave of any Pathfinder enthusiast, and its "four poster" format will even allow for easy reference at the game table for those lacking the wall space to do it justice. The Campaign Setting product line will also see a new Classic Monsters-style book in the form of Misfit Monsters Redeemed (and you won't believe what that's about until you read the description, believe me) as well as Lost Cities of Golarion, which explores six adventure locales from throughout the world of Golarion.
PATHFINDER PLAYER COMPANION
We can't let the GMs have all the fun, after all, so we've also planned a couple of sure-fire player's guides for the last third of 2010 that will be must-buys for Pathfinder RPG players. October sees the release of the Inner Sea Primer, a slimmed-down overview of the Pathfinder world designed specifically for players. This book will include tons of new character traits tied to the regions and religions of Golarion, and will provide a perfect "gist" of the setting for those looking to dip a toe in the water without needing to buy a big hardcover book. December sees the release of Halflings of Golarion, which rounds out the player's guides to the standard "demihuman" player character races in the Pathfinder RPG with plenty of details on how to integrate them into Golarion campaigns. Lots of fun equipment and lore in this one for fans of halflings (and everyone else, too)!
PATHFINDER MODULES
Gamers have been asking for a high-level Pathfinder adventure since the very beginning, and now I'm pleased to report that the time has come at last! Shipping in September, The Witchwar Legacy takes 17th-level player characters to the snow-shrouded witch kingdom of Irrisen to thwart a plan by the Ice Queen involving the insidious Baba Yaga herself! If that's not enough, in November we'll release a brand-new 1st-level starter adventure called The Godsmouth Heresy, set in the shadowy city of Kaer Maga, site of June's City of Strangers sourcebook!
GAMEMASTERY ACCESSORIES
Paizo's popular map products keep on coming in the last part of 2010, including the first-ever crossover between the Map Pack and Flip-Mat lines! Everything starts innocently enough in September with the release of Flip-Mat: Forest, but things really get interesting in October, with Map Pack: Shops. This 18-tile map set includes the interiors for several different stores, apothecaries, taverns, and the like, but things become super-special when you combine this pack with November's Flip-Mat: City Streets, which details a mercantile district suitable for use with other city Flip-Mats. The roofed buildings on this Flip-Mat (suitable for rooftop chases) correspond exactly to the interiors presented in Map Pack: Shops, providing a uniquely immersive tabletop experience. And if that's not enough to impress your jaded players, spring December's Map Pack: Ambush Sites on them. They probably deserve it.
GameMastery Cards keep coming as well, this time in the form of new GameMastery Condition Cards, handy reference cards for all of the various conditions in the Pathfinder RPG rules.
PATHFINDER ADVENTURE PATH
And, of course, we haven't forgotten the date that brought us to the big dance in the first place. The last trimester of 2010 will see plenty of action in the Pathfinder Adventure Path line, as the Serpent's Skull Adventure Path takes a jungle trail toward its stunning conclusion! Ruined Azlanti cities, Red Mantis assassins, monkey-men, the Pathfinder Society, ancient serpentfolk, and one very, very angry Gorilla King are all in store in a quartet of adventures by Tim Hitchcock, Kevin Kulp, Greg A. Vaughan, and Graeme Davis! The Serpent's Skull is a return to classic-style adventuring in the Pathfinder tradition, and we can't wait to get you guys into the jungle!
I'm saving our Planet Stories releases for tomorrow's blog, so be sure to tune in then for some of the biggest Planet Stories news we've had yet!
So much is happening here at Paizo these days that it's difficult to remember the uncertainty and horror of the last few years, with major changes to our business, our game system, and our lives. All of us really appreciate the support you have shown us so far, and we look forward to more exciting products in the months and years to come!
Those of you who recognize a striking similarity between the title of this blog post and Pathfinder Adventure Path #29's editorial have no doubt already inferred what I'm about to say, but I've been waiting almost a year to say it, so here goes:
And what an announcement it is! First up, releasing officially in September but with early preview copies slated for a Gen Con release, is Winter Witch from New York Times best selling author Elaine Cunningham. Journey to the icy land of Irrisen with a barbarian shield maiden and her ne'er-do-well (but magically gifted) accomplice on a quest to save the woman's sister from the sinister daughters of Baba Yaga!
Immediately after that, we have the triumphant return of Dave Gross's mystery-solving duo, half-elven noble Varian Jeggare and the tiefling Radovan, in the gothic adventure Prince of Wolves. Something is rotten in Ustalav, and only Egorian's greatest detective team can delve into the haunted hills to uncover the truth—and make it out alive...
Each Pathfinder Fiction novel is a mass market paperback, completely standalone, and costs just $9.99. What's more, very soon we'll be launching the ability to subscribe to the line, with subscribers receiving a free PDF of each book they buy.
While we've only announced two of the books so far, I can also say with authority that the party is just getting started. In addition to several fabulous authors currently in negotiations and development, it's my pleasure to also introduce the addition of fan favorite Paul S. Kemp to the line. Though we're not ready to share any details about books beyond the initial two just now, rest assured that more news will continue to come as we get closer to the line's official launch at Gen Con Indy.
In the meantime, rather than joining me in counting the days until the release, why not head on over to the Pathfinder Fiction messageboards and let us know what you think? Who would you like to see writing in the line? What regions seem ripest for a novel? As with everything we do at Paizo, we're always listening.
Your favorite 8 contestants are advancing to Round 4! This time, their task is to design and map a Golarion location! Regular judges Clark Peterson of Necromancer Games, and Paizo's own Wes Schneider and Sean K Reynolds will review each entry along with guest judges Corey Macourek, and Robert Lazzaretti. Your votes will determine the four contestants who will compete in the final round of RPG Superstar 2010, battling to win a commission to design a Pathfinder Module to be published by Paizo!
Well, Friday was my first day as the new Editorial Intern at Paizo, and I must say I'm not disappointed.
One of the first things I noticed in the office was that everyone spoke like a GM at all times, talking about drawing up maps and discussing the finer points of the gnomes of Golarion. It's awesome. Being the only Pathfinder GM in my group back home, my players often don't understand the work that goes into running a game, which, as I'm sure many GMs can attest to, is a little frustrating at times.
At any rate, it has been a fun transition, going from an environment in which I am the most experienced and rules-learned person at the table to Paizo, where I am practically the polar opposite. It puts GMing into perspective, to be certain; crafting the world of Pathfinder is a bit more daunting a task than designing a two-level dungeon for Saturday night's session. Which makes me all the more excited to work here.
Huh. It's been a while since I've talked about an Adventure Path in the blog, I just realized. Looking back, seems the last time we talked about an Adventure Path at all was on January 6th, in fact. AIEEE!
Now... sometime soon I wanna share with you some excerpts from Merisiel's journal that have come into my possession... excerpts that catalog her joys and frustrations over the foundation of her new nation in the northeastern River Kingdoms... but I'm still deep in the process of translating it to English from Elven and excising all the racy parts that the MAN won't let me put on the blog.
So, since I don't have the time yet to post that preview of the kingdom-building rules that'll be appearing in Pathfinder Adventure Path #32, why don't I show off some of the art from the first Kingmaker adventure instead? Let's see... how about pictures of two of the more ferocious war chieftains your PCs will be dealing with during the course of "Stolen Land?" Names withheld to prevent the not-so-innocent...
And I promise to make public Merisiel's journal soon! Stay tuned!
Illustration by Kyushik Shin
Illustration by Eric Belisle
Illustration by Scott Purdy
PS: Yes... the third picture is of a carbuncle. For real.
My day... week... life as of late has pretty much been dominated by putting the final (-ish) touches on our next big hardcover, the GameMastery Guide. It's at that weird and exciting point right now where it's making that transition between a maddening number of .doc files and something at actually looks like a book. So between the dozens of tables, charts, stats, and hundreds of pages of advice, some pretty awesome art and incredible layouts are creeping in. While I'll save most of the really exciting parts for previews closer to this behemoth's release, I wanted to throw one of my favorite new half-page illustrations out there. For now, though, it's back to those endless tables. 100 dungeon features, here I come...
Round 3 Monster Stat Blocks Now Open for Comment and Voting!
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
The Top 16 survivors of Round 2 are back with revised monster descriptions and complete Pathfinder Roleplaying Game statistics for their winning villains. Regular judges Clark Peterson (Necromancer Games), Wes Schneider, and Sean K Reynolds (Paizo), and guest judge and Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Lead Designer Jason Bulmahn have posted their comments and recommendations to the discussion pages of all 16 submissions, and now it's your turn to vote for your favorites! The Top 8 finishers will proceed to Round 4. In the end, only one contestant will be chosen as 2010's RPG Superstar, winning a commission to design a complete Pathfinder Module that Paizo will publish!
This year's Top 16 competitors have beaten out hundreds of rivals, writing about wondrous items, strange new monsters, and now presenting a complete Bestiary-style stat block for their monster. Today at 2 p.m., voting begins for Round 3. Come check out the contestants' monsters and the comments from the judges—including guest judge Jason Bulmahn!
Voting ends Monday, February 15, at 2 p.m. Pacific time!
As I write this the finishing touches are going in on our newest Pathfinder Module, City of Golden Death, the climactic conclusion to the Price of Immortality campaign arc. Written by our own Events Manager, Joshua J. Frost, the adventure takes the PCs to the notorious Isle of Terror, where they'll face agents of the Living God Razmir, ageless menaces from ancient Thassilon, the undying machinations of the Whispering Tyrant himself, and even greater perils! Here's a sneak peak of some of the scenes your PCs can expect to face when the module releases in just a few short weeks. Enjoy!
Nothing ruins a session of Pathfinder RPG more than a badly drawn map. You sit in your chair, your character sheet and dice firmly in hand, and stare at the crudely drawn map the GM sketched on the mat, struggling to discern exactly what those squiggles on the board are supposed to be.
"So, where's the door?" you ask and the GM points to a series of more complicated squiggles in the mass of squiggles. You put your mini down on the map and your GM sighs and says something like, "That's not even a room," and moves your mini over a few squares—like you could even see a room in the spaghetti shapes spattered on the mat.
Good maps make for good adventures. A bad map, whether it's drawn on a mat by your GM or published in a printed adventure, can ruin everything. If you can't tell where anything is supposed to be or what those squares, lines, tags, squiggles, or eraser marks are supposed to represent, it's going to be awfully difficult to explain them to your players—or, heck, to even figure them out for yourself. Pathfinder RPG, like its predecessor, is a game wherein eventually minis come out, get placed on 5-foot squares, and action happens. That action can either happen in a lavishly detailed temple of Cayden Cailean, or it can happen on a board that looks like a cross between a blood stain and a chalk board full of combinatory mathematics.
I have a handful of authors for the Pathfinder Society scenarios who turn over absolutely amazing maps with every adventure—sometimes these maps are so good I question why we're sending them to a professional cartographer to, essentially, just be colored. Tim Hitchcock is easily my best author-turned-map artist. The sample map below was his turnover for the temple of Cayden Cailean in Absalom for Pathfinder Society Scenario #40: The Hall of Drunken Heroes. As soon as I opened that image I knew exactly what the hall looked like, where everything was, how to get in and out, and where every set of stairs, every door, and every window was. In my art order to Mike Schley, the Pathfinder Society cartographer (and an amazing artist), I simply said, "Awesome author turnover—follow his lead."
Turnover by Tim Hitchcock
I wish I could say it was always like that. I wish I could say every turnover we receive at Paizo is art and requires no extra work on the part of the developers. I wish I could say every turnover had a one-line art order to the cartographer like mine above. Unfortunately, we receive a lot of really bad maps. That's not to say we have a lot of really bad designers or anything—far from it. It's more to say that perhaps we haven't emphasized enough what a gargantuan pain in the tail slap a bad map turnover is. Let's say you're designing a small 5,000-person city for us. Your map turnover comes in with 5 box shapes, a circle, and a few smudges. Now, we can read through your text and pull out all of the relevant tags and information about the city and add those to the map (which we'd rather not do, mind you) but, in the end, we're going to have to redraw that map ourselves—which is time we should be spending making the adventure or city write-up better, rather than fixing the turnover.
A good map, like Tim's, tells us immediately everything we need to know about the location. I don't have to redraw his map and I don't have to send a novel with the map order that includes tags and descriptions for every room so the cartographer can get the map right. Were we to send our cartographers the bad map example from above, without also sending along the entire article that goes with it, we'd get back a nicely drawn, full-color drawing of 5 box shapes, a circle, and a few smudges. Our cartographers are awesome, but their base for quality is only as good as the hand-drawn map they receive. A cartographer should be able to open the author's map and immediately get to work turning a good map into a great map rather than reading a wall of text and then turning a terrible map into a mediocre map.
A lesson for all of you would-be future Paizo authors and current Paizo freelancers: a map turnover can make or break your submission. When you're done drawing it, look it over with a careful, discerning, player-focused eye. If you drew that map for your table of players, would they have any idea what it was on first glance or would they, like the first example, put their mini in the wrong place when combat started? Your map doesn't have to be a work of art—it just has to be interpretable so our artists can make it one.
As one of my new duties here in Paizo's editorial pit, I've been asked to take on the development for the upcoming Pathfinder Module From Shore to Sea, designed and developed with the assistance of the patrons at Wolfgang Baur's Open Design Studio . The adventure is a fun-filled romp (some might say a terrifying delve) through sunken ruins, with ancient Azlanti technology and undersea abominations thrown in for good measure, and I thought now was a good time to share a little bit of the process that goes into developing a Pathfinder Module.
We've already done the art and map orders for the adventure, helped in no small part by author Brandon Hodge's detailed and descriptive turnovers. Which leads us to the adventure itself. I'm still wading around in the shallow waters of the module (just getting my feet wet, so to speak), but I've already ventured into spooky, seaside villages, dealt with their insular, ichthyic inhabitants (some preliminary sketches appear below), and wrestled with giant tentacles from beneath the waves. From Shore to Sea has already had extensive playtesting as part of the design process at Open Design, so most of my development work so far has involved arranging things in a more Pathfinder-friendly format, clarifying rules issues, and making a few minor adjustments here and there to make a cool adventure even cooler.
It's looking like a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to diving even further into the adventure to see what ancient Azlanti wonders and eldritch horrors come to light from out of its abyssal depths. Maybe I'll even get a chance to run some unfortunate players through it myself eventually. Now all I have to do is keep James Jacobs from throwing a tylosaurus into the adventure...
RPG Superstar™ 2010: 16 finalists advance to Round 3!
Round 3 contestants will create monster stat blocks
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Our Top 32 contestants submitted their Round 2 entries in the form of monster concepts for use with Paizo's Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. In addition to regular judges Clark Peterson, Sean K Reynolds, and Wes Schneider, guest judge Greg Vaughan commented on each contestant's submission. You voted for your favorites, selecting our Top 16 contestants; the ultimate winner will earn a paid commission to write one of Paizo's upcoming Pathfinder Modules!
Although the playtest of the six base classes set to appear in the Pathfinder RPG Advanced Player's Guide was scheduled to be over yesterday, we have decided to extend it by two weeks to give you a chance to review and playtest the changes from the previous three rounds. We took all of your feedback and ideas and implemented a number of changes to the classes, combining them into one handy reference PDF. You can find the PDF right here.
You have two weeks to playtest and comment on these revisions in the Final Playtest messageboard forum. Make sure to post your feedback on in the correct forum, because we might miss it if you place it in one of the older forums. On February 15th, all of the forums will be closed.
As with previous playtests, this process has been a huge benefit to the development of these classes. I hope that you have enjoyed participating in the process. Look for previews of the final book to start appearing in June, ramping up to the final release in August.
Voting Booth Closes Today for RPG Superstar Monsters
Monday, February 1, 2010
Just a quick reminder—the voting for Round 2 of RPG Superstar 2010 ends today at 2 p.m. Pacific Time! If you haven't visited the voting booth yet, there's still a little time left! Tomorrow, we announce the Top 16 competitors who advance to Round 3!
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