Ultimate Equipment Preview: Oh, For a Muse of Fire!

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

The massive burning blade of the fire giant whipped through the air in a horizontal stroke, just inches above Merisiel’s head. She deftly lunged to the side to avoid the deadly strike, but singed one of her long graceful ears in the process.

“Your assistance would be greatly appreciated,” she shouted at Valeros, who was busy fending off a pack of flaming hounds across the room. Her lunge transformed into a roll past the giant’s right knee, the blade of her dagger finding purchase in a seam of his ensorcelled armor. Roaring with pain, the giant pulled back and raised his sword overhead.

Avoiding the flaming maws of the hell hounds, Valeros brought his blade down on the head of one of the snapping beasts, dousing its fires for good before turning to take on a pair of the hounds coming up from behind. “I’m beginning to think the diadem of the giant lord might not be worth this price!”

Valeros might be unsure, but you are definitely going to want to get your hands on all the valuable items packed in the pages of Ultimate Equipment, due out in just 3 weeks. This preview includes more treasure from this mighty tome—specifically, the loot from a CR 11 encounter with a fire giant and a pack of hell hounds.

Fire Giants are humanoids that can possess a number of different treasure types, but for this encounter we are going to be focusing on Type E: Armor and Weapons with a splash of Type B: Coins and Gems. With 10,500 gp worth of loot to give out, we are sure to have some great items.

Treasure Type E: Armor and Weapons
8,000 gp Reward (total value 8,000 gp)
+1 defiant full plate (humanoid [elf]), +1 greatsword

Treasure Type B: Coins and Gems
2,500 gp Reward (total value 2,450 gp)
600 gp, opal (worth 450 gp), unworked topaz gemstone (worth 300 gp), diadem set with a single flawless black pearl (worth 1,100 gp)

Looks like Merisiel is going to have a difficult time hurting that fire giant. One of the great things about this system is the ability to customize the treasure to suit the needs of the encounter. Even if you feel like rolling randomly on the many tables throughout the book, you can still pick and choose specific pieces to enhance your encounters. This week, I made sure that the most valuable gemstone was actually a piece of jewelry (the rules for creating and pricing jewelry can be found in the preview spread from last week looking at art objects); that way it would fit the story I was trying to tell.

Well, that wraps up this week. Next week, our brave heroes will be going for some big treasure, while trying to plunder the lair of an ancient white dragon!

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer

The Year of the Risen Rune Launches at Gen Con

Monday, July 30, 2012

Illustrations by Miguel Harkness and Jason Rainville

As players and GMs familiar with the Pathfinder Society Organized Play program surely know after four full seasons of adventure, each year a new season of the campaign launches at Gen Con, and this year is no different. Over the last few seasons, we’ve worked to increase the amount of continuity within the campaign such that each season has a clear theme and plot arc, and so that participants in the campaign will be able to see the effects of their actions as the campaign evolves over several years. I think Season 4, which we’re calling the Year of the Risen Rune, will be the best season yet!

The Year of the Risen Rune will take the focus of the campaign to Varisia, land of ancient ruins, powerful magic, and political forces competing for control of the largely untamed frontier region. We’ll visit such classic Pathfinder locations as Korvosa, Riddleport, Magnimar, and Kaer Maga, as well as places no published adventure has yet trod, including the dwarf city of Janderhoff, the orc outcast city of Urglin, and unplumbed Thassilonian ruins that have never been mentioned before. The Pathfinder Society will truly be exploring uncharted territory.

The season will also see the return of several ongoing villains, including the rogue Shadow Lodge dissidents who threatened the entire society 2 years ago (and who were first encountered in Kaer Maga), the Aspis Consortium, and several yet-to-be-revealed blasts from the campaign’s past. There will also be new foes making life tough for Pathfinders, including the cult of Lissala—forgotten goddess of runes, fate, and obedience—whose gift of rune magic to Thassilon’s founder paved the way for the evil runelords to wrest control of the ancient empire. The Year of the Risen Rune will culminate in a confrontation with the campaign’s most dangerous and powerful threat yet, though who or what that force of malevolence is will have to wait for a reveal later in the season.

We’ll be debuting the season with four brand-new scenarios at Gen Con, written by fan-favorite authors Matt Goodall, Mike Shel, Larry Wilhelm, and Dennis Baker. Whether it’s Rise of the Goblin Guild, which pits the Pathfinders against the Pathfinder campaign setting’s most beloved little psychopaths, or In Wrath’s Shadow, in which the PCs will explore an ancient ruin at the foot of Hollow Mountain, seat of power of the Runelord of Wrath, there’ll be no shortage of potential adventure for players at Gen Con.

And for over 500 participants in the annual Pathfinder Society Special on Friday night, the 75-table event Race for the Runecarved Key, Tim Hitchcock and Kyle Baird will pit teams against one another to qualify for an exclusive second part of the event on Saturday night.

Check out a few pieces of art from these forthcoming scenarios to hold you over for another two and a half weeks, and we’ll see you with your dice and minis in hand on Thursday, August 16 at Gen Con Indy!

Mark Moreland
Developer

Last Chance to Vote for Paizo in the ENnie Awards!

Friday, July 27, 2012

Paizo is proud to be nominated for SEVEN awards at the upcoming annual Gen Con/EN World ENnie Awards!

Nominated products were selected by an expert panel of judges affiliated with the great gaming community over on ENWorld.org, but the overall winners in each category will be determined by popular vote.

THAT'S WHERE YOU COME IN!

Voting closes THIS SUNDAY, so if you haven't yet had a chance to vote for your favorite products, please jump over to the Official ENnies Voting Booth to choose your favorites. While the awards boast a host of awesome nominees from several gaming companies, we hope you'll pay particular attention to this year's Paizo nominations:

Best Aid/Accessory
GameMastery Chase Cards

Best Art, Cover
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box (Wayne Reynolds)

Best Cartography
Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Jade Regent Poster Map Folio

Best Free Product
Pathfinder Module: We Be Goblins!

Best Miniatures Product
Pathfinder Battles: Heroes & Monsters

Best Production Values
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box

Product of the Year
Pathfinder RPG Beginner Box

Please VOTE BY THIS SUNDAY to show your support for Paizo and the Pathfinder RPG!

Thanks!

Erik Mona
Publisher

Pathfinder Battles Preview: Rise of the Runelords Round-Up

Friday, July 27, 2012

We're still in the process of photographing the paint masters for the next Pathfinder Battles set, which ties into the Shattered Star Adventure Path. The first installment of that campaign debuts in just a few weeks at Gen Con Indy, where we'll also debut the Rise of the Runelords Pathfinder Battles set.

While our cameras are clicking in anticipation of future blogs, I thought it was high time to reveal the complete official set list for the Rise of the Runelords set, complete with collector numbers and rarities.

I am really excited to hear your feedback on this set later this month. I think you're going to love it. And for the first time, here's a complete, official list of the set for your collecting pleasure.

More next week, including honest-to-goodness images of the first Shattered Star set. I swear!

But for today, here's the list!

Rise of the Runelords Set List

Common		Uncommon
1  Bugbear Hero 2  Goblin Commando 3  Goblin Dog 4  Goblin Warchanter 5  Kobold Champion 6  Faceless Stalker 7  Ghoul 8  Harpy 9  Ogrekin 10  Yeth Hound 11  Denizen of Leng	12  Redcap 13  Sinspawn 14  Sinspawn Axeman 15  Skinsaw Cultist 16  Alu-Demon 17  Lamia Kuchrima 18  Shining Child 19  Warrior of Wrath 20  Wraith	21  Goblin Commando on Goblin Dog 22  Jakardros Sovark 23  Lyrie Akenja 24  Ameiko Kaijitsu 25  Harsk, Dwarf Ranger 26  Lamia Matriarch 27  Malfeshnekor 28  Orik Vancaskerkin 29  Tsuto Kaijitsu 30  Vale Temros 31  Kaven Windstrike 32  Khalib	33  Ogre 34  Ogre Brute 35  Seoni, Human Sorcerer 36  Shalelu Andosana 37  Viorian Dekanti 38  Dire Bear 39  Stone Giant 40  Stone Giant Champion 41  Vraxeris 42  Lamia 43  Wendigo 44  Yeti
Rare		Huge	Promotional (Gargantuan)
45  Aldern Foxglove 46  Jaagrath Kreeg 47  Lucrecia 48  The Scribbler 49  The Skinsaw Man 50  Highlady Athroxis 51  The Mithral Mage 52  Runelord Karzoug	53  Stone Golem 54  Azaven 55  Lamatar Bayden 56  Mokmurian 57  Forgefiend 58  Nualia 59  Warchief Ripnugget 60  Young Red Dragon	61  Karzoug Statue 62  Lamia Harridan 63  Storm Giant 64  Treachery Demon	65  Rune Giant

Good luck completing your collections!

Erik Mona
Publisher

Paizo Publishing's 10th Anniversary Retrospective—Year 5 (2007)

The Year Everything Changed

Thursday, July 26, 2012

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

Erik Mona's odd T-shaped map that would eventually become the Inner Sea Region of Golarion.

As 2007 dawned, Paizo had a lot of work to do. The final issues of Dragon and Dungeon were coming in August, and we had already started thinking about what we were going to do once they had run their course. Wizards of the Coast wanted to make an announcement about the magazines coming to an end sooner rather than later, but we knew that this announcement was going to cause an uproar with a fury usually reserved for new editions of D&D—maybe even bigger—and when people came to us with questions, we wanted to have answers. Once again, Wizards was gracious, and allowed us to make the announcement on our own schedule.

Our customers were used to getting something from us every month and we didn't want that to end. But starting a new magazine was not the way to go. Even if we had wanted to try to replace our venerable magazines, we just didn't have the cash reserves needed to make it happen. Besides, the magazine industry isn't what it used to be, and the profit margins on magazines are razor thin; I was very tired of fighting all the inefficiences of that product format.

So we took the thing that was working the best—the Adventure Path concept—and reshaped it into a 96-page softcover book that would provide a full AP over six consecutive monthly volumes. The front half of each book would be the Adventure Path, while the back half would house support articles and a short piece of fiction. In many ways, the front was Dungeon and the back was Dragon. The new book had the same number of pages as an issue of Dungeon, but since it didn't have all the advertisements, we actually had more content to develop each month. Also, it took 12 issues of Dungeon to complete an AP, and we were now attempting to do it in half the time. This task was going to be a tough one.

After much brainstorming, we eventually gave it the name "Pathfinder." (See the sidebar below for a look at how we came up with the name.)

The cover of the first draft of the setting bible that would become the Pathfinder campaign setting. Notice that Golarion was dubbed the "Planet of Adventure" way back then.	The front page of the outline for the first Pathfinder Adventure Path. It's called Adventure Path Four because there were three previous APs in Dungeon Magazine. Notice some of the early differences, such as Sularia (Thassilon), Ur-Giants (Rune Giants), and kobolds as the critters that infest Sandpoint.	Now the title of the AP is "Rune War" and things are looking closer to the final. Interesting differences include the Dihedron Rune (Sihedron Rune) and Sinseren (Xin-Shalast).	This incarnation of the outline finally has the name "Rise of the Runelords," and much of it survives unchanged in the final Adventure Path.

We also had to think long and hard about pricing. The printing quotes we'd received on 96-page full-color softcover books suggested that we needed to charge $24.99, a big jump from the advertising-subsidized $7.99 cover price of Dungeon. And in order to survive, we needed to capture as many Dragon and Dungeon subscribers as we could, and that meant we needed to make a compelling case to our subscribers.

Instead of $24.99, we set the retail price at $19.99. Then, to entice people to subscribe, we set the subscription price at $13.99 plus shipping, with the additional benefits of a free PDF and a discount on almost everything we sell at paizo.com. While it still cost more than Dragon or Dungeon did, we knew that we were providing amazing value, and we believed that once people saw the finished product, they'd understand that.

Another big problem we had to deal with was our subscriber debt. Even though we had stopped offering long-term subscription options the year before, and had recently switched entirely to month-to-month subscriptions, we had still taken a lot of money over the years for issues that would never come out. Some customers had purchased subscriptions extending for a frankly startling number of years into the future. I put together a big spreadsheet that looked at how many issues of each magazine we owed to each subscriber past the last issue, and how much the refunds we owed each of them would be. We looked at the cost for making an AP volume and shipping it to various places in the US and around the world, and then we had to make a gut-wrenching decision—how many volumes do we want to offer subscribers for the remaining value of their subscriptions? If we made an offer people couldn't refuse, not only would we not have to give a refund to that customer, but we'd get the opportunity to show them that we were making a product worth the asking price; hopefully at least some of them would keep their Pathfinder subscriptions beyond those volumes.

We ended up valuing these copies at such a low price that we actually lost money on almost all of them. That is, it cost us more to make and ship each copy than it would have cost to give refunds to the same people. But there was a benefit in addition to the chance to woo them over to Pathfinder: the cost of fulfilling those volumes to subscribers was spread over many months. If we'd had to write everyone refund checks all at once, that would have put us out of business. We also mitigated this problem by offering people the ability to fulfill their remaining issues from our stock of back issues, and by offering the option of taking a higher amount of store credit—120%—instead of cash.

My budget had around 20% of our subscribers taking the Pathfinder AP volumes instead of a refund check. I assumed about 30% would take the store credit option, with the remaining 50% asking for the refund check. I hoped we'd do better than that, that maybe closer to 50% would take the AP volumes, but I budget for what I feel is the most likely course.

We also offered a special messageboard tag for people who committed to an ongoing Pathfinder subscription before they even saw the first volume (not just transitioning issues from their Dungeon or Dragon subscription, but making an actual commitment beyond that). These early supporters received the Pathfinder Adventure Path Charter Subscriber tag, which they'll keep for as long as they keep their AP subscription going. Charter subscribers who stop their subs for even a single volume lose their charter status, so the number of charter tags slowly decreases over time; there are just 1,075 as I write this. The trust and ongoing support of our charter subscribers means a lot to us.

With our plans in place, we set a date with Wizards of the Coast to announce the end of Dragon and Dungeon. April 19, 2007 was going to be a nerve-wracking day for the Paizo staff as we unveiled our new plans and then sat back to see what would happen. Would it be the end of our company, or the beginning of a whole new adventure? Would unhappy subscribers come to our offices with pitchforks and torches? As always, the power rested in the hands of our customers.

At 9:00 AM PST, the paizo.com website was taken down for the first time other than to do maintenance; you can see the page we put up here. We were down for approximately two hours while we readied all of the press releases, subscription offerings, FAQs, and such, and when the website came back up at 11 AM, in addition to the press release about the magazines there was a message from Erik and we soon added a message from me on the front page. We explained about the magazines, and we explained about Pathfinder. Then we watched, interacted with everyone posting on the messageboards, and waited. And the most remarkable thing in my history in the industry happened. People came out of the woodwork to support us and stick by us. In the end, close to 66% of all subscribers ended up taking us up on our offer to send them Pathfinder AP volumes in place of their refund, better than double my budget. (The largest number of AP volumes received in lieu of a refund: 44!)

Also on that day, we launched the Paizo blog, which has now become a daily dose of Paizo news! We introduced Varisia on day 1, and the goblins on day 2! In the days leading up to the launch of the Pathfinder AP at Gen Con, we unveiled the new iconics, talked about the non-adventure content, and basically tried to keep up everyone's interest as we headed to launch.

Postage for the first Pathfinder subscription shipment pours out of our label printer in August 2007. (Our label runs are much more organized now.) And the same shipment neatly packed up and waiting for the Post Office.

Of course, there was a still a lot of work that needed to be done. With the magazines, we simply generated an Excel spreadsheet which we then uploaded to our printer, and they took care of all of the logistics of sending issues to subscribers. Starting in August, we were going to have to do that ourselves for the first time. We weren't exactly rookies at shipping products to people; we'd been running the paizo.com store for a few years, and it had grown to a pretty decent sized business. But the sheer volume of a single subscription run dwarfed any amount we had ever shipped at one time thus far. We needed to be able to print out massive numbers of labels at one time—check out the pictures of our first label run in this blog—and then have the manpower to pack them all as quickly as possible. It was "all hands on deck," and even Jeff Alvarez and myself spent many a long hour packing and shipping Pathfinder AP volumes that year.

But the APs weren't the only new line of products. In February, we had announced our line of GameMastery Modules launching in June with Nicolas Logue's now classic Crown of the Kobold King adventure. Our first Free RPG Day product was Hollow's Last Hope, a lead-in adventure for Kobold King that we also gave away as a free PDF on our website as a way of enticing folks to try out the new line of adventures. Follow-up adventures by Jason Bulmahn and James Sutter rounded out the GameMastery Modules launch titles leading up to Gen Con.

In March, we announced the Planet Stories line. The result of Erik Mona's love of old sword-and-planet fiction, Planet Stories was all about bringing out-of-print classics to a new generation of fans. We launched with a super strong line-up of Robert E. Howard, Gary Gygax, Michael Moorcock and C.L. Moore. Our hope with this line was that we could gain a foothold into bookstores with a product type they were used to carrying, and then leverage that into our RPG products. We also wanted to establish a line of products that weren't tied to our RPG business in case that didn't work out as well as we'd hoped.

Our other GameMastery products started to really take off in 2007. We had been selling Steel Sqwire's existing Flip-Mats for a few months before we released the first of our own designs, Flip-Mat: Tavern. We've released a new Flip-Mat every other month since then. Our biggest GameMastery release for the year, though, was a product that has since become a gaming table staple—the Critical Hit Deck. Masterminded by Jason Bulmahn, the Critical Hit Deck has perhaps put more characters in the ground than any accessory in gaming history and has been a consistently great seller for Paizo.

Of course, we still had the final issues of both Dragon and Dungeon to deliver, and we planned to go out with a bang! The final issues of Dragon had a slew of Demonomicons and Core Beliefs articles, as well as the world of China Miéville, the World Serpent Inn, and a super-sized final issue returning to some of the most iconic articles in Dragon's storied history, capped off with a cover by Larry Elmore!

Dungeon finished off the Savage Tide adventure path with a return to the Isle of Dread and a faceoff with the prince of demons, Demogorgon himself! In addition, Nick Logue returned to Scuttlecove one more time and Jason Bulmahn penned his infamous "Kill Bargle" adventure in the final issue.

One of the best things about publishing Dragon and Dungeon magazines was the ability to constantly try out new talent. It's really hard to try out new talent without risking the destruction of your production schedule if the new guy screws up his assignment. Matter of fact, trying out new talent was the very reason that the Class Acts section of Dragon was created. With the magazines going away, Paizo was going to need to find a new way to cultivate design talent.

I was ruminating on this problem when an idea came to me. Vic and I are fans of American Idol; I love the fact that talented unknowns can become overnight stars by winning that competition. Could we do the same thing for RPG designers? And thus was RPG Superstar born. Anybody could enter by designing a wondrous item, and our esteemed panel of judges (that season, Wolfgang Baur, Erik Mona and Clark Petersen) would hand-pick the top 32 before our community voted to winnow that number down via various design challenges until we had a winner. The prize was a paid gig to write a 32-page GameMastery Adventure. More than 1,000 people entered the contest that kicked off late that year, with the winner being crowned in early 2008.

Stonehenge game designers (from left to right) Richard Borg, Mike Selinker, Paul Peterson, Bruno Faidutti, and Richard Garfield pose with copies of the game at Essen Spiel in Germany. Mike Selinker holds a card inquiring about the missing James Ernest.

Our Titanic Games line released its most ambitious product in May. Stonehenge was not just a board game, but a flexible toolkit that could be used to create a wide variety of new board games, sold with rules for five different Stonehenge games from the world's best game designers. We published a sixth game from Paul Peterson called "Stonehenge Rocks" in the July issue of Knucklebones magazine, and launched the Stonehenge Library on paizo.com, where game designers of all stripes could easily publish rules for their own games and anyone could download them as a fully formatted PDF. To date, 42 different games have been posted there for free download!

Gen Con 2007 was one of the most memorable in Paizo's history. Not only were we sending Dragon and Dungeon off with epic final issues, but we were putting the Pathfinder Adventure Path into the hands of customers for the first time. I felt like an expectant parent waiting for the doors to open on Thursday morning. We'd decorated the booth with large banners of Karzoug, Valeros and Seoni. We were running a delve in the booth based on the Seven Swords of Sin module, crafted by the evil minds of the combined Paizo staff as we each tried to outdo each other in killing the most characters. Stats were kept throughout the convention; Phil Lacefield Jr, collected the most overall kills, while Erik Mona's vrock chamber was the single deadliest room.

Gen Con has always been a place where Paizo has made some of our biggest announcements, and this year it was the impending release of the Pathfinder Chronicles campaign setting in early 2008. With the launch of the Pathfinder AP and the GameMastery Modules, everyone was clamoring to know more about the world we were setting them in. Erik and Jason had already began throwing around ideas for filling out the world around Varisia, but that's a story for next year...

At the ENnie Awards that Gen Con, Paizo won 2 golds and a silver. The awards received were:

• Best Aid or Accessory: Silver Medal for GameMastery Combat Pad (published in conjunction with Open Mind Games)
• Best Miniature Product: Gold Medal for GameMastery Flip-Mat: Tavern
• Best Free Product: Gold Medal for Savage Tide Player's Guide

The final tally for the Seven Swords of Sin dungeon delve in the Paizo booth at Gen Con.	Larry Elmore signs copies of the last Dragon Magazine, with his painting gracing the cover.	Cover artist Wayne Reynolds poses with the first Adventure Path volumes!	James Jacobs stands proudly next to his creation, Karzoug the Claimer.	Gary Gygax signs his Planet Stories novel The Anubis Murders at the Paizo booth during his last Gen Con.

Sales during the convention were brisk, and the feedback we received from our customers was nothing short of fantastic. And we needed all that good karma, because we were dealt another blow when Wizards of the Coast announced at the show that D&D 4th Edition was coming in August 2008. We had just launched two new lines of 3.5 compatible products, and it seemed that they could already be on a deathwatch towards obscurity. Sometimes it seemed as if every time we got up, there was something to knock us down again.

However, after talks with our colleagues at Wizards of the Coast, we were cautiously optimistic. There was talk of getting together when we were back in Seattle and running through a playtest of the current rules. We were also promised that there would be a third-party license, similar to the OGL, really soon.

When we got back to Seattle, we anxiously awaited the opportunity to playtest 4th Edition, but that never materialized, and the license that eventually became the GSL was delayed month after month. Meanwhile, the more the public learned about 4th Edition, the more our community—and our gut—was telling us not to go there.

One of the largest threads on the paizo.com messageboards began in October, when Erik announced that Paizo Is Still Undecided. The lack of any information from WotC and the seemingly overwhelming support for us to stay put were making us lean towards sticking with 3.5, but it would be suicide to produce support products for a game that no longer has core rules in print. So if we wanted to stick with 3.5, we knew that we'd have to release some sort of rulebook.

As the end of 2007 neared, we still held out hope that things might work out for 4th Edition. But we were already planning the Pathfinder Adventure Path that would begin shipping the same month that Wizards was releasing 4th Edition, and the deadline for soliciting August 2008 products to our distributors was rapidly approaching, so we needed to make a decision, and fast.

As the year ended, our new product lines were well-received, and the new Paizo was looking healthier than ever. But the decision about 4th Edition was now reaching a critical stage and the new year would again test our mettle. Fortunately, Jason Bulmahn had started tinkering on his own time with some ideas he had for a 3.5 revision, a project he had dubbed "Mon Mothma..."

Employees who started in 2007 (in order of hiring date):
Corey Young, Customer Service Representative
James Davis, Art Director
Keely Dolan, PDF Technician
Chris Sanders, Warehouse Personnel
Chris Self, AP/AR Coordinator
Carolyn Mull, Sales and Marketing Assistant

Employees who left in 2007 (in order of their end date):
Kelly O'Brien
Sean Glenn
Michelle Barrett
Phil Lacefield, Jr.
Keely Dolan

A scan from Wes Schneider's notebook shows some of the brainstorming for the Adventure Path line. We mixed and matched words to create potential names. In the lower left-hand corner, "Path" and "Finder" are conveniently near each other. Coincidence?

Naming Pathfinder

With the name Pathfinder so prevalent in everything we make nowadays, it's almost hard to believe that six years ago, we were struggling with what we were going to call our new line. If you've ever been involved in a brainstorm for naming something, you'll know that it's an agonizing process. We gathered the Paizo creative staff into the conference room and started to brainstorm words that we associate with adventures. Here we see the notes Wes Schneider took from our brainstorm. Once we had a list of words, we started combining some of them to make potential names, so if we had the words crypt, morning, crawl, star, and sword, we'd try names like like Starsword, Morningstar, Cryptcrawl... After three long meetings, nobody was entirely happy with what we'd come up with. The leading candidate for quite a while was actually "Kobold," because we like the little buggers, and because we thought it would be a neat homage to Dragon Magazine (it turns out that Wolfgang Baur had a similar thought process when he named his new magazine). Pathfinder was one of the names that made the finalist list, but it took us a while (and a successful trademark search) to convince us that we'd found the path we were seeking.

Lisa Stevens
CEO

Chris Self: His Account of Things

In summer 2007, Paizo wasn't even on my radar. I had looked at the website once or twice, mostly looking for dice, but I didn't have any ties to the company at the time. I wasn't a fan of the magazines, all of my adventures were homebrew, and I didn't have enough money to buy much of anything, let alone do it through an online store I'd never heard of anyone else using.

Earlier that year, I had packed up my books and my cats in an old station wagon, given away all of my furniture, quit my job, and moved to Seattle. I had always promised myself that I would get out of Albuquerque, and now that I had finished my degree and had a few years of work under my belt, I'd decided it was time to make good on that promise.

Once I arrived in Seattle, I threw around some applications and resumes, found a place to live, all the normal things you do when you move to a new city on a whim.

When I got the email from Lisa that she wanted me to come in for an interview, I was surprised. I had sent in my resume weeks earlier and had, in fact, accepted and been working another job for several weeks. But I was not about to turn down a chance to interview for a game company. So, in for the interview I went.

The offices were a surprise. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't boxes of magazines scattered about, product stacked on shelves in offices, and an office open but mostly deserted after 6 pm. Once I finally tracked down Lisa and started my interview with her and Paizo's corporate accountant, Dave Erickson... that's when the magic of Paizo struck me for the first time.

The vision that Lisa laid out for the company was... enticing. A magazine publisher for D&D who was also rolling out a series of science-fiction classics and expanding their gaming product lines sounded like exactly the type of company I wanted to work for. When Lisa offered me the job, there was no hesitation, despite the hefty cut in pay I was taking to take the job.

My first day in the office is also my most memorable. I had been set up in a desk in a cul-de-sac in the hallway, straddling the area between sales, accounting, Lisa's office, and the editorial pit, and with a view straight down the hallway to see all of the offices that it wasn't adjacent to. This gave me an excellent view of a certain PMG putting an Amazon package on the desk of a certain other employee (who will remain nameless). This also gave me an excellent view of said employee opening this box. This box contained a spider. An electronic spider. A remote controlled electronic jumping spider. And a certain PMG held the remote. The best view, though, was of a large man screaming like a little girl and running, cussing, from his office.

Yeah, that first day let me know that I had really made the right choice in choosing to work at Paizo.

That decision has proven a wise one over the last five years. Paizo has been the first job that I've looked forward to coming to every morning. The people I work with are remarkable, every single one of them; the company is amazing; I believe in the product; and I feel valued every day.

Since this is my moment in the spotlight on the blog, I would like to close with one note: Dave Erickson, the accountant whom I initially worked under at Paizo, was an excellent accountant, and one of the most scrupulously ethical people I've ever met. I learned a great deal from him, and learned even more from him once I shouldered his duties after his passing. You are missed, Dave.

Chris Self
Finance Manager

Misery's Mirror

by Liane Merciel

Chapter Four: The Burdens of History

They left the midnight mirror without speaking.

Once on the other side, safely back in the Cathedral of Bones, Isiem snatched up the fallen shroud of silk and swept it back over the glass. Then he sat heavily on the bed, shuddering, as Ascaros sank to the floor beside him.

"You can't go back," Isiem said.

Ascaros did not reply. He laid his staff across his lap, thumbing its silver adornments over and over in repetitive circles.

"You can't," Isiem repeated, more urgently. "Silence is a trap."

"Is he?" Ascaros asked, as if the answer were of no great concern.

"Everything he said was meant to bait you. His false candor, the sly promises of power, the allusions to your predecessors' failures, even the mention that two others had refused his offer, so that you wouldn't be tempted by pride to be the first to say no... it is all calculated to bring you into his grasp."

"My ancestor's gifts are all curses," Ascaros replied. He raised his bad arm in its sling, plucking at the linen bandages that concealed the dead gray flesh. "He left hundreds of children, the shae said... and of those hundreds, I am the last. What an honor. How proud he must be." He shook his head bitterly. "The sorcery in my blood is killing me already. What does it matter, then, if Silence wants to do the same?"

"Is that what you want? A quicker end?"

"No. What I want is a way out. From all of this." Ascaros gestured to the cathedral's walls, to all the decades upon decades of human bones that hemmed them in. "Perhaps the shae can give me that. One way or another. Failing that, I'll take a better chance of surviving the Dusk Hall."

"You don't need him for that."

"You don't need him for that." Ascaros's smile was brief and weary. "We've discussed this before, Isiem. You truly have no idea what the Dusk Hall is like for someone without your gifts. It'll only get worse now that we're working individually with the masters. You can't help me anymore. But Silence can."

"Even if that help is not freely given?" Isiem pressed. "You would be the same as our masters, then. Forcing another to do your will with no regard for its own."

Ascaros's lips thinned. He looked away, feigning an intense interest in the arrangement of the bones upon their door. "I could offer him a limited term. Ten years, then a guarantee of freedom. After millennia in the mirror, that would be nothing to him. But for me... it might be enough to find a way out of Mesandroth's curse. By embracing undeath, maybe. Finishing the transformation that began before I was born." He shook his head in frustration. "I don't know if that's the right path, or if it would work. But the shae might."

"What about Voraic?"

The punishment for betrayal in Nidal is far worse than death.

"We should talk to him again." Ascaros stood, leaning on his staff. "In here. I want to see him face the mirror."

Isiem inclined his head. He left his friend in their room and went to find one of the Over-Diocesan's lackeys. "Bring us the apprentice, Voraic," he said when he found one. He took a seat on a bench of bones in the hallway until the acolyte returned with the man.

Voraic looked worse than he had the last time Isiem had seen him. His skin was almost as gray as his clothing. His fingers trembled visibly with exhaustion; weariness had scored deep lines across his face. And yet even through his bone-deep tiredness and guarded caution, the fear in him was plain.

"My time is precious," Voraic said as soon as Isiem rose to greet him. "I have work."

"We won't keep you from it for long," Isiem said, ushering him smoothly into the room. He locked the door behind their guest with a quiet click.

"What are you doing?" Voraic asked, turning back in alarm as Isiem turned the key. There were many locks on their door, and Isiem turned them all.

"Asking questions," Ascaros answered coolly. He pointed the silver-capped head of his staff at the mirror behind its veil. "What do you know about that?"

"Nothing," Voraic stammered. He knotted his hands together, wringing them in unconscious circles.

Ascaros gave him a thin, humorless smile. He wound the spiked chain of his holy symbol through his fingers and folded his hands in prayer, squeezing the barbs between his palms until both hands were studded with crimson droplets. A pulse of magic emanated from his maimed hands, filling the room with a flare of muddy red light and then receding. Isiem could still feel the enchantment in the air, however, and he knew the other two could as well.

"Try it again," Ascaros said, unbinding his hand. The wounds had faded to small pink dots. "What do you know about the mirror?"

Voraic's tongue flicked out nervously to wet his lips. His hands moved faster, over and over each other, strangling his fingers in fear. Silently his mouth moved, forming a protest that Ascaros's spell quashed—

—no, Isiem realized in a flash of sudden terror, that's not a lie. That's a spell.

Fire exploded at Voraic's feet. Isiem flung himself away to escape it. In the corner of his eye, he saw Ascaros do the same, taking cover behind the midnight mirror. It fell to the floor with a resounding crash, although the sight was obscured behind a rush of scarlet flames. The fireball Voraic had summoned was a sickly crimson thing, its colors murky and uncertain.

There was nothing uncertain about its heat. The mirror's shroud burst into flames and, almost as quickly, into ash. The bed shielded Isiem from the worst of the explosion, but he still felt the blaze through his clothes and the incongruously gentle drift of his own burning hair against his cheek.

Through it all, Voraic stood still in a pillar of torment, engulfed in clinging fire and screaming wildly as he burned. His spell had not been directed at the shadowcallers, not really; it was meant for himself. The agony of burning alive was nothing compared to what the Kuthite inquisitors would do to him if he were taken alive. This was his escape.

Ascaros stopped it. He tore one of the heavy black drapes from the walls and knocked the burning wizard to the ground. The shadowcaller tossed the drape over Voraic and held it down to smother the flames, adding a few kicks for good measure.

"Misery take the fool," he snarled, shoving a hand in through the drapes to pull Voraic back from death's brink. Sweat and soot blackened his brow, but Ascaros's concentration was untouched. "Help me," he snapped at Isiem. "Hurry. The Over-Diocesan's minions will be here soon. The idiot's attempt was hardly subtle."

Isiem nodded and fumbled through the drapes, ignoring his own pain. He caught hold of the man's hands: a sticky, sloughed mess of raw flesh and bubbled skin. Several of the fingers were gone; he couldn't tell how many. He closed his hands over Voraic's, pressing each ruined mass into a ball, and prayed for Zon-Kuthon's cruel mercy.

The Midnight Lord answered, and Voraic's mangled hand healed. Isiem continued to press down, fusing the man's remaining fingers—dead or alive—into the pulp of his palms. The flesh healed over itself, trapping the fingers like flies in amber. It was an effective, if grisly, safeguard against spellcasting. There would be no further surprises.

Slowly Voraic came back to consciousness as the healing magic flowed through him. The flames had ruined him. One of his eyes was gone, its socket a molten pit. His nose was a scab of charred meat pocked by two holes. The silver hoops in his ears had been blasted into globs of bubbled metal that dripped onto his shoulders. If he lived, he would be a monster... but there was no one in this room, Isiem thought, who intended for him to live long.

Ascaros dug his fingers savagely into the apprentice's cheek, yanking his face up so that their gazes met. "What do you know about the mirror?"

Voraic's mouth twitched. His shoulders sank under the weight of the drapes that still covered his body. "I have been inside," he admitted in a feeble croak. "I have spoken to the shae."

Ascaros jerked his fingers, flopping Voraic's head as though he were a fish on a hook. "You killed my aunt at his instigation."

"No. Not at the shae's instigation." The wizard rolled his good eye at the toppled mirror, staring at it without seeming to really see it. "Silence offered to help. He gave me the tools and the opportunity. But I would have done it on my own eventually, with or without him."

"Why?" Ascaros released his grip and stepped back. He sounded genuinely curious. "Misanthe saved you. She plucked you from the Hovels and gave you not just survival, but a chance at greatness."

"Should I be grateful for that? She took me from one hell to another. A worse one, I think." Voraic's burned lip curled, cracking at the edges. "And she murdered my mother."

"How did you do it?" Isiem asked.

"Silence taught me the spell. It was Misanthe's secret sorcery; no one knew that magic but her. Her refusal to teach it to anyone else—even her apprentice—was famous. It was a traceless weapon, or as near to one as I could manage." Voraic grimaced, shifting under the drapes in a futile attempt to find a less painful position. "But I would have done it even if I'd known I would be caught."

"Did he teach you anything else?" Ascaros demanded.

"Yes." Voraic's remaining eye squinted at the shadowcaller for a moment. Then he wheezed a strangled, mirthless sound that might have been a laugh. "Why, did he promise to share those secrets with you? It's tempting, isn't it? Centuries of lore at your beck and call. He isn't lying. He has the knowledge. But if you’re asking whether it's worth dealing with the shae..."

"Is it?"

Voraic closed his eye and let his head loll back. The ribboned flesh of his cheek blew in and out with each breath he took. "Look what became of your aunt. Look what became of me. All Silence says is true: he invites you to destruction."

Isiem glanced at his friend, but Ascaros did not return his look. "How did you get into the mirror?" Ascaros pressed, still intent on the apprentice. "It only admits those of my blood."

"The blood doesn't have to be in you." Weakly, Voraic reached for a blackened chain around his neck. The links had become stuck to the man's melted flesh, but Ascaros plucked it away with callous ease. Attached to the chain was a small vial, its glass shattered by the dying apprentice’s convulsions. A charred rime clung to the inner surfaces of the few fragments that remained. "I wore hers, and it was enough."

Ascaros's face hardened. He jerked the broken vial off Voraic's neck, snapping the damaged chain. "Does anyone else know this?"

"No. Misanthe might have suspected... but it was a routine task for me to clean her tools after her prayers, so unless Silence told her, she would not have known that I kept the blood, or why." Voraic coughed out another miserable laugh. "Kill me and the secret dies too. But you will have to hurry. The Over-Diocesan's servants are coming. Give me a quick death, and I won't shout your secret loudly enough for them to hear."

"Consider it done." Ascaros drew the dagger at his belt and plunged it into the empty socket of Voraic's missing eye. The apprentice thrashed under the heavy drape, kicking spasmodically for several seconds and then stopping.

Ascaros withdrew the dagger and wiped it off on the thick black cloth. Before he could sheathe it, a sharp knock sounded at their door.

"Open," a woman's voice ordered, "or suffer."

"Of course," Ascaros called back, standing. He turned toward the door, but before he could take two steps, Isiem caught his arm.

"What will you tell them?" Isiem whispered. He canted his head meaningfully toward the overturned mirror. Resting lopsided on its halo of chains, the mirror seemed almost ordinary, by the standards of Nidalese decor. Yet one needed only a glance at its response to Ascaros's reflection to see that it was anything but.

"The truth," Ascaros whispered back. "Voraic murdered my aunt as revenge for his mother's death. She allowed him to learn the spell that he used to kill her. He attacked us when we confronted him, and we killed him in self-defense. The mirror is useless to anyone not of its creator's line, so there is nothing for them to gain by taking it."

"That isn't the truth," Isiem protested.

Another knock struck their door. This one sounded like it had been delivered by a mailed fist, not a bare hand. "Open."

"It is," Ascaros hissed back. He yanked his arm free and hurried to the door, making a noisy show of struggling with the locks. Several had been damaged by the fiery blast, so his efforts were not entirely feigned. "It is true enough to pass the clerics' spells, and true enough to keep us safe. What greater truth could you want?"

Unable to find an answer quickly, Isiem changed tacks. "What of the mirror? Silence? Do you still intend to offer him a term of ten years?"

Ascaros hesitated. He turned back halfway, his expression caught somewhere between desperate hope and desperate terror. He gripped the misshapen knob of the bottom lock as tightly as a drowning man clinging to a final frayed strand of rope.

Then the practiced mask of stoicism slid back over his face, and he forced the last lock free.

"It's not your burden, Isiem," he said, standing aside for the Over-Diocesan's agents to open their door. "Silence is mine."

Coming Next Week: A quick trip inside an ancient tomb with veteran Pathfinder author Mike Kortes in "The Twelve-Hour Statue."

For More of Isiem's adventures, check out Nightglass, available now!

Liane Merciel is the critically acclaimed author of the Pathfinder Tales novel Nightglass—also starring Isiem—as well as the short Pathfinder Tales story "Certainty." In addition, she's published two dark fantasy novels set in her own world of Ithelas: The River Kings' Road and Heaven's Needle. For more information, visit lianemerciel.com.

Illustration by Andrew Ryan.

Ultimate Equipment Preview: Are You My Mummy?!

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Valeros slashed out desperately with both of his blades as he pushed back away from the trio of mummies that had emerged from the darkened crypt. Ancient, ensorcelled bandages fell to the floor in a cloud of dust as the arm of one of the horrors was severed at the elbow. Apparently uncaring of the grievous wound, the mummy continued to shamble forward, reaching out with its remaining hand as it tried to find the warrior's throat. Valeros continued to backpedal, but suddenly pitched over onto his back, his foot stumbling over one of the many canopic jars that littered the floor.

Quite suddenly, Merisiel emerged from the shadows and drove the blade of her rapier through the first mummy's head just as it was reaching down to finish off Valeros. As the undead thing collapsed to the floor, Merisiel extended her hand to help the fighter off the floor.

"There had better be some valuable treasure in this tomb" she said with a wink before turning to face the remaining mummies.

Merisiel, and all of you players and GMs out there, are sure to get all the valuable treasure you need in just 4 weeks with the release of Ultimate Equipment. Each week, leading up to the book's release, we are going to be showing off a sample treasure haul from this mighty tome. Up this week, the loot from a CR 8 encounter with a trio of mummies.

Mummies, being undead, can have a wide variety of treasure types. Since we have 5,000 gp to spend on treasure for this encounter, I think we will give out something from Treasure Type F: Combatant Gear and a little something from Treasure Type C: Art Objects. Undead don't usually have art objects, but it makes sense for this encounter and the treasure types are flexible in this way.

Treasure Type F: Combatant Gear
4,000 gp Reward (total value 3,705 gp)
mithril shirt, masterwork longspear, buffering cap, potion of remove paralysis

Treasure Type C: Art Objects
1,000 gp Reward (total value 1,200 gp)
gold mask (worth 450 gp), gold-and-platinum statue of a deity (worth 750 gp)

Not a bad haul for one encounter, and you can easily picture one of the mummies wearing the mask, while the other valuables are located in the tomb itself, with the statue as the center point of the room. You could even put the statue on some sort of trap, which might give you the opportunity to add even more treasure to the encounter. One of the great things about this book is that sometimes the charts and tables can give you ideas to flesh out the encounter and add an extra level of detail to the surroundings. After all, the players always pay attention to the loot.

Well, that's all for this week. Next week, our brave heroes will be facing off against a fire giant and his hell hound minions!

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer

Paizo and Pathfinder Seminars at Gen Con

Monday, July 23, 2012

This past year has seen many additions to the Pathfinder brand, including Pathfinder miniatures and the Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition. The Pathfinder Tales line has grown three times what it was a year ago. And, we saw the conclusion of the tenth Adventure Path! There has been so much Pathfinder goodness, it amazes me to look at my bookshelf and see it able to hold against the strain of all the new, awesome products that have been added.

Next year will see an even greater increase not only in our current product lines, but expanding into other areas such as comic books and online games. The goblin will be brought to life, so to speak, in the form of a plush toy. And, there are other secrets I, and many other Paizo staff, would love to tell you about, but you will have to attend our expanded seminars schedule at Gen Con to get the lowdown on these.

At Gen Con 2011, we had 7–8 seminars that touched on future products, secrets of Golarion, and the like. With this being Paizo's tenth anniversary as a company, and the 5-year anniversary of the release of the first Adventure Path, there was simply no way for us to fit everything we wanted to tell you and show you in those few seminars. So, after much discussion, we decided to double the number of seminars offered at Gen Con this year. The following is a listing of seminars, a short description of what each will entail, and the guests that highlight each.

Thursday, August 16

Pathfinder Society Organized Play Q&A (10:00 AM–11:00 AM)
Want to learn how to get involved in the fastest-growing organized play campaign in the world, with games running at conventions, game stores, and homes in every state and all over the planet? Already an active Pathfinder Society player with questions about the campaign? Join Paizo Campaign Coordinator Mike Brock and Pathfinder Society Developer Mark Moreland as they discuss all aspects of the largest Pathfinder campaign of all time.

Pathfinder Adventure Path Q&A (2:00–3:00 PM)
With the release of the Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition this summer, Paizo celebrates 5 years of Adventure Paths. Join Pathfinder Creative Director James Jacobs and developers Rob McCreary and Adam Daigle as they reveal 2013's Adventure Paths, take your questions about past Adventure Paths, and share details on the brand-new campaign, Shattered Star!

Paizo Publishing: 2012 and Beyond (4:00–5:00 PM)
Paizo CEO Lisa Stevens, Publisher Erik Mona, Creative Director James Jacobs, Managing Editor F. Wesley Schneider, and Lead Designer Jason Bulmahn reveal upcoming Pathfinder RPG hardcover rulebooks, Adventure Paths, and more in this spoiler-rich discussion of things to come.

Friday, August 17

Pathfinder RPG Rules Design Workshop (10:00–11:00 AM)
Pathfinder designers Jason Bulmahn, Sean K Reynolds, and Stephen Radney-MacFarland lead a hands-on workshop on rules design, as they discuss current design projects with attendees, and work with the audience to develop rules from concept to execution.

Pathfinder Tales Author Summit (12:00–1:00 PM)
Paizo's Fiction Editor James Sutter (Death's Heretic) leads a panel of Pathfinder Tales authors as they discuss their novels, characters, and their process as professional authors. Guests include Dave Gross (Prince of Wolves, Master of Devils, Queen of Thorns), Robin Laws (The Worldwound Gambit, Blood of the City), and Howard Andrew Jones (Plague of Shadows).

The Art of Pathfinder (1:00–2:00 PM)
Join Paizo's Publisher Erik Mona, Senior Art Director Sarah Robinson, and the Paizo art department as they discuss the award-winning look behind the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and take your questions about the visual aspect of the Pathfinder lines.

Writing for Paizo (2:00–3:00 PM)
Interested in contributing creative material to the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game? Would you love to have your adventures, monsters, or game material published by Paizo? Managing Editor F. Wesley Schneider, Senior Editor James. L Sutter, Creative Director James Jacobs, Game Developer Sean K Reynolds, and Pathfinder Society Developer Mark Moreland share secrets of the craft and chart the path to publication in this informative seminar.

Pathfinder Player Companion: Inside the Overhaul (4:00–5:00 PM)
In August, the Pathfinder Player Companion goes monthly, with new features, a brand-new look, and tons of new excitement. Join Paizo Managing Editor F. Wesley Schneider, Senior Editor James L. Sutter, and Developer Patrick Renie as they outline the new changes and reveal exciting new territory in the months ahead.

Saturday, August 18

Pathfinder Society Organized Play Q&A (10:00–11:00 AM)
Want to learn how to get involved in the fastest-growing organized play campaign in the world, with games running at conventions, game stores, and homes in every state and all over the planet? Already an active Pathfinder Society player with questions about the campaign? Join Paizo Campaign Coordinator Mike Brock and Pathfinder Society Developer Mark Moreland as they discuss all aspects of the largest Pathfinder campaign of all time.

Rise of the Runelords Fifth Anniversary Round Table (11:00 AM–12:00 PM)
The very first Pathfinder Adventure Path returned in a revised and collected hardcover edition this summer. Join Paizo Creative Director James Jacobs, Managing Editor F. Wesley Schneider, and authors Wolfgang Baur and Greg A. Vaughan as they reveal the secret history of the Pathfinder Adventure Path that started it all.

Pathfinder RPG Rules Q&A (12:00–1:00 PM)
Join the Pathfinder RPG design team for an up-close look at the rules of the Pathfinder RPG. Pathfinder designers Jason Bulmahn, Sean K Reynolds, and Stephen Radney-MacFarland take your questions and discuss the philosophy behind the Pathfinder game rules.

All About Pathfinder Online (1:00–2:00 PM)
Paizo is partnering with Goblinworks to produce a new MMO. The developers explain the project and will answer questions from the audience.

10 Years of Paizo Publishing (3:00–4:00 PM)
A cast of Paizo superstars including CEO Lisa Stevens, Publisher Erik Mona, and Creative Director James Jacobs, and Chief Technical Officer Vic Wertz look back on 10 years of Paizo Publishing, from Dragon, Dungeon, and Star Wars Insider magazines to paizo.com to the Pathfinder RPG and beyond.

Secrets of RPG Editing (4:00–5:00 PM)
Want to learn how to avoid those nasty errors in the RPG product you're writing or publishing? Paizo Managing Editor F. Wesley Schneider, Editors Judy Bauer and Christopher Carey, and Developer Patrick Renie administer an editing test challenge and reveal the ins and outs of successful RPG editing.

Sunday, August 19

Golarion: Inside the Pathfinder Campaign Setting (10:00–11:00 AM)
Paizo Creative Director James Jacobs, Managing Editor F. Wesley Schneider, and Fiction Editor James L. Sutter reveal what's going on in the wide world of Pathfinder's official campaign setting, from secrets of the world's creation to an overview of upcoming products to general questions from the audience.

Mike Brock
Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator

Pathfinder Battles Preview: Spirit of the Season

Friday, July 20, 2012

With the glories of PaizoCon behind us, the Paizo editorial department finds itself deep in the throes of that fabulous annual event called Gen Con Prep. The office is abuzz with the work of getting ready for the Big Show. All of Gen Con's big releases (Ultimate Equipment, the Bestiary Box, etc.) were finished long ago, of course, but there's still a ton of stuff to do before we can head to Indianapolis next month. We've got catalogs to finish, signs to complete, Pathfinder Society events to edit, and a million other tasks that are probably invisible to Gen Con attendees, but which are absolutely critical to making sure the show goes off without a hitch.

That's all a very long and elaborate way of saying I've been too slammed this week to write a proper blog introducing the next set of Pathfinder Battles miniatures, which ties into August's Shattered Star Adventure Path. We've seen about 2/3rds of the paint masters for this set already, and they continue the tradition of steady and amazing improvement we've been shooting for with each new release in the Pathfinder Battles line. The WizKids production manager is bringing over a bunch more paint masters tomorrow, and I'm hoping we'll have seen almost the complete set within a few short weeks.

The first pictures of some Shattered Star minis will come next week. This week I want to show off a miniature that fits in between the Rise of the Runelords and Shattered Star sets. And it just so happens that this miniature ties into the general theme of Gen Con Prep, as it's the official 2012 convention promo figure: The Festering Spirit!

The Festering Spirt made its debut at PaizoCon, where we included a complimentary figure in every attendee's goodie bag. We'll also have the figure at Gen Con, available for free with any purchase of $50 or more.

Many of you may recognize the base sculpt of the Festering Spirit as the Spectre from the Heroes & Monsters set. This time, we've cast the undead horror in clear plastic, and then drybrushed the figure with shades of opaque green. The mini really shines when held to the light, and the whole thing adds a very "toxic" luster to what is already a spooky miniature in any color.

We'll have singles of the Festering Spirit available following Gen Con here on paizo.com, so those of you who weren't able to make PaizoCon or Gen Con will still get a chance to get your hands on this very cool figure.

And with that, it's back to the salt mines for me! Next week, we'll take our first real look at the Shattered Star, and you guys are going to be blown away!

Erik Mona
Publisher

Auntie Lisa’s Story Hour: Gen Con Reminiscences—The Paizo Years

Thursday, July 19, 2012

With PaizoCon 2012 now in the rear view mirror, my attentions turn toward Gen Con in Indianapolis, August 16–19. I’ve personally gone to every Gen Con since it was held at UW Parkside in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but since this is Paizo’s tenth anniversary year—and Paizo’s tenth Gen Con—I figured I’d limit this blog to stories from the last decade. Gen Con is and always has been our biggest show of the year and the convention where we release our biggest products, so many seminal events in Paizo’s history take place at this granddaddy of all gaming conventions.

Our trip down memory lane begins in August 2002. Paizo was a newly minted company, having started business just one month prior, so we hadn’t lined up our own booth at Gen Con. Our friends at Wizards of the Coast had already allocated a part of their booth for the periodicals department that we’d taken over, so they allowed us to set up camp in their castle for the show. Paizo’s owners and a small team of editors spent the weekend talking to thousands of gamers who were wondering what the future held in store for their favorite magazines with Paizo at the helm.

Gen Con 2003 was all about the Paizo exclusive silver Boba Fett action figure we’d organized as part of running the Official Star Wars Fan Club and Star Wars Insider magazine. Vic and I knew what kind of excitement an exclusive figure would generate, but I don’t think Gen Con had a clue. So imagine their surprise when a huge storm of fans rushed the small Paizo booth and started a long line that stretched past and even through other vendors’ booths! We sold a ton of this action figure, but there was a little consternation among the employees who worked on Dragon and Dungeon: Gen Con was the D&D show, and they were used to taking the limelight at the booth. It was hard to argue with the fact that Boba Fett paid a lot of bills, though, and all in all, it was a really good Gen Con for Paizo.

2004 was the year we launched Amazing Stories and Undefeated, and relaunched Dragon and Dungeon. We put free copies of all four magazines into each attendee’s gift bag, which cost us a pretty penny. It didn’t ultimately make much of an impact on sales, so it was probably not the best marketing decision we ever made, but we were excited about what we were doing and we enjoyed giving potential customers issues to read at their leisure. To celebrate the relaunches of Dragon and Dungeon, we created T-shirts that customers could get for free by starting a new subscription or renewing an existing one. The Dragon T-shirt had Wayne Reynolds’ iconic dragon bursting through the cover page, while the Dungeon tee had a picture of Warduke, an homage to the D&D cartoon series and action figure line from the early 1980s. But the most controversial thing we did at the show that year was bring the Undefeated cheerleaders. Jenny Bendel, our marketing manager, wanted to create a stir and drive traffic to the booth, so we bought cheerleader costumes with the Undefeated logo on them and hired some local models who dressed in the cheerleader costumes and decorated passersby with Undefeated temporary tattoos bearing Johnny Wilson’s slogan for the magazine, “Nobody Likes a Loser.” Again, I’m not sure it helped sales all that much, but it sure did drive traffic to our booth, including a couple of local television crews!

By Gen Con 2005, we were already working toward making Paizo about more than magazines. Our big release was the Shackled City hardcover, and we decided to create a huge tower of books in the middle of the booth. We planned for hordes of customers to snatch up their copies, making the tower disappear throughout the course of the convention. Unfortunately, we brought way too many books, so even though sales were brisk, much of the tower was still standing at the end of the con.

My favorite memory from Gen Con 2005 was the ENnie Awards ceremony. Paizo had taken home our first ENnie—a gold award for Dungeon—in 2002, though all of the work that was being recognized had been done by our employees when they were still part of Wizards of the Coast. 2005 was the first year that the accolades were truly our own. All in all, we won 4 gold awards and one silver—but for me, the silver was the most exciting: it was for Best Publisher! Since its inception, Paizo had been struggling to gain an identity in the gamer community. If we were lucky, we were known as “the Dragon and Dungeon company”; many, many readers hadn’t yet figured out that we weren’t actually part of Wizards of the Coast. In industry surveys, retailers often reported Paizo sales as Wizards’ sales, and distributors still gave our magazines TSR product codes! So that silver ENnie was validation that we were finally stepping out from the shadow of Wizards and forging our own identity. It was a very sweet moment.

2006 was all about trying to fill the gap where Undefeated and Amazing Stories had been. Our GameMastery Map Packs and Item Cards were front and center in our booth, along with our Compleat Encounters line. It was a bit of a transition year for us, so we filled the booth with anything we think we could sell to gamers, including a big bin of Toy Vault plush right in front of the register. We partnered with Looney Labs that year to bring in a little more traffic and a little more sales; Looney also partnered with us in 2007.

2007 marks the launch of the Paizo that everybody knows today. We were sad to release the final print issues of Dragon and Dungeon at Gen Con, but we were very excited about the debut of the Pathfinder Adventure Path, with James Jacobs’ now classic “Burnt Offerings” adventure kicking off Rise of the Runelords. Our booth was decked out in large Pathfinder banners showing off Wayne Reynolds’ new iconic character artwork. Our line of GameMastery Modules was also a recent addition, and Nick Logue’s “Crown of the Kobold King” was being played delve-style in the booth using Dwarven Forge terrain. It was super impressive!

Gen Con 2007 was also exciting for our Titanic Games board game line. We’d already released our first board game, Kill Doctor Lucky, and at this show, we were debuting Stonehenge, a board game that I thought could change the way folks looked at games. Stonehenge consisted of a board, cards, and other pieces that were designed as a flexible toolkit that budding game designers could use to create their own board games, sold in a package with rules for five different Stonehenge games from the world’s best game designers. Our booth was abuzz with constant demos of both Kill Doctor Lucky and Stonehenge, with game designers Richard Garfield, Mike Selinker, and James Ernest stopping by the booth to show off their games.

A personal memory from 2007 was having Gary Gygax in our booth to sign autographs. We had just released Gary’s The Anubis Murders novel in our Planet Stories line, and the father of RPGs took the time to interact with our fans and sign their books. I’d first met Gary way back at my first Gen Con, when I was a fan myself, and we had become friends through the years. I am honored that Paizo was part of his last Gen Con.

The Pathfinder campaign setting saw its release at Gen Con 2008 with our 256-page hardcover book. For the previous year, fans of our modules and Adventure Paths had been clamoring for us to flesh out the world of Golarion, and this book was our answer. We ended up selling out of our Gen Con allocation on Saturday and having to turn away potential buyers the rest of the weekend. Another big Gen Con success for us was the Pathfinder RPG Beta. This softcover printing of our Beta playtest rules was something we weren’t 100% sure people would want to buy, but since we wanted to get folks excited about next year’s release Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook, we brought a lot of copies of the Beta along, figuring we could always ship the extras back home after the convention was done. Little did we know that they would be gone by the end of the second day! The response was incredibly uplifting. The weekend culminated with Paizo winning our first gold ENnie for Best Publisher, a true honor, along with six other golds and a silver.

Gen Con 2008 was also memorable for the launch of our Pathfinder Society Organized Play program. Season 0 was our playtest season, and our smallish room was packed with gamers from the start of the con to the finish. Four hundred characters were made and six hundred registration cards handed out. Kicking off each new Pathfinder Society season at Gen Con is now a PFS tradition.

Of course, at Gen Con 2009, the Pathfinder RPG launch took center stage. The night before the show started, Paizo had our first contributor party for staff, freelancers and top Pathfinder Society GMs. It was the first opportunity any of them had to see the Core Rulebook, and I remember watching proudly as they devoured each page.

We again built a huge pile of the books in the middle of our booth, reminiscent of 2005’s Shackled City tower. But this time, selling out was a real possibility: the first print run of the Core Rulebook had sold out before the show even began, and as news circulated that Gen Con might be the only place customers might be able to buy the book for months, a large crowd of folks gathered outside the dealer hall, waiting to rush in to buy it. When the doors opened, our booth was inundated by hundreds upon hundreds of gamers hungry to grab a copy. The line soon spread into the artist area across the way, and we had to marshal every employee available to keep it from devolving into chaos. Erik and I quickly hatched a plan—I grabbed a box of books and headed down the line, offering people who just wanted the rulebook the ability to quickly hand over some cash and get out of line. Hundreds took us up on this offer, and we were able to get the line under control by the end of the first day.

2009 will also be memorable for me because of the start of our relationship with Reaper Miniatures. We’d worked out a licensing deal with them a month or so earlier, but imagine my surprise when they showed up at the convention with greens of the first minis to show off! Even cooler, they had sculptors actually working on new sculpts during the convention. I think I spent as much time in the Reaper booth as I did in the Paizo booth that year, constantly checking to see if the sculptors had completed new figures.

We’re really proud of the Core Rulebook, but it’s nevertheless very much a revision of what had come before. In 2010, we were able to offer something uniquely our own in the form of the Advanced Player’s Guide. Jason had conceived of the APG at the previous Gen Con, and we were all super anxious to see what everybody thought of our new classes and new ideas such as the archetype mechanic. We needn’t have worried; the APG was the hot selling book of Gen Con, with hundreds and hundreds of copies sold over the course of the show. We also launched our Pathfinder Tales fiction line that Gen Con, and author Dave Gross spent his time at the booth autographing copies for eager fans. We proudly won our second gold ENnie for Best Publisher, part of a grand total of 11 golds and two silvers! Wow!

2011 was all about the Ultimates at our booth. Ultimate Magic and Ultimate Combat both made a splash at the convention, as well as the kickoff of our Jade Regent Adventure Path—the first time that an AP travelled outside the bounds of the Inner Sea. But what had me super excited was the unveiling of the Pathfinder Battles line, our new prepainted plastic miniatures partnership with WizKids. We had paint masters of Valeros, Seoni, Kyra and Merisiel at the booth for all to see, as well as an unpainted prototype of the black dragon incentive mini for the first set, Heroes and Monsters. At the ENnies, we brought home the gold for Best Publisher yet again, a truly mind-blowing feat, along with seven other gold ENnies.

Gen Con 2012 is just a month from now and my mind is racing. How will everyone like Ultimate Equipment? Will we have enough plush goblins to last the weekend? Even with our Pathfinder Society room almost three times as large as last year, will it be enough? I can’t wait to see people playing games with our Pathfinder Pawns for the first time. Oh—and wait until everyone sees WizKids’ Rise of the Runelords minis set for the first time in person—people are going to freak! It’s going to be great watching folks playtest the new Pathfinder Adventure Card Game for the first time at Gen Con. And this will be the first year that Goblinworks will be at the con, showing off some of our early visuals for Pathfinder Online. We’ll also have the first issue of the Pathfinder comic book at our booth, complete with a unique Gen Con variant cover! And we’re returning to Varisia in Shattered Star, the first-ever Adventure Path sequel. There’s so much going on I can’t even think of it all! But I do know that I’ll have another year of memories from the Best Four Days in Gaming!

Paizo at Gen Con through the years:

2002	2003	2004	2005	2006

2007	2008	2009	2010	2011

Lisa Stevens
CEO

Misery's Mirror

by Liane Merciel

Chapter Three: Silence

"What would spur someone to kill her?" Isiem wondered aloud as they left the dead shadowcaller on her bier. "Not rebellion, surely. In Westcrown, perhaps, but not Nisroch."

"The mirror," Ascaros answered. He swept up the stairs from the chamber of the dead to their temporary quarters, where the Over-Diocesan's lackeys were to have delivered Misanthe's belongings. Blue-flamed candles in sconces of bone flickered as he went past. "Of course it's the mirror. It could be nothing else."

Isiem hurried after his friend. "You don't even know what the mirror is."

"True." Ascaros paused on the stairs, waiting until a black-robed Kuthite acolyte passed out of earshot. "But I know the Dusk Hall wants it badly enough to send us all the way from Pangolais to fetch it. If they would do that, others would do more."

They had reached the door to their room. It, too, was built of bone, arranged in ornate patterns that drew the eye in and did not easily let go. The same patterns repeated within the room, crawling over its walls and ceiling. Black drapes muffled some of the walls, softening sounds that would otherwise have reverberated harshly against the bones, but otherwise they were surrounded by the leavings of the dead. Even the desk and chairs were built of bone. The bedframe was an embrace of dead arms crowned with an arch of skulls.

On that gray-blanketed bed, illumined by a flickering host of blue-flamed tapers, Misanthe's belongings waited for them: A silver necklace holding a clear, many-faceted stone within which ghostly snowflakes swirled. A staff of smooth, glassy white wood that seemed almost ethereal in the cathedral's gloom.

And the mirror, hulking and ominous, its edge just peeping out from under a shroud of night-blue silk. The mirror towered higher than either of the shadowcallers' heads. A tangled hoop of chains served as its frame; the links of the chain had been bent and battered until they resembled curved hooks gouging the air.

"It's an ugly piece of work," Ascaros said, pulling aside the silken cover. The hooks caught the fine cloth and tore it; judging from the tatters that fringed the shroud, that was not the first time the mirror had ripped its veil.

A chill seemed to come over the room as the torn silk fell away, revealing the milky, impenetrable grayness of the mirror's glass. Voices seemed to whisper softly from its depths—not addressing the shadowcallers, but talking to each other or themselves, unaware of those who listened from outside. Their accents were archaic, their desire clear. One and all, they pleaded for freedom.

"It's not a nightglass," Isiem said. "That's a midnight mirror. A prison."

"Yes." Ascaros's face was unreadable. Isiem couldn't tell whether his friend was relieved or dismayed that he recognized the midnight mirror for what it was, but he was sure that Ascaros was not surprised. "It's an heirloom of my line."

"You knew this was what the Dusk Hall wanted."

"I suspected that it might be." Ascaros's grip tightened on his silver-capped staff. His knuckles went white under the candles' blue glow. "But I wasn't sure, because if the lore of my family is true, it wouldn't do them any good. It only functions for my kin."

"Explain."

"That mirror has been passed down from father to daughter, aunt to nephew, through the generations of my family since time immemorial. It goes to the magically gifted scions of the line... to sorcerers, always and only." Ascaros gazed into the mirror as if he could read his own future—or his ancestors' past—within the rippling fog. "Misanthe was the last of those, except for myself. She told me that much of its history, but not what it does or why we keep it. All she ever said was that it was part of our curse." He touched his linen-wrapped arm, grimacing faintly. "As if the rest of it weren't enough."

Isiem nodded minutely. He knew the curse that ran through Ascaros's blood. It gave him magic, but it also sapped his life, killing him slowly with every spell he cast. His family's curse had already claimed his arm. In time, unchecked, it would take the rest too.

But none of that answered the immediate question. A midnight mirror was a planar prison, sacred to the followers of the Prince of Pain. There was no clear reason that a Kuthite artifact should be bound to one particular bloodline, much less a sorcerous family that had no special ties to the faith. Nor was there any reason the Dusk Hall should want such a thing. "What's in the mirror?"

"I don't know."

"You should find out."

"Yes." Ascaros made a small, miserable huff of a laugh. "I suppose I should. That's what this is about, isn't it? Misanthe's death, the Dusk Hall sending us out here... probably the Over-Diocesan's hospitality, too. It's all about whatever is in that mirror."

"Whoever." Isiem walked toward it and held his right hand up facing the glass. The whispering voices went silent as he approached, and the ghostly mist within the mirror swirled away, leaving a blank opacity facing him. "You don't have any idea?"

"None."

"Then you must go in. Or let whoever is in there out... but anyone powerful enough to be of interest to the Dusk Hall will not be easily controlled or contained."

"We'll go in." Leaning on his staff, Ascaros straightened and stepped toward the mirror. He brushed a palm over the pockets containing his spell components, as if reassuring himself that they were all there. "Not because of that. Because I don't want the Over-Diocesan seeing who waits inside."

The mists swirled before Ascaros. Instead of the flat, empty space that faced Isiem, a spectral staircase appeared opposite the sorcerer. Built of ghostly, translucent bones that recalled the construction of the cathedral, it spiraled up into an infinity of gray.

"It knows you," Isiem murmured, troubled and awed. "Your blood is the key."

Even under the best circumstances, a shae is a dangerous ally.

"Let's hope it works as easily from the other side." Leading with the head of his staff, Ascaros stepped in. The mirror's glass scarcely shivered as he passed through, and it offered no more resistance than mist.

On the other side, Ascaros's figure receded rapidly up the stairs. He was ascending far faster than he could ever have climbed a real staircase, as though the mirror itself were pulling him in. At the top, a speck of blackness had appeared and was swiftly expanding. It opened like the yawning, shadowy mouth of some enormous lamprey, hovering hungrily in the air.

The sight of it spurred Isiem out of his distracted trance. He plunged through the mirror, hurrying to catch his friend.

Entering the midnight mirror was curiously simple. The weight of Isiem's body seemed to lift from his feet. Walking felt like floating, although he could see no change in the outward appearance of his gait. A deep hush settled over him, and a gentle but profound chill, as if he had walked into one of the Uskwood's sacred glens.

Zon-Kuthon's power was strong here. Bowing his head in silent submission to his god's presence, Isiem began walking up the staircase.

As he reached the halfway point, he saw Ascaros vanish through the portal at its top. The toothy fringes of the portal quavered and spiraled inward, as if the lamprey mouth were swallowing its prey. An instant later, it pulsed and then steadied, open again.

Ready for another meal. The thought brought a quick flicker of fear, but Isiem damped it down and continued his climb. Under him stretched an infinite gray abyss. There seemed to be no solid ground in this netherworld, or at least none that he could see. Only the stairs... and wherever they led.

Far faster than he would have believed possible, Isiem reached the apex. Just ahead, the portal waited, its ragged edges weeping blackness around the central void. He had expected to feel some pull into its depths, but there was none.

He went in. Electricity prickled along the small hairs of his body; a soundless gust flattened his clothes against him. Then the darkness parted, and Isiem found himself standing on a field of stars.

All around him, black grass swayed under a black dome of sky. The seed heads of the grass were white as snow, echoing the frosty stars high above. The pale bones of horse and man, half-buried by the grass, gleamed like pearls amidst the ebon stalks.

The vastness of the nighttime plain was broken only by a single hut of felted horsehair, a hundred yards before him. In front of the hut, a campfire burned, its flames oddly colorless in this strange gray world.

Two figures sat beside the fire. One of them was Ascaros. The other Isiem did not know. It wore a black horsehide cape in the style of the ancient Nidalese horselords, and a featureless mask of white porcelain covered its face. Countless silver pins studded the cape, glittering in yet another echo of the starry sky.

"What is this place?" Isiem asked, walking toward the tiny fire. As he got closer, he could see that Ascaros's face was white and frozen, as if his friend had received some devastating news and was still struggling to understand.

It was the other who answered. Up close, it was apparent that their host—if host he was—was not human. Wisps of shadow trailed around his form, constantly merging with and breaking from his body. The mask and cape seemed to be the only points anchoring his body; other than those form-granting garments, he was as ill-defined as a cloud of smoke.

A shae. One of the true children of the Plane of Shadow. Isiem had read of their kind, but never seen one before—the shadow-people had few dealings with the Dusk Hall.

"An illusion," the shae said in a voice accented with the melodically guttural inflections of old Nidalese. "Some is of my making. Some is the mirror's. But none of it, since you set foot on the stairs, has been real."

"I thought this was a prison," Isiem said. He sat on a horsehide-covered log near the fire, next to Ascaros. His friend shifted slightly to make space for him, but did not look up. He continued to stare blankly into the smoke-gray flames.

"It is." The masked creature raised a hand and tilted it to and fro, as if to undercut his own words. "It was. Its nature has... changed, somewhat, over the years. I am hardly the rebel I once was, and the mirror has, accordingly, granted me a certain degree of comfort. Eternal torment has not proven to be my lot after all. But the place is still unkind to look upon, in its natural state, and so I have chosen to render it more appealing. A prison of infinity, not walls."

"Who are you?" Isiem asked.

"Call me Silence." The porcelain mask was incapable of showing expression, but the voice behind it was rich with amusement. "My captor was fond of shouting that word at me, so I took it as a name."

"Your captor?"

Ascaros stirred. "Mesandroth," he said. "My ancestor. Founder of my line."

"A wizard of enormous power. One obsessed with immortality." The shae shrugged. The silver pins threaded into his black cape gleamed in the cool gray firelight. "Whether he found it, I could not say. His offspring proved to be sorcerers, imbued with the magic and death in his blood. He himself was not. He had no insight into their magic and no interest in their lesser gifts. So he captured a sorcerer—me—and tasked me with teaching his children. He imprisoned me in here, because although the shaes are long-lived, we do die eventually. Mesandroth intended that I should live forever, serving his line. So he told me. Then he left."

"And you've been in here ever since, teaching every sorcerer in the line," Ascaros said.

"Not every one," Silence corrected him. "In the early days, there were too many. Mesandroth had hopes that one of his sons or daughters might become a worthy apprentice. Not an heir—he had no intention of dying—but someone who might stand at his side. He had many, many children. Far too many for me to tutor.

"For centuries, I was a... prize." A wry note crept into the shae's voice, and under it a hint of age-old pain and anger. "They fought over me, his children. Dozens killed each other. The victors sought to learn my secrets. Some of them were kind, others cruel, but all wanted the same thing. Magic. I gave it to them, for I had no choice. And when each one died, I rejoiced, and added a pin to my cape."

"I'm the last of them," Ascaros said softly. He looked at Isiem. "The last with any gift for sorcery, anyway. My death wins his freedom. Silence has been engineering the destruction of Mesandroth's descendants for thousands of years... and I'm the last one."

"Yes." The shae laughed quietly. "It troubles him, knowing that. As well it should. When he is dead, the terms of my bondage will be complete, and I will finally be free."

"You just told him that?" Isiem asked.

"I always tell them. I give them all the same choice." Silence stood, turning his back on them. He raised his hands to the illusory sky. "I am bound to serve, but I do not do so gladly. Walk away—release me from your part in your forefather's sin—and I will have no opportunity to hurt you. But take this poisoned gift, and I will do my utmost to destroy you."

The shae let his hands fall, but kept his back to the shadowcallers. "Every time a new would-be master enters the mirror, I repeat the same offer. I have done this hundreds of times over the centuries. In all that time, two have refused Mesandroth's gift. Two. The others have all tried to evade their doom while using me. The master's children do not give up their ambitions easily, and my knowledge is vast. The temptation is too great.

"Some try to beat me into submission. Some try to bribe me. Some try to seduce. I have seen all their stratagems over the years. But I am a creature captured and kept in a midnight mirror of Zon-Kuthon; pain holds no fear and no surprises. There is nothing I desire more than an end to my bondage, and bribes are meaningless in this place. The seductions I always accept. I lie with them, and enthrall them, and ensure they will leave no mortal children who might perpetuate my suffering."

"You killed Misanthe?" Isiem asked.

The shae looked back at them. The eyeholes of his mask appeared to be blank black spaces, yet Isiem had the fleeting impression that laughter twinkled in those hollow gaps. "I did not. I am not permitted to cause harm to Mesandroth's blood."

"But you know who did." That was Ascaros.

"Of course." Now the laughter was clearly visible, a roiling in the shae's smoky form. "It was her apprentice, puffed with ambition. An old story."

"But you did the puffing," Isiem said.

"And taught him the shadow garrote." Ascaros's voice was brittle ice.

Silence held his hands out in wordless acknowledgement. "And when the apprentice comes back to claim me as his reward, he will die, because nothing prevents me from slaughtering him. It's an absurdly simple plan. Utterly predictable. Yet it rarely fails."

"We could stop you," Isiem said.

"You could," Silence agreed, "but you won't. Or rather, he won't." The shae pointed at Ascaros, who was once more staring into the fire. "No, he will do as his kind always does. Even knowing that it will doom him, even knowing that he will die, your friend will claim his inheritance."

Coming Next Week: Accusations and decisions in the final chapter of Liane Merciel's "Misery's Mirror."

For More of Isiem's adventures, check out Nightglass, available now!

Liane Merciel is the critically acclaimed author of the Pathfinder Tales novel Nightglass—also starring Isiem—as well as the short Pathfinder Tales story "Certainty." In addition, she's published two dark fantasy novels set in her own world of Ithelas: The River Kings' Road and Heaven's Needle. For more information, visit lianemerciel.com.

Illustration by Andrew Ryan.

Ultimate Equipment Preview: Roll Up Some Loot!

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Rumor has it that everyone, both players and GMs, love to get their hands on new gear. From the new sword that would be perfect for your PC—or even better in the hands of a villain—to a wizard’s staff, gear and magic items have always been an exciting part of the game. Fortunately for all those treasure seekers out there, we’re just five weeks away from Gen Con and the release Ultimate Equipment, the next exciting hardcover book for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

The new toys in this book are divided up into a series of handy chapters, starting with nonmagical weapons, armor, and gear. The book then moves on to present endless pages on new magic items, from rods, staves, and rings, to artifacts and intelligent items. This mighty tome contains more wondrous items than any other book in the Pathfinder library, conveniently divided up by the slot that it occupies.

Over the next five weeks, we are going to be looking at some of the items in this book, but instead of just showing off a few spreads, I thought this would be a great excuse to take a look at the random treasure generation system found in the appendix. Each week, I’ll use the system to generate a few pieces of treasure for you to drool over. This week, we’re going to start out with something simple: the treasure trove of a goblin tribe. Assuming the entire tribe is approximately a CR 5 encounter, we’ve got 2,300 gp worth of loot to assign. Since goblins are humanoids, they can have a wide variety of treasure types, so we are going to go with Treasure Type D: Coins and Small objects. As you can see, this table has a variety of entries for me to choose from, but to equal 2,300 gp, I’m going to take a 2,000 gp entry and a 300 gp entry. I could mix it up with some other tables as well, but I’m going to keep it simple this week. Rolling up the two entries, I get the following:

2,000 gp Reward (total value 1,910 gp)
60 gp, 5 pp, potion of levitate, scroll of hydraulic torrent, and a scroll of mass cure light wounds

300 gp Reward (total value 482 gp)
40 sp, 28 gp, potion of bull’s strength, and a scroll of flaming sphere

Each reward gives the GM a series of additional rolls to make in the appendix and throughout the rest of the book to determine treasure to assign for the encounter. If I instead wanted a bunch of minor treasures, I could have bought four 500 gp rewards and one 300 gp reward. The result would have been a lot more coins and lower-priced items. You might notice that my 300 gp reward came out a bit over, while the 2,000 gp reward ended up a bit under (with the total coming out at 2,392 gp). The system is balanced so that over time, most of your treasure rolls should average out to give the party the right amount of treasure.

Well, that about wraps up this week. Now that we’ve covered some of the basics, next week we’ll be fighting a trio of vengeful mummies to see what loot they might have, and will be taking a look at some of the brand new items you can find in this book.

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer

Guests at Paizo's Gen Con Booth

Monday, July 16, 2012

This will be my seventeenth Gen Con. The previous 16 Gen Cons I have attended all hold different and special memories. From GMing 10 slots of Pathfinder Society, to winning the Alternity RPG Open in the late 1990s, to taking my wife and son to their first Gen Cons, they all hold a special meaning. One of my fondest memories was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when I was able to get autographs from both Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. As a young 20-something, it was quite the experience to meet these two icons of the industry. Much as I was able to meet two industry people, and later was able to brag about it to friends who didn't join me that year, meeting the people that work in the industry is the highlight of the show for many convention-goers.

This year at Gen Con, you will, of course, meet the Paizo celebrities that work our booth year after year. Among these will be Jason Bulmahn, James Jacobs, Erik Mona, Sean K Reynolds, F. Wesley Schneider, and James L. Sutter. But this year, we'll also have several special guests that work with Paizo on various products.

From Goblinworks, the company working to bring Golarion to life at Pathfinder Online, Ryan Dancey and Mark Kalmes will make appearances.

We will also have several of our Pathfinder Tales authors hosting meet and greets and signing your novels. Among the authors currently scheduled to make appearances are Dave Gross, Howard Andrew Jones, and Robin D. Laws.

Additionally, Paizo has teamed up with Dynamite Entertainment to officially launch the brand new Pathfinder comic book with a special Gen Con-exclusive edition of Pathfinder #1 for sale at the Paizo booth. Artist Andrew Huerta and writer Jim Zubkavich will also be on hand to meet with fans and reveal new details about the monthly comic series.

The cast and crew from the films Dorkness Rising and The Gamers are planning several appearances at the booth.

And members of our very own art department, Sarah Robinson and Andrew Vallas, will be doing art portfolio reviews throughout the con.

All in all, that is a great list of guests that are joining us at the Paizo booth to round out the show for you and surely make for the most memorable Gen Con yet.

Mike Brock
Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator

Pathfinder Battles Preview: Shine On, You Crazy Diamond

Friday, July 13, 2012

First off, did you know that our first set of Pathfinder Battles minis, Heroes & Monsters, was just nominated as the Best Miniatures Product of the year for this year's Gen Con/EN World ENnie Awards? We're enormously proud of such a strong showing with our very first set, and given the leaps and bounds of improvement on sculpts, painting, and packaging we've experienced since then, I'm very excited to see how the Rise of the Runelords set does at next year's awards!

But in order to complete production on the Rise of the Runelords set, we had to get every miniature just right. And there was one little bastard in the set who seemed to elude our efforts until—quite literally—the very last few minutes of the pre-production process.

Illustration by Eric Belisle

There he is, the final miniature to be revealed in the Rise of the Runelords set. The Shining Child. He's a kind of glowy outsider from the edges of the multiverse, summoned by the ancient wizards of Thassilon to do their bidding in the era of the Runelords' dominion. This creature has been a favorite here in the office since we introduced it way back in Pathfinder Adventure Path #4, and we always knew we wanted to make a miniature of it.

The creature's first appearance, by artist Jonathan Wayshak, was absolutely gorgeous, but also enormously abstract and literally impossible to sculpt into a three-dimensional miniature (that's the thing about those light-based outsiders, you know). When we included the Shining Child in Bestiary 2, we asked artist Eric Belisle to create a more physical version of the creature, still infused with eerie light effects and still otherworldly and spooky. His image is the one posted above, and it's become the definitive "look" for the shining children in the meantime.

So when we sat down to create the list of figures we wanted in the Rise of the Runelords set to support the new Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path Anniversary Edition, we gleefully added the Shining Child to the list. After all, we'd been working with WizKids to add several miniatures with clear plastic effects in the set, and since this guy was translucent and composed of living light, he would be the perfect candidate!

It would be easy!

I've subsequently learned that nothing is truly easy when it comes to making little plastic men, especially when you get into weird plastic effects. In the months that followed our decision to include the Shining Child in our set, he rapidly became the most difficult figure from a production perspective.

For starters, the Shining Child is size Small, making him a bit more difficult to sculpt than some of the larger figures. That turned out to not be such a big problem, as WizKids has great sculptors. The initial sculpt, which has since vanished into the dark depths of my email in-box, sailed through approvals without a single comment. It looked great.

Then we started trying to figure out how to paint it, and the real trouble began. Take another look at that image. The guy's clearly kind of transparent, so we figured we'd start with a fully clear plastic base. We needed some purple highlights, and some splatters of yellow or gold paint to sell the light effects, but that ought to be simple enough, right? Oh yeah, and it had to look like light was coming out of the creature's eyes and mouth. No problem, right?

In an email entitled "Shining Child, the Bane of My Existence," WizKids' production manager sent along these three "options" from the factory, based on our original paint step specifications:

Yeah, not so great. You can see the hint of the awesome sculpt in these images, but the clear effect was really making it difficult to pick out details. WizKids did their best with an opalescent paint effect on the creature's hair, but I knew no one would be happy with this miniature, because both the WizKids production team and I weren't happy with the miniature. Also, it didn't look enough like the art to really sell it as a Shining Child.

So we went back to the drawing board, from a color point of view. Taking a look at Belisle's original art, we realized that he had done a great job simulating a clear figure by starting with a white base. So we sent word to the factory. Any chance you can try that?

Well, they tried, anyway.

At this point I could see we were headed in the right direction, but still a good distance from the finish line. For starters, the figure looked like it had been dipped in White Out, and the face had actually taken a step backward. I knew this was to be a common miniature in the set, but I wanted to make sure it wasn't also hideously ugly, so I sent WizKids back to the drawing board.

At this point, the WizKids production manager got so fed up trying to filter our painting instructions to the factory that he sat down with a bunch of "blank" figures and simply started painting them himself. He rapidly turned around a control figure that came closest to the mark of everything we had tried so far when he sent me this picture:

I thought it looked much better, but needed to see it in person. As you've probably noticed comparing our blog photos to the final miniatures, sometimes pictures don't really do a figure justice. Sometimes, you've just got to hold the figure in your hand to properly judge it. Happily (and by a sort of cosmic coincidence), WizKids' production manager happens to live about 10 minutes from my apartment, so nearing the last day we could possibly fix this without trainwrecking the schedule for the set, he stopped by my place for a quick review of his personally finished paint master.

I thought it looked great in person, and at long last gave him the go-ahead to put the figure into production.

The end result is a Shining Child that actually looks like a Shining Child. A figure that utilizes the clear plastic while still possessing depth. It honestly turned out to be one of my favorite figures in the entire set.

But holy moley, it was a pain in the ass to make, so I wanted to save it for last so I could tell you the whole, gory story.

Thanks, Shining Child. You proved that sometimes, it's the best children who come in last.

Next week, we'll begin our tour of the very next Pathfinder Battles set: The Shattered Star!

Erik Mona
Publisher

PaizoCon Recap

Thursday July 12, 2012

The doors have closed on PaizoCon 2012, cementing its place as far and away the best PaizoCon on record. But even if you didn’t make it out to Redmond to hang out with the Paizo staff, all of our incredible guests, and a host of the greatest gamers in the world, all is not lost. Between constantly rolling cameras, thousands of snapshots, and dozens of blog posts, the show was phenomonally well documented. Check out the highlights compiled here for your viewing and reviewing pleasure.

Gamerati Seminar Videos & Interviews

Ed Healy from over at Gamerati.com managed to document PaizoCon 2012 from nearly every angle. Check out the 10 Voices from PaizoCon video below, with more (like the Secrets of TSR seminar and a bit from Ryan Dancey’s Pathfinder Online seminar) at Gamerati’s PaizoCon 2012 YouTube channel.

PaizoCon in Pictures

Dozens of Paizo staffers and gamers were snapping pictures all weekend long. Check out just a few of the highlights.

One of the hotel monitors made a fantastic high-tech greeter!	Will Chase at setup, pumped and ready to go!	One of the calmer slots’ adventures taking place in the Pathfinder Society hall.	Venture Captains Nani and Kyle Pratt giving Larry Wilhelm good marks during the hilarious GMing 101 seminar.	Mike Brock and Cosmo learning how to GM during the seminar.

Team Adventure Path getting ready to announce the new Reign of Winter Adventure Path.	James Jacobs gives away the secrets of great map design during the cartography seminar.	Sara Marie, and the littlest golem and attendee of PaizoCon, Mikey Teter.	This year's Pathfinder Society Special Event, the Grand Convocation, brought together players, NPCs, and Faction Heads for a night of costumes and some serious gaming and roleplaying. Here we have Amenopheus, the Osirion faction head!	One of the stars of the Grand Convocation: Michellia Blakros.

Paizo's very own Crystal Frasier and Liz Courts, who ran events during the Convocation.	All of the costumed NPCs, Faction Leaders, and players who participated in this year's Grand Convocation.	Goblins have never been so adorable thanks to Xanthestar Customs!	Editor Judy Bauer is all ready for the Reign of Winter Adventure Path with her cozy Dancing Hut mittens!	Developer Patrick Renie in his ADORWABLE goblin hat made by Jodi Lane Reynolds! (Don’t laugh, he got plenty of compliments from “The Ladies™.”)

Painters hard at work at the Reaper Miniatures table.	Lisa Stevens gets in on some of the action for Adam Daigle's Green Blood on a Black Rock game.	Each round pitted monster against monster to determine the ultimate winner!	There were bets on each monster, so things got a bit tense when the Shambling Mound and Blue Dragon were near the end of their round.	A sneak peek at Project Swallowtail, the new Pathfinder card game revealed at PaizoCon.

One of the two tables that were playing through Project Swallowtail on Saturday.	Artist Wayne Reynolds poses with phenomenal Valeros cosplayer (and Paizo Customer Service Specialist) Erik Keith.	Valeros will not be out-drunk! A lesson Jason Bulmahn learned the hard way.	A powerhouse of Adventure Path writers: Richard Pett, Nicolas Logue, Brandon Hodge, and Greg Vaughan.	This year during the Banquet, Lisa announced a new award to be given at each PaizoCon: Volunteer of the Year! Here are the winners for the first three years: Tim Nightengale, Liz Courts, and Mark Moreland. Congratulations and thank you!

Photographs by Chris Carey, Chris Lambertz, F. Wesley Schneider, and Sarah Robinson

Announcements

If you haven’t heard already, we announced quite a bit a PaizoCon. Click the links below for more details on some of the biggest news.

Paizo Volunteer of the Year Award

Pathfinder RPG: NPC Codex

Pathfinder RPG: Ultimate Campaign

Reign of Winter Adventure Path

Paizo Game Space Virtual Tabletop

Pathfinder Battles: Shattered Star

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game (Project Swallowtail)

Pathfinder Player Companion Relaunch

With that, PaizoCon 2012 is pretty much a wrap. Thanks from everyone here at Paizo to the hundreds of gamers and guests who came, played, GMed, ran seminars, talked, laughed, and shared for making this PaizoCon so much fun. For those who didn’t get to make it, we’re already excited to do this all over again, so hopefully we’ll get to see you next year! And in the meantime, scroll down for an important announcment about Gen Con...

F. Wesley Schneider
Editor-in-Chief

The Gen Con Costume Contest is Coming!

Check out these awesome costumes from last year!

Heads up, everyone! It's time to dust off those sewing machines and fabric paints and start getting ready for the Fifth Annual Gen Con Pathfinder Cosplay Contest!

It's hard to believe that it's been five whole years since a priestess of Desna first showed us just how crafty our community could be (pun intended). In the years since, we've seen Pactmasters and witches, alchemists and Gray Maidens. But we know that there are more of you cosplayers out there, and we want to see you!

Here's the deal: At some point during Gen Con Indy this August, you show up to the Paizo booth dressed in your best Pathfinder costume—any monster, character, faction member, deity, or other figure from our world. In order to be eligible, your costume needs to be identifiably Pathfinder-related, not just generic fantasy—a knight isn't enough, but an Eagle Knight of Andoran is.

In addition to drawing a crowd of happy gawkers, you'll have your picture taken by a member of the Paizo staff. The best costumes—as decided by us—will end up on the Paizo blog once we return from Gen Con, at which point we'll allow the paizo.com messageboard community to pick their favorite. What criteria that mad and merry crew will use is anybody's guess, but whoever they select as the best Pathfinder cosplayer will walk away with 50 dollars in store credit! Even more importantly, the winner will go home knowing that he or she (or they—I'm still waiting for a life-sized Sandpoint Devil puppet) have entered the exclusive cadre of the Paizo Cosplay Winner's Circle.

The clock's ticking—will you be ready in time?

James Sutter
Senior Editor

Misery's Mirror

by Liane Merciel

Chapter Two: Hovels

The Hovels lived up to their name.

The poorest and most wretched of Nisroch's people did not live in the city. They huddled outside its walls, clustered in a miserable, mud-drenched shantytown by the Leper's Gate. There was little stable ground to support them, so the denizens of the Hovels built high and dense, creating a teetering warren of sticks that seemed a sneeze away from collapse at any moment.

Swaths of sucking mud surrounded the Hovels, filling the entire tangled labyrinth with the stench of rotting fish and worse. Isiem saw paupers picking through the filth in search of food or usable refuse. They wore stilts and masks of wadded rags in a futile attempt to protect themselves from disease as they poked through the city's garbage.

Other paupers bore the sigil of the Morbidium—three links of heavy chain run through by a scalpel—scarred or branded on their skin. The mark signified that they had sold their bodies to the scholars of the Morbidium for experimentation. It allowed them temporary safe passage through Nisroch's walls... until the scholars were done with them.

For a handful of gold, they sold their flesh, their bones, their sanity. Then, stripped of everything that interested the scholars, they were discarded. They drifted to the Hovels and stayed there for whatever days or weeks were left to them. The unlucky ones, Isiem had heard, could persist for years.

"Why would anyone choose to live here?" Ascaros muttered through the sleeve pressed over his face. He lagged behind as Voraic led them through the Leper's Gate, eyeing the damaged souls who wandered the slums.

"Because they want to live, and there is nowhere else for them to do it," Voraic said. There was an odd note of sympathy in his voice. Behind his back, Ascaros and Isiem exchanged a look. Proper Nidalese did not express pity for their inferiors.

"I'd sooner die than live like this," Isiem said. He meant it. The Kuthite church taught that beggars and paupers were parasites on society; the only reason they were not purged immediately was because their sufferings pleased Zon-Kuthon. It was not a doctrine that lent itself to charity.

"The rest of them should too," Ascaros said. "Have some shred of dignity. There's none in living in the Hovels, and there's no way out."

"There is," Voraic said, pushing open the creaking gate. He stepped through the gap in Nisroch's great black walls, passing from rainy gloom into midnight and back into rain.

Again the shadowcallers exchanged a glance as they followed him. Then Ascaros said, carefully neutral: "You speak from experience?"

"I do."

For a time it seemed that he would not elaborate. The gate closed behind them. Isiem watched a knot of small children, some thirty feet away, fight one another for the corpse of a starved orange tomcat. Their struggle was as grimly silent as it was vicious. Beggars' get they might be, but these children were still Nidalese.

A scrawny boy, bleeding from the temple, ran off with the dead cat. The others scattered from the shadowcallers' approach. Clearly they had learned to be wary of visitors coming from the city.

"I was like him, once," Voraic said softly, lifting a sleeved hand toward the boy with the cat. "Desperate. Starving. Willing to fight—to kill—for a meal like that. Most days, I didn't have the chance. I lived in the mud with my mother and four siblings. By the time I was ten, two of those four were dead, and my mother had had two more. I don't remember any of our fathers."

"A terribly sad story," Ascaros said aridly.

"How did you get out?" Isiem asked.

"Misanthe lifted me from the Hovels," Voraic said. His robes quivered and he hunched a little further down, keeping his back toward his companions. "It was during one of the burnings. Ten... fifteen burnings ago. I don't remember. They happen every year, twice a year sometimes. It's hard to keep count. I was ten. It was summertime, and the smell was bad. The Over-Diocesan sent her faithful to cleanse the Hovels. Their poisoned fires tore through the buildings, and they marched through the streets, killing anyone who managed to survive the smoke.

"My mother pushed me through the flames toward them. I knew what she was doing; she wasn't the only one to try it. Children who are stoic enough—Nidalese enough—to endure extraordinary pain without crying sometimes find acceptance among the ranks of the faithful. My siblings were too weak to have a chance. But I endured the fire without flinching, and when I stumbled back to my feet in front of the masters, I saw a glimmering of respect.

"Misanthe stopped the others from killing me. She said I had promise. She tested that promise before she took me, but I passed. And so I became her apprentice."

"Tested it how?" Isiem asked.

Ascaros would do well to guard his emotions.

A small shrug rippled Voraic's rain-soaked robes. His voice was steady but toneless. "She found my mother. She killed her. Then and there, in the smoke. There were screams all around us from others burning in the Hovels. My friends, some of them. My brothers and sisters. But Misanthe told me not to take my eyes off what she was doing, no matter what went on around us. I obeyed. And I did not cry. At the end of it, she said I had proven myself well enough to be worthy of magic... eventually. She did not want a useless child. So I trained in Nisroch, first, and in time she came back for me."

A path of broken planks sunk into the mud served as stepping stones to the Hovels. Ascaros lifted the hem of his charcoal-gray shadowcaller's robes away from the filth, grimacing as his boots squelched in the sodden earth. Ramshackle buildings closed around them, funneling the rainwater into tumbling rivers that slid from warped roof boards and splashed into the mud. "Were you with her in Westcrown?"

Voraic shook his head. "Only in Nisroch. I did not have permission to enter Cheliax." He paused, pointing to a crooked black spar that thrust up from the teetering buildings ahead. "That is where it happened. The burning always starts on the outer perimeter and pushes in toward the city, so that those fleeing the flames run into the archers on the walls."

"Wait here," Ascaros said. "See that we are not disturbed."

"'See that we are not disturbed'?" Isiem echoed as they strode deeper into the Hovels. Fearful eyes peered at them from the darkness within the shacks, but neither of the shadowcallers paid them any mind. Most of the Hovels' denizens fled or hid from their approach. A few were too damaged to do either, but even those would never dare confront them. Voraic was right: these people wanted to live. And confronting shadowcallers was no way to do that.

Ascaros shrugged. "Let him see the excuse for what it is. What difference does it make?"

"None, I suppose." Isiem watched a muttering idiot go by. The sigil of the Morbidium was branded on his brow, although it had been partly cut away. A row of large, careless stitches ran up the side of the man's neck and across his stubbly head. The wound they'd once closed had healed long ago, but the stitches remained, red and inflamed with infection. The man stumbled into a doorless shack and vanished from view, although Isiem could still hear him mumbling deliriously to his invisible friends or foes. "Does his tale ring true?"

"That he was plucked from the Hovels by my aunt? Perhaps. It isn't a story I'd brag about, but perhaps he wanted to deflect our suspicions."

"Do you suspect him?" Isiem asked.

"Maybe." Scowling, Ascaros stepped over an insensible woman lying sprawled across the alley. A cracked board served as her bed, or bier—Isiem wasn't sure which. She had no legs. The empty cloth of her skirts had been trampled into the mud so deeply that the garments were barely more than ripples in the puddled filth. The stench of wine-sweat fogged the air around her.

Forty yards past the legless woman, the Hovels opened to the sky. Spell-driven firestorms had blasted away the buildings. The mud around them was black and gritty with the coarser leavings of the flames: chunks of charred wood, a knot of melted pins embedded in a clump of burned hair, a few fragments of scorched bone. Nothing larger survived.

At the edges of the ruins, the Hovels were beginning to creep back, like vines stretching out after a forest fire. A mound of garbage here, a tangle of laundry lines there. Some of the rooms that had been cracked in half like gourds were patched up again. But no people.

"So this is where my aunt died," Ascaros said, surveying the desolation. "Useless. There's nothing here to examine."

"Witnesses don't seem likely either," Isiem said, "although I suppose we could knock on doors and see who answers. If they answer."

"They'll answer," Ascaros said grimly. Raising his silver-capped staff, he started for the nearest shack.

The fourth door they tried yielded a person with functional eyes and a mouth. He was another of the Morbidium's cast-offs; his fingers were reduced to three on each hand, and those three were unnaturally extended with stitched-in joints from the missing digits. Craters the size of cherries pocked his skull, collecting rain in little pools.

But he could see, and he could talk to them, and that made him better than the other creatures they'd found.

"What did you see when the fires came?" Ascaros demanded.

The wretch blinked at them from his doorway. Rain trickled down his dented scalp and ran down the sides of his nose, dripping into his slack toothless mouth. Behind him, a handful of children huddled in the dark. Isiem wondered if it was for their sake that this man had sold himself to the Morbidium—and what they must think if he had. What was a father like this worth?

"Fires," he managed at last.

"Yes," Ascaros said impatiently. "Fires. What happened? Who was here?"

"Many. Many in robes. With the fires."

"Was there a woman? One who looked like me?" Ascaros lifted his bad arm in its sling. "With an arm like this?"

The broken man nodded slowly. His fingers twitched strangely, as if the movement originated somehow in the sewn-on middle joints. "She was here."

"What happened to her?"

"The fires came down, and she walked into a house. Struggling. The fires ate her."

"Struggling?" Isiem repeated. He wondered if the man was confused. Those dents in his skull were very deep. "Against what?"

"Death." The broken man nodded emphatically. He drew his fingers across his throat. They wriggled spastically, like the convulsing legs of a crushed ant. "Fighting against death. She walked into the fires and they ate her."

"Thank you," Isiem said. He took Ascaros's sleeve gently and pulled his friend away from the door. The other shadowcaller's face had twisted into a scowl that suggested he was about to explode with rage, and Isiem didn’t think that would help them here.

"Worthless," Ascaros fumed, stabbing his staff into the stinking ground. He seemed angrier—and more afraid, Isiem thought—than the broken man's story warranted. "That idiot was worthless."

"Of course he was," Isiem said. "The Morbidium took everything of worth in him." He sighed, casting a glance up at the dull gray sky. The storm showed no signs of dissipating. "Do you want to try the other doors, or shall we pursue another lead?"

"There's no use talking to any of these lackwits. The ones that have tongues don't have eyes, and the ones that have eyes don't have brains." With one last snarl at the patched-up dwellings around the burned site, Ascaros turned back the way they'd come. This time he did not step over the legless woman in the mud; he jabbed his staff into her empty skirts and kicked her savagely in the side. The woman spluttered in the filth, struggling feebly.

"Control yourself," Isiem cautioned him quietly. "Voraic may see. Or some other Nisrochi. It would not do to damage our dignity."

Ascaros stiffened, breathing heavily, but after a moment he nodded and stepped over the sobbing, still-drunk cripple. He brushed a fleck of mud from his robes. "Yes."

"Do we have another lead?"

"The apprentice. He might owe her everything, but when has that stopped treachery? And my aunt's remains. They are being kept at the cathedral."

"We have to collect them anyway," Isiem said. "Let's begin there. No need to let Voraic know we suspect him until we must—and if we glean anything from Misanthe's remains, it will let us question him more carefully."

"To the cathedral, then," Ascaros said.

∗ ∗ ∗

Misanthe's corpse was laid on a table alongside several others in a small room under the Cathedral of Bones. Isiem had seen similar rooms, and similar tables, beneath the Dusk Hall. They served alternately as torture beds, dissection tables, and biers—sometimes all three in quick succession.

Copper pieces rested atop each of Misanthe's eyes, signifying that a spell had been used to delay the decomposition of her body. Not that there was much to preserve. The flames had not been gentle; Ascaros's aunt was barely recognizable as human. She had suffered from the same family curse as her nephew, and the peculiar decay it inflicted left her corpse even harder to study. Much of her body had been dead and withered even while she was living, and the curse-desiccated flesh had burned like kindling in the fire.

But there was enough left to look at. Isiem pushed up his sleeves and began his examination. Ascaros hovered by his shoulder, following his work.

Most of the injuries were straightforward, but one...

"Do you see this?" Isiem asked, pointing to a dark ring that encircled Misanthe's throat. Burns obscured some of it, but nevertheless it was clear that the mark made a perfect circle around her neck. It looked like a bruise, almost, but the evenness of the color and its peculiar grayish hue spoke to an unnatural origin. No human hand could produce such perfect uniformity.

"Yes." Ascaros looked paler than usual. The tension that had been in him since their conversation with the dented man in the Hovels seemed to have snapped, as if the sight of the corpse confirmed some suspicion he'd been nursing since then.

"What is it?"

"The mark of a spell. She called it the shadow garrote." Ascaros paused, fiddling with the wrappings on his bad arm. His mouth twisted slightly. "That was one of her most powerful spells, and the most secret. She wouldn't have taught it to anyone. She refused to teach it to me—and I wouldn't have had the strength to cast it if she had. Not many people even know it exists."

"What are you saying?"

"That Misanthe was the only one in the world who had that spell. Unless she used it for a suicide, that means someone else reflected her own magic against her. And that means..."

"...that she wasn't killed by an apprentice," Isiem finished for him. Turning a spell against its creator was a feat of extraordinary magic. It was far beyond either of them; it was likely beyond their masters at the Dusk Hall. "That's an archmage."

Coming Next Week: Deepening shadows—and their residents—in Chapter Three of "Misery's Mirror."

For More of Isiem's adventures, check out Nightglass, available now!

Liane Merciel is the critically acclaimed author of the Pathfinder Tales novel Nightglass—also starring Isiem—as well as the short Pathfinder Tales story "Certainty." In addition, she's published two dark fantasy novels set in her own world of Ithelas: The River Kings' Road and Heaven's Needle. For more information, visit lianemerciel.com.

Illustration by Andrew Ryan.

Strategic Redesigns: Bestiary Box Preview

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

When planning for the Bestiary Box, we knew there were a few monsters that needed new art. They either didn’t fit in the pawn format, they were monster variants, or they were just missing art. There were also a handful of monsters that just deserved new art.

Sure, the old art was suitable for the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary, but we knew that sometimes it’s good to shake things up and do them over. There are many reasons to do this: It adds value to the box. We knew that you would want new art because... well... new art is flipping cool. Sometimes our ideas about the monster in question have evolved, and we wanted to express that evolution graphically. Other times we just thought we could do better.

For our last Bestiary Box preview, we thought we would share these somewhat random shots of new pawn art. This isn’t all of the new art in the box, but it gives you a good idea of some of the cool new renderings you’ll find when you get your paws on this exciting product.

Illustrations by Dmitry Burmak and Eric Belisle

Stephen Radney-MacFarland
Designer

Pathfinder Society Overview for Gen Con

Monday, July 9, 2012

This year's Gen Con will be the most ambitious for Pathfinder Society yet. With Gen Con being the largest gaming convention in North America, I thought of how I could make Pathfinder Society bigger and better than it has ever been, while improving the quality for our players. So, I wanted to give an overview of what to expect from Pathfinder Society if you are attending Gen Con this year.

Last year, we ran 50 tables of Pathfinder Society scenarios per slot. We sold out almost all tickets within the first week of ticket sales going live, so I knew I wanted to expand our play opportunities. In 2011, we had four rooms attached with the walls open to create one large Pathfinder Society gaming hall. It was fairly crowded with so many tables in that one area, so we requested and received seven rooms this year. Having almost doubled the size of the gaming hall, I wanted to expand the number of tables but also increase the amount of room between tables, as I know this was a suggestion from last year made by numerous players and GMs. So, I only added 50 percent more tables this year, expanding the Pathfinder Society gaming hall to 75 tables per slot.

Another piece of good feedback we received was that with the Pathfinder Society HQ set up against one wall, the people on the other end of the gaming hall had a difficult time interacting with HQ. With this year's hall having almost double the size, I wanted to change things up a bit to make it easier for both GMs and players to interact with HQ. Therefore, we are making a larger Pathfinder Society HQ and placing it in the center of the gaming hall. In addition, I have assigned 8–10 volunteers per gaming slot to work solely in Pathfinder Society HQ to help facilitate administrative tasks more quickly, including getting data entry of tracking sheets completed while at the con. This will also help us to correct any errors that come up on site as opposed to weeks later after the show. The volunteers will also serve to muster GMs and players to tables, facilitate the prize table, and various other tasks.

We will also be introducing Season 4 of the Pathfinder Society to all of you. The new Pathfinder Society Guide to Organized Play (which will be the focus of a blog post in a few weeks) will go live, and I think many of you will appreciate the new rules changes and tweaks. We will still have some favorite scenarios from Season 3, as well as the final four Season 3 scenarios that were launched at PaizoCon. But we will also be debuting the Year of the Risen Rune with four brand-new scenarios to help kick off Season 4. In total, we will have 18 different scenarios for players to choose from.

In addition, we will have the largest Gen Con Special to date, seating 450 players to complete the adventure as a group, similar to the Year of the Shadow Lodge and Blood Under Absalom from the last two Gen Cons. This year, we have added to the Special and created a competitive, exclusive second round of play that will only be available at Gen Con 2012. The top three tables from each tier will advance to the second round by utilizing a secret scoring system. I have hand selected only four- and five-star GMs to judge these tables, with many of them being current or former Venture-Captains. We may also have a celebrity GM or two to add to the mix. Every table that advances to the second round will receive a better Chronicle sheet than that which was received in the first round and awarded to all players. The top table from each tier in the second round will receive a unique Chronicle sheet awarding a very special, one-of-a-kind prize that will only be available at Gen Con.

Don't worry if you miss out on those two Chronicles. We will also have 18 new Pathfinder Society convention Chronicles available to win. This year, for every two events you play in, you will win something, whether it be a special Pathfinder Society boon or a Pathfinder product.

In addition to all of the above, we are launching three new events this year for Gen Con 2012. We are adding the Kid's Track, the Beginner Box Introductions, and the GM 101 workshops.

For the Kid's Track, we have set aside two tables for the morning and afternoon slots that are for children attending Gen Con, offering them a chance to play the Beginner Box Intro adventures with other children their age. These slots are 2 hours each and will be run four times each day at each of the two tables. A different adventure will be run each day of Gen Con, and any child who completes all four will receive a special certificate denoting his or her achievements. In addition, we will be providing pregenerated characters, as well as the corresponding miniature from the Beginner Box Heroes miniature pack, for the child to keep. If the child plays all four adventures with a different pregen, she can walk away with the full set. We will also be providing parents a coupon for 10% off the purchase of the Beginner Box while at the show. Finally, we will be providing each child a set of dice to keep.

For the Beginner Box Introductions, I decided to make this a 5-hour, paid slot this year. The first hour will have the GM explaining the basic rules of the game, reviewing the pregenerated characters, and answering any questions. The final 4 hours of the slot will allow the players to play through all four of the Beginner Box Intro adventures that were used for the Beginner Box Bash last October.

The GM 101 workshops were launched at PaizoCon for their final test run and will be making their official debut at Gen Con. The workshops were developed by the Georgia regional coordinators, and then over the past 6 months, with the help of several awesome Venture-Captains across North America, we tested various ideas for GM 101 classes in their regions. We took those ideas, formulated the best ones into a grouping, and drafted up solid guidelines for what we are calling the GM 101 workshops. As they are 5 hours long, and knowing your time is valuable at Gen Con, we broke the program into two parts. The first part, which will run for 2 hours, is titled Pathfinder GM Basics. This introductory program focuses on improving GMing skills, handling challenges, and giving a great table experience. Part 1 includes four breakout sessions covering Roleplaying and Lore, Combat and Rules, Running the Game, and Advanced Topics. Part 2 is titled Practice Makes Perfect. Part 2 of this program introduces the Deck of Many Situations, a tool to help GMs focus on improving their improvisational technique while applying the lessons learned in Part 1. Participants draw cards that detail difficult GMing situations, and have a brief period to resolve their respective situations before time is called. Our experienced GMs offer advice and techniques based on observation of your GMing style tailored to help you sharpen your skills and improve your expertise.

Finally, for those not familiar with Pathfinder Society, we will be hosting two Pathfinder Society Q&A sessions on Thursday and Saturday morning. We hope that any player who has wanted to try out Pathfinder Society but hasn't for whatever reason, will come to one of these seminars, ask any questions he or she might have, and then try out Pathfinder Society sometime during the course of the convention.

With just over a month away, I am excited about my first Gen Con as Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator. I have tried to put together the best possible programming for all of you and hope to make this your best Pathfinder Society experience to date. There are still tickets available for most scenarios, but those numbers will continue to rapidly decrease the closer we get to the show. If you haven't purchased your event tickets yet, head over to the Gen Con event registration site to do so. You don't want to miss out on all the new and exciting things we have planned for Pathfinder Society at Gen Con 2012.

See you in August!

Mike Brock
Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator

Cosmo demonstrates proper crosswalk button use

Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 08:07 PM Pacific

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

Adam and Liz at tear down

Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 04:16 PM Pacific

Chris Self
Sales Manager

Find something; lose something?

Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 09:28 AM Pacific

We've started a lost and found box at the registration table. If you've found something that needs to find its home or if you've misplaced something hopefully we can help!

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

The History of MMOs!

Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 07:00 AM Pacific

A recording of Ryan Dancey's seminar on the history of MMOs.

Video by Ed Healy of Gamerati

Ross Byers
Assistant Software Developer

The Seoni mini looks amazing!

Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 02:06 AM Pacific

From the Rise of the Runelords Pathfinder Battles Miniatures

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

Out of beer?

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 11:09 PM Pacific

Valeros's tankard has run empty.

Ross Byers
Assistant Software Developer

Project Swallowtail!

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 10:36 PM Pacific

The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game!

Gencon 2013

Character based deck building card game.

You'll have to hope Vic makes an awesome post with the rest of the details because I can't keep up with all the awesomeness!

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

Erik Mona talks about fun stuff from future!

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 10:33 PM Pacific

-Goblin plushies-Pathfinder Comic Book-Next PF Battles Minis will be from the Shattered Star Adventure Path! 55 miniature set. Amiri and Lem will be in it!

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

Paizo announces Paizo Game Space

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 10:18 PM Pacific

Paizo reinvents the virtual tabletop to be played directly on Paizo.com!

Uses Paizo's high, max resolution maps, handouts and everything you need to run our APs. Makes everything easy to connect with people and get playing. As long as you can get to Paizo.com you can play!

Edit: We've posted details on the announcement, some screenshots (including features that weren't shown at the banquet), and more info about free play and paying for stuff.

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

Wes announces changes to player companion line!

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 10:06 PM Pacific

Total overhaul of player companion line!

Who likes Varisia? Compilation of things about Varisia plus loads of new stuff! More "visual" redesign to make it super easy to find cool information to flesh out your characters.

Rules index for each books do they aren't scattered throughout.

Map have dotted lines for the roads of Varisia. Includes how far distances are in miles.

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

James Jacobs talks about Adventure paths!

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 09:54 PM Pacific

Shattered Star (first sequel ap) gray maidens, dark rider with spinal cord whip, players as Pathfinder Faction members, Giants, drow, Demi lich .... And worse! (Richard pett will be involved for the "and worse").

Reign of Winter will be the next AP after Shattered Star. Return of Baba Yaga to Golarion! "What happens if player characters get into Baba Yaga's hut?"

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

Spring 2013

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 09:42 PM Pacific

Ultimate campaign! Bringing life to your campaign between the fighting.

Random generating character backgrounds which ties into story feats.

Helps out finding out what happens between adventures, operating guild, building skills.

Kingdom rules and war rules!

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

Paizo announces NPC codex!

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 09:39 PM Pacific

Stat blocks for every core class from 1-20 level.Every odd level example is typical for class, every even level is an oddball example. Stat blocks for prestige and core classes.

Everything uses options from core book to make life easier!

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

Jason talks about ultimate equipment

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 09:33 PM Pacific

Coming out at gencon! One stop shopping for your character.Chapters on arms weapons and armor. All core source material plus more. Mundane equipment chapter. New alchemical stuff.New foods! fermented horse milk, elven trail rationsMagical weapons and armor: enchanted eel skin, invincible armor!Chapter on rings, rods and staves.New innovated way of presenting material!Wondrous items... Lots of slots to fill (Jason's joke not mine). Organized by slot so you can say "my feet slot is free, what can I get to put on my feet?"Chapter on artifacts, cursed items and... Intelligent items, like a singing sword! Appendix for generating random treasure items for PC's to make it easier (brought back treasure types).

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

Paizo announces Volunteer of the year award!

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 08:54 PM Pacific

Tim Nightengale!!

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

Banquet hall is packed!

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 08:27 PM Pacific

So many Paizo fans.

Ross Byers
Assistant Software Developer

Goblin reroll

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 08:24 PM Pacific

Sean K Reynolds
Developer

Let the feasting commence!!

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 08:12 PM Pacific

Preview Banquet

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

Hey, there's a lot of people here for the banquet...

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 07:12 PM Pacific

Cosmo
Customer Service Manager

Banquet line superstar

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 06:39 PM Pacific

Sean K Reynolds
Developer

Rules are hard!

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 05:12 PM Pacific

Sebastian is having a hard time figuring out the area of effect for his Super Sparkle Aura.

Cosmo
Customer Service Manager

What is this "Project Swallowtail" thing?

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 03:57 PM Pacific

Seriously... I dunno.

Cosmo
Customer Service Manager

James proudly shows off his new acquisition!

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 03:15 PM Pacific

The original cover art for the final issue of Age of Worms has a forever home!

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

Nick Logue and HeroLab

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 01:18 PM Pacific

Whatever NPC he's building will murder your PCs and defile their corpses.

Mark Moreland
Developer

Con goers needing lunch?

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 11:42 AM Pacific

Keep up your gaming strength and don't forget lunch!

Just head out the back of the hotel (out the doors past the PFS table) and the Redmond Saturday Market is open and full of delicious things, fresh fruits and veggies, amazing Veraci pizza, kettle corn and more!

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

I can think of a certain upcoming AP these mittens would be good for :)

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 11:07 AM Pacific

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

PaizoCon Knitting Circle!

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 11:01 AM Pacific

...waiting for the next big rush of registrations.

Cosmo
Customer Service Manager

Overlooking the Grand Convocation

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 10:28 AM Pacific

Overlooking the Grand Convocation last night!

Chris Self
Sales Manager

Separated at birth? Jeff Grubb and Dave Gross

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 10:19 AM Pacific

Pierce Watters
Sales Director

Cosmo is special!

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 09:10 AM Pacific

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

Check out more Paizo Pictures!

Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 07:43 AM Pacific

Check out this facebook page for a ton of awesome PaizoCon pictures by the very talented Ed Healy!

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

Even more costumes!

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 10:54 PM Pacific

Sean K Reynolds
Developer

More Grand Convocation costumes

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 10:53 PM Pacific

Sean K Reynolds
Developer

Costumes at PFS grand convocation

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 10:50 PM Pacific

Sean K Reynolds
Developer

T&T and party betrayal

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 10:41 PM Pacific

My Tunnels & Trolls PCs advance on the ghoul king and his minions... just as Leadfoot, the dwarf PC, decides to turn against the party and ally with the ghouls!

Sean K Reynolds
Developer

Watch out for her in a dark alley!

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 07:35 PM Pacific

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

The littlest golem

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 05:56 PM Pacific

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

Website sneak attack!

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 04:11 PM Pacific

While everyone was distracted with PaizoCon, we rolled out a new Pathfinder Society portal here on paizo.com. Check it out by following the Pathfinder Society link to the left. My favorite new feature are the faction pages andfaction roleplay forums.

Mark Moreland
Developer

Rise of the Runelords Minis pictures

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 03:20 PM Pacific

Slightly less blurry minis pics

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

Pathfinder Adventure Path Seminar

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 03:14 PM Pacific

These fine people just found out the AP after Shattered Star will be Reign of Winter!

Adam Daigle
Developer

Pathfinder Society terrain

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 12:02 PM Pacific

Mark Moreland
Developer

Madmen!

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 11:59 AM Pacific

Three of our more demented freelancers in their unnatural habitat.

Adam Daigle
Developer

Bright and Early!

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 10:59 AM Pacific

The line is out the door for 7am registration! Luckily we flew through the line faster than we've ever gone before!

Don't forget to check out Paizo's Facebook page (Facebook.com/Paizo) and upload your convention pictures to our wall!

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

His first PaizoCon in a blue shirt...

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 10:47 AM Pacific

...and Daigle is already worn out. It's not even noon yet!

Cosmo
Customer Service Manager

So Many Minis

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 10:19 AM Pacific

It wouldn't be Friday without a minis blog. All Pathfinder Battles minis from both sets are here to see.

Mark Moreland
Developer

Wayne Reynolds and the Tome

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 10:10 AM Pacific

Even Wayne is impressed!

Mark Moreland
Developer

Example of Runelords handouts

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 09:55 AM Pacific

This is how all handouts are presented in the Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition Special Edition. Each is held in a pocket within the associated page.

Mark Moreland
Developer

Karzoug, Technical Director

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 09:49 AM Pacific

Give Vic an arcane tome and it goes to his head.

Mark Moreland
Developer

Pathfinder Society off to a strong start

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 09:22 AM Pacific

First slot is going great!

Mark Moreland
Developer

Pathfinder Society is under way!

Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 08:43 AM Pacific

A great start to Pathfinder Society at PaizoCon 2012

Mark Moreland
Developer

It's coming...

Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 02:27 PM Pacific

Soon!

Ross Byers
Assistant Software Developer

Rise of the Runelords Player's Guide

Thursday, July 5, 2012

With the imminent release of the new Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition (and its super-special Deluxe Collector's Edition), we've released a free Rise of the Runelords Player's Guide PDF! Within these pages, you'll find new traits for your characters, a thorough gazetteer of Varisia, and... well, why are we even talking about it? It's free—go download it already!

James Sutter
Senior Editor

Misery's Mirror

by Liane Merciel

Chapter One: A Death in Nisroch

"I need a favor," Ascaros whispered, stopping before Isiem's library table.

"Of course you do," Isiem murmured back, unsurprised. He did not lift his head from the scroll he was copying.

Once, he and Ascaros had been friends. As children in the village of Crosspine, they had been almost brothers. That friendship had survived the early years of their tutelage in the Dusk Hall of Pangolais... but only the early years. The isolating influence of Zon-Kuthon's faith and the weight of their respective sins of survival had pushed them apart. Now, as they neared the end of their time as students, that childhood friendship seemed nearly as distant as childhood itself.

The last time they had spoken seriously, almost two years ago, it had been Isiem who asked a favor of Ascaros. His friend had refused him then, Isiem reflected. It was tempting to do the same in turn.

But there was real fear in Ascaros's voice, under his Nidalese reserve, and Isiem had never been one to abandon his friends—even old friends, even strained ones—in times of need.

Besides, he was curious. What could be so important that it would drive Ascaros to this desperate attempt at reconciliation?

Isiem put his pen aside and looked up. Ascaros was still standing before his table, unmoving. His left arm, wrapped from fingers to elbow in white linen, rested useless in a sling, as it had for years; his right hand gripped the incense-filled Osirian staff he used to mask the odor from that ruined arm. The dim silver magelights of the Dusk Hall's library made it difficult to read Ascaros's expression, but Isiem would not have expected to see much anyway. No Nidalese worth his name let pain show on his face.

"What do you need?" he asked.

Ascaros ran his good hand through his dark, curly hair. In Crosspine that hair had been a rich russet, but years of living under the shadow of Pangolais had drained the ruddy warmth from the boy's locks. Now his hair was almost black, with only the barest hint of red remaining. Compared to some of the other changes the Dusk Hall had wrought in them, Ascaros's hair was a small thing, but Isiem's eye was often drawn back to it. They were not who they had been, either of them.

"Not here," Ascaros said after a long hesitation. He glanced down the hushed rows of shelves. "Can we talk in your room?"

"If you like," Isiem said. He was due to begin an apprenticeship with a Chelish wizard soon, but his new mistress had not yet come to claim him, so he still had student's quarters in the Dusk Hall. Although small and spare, they offered more privacy than the library did.

He stood, closed his scroll case, and led the way back to his room.

With the door locked behind them, Ascaros relaxed. He leaned the silver staff against Isiem's wall and sank into a black iron chair, leaning into its spike-filigreed back as if the thorny metal were a silk cushion. Eyes closed, he said: "I'm going to Nisroch."

"Nisroch?" Isiem echoed. "Why?"

"Misanthe. My aunt. The one who served in the Midnight Guard. She... died." Ascaros rubbed his dead arm through its wrappings. "I don't have many details, but it happened in Nisroch, two days past. The Dusk Hall wants me to investigate."

"Why you?" Isiem asked quietly.

"Because she was my aunt, I suppose." Ascaros shrugged. "And because I am a student here, and they have some measure of control over me. Misanthe had several objects of value, and I imagine the Dusk Hall intends to claim them. I am her last living relative—or the last with any standing, which amounts to the same—so if I do not object..."

"Will you object?"

Isiem no longer puts much stock in friendship.

"I don't even know what she had." Ascaros pursed his lips unhappily. "An enchanted staff, a silver necklace. I remember a black mirror, too. It might have been a nightglass."

"Yes, that could cause trouble," Isiem murmured. Nightglasses were powerful tools, and dangerous ones. An apprentice with a nightglass could summon shadowbeasts that would strike fear into a master wizard's heart. The Dusk Hall held the largest collection of nightglasses in Nidal, and it coveted more. It was not difficult to believe that their superiors would send a student to retrieve one—even from that student's dead kin.

Whether the Dusk Hall had any legitimate claim to the glass almost didn't matter. The Hall wanted it. Ascaros would therefore have to retrieve it, or risk facing their masters' wrath. After years of seeing the scars that their teachers inflicted for far lesser transgressions, Isiem doubted his friend would be eager to disobey.

"When do you leave?" he asked.

Ascaros raised his head and looked at him. "Tomorrow. I am allowed one companion. One of the masters offered, but... I would feel better if I had a friend. Will you come?"

"Of course," Isiem said.

∗∗∗

Black and swollen and slow, the Usk River poured from the hinterlands of Nidal into the sea. It carried the shadowcallers' vessel from the Uskwood to the coast, and it bore them past the massive, rust-streaked Rivergate that filtered incoming traffic. At the Rivergate their documents were checked three times, their identities questioned, every parcel in their belongings opened and examined—but all of it was done in under twenty minutes. Nisroch saw more merchants and travelers than any other city in Nidal, and its sternly efficient officials kept its traffic moving.

Isiem's first impression of the city, as their boat passed through the rain-swept walls, was of towering gloom. Nisroch was known as the Maw of Shadow, and while it did not have Pangolais's black trees to cast its inhabitants into an eternal twilight, its dense gray storm clouds had much the same effect. He wondered whether the hand of Zon-Kuthon kept those massed clouds hanging over the city; surely no natural storm would linger so long.

Spires and mausoleums crowded the banks of the city's wealthy northern quarters, throwing jagged shadows across the river. To the south, the city's laborers and commoners lived in smaller homes of basalt and dark wood. Two immense bridges, their wet black stone carved into lovingly detailed depictions of tormented petitioners, connected the halves of the city. Rainwater cascaded down the bridges' sides in shivering cascades, drenching the boats that passed below.

High above the Nisrochi nobles' silver-edged towers and iron-gated mansions, the Cathedral of Bone loomed. Sixty feet high and raised even higher on an artificial hill of stepped stone, the cathedral was a gleaming white pearl in a grim black city. It was built entirely of human bone—and the building, legend claimed, was never done. Squinting through the rain, Isiem thought he could make out a lattice of scaffolding clinging to the west side. Somewhere nearby, he knew, Kuthite torturers would be stripping more bones from victims' bodies and washing them in acid to cleanse them for the faith.

"We'll go there first," Ascaros said. "We must report to the Over-Diocesan and be formally welcomed into the city."

"And if we don't?"

"It isn't a choice."

Ascaros's prediction proved correct. No sooner had their boat docked than five Nisrochi officials approached them on the pier. Three wore the harbormaster's silver pin over their plain black robes. Two wore the spiked chain of Zon-Kuthon.

"We welcome you to Nisroch," one of the Kuthites said. She was a short, round woman, her fingernails gnawed to uneven stubs. Her eyebrows were plucked completely bald, an affectation that Isiem had noticed among several of the harbor officials as well.

The other Kuthite was a man. He seemed younger than his companion, or perhaps merely subservient to her. His eyebrows, too, were plucked bare, and his head was shaved clean—a look that did not flatter his bumpy scalp or pallid gray complexion. Although he was not fat, the skin of his jowls hung around his chin in loose, sagging folds. He carried himself hunched inward, as if perpetually cringing away from the unseen blows of fate.

Isiem disliked him instantly. But the shadowcaller kept his manner neutral as he replied: "We are grateful for your welcome."

"The Over-Diocesan invites you to pay your respects at the Cathedral," the woman said.

"We are honored to accept," Ascaros said.

"I'll have your belongings brought up shortly," the boat's captain called behind them as his passengers departed. Neither the shadowcallers nor the Kuthite clerics acknowledged his words as they crossed the rain-slick pier. All knew the captain would have been badly beaten if he had failed to observe the proper courtesies. Impoliteness was not tolerated in Nidal, least of all impoliteness to one's betters.

It was a thought that loomed large in Isiem's mind as they approached the Cathedral of Bone. A single steep, narrow staircase led to the cathedral, slicing through the immense stone steps that supported the macabre edifice.

Small shrines flanked the stairs, each attended by one to three black-clad Kuthite dedicants and an equal number of petitioners offering themselves up for a show of piety in pain. The oldest of the shrines were built entirely of human bone; the newer and poorer ones still had animal bones woven into their walls.

The suffering that took place within those shrines was voluntary—mostly—but the screams and whimpers echoed in Isiem's ears as he walked past, keeping his gaze fixed on the church's doors so he would not have to see. Iron pincers, liars' masks, thumbscrews, salt knives, branding by frost and fire... and those were the tortures people chose to undergo. There were worse things in the dungeons under the Dusk Hall, and Isiem did not doubt that there were worse yet in the depths of the cathedral. The ascent was a pointed reminder of what a breach of etiquette could cost.

It was not the Over-Diocesan who met them at the cathedral's ornate bone doors, however, but a younger priestess wrapped in a clanking mantle of chains. Deep red scratches covered every inch of her skin except for her face, creating the impression of a flayed undead creature wearing a perfect porcelain mask.

"You will be Ascaros of the Dusk Hall," she said. "Your companion?"

"Isiem, also of the Dusk Hall." Ascaros inclined his head slightly over his folded hands. Beside him, Isiem did the same. "We thank you for your welcome, but we are eager to begin our work."

"Yes. Of course. The death of Misanthe." The cleric raised her bald eyebrows. "A member of the Midnight Guard, was she not? Remind me, please: what is the Dusk Hall's interest in that?"

"She was a Midnight Guard," Ascaros said. "But she was also one of our masters. Assignment to the Midnight Guard is temporary; membership in the Dusk Hall is not. She had finished her assignment in Cheliax and was on her way back to us when she died. And," he added, as though it were an afterthought, "she was my aunt."

The priestess dismissed that bit of information with a grunt. "I suppose the Dusk Hall does have some stake in it, then. Very well. She died while clearing the Hovels. The vermin were fighting back this time, so we asked if she would assist our own efforts. She kindly agreed to assist us. Unfortunately, it seems the vermin had a nastier bite than she realized."

"My aunt was slain by... paupers?" Ascaros sounded strangled.

"Calling them paupers would be kinder than they deserve. They are wretches. Human filth. They cling to our city like barnacles to a ship, and like barnacles, they must be scraped off." The priestess shrugged. "In any case, you are welcome to go to the Hovels if you like, although no guard can be spared for you. You may also collect her belongings. They are being held in storage at the cathedral. Voraic will show you the way." She gestured to the bald, stooped man who had accompanied them from the pier. "There may be more he can tell you. He was her apprentice, and the last to see her alive."

"Were you," Ascaros said flatly, turning to the man. By his tone, he liked Voraic even less than Isiem did.

The bald Kuthite bowed his head. The silver hoops threaded through his ears clinked against one another. "Yes."

"How did she die?"

"Bravely." Voraic kept his gaze fixed downward, looking at none of them, but Isiem still caught the grimace that wracked the gray man's face as he spoke. "But badly." He hesitated. "I can take you there, if you would like to see the place."

"Show us," Ascaros said.

Coming Next Week: Further glimpses of life in one of Golarion's most horrifying cities in Chapter Two of "Misery's Mirror."

For More of Isiem's adventures, check out Nightglass, available now!

Liane Merciel is the critically acclaimed author of the Pathfinder Tales novel Nightglass—also starring Isiem—as well as the short Pathfinder Tales story "Certainty." In addition, she's published two dark fantasy novels set in her own world of Ithelas: The River Kings' Road and Heaven's Needle. For more information, visit lianemerciel.com.

Illustration by Eric Belisle.

Dragons Reloaded: Bestiary Box Preview

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

In last week's blog I covered some of our rationale for creating the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Bestiary Box, and unleashed some of the new elemental pawn art you'll find in that box. This week we are continuing our look at the new art with the most iconic enemies in fantasy—chromatic dragons!

When it came to creating the dragon pawns for this box, dragons posed a particular challenge. While the art for the dragons in the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary is great, none of those pieces were commissioned with anything like pawns in mind. Their majestic wings, razor-sharp claws, and toothy maws were designed to look scary on the printed page, but their grandeur couldn't be confined to the measurements of a pawn without cropping. And let's face it, cropped dragons just didn't look nearly as scary. We went back to the drawing board, and tasked Ben Wootten with creating awe-inspiring dragons that would fit on pawns. Personally, I think he did a phenomenal job. I think you'll agree.

Illustrations by Ben Wootten

Stephen Radney-MacFarland
Designer

Archerfeast

Monday, July 2, 2012

Back in January, when I learned that PaizoCon was the first week of July, I knew we would be tying Archerfeast into the Grand Convocation somehow. The fact that Archerfeast falls on Erastus 3rd on Golarion made for a perfect fit for today's Pathfinder Society blog post.

Managing Editor, F. Wesley Schneider, wrote the description below detailing Archerfeast, and beneath that you'll find a special Pathfinder Society Chronicle sheet you can download and apply to a Pathfinder Society character. Archerfeast is mentioned on page 249 of Pathfinder Campaign Setting: The Inner Sea World Guide.

Across Avistan, few festival days are as anticipated or celebrated as widely as Archerfeast. Despite the holiday's origins in the worship of Erastil, common countryfolk from the Lands of the Linnorm Kings to Taldor celebrate the height of summer with a day set aside for establishing new relationships, enjoying current camaraderie, and celebrating the gifts of the gods.

While the festival's traditions emphasize contests of marksmanship—still a prominent part of any Archerfeast celebration—most have expanded to exhibit talents of all types, from baking and storytelling to racing and mock combat. Aside from encouraging a fair-like atmosphere, many of the displays and competitions serve one of two secondary purposes: either as a way for merchants to show off their superior livestock and wares, or—more popularly—as a way for eligible men and women to show off to each other.

While the day's events at most Archerfeast fairs are filled with games, food, and crafts, the night brings dancing, drinking, pranks, and the crowning of the princes and princesses of spring and summer for the two single youths and two single adults who faired best in the day's events. The festivities continue late into the evening, but end promptly at midnight, so that—in true Erastilian fashion—the next day's responsibilities are not overly impeded. For those not of Erastil's flock, however, private parties, drinking, and trysting carry on long into the next morning.

Click here to download the Archerfeast 4712 Boon! - 119 KB (zip/PDF) This Boon is no longer available as of 7/23/12.

Mike Brock
Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator