Pathfinder Battles Preview: The (Goblin) Dog Days of Summer

Friday, June 29, 2012

It's 2:25 PM and I still haven't written today's Pathfinder Battles preview blog.

MUST BE SUMMER!

I love the arrival of summer here in the Pacific Northwest, which for the other 9 months of the year likes to keep itself cloaked in a mantle of soggy gray misery. Finally, the sun peeks over the mountains and through the otherwise ever-present clouds, and a bit of happiness returns to the world.

Unfortunately, I'm always too damn busy to appreciate it, because summer also means the arrival of the most hectic season for Paizo, with prep for major conventions like Gen Con and PAX eating up virtually every minute of the day. Right now we're working liked geased tinker-gnomes trying to get all our tasks accomplished for PaizoCon, which happens NEXT WEEK!

Oh. My. God.

So yeah, sorry it's taken a few extra hours of waiting for today's Pathfinder Battles goodness. I assure you (especially those of you coming to PaizoCon) that the wait will be very much worth it.

Speaking of PaizoCon, I'm pleased to announce that it's our intention to have EVERY SINGLE figure in the Rise of the Runelords Pathfinder Battles prepainted miniatures set on display at the convention store, so I encourage minis fanatics attending the show to bring cameras, because you're going to see some stuff there you've never seen before, even on this very blog! (The set will also be on full display at Gen Con, where we'll actually have the product for sale in line with its August release.)

Next week's blog will feature the set's final "mystery figure," the creature so challenging to sculpt and paint that it took us something like eleven tries to get it right. Can you guess what figure that might be?

In the meantime, here are two remaining stragglers who we haven't managed to show off yet, mostly due to bad camera angles on our original paint master shots. Somehow, our over-worked art team managed to snap a few better images of these shy characters (in their final production-run incarnations, no less), and now we're ready to reveal them to the world.

First up is the Goblin Dog, a common figure that you'll definitely want by the handful if you're running the first chapter of the Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition (now also available as an ultra-sweet Deluxe Collector's Edition).

As you can see by this critter's gross skin and gnarly teeth, "Goblin Dogs" aren't really dogs at all, but nasty rodents trained by goblins as repulsive mounts. Goblins hate real dogs, of course, but everyone needs a best friend, and these gross creatures fill the role admirably.

Next up we have Viorian Dekanti, a rare villain from the final chapter of the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path, Greg A. Vaughan's "Spires of Xin-Shalast". Viorian wields Chellan, one of the legendary Seven Swords of Sin. A champion of the campaign's final "end boss," Viorian is not one to be trifled with (though her golden armor is certainly worth a pretty penny).

Of course, if you like the looks of her, Viorian can easily double as a martial player character or any important NPC armed with a sword and wearing fancy armor.

That's it for this week. ONLY ONE MORE MINI TO GO!

Then, I suppose it'll be time to start revealing figures from the next set.... which we plan to reveal at PaizoCon!

See you there (or see you here, in upcoming weeks)!

Erik Mona
Publisher

Paizo Publishing's 10th Anniversary Retrospective—Year 4 (2006)

Battling Headwinds

Thursday, June 28, 2012

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

Paizo was optimistic heading into 2006. The previous year, we had worked very hard to build a business that could not only stand on its own, but also be innovative. We weren't out of the woods yet, but we could at least see the edge of the forest drawing ever nearer.

As I mentioned in the 2005 blog, we had decided on a six-point strategy to build a more solid foundation for Paizo. We dubbed 2006 a "retrenching year," since our plan was to continue to build upon the strategy of 2005. Many projects started in 2005 saw their fruition in 2006, and we started projects in 2006 that wouldn't see the light of day until 2007. Here's how we attacked each of our six key strategies in 2006.

• Expand our subscriber base for Dragon and Dungeon while continuing to make those businesses more efficient.

Dragon Magazine had a bit of a retrenching year too, since it was hitting its stride and things were looking good on the subscription and circulation fronts. Both the Demonomicon of Iggwilv and Core Beliefs regular series saw new installments, and the much beloved Campaign Classics themed issue returned with all-new features for every published D&D campaign setting! But the big news was Dragon 344, which celebrated the 30th Anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. For this special occasion, we asked Gary Gygax to write a new Gord the Rogue short story, Bruce Heard to revive his Voyage of the Princess Ark column, and Ed Greenwood to pen another Wizards Three short story installment.

Dungeon Magazine continued its string of amazing Adventure Path installments, finishing up the Age of Worms in Dungeon 135 with a battle against old Kyuss himself. Then in November, Dungeon 139 launched the Savage Tide Adventure Path with a return to Sasserine, a town first introduced in the Shackled City AP. In that same issue, we added to the infamous Maure Castle with a Rob Kuntz–penned adventure, "The Greater Halls."

The cover for the Savage Tide Adventure Path Player's Guide.

But the biggest news for Dragon and Dungeon came behind the scenes, and was something that the public wouldn't learn about until early 2007. In April, I'd asked Wizards of the Coast for a meeting with the following agenda:

We would like to discuss the long-term relationship with Wizards for Dragon and Dungeon magazines beyond the term of the current contract. Paizo has plans to spend money and resources to build up the magazines, but since these expenditures have a long window of monetary recovery, we are hoping to come to a consensus on how our two companies plan to work together on the magazines past next March.

Our license for publishing Dragon and Dungeon was due to expire in March 2007, and this meeting would be the first step toward negotiating a renewal of that contract. It took a while to find a time that fit everyone's schedule, and we finally had to resort to meeting by phone rather than face-to-face. On May 30, 2006 at 2 pm, I had a conference call with Wizards, and it was during this call that they let me know that they had other plans for Dragon and Dungeon; they wouldn't be renewing the license for the magazines. I personally don't remember much of my reaction, but after the call, I brought Erik in to my office and told him the news, tears streaming down my face. (Read Erik's recollection of this major event below.)

We always knew that this might be a possibility. That was, after all, one of the main reasons we had been building the other parts of our business: so we wouldn't be caught unprepared if the unthinkable were to happen. But I don't think any of us ever really thought that this was much more than a remote possibility. Dragon and Dungeon were finally firing on all cylinders and were enjoying critical acclaim that hadn't been seen in years. So this news struck us to the core. In one meeting, the last large chunk of the company that we started not quite four years before was going away. We were numb. How the heck were we going to cope with this? Frankly, it seemed impossible at the time.

I have to give Wizards of the Coast a lot of praise for how they handled the end of the license. Contractually, they only needed to deliver notice of non-renewal by the end of December 2006; without the extra seven months' notice they chose to give us, I'm not sure that Paizo could have survived. Wizards also granted our request to extend the license through August 2007 so that we could finish up the Savage Tide adventure path. This gave us quite a bit of time to figure out how we were going to cope with the end of the magazines. It would have been very easy for WotC to have handled this in a way which would have effectively left Paizo for dead—all they would have had to do was follow the letter of the contract. Instead, they treated us like the valued partner we had been, giving us the ability to both plan and execute a strategy for survival. For that, I will always be thankful.

The news caused us to kick our plans for other product lines into a higher gear. In fact, before even two hours had elapsed, we'd already scheduled an offsite meeting at my house. We knew that the key to our survival beyond Dragon and Dungeon hinged upon our mastery of creating adventures, particularly Adventure Paths. So we started to plan for what would end up being one of the most shocking announcements in the history or RPG gaming... but that tale will have to wait until the 2007 blog!

One decision we had made earlier in the year ended up helping us quite a bit in this transition. As I mentioned in a previous blog, sending renewal notices for subscriptions is a very expensive task that eats up a lot of a sub's profits, so we were trying to encourage more and more folks to manage their subscriptions on paizo.com. In April, we had unveiled month-to-month subscriptions, which allowed subscribers to be charged for an issue each month instead of prepaying for an entire year—to our knowledge, this was virtually unprecedented in the magazine industry. Sending magazines until the subscriber told us to stop meant that we didn't have to send renewal notices, and that was helping our bottom line. We had no idea at the time, of course, but this system would be our salvation the following year—it meant that there were were a lot fewer people we'd have to refund subscription money to when the magazines ended. For the first part of 2006, month-to-month subs were offered in addition to the usual 1-, 2-, and 3-year subscriptions; soon after we learned that the magazines were ending, we discontinued the long-term subs and added a new six-month sub.

There were also some major personnel changes for the two magazines. With the departure of Keith Strohm early in the year, Erik Mona was promoted to Publisher. Erik and I have been working together since the late 1990s, and have developed a very similar mindset when it comes to the business end of things: perfect for somebody overseeing the entire publishing arm of Paizo. In June, we promoted James Jacobs to Editor-in-Chief of Dungeon Magazine, filling the spot Erik vacated. Erik remained the Editor-in-Chief of Dragon Magazine until it's end.

The final Dungeons & Dragons book published by Paizo, The Art of Dragon Magazine Hardcover.

• Expand our license for Dragon and Dungeon to create official non-magazine Dungeons & Dragons products—especially those we could base on in-demand but out-of-print material from the magazines.

Following up on the success of the Shackled City hardcover in 2005, we managed to publish two more D&D products before our license expired. The first was Monster Ecologies, a compilation of the very popular article series from Dragon Magazine that found its genesis all the way back in Dragon 72 in 1983! We compiled the best of these articles and updated them for D&D 3.5. The final D&D book we published was the Art of Dragon hardcover, released on the last day of 2006! Dragon had launched the careers of many of the most famous fantasy artists, and this book was a celebration of that artwork. We spent hours poring through old magazines and looking through boxes of old transparencies from TSR, culling the best and putting them into a book beautifully designed by Sean Glenn. All in all, a fitting end to our licensed D&D book line.

• Create generic gaming accessories that would appeal to our RPG customers.

At the end of 2005, we had just launched the GameMastery Map Pack line. 2006 saw five more packs: Graveyard, Countryside, Fortress, Haunted Mansion, and Dungeon Chambers.

In March, we launched the GameMastery Item Card line with Item Pack One. Item Cards were designed to provide GMs with beautiful full-color cards to represent the loot they give out in games. Players could then use the cards to keep track of their inventory rather than scribbling things on their character sheet. Later in the year, we released two expansions in booster pack form. Hero's Hoard and Relics of War turned out to be very divisive, with many customers complaining about the randomization and collectibility of the cards, including special foils. Paizo had gone with the booster format in response to some discussions with our distributors, but it almost killed the Item Card line. (In 2007, we went back to the non-random deck format that continues today; there have been 19 total releases in this line so far.)

In December, we also released the GameMastery Campaign Workbook, a pocket-sized journal for GMs to record a wide variety of information for their campaigns. Unfortunately, the glue used to bind the book was faulty, and we had to to initiate Paizo's first (and so far, only) major product return program, exchanging glue-bound copies with new spiral-bound copies early the following year.

Though this doesn't adhere to the "generic" part of the goal, we released a line of unpainted metal miniatures for Monte Cook's Ptolus campaign. Erik has a longstanding friendship with Monte, having played in his Ptolus campaign for years. When Monte came by the office to show off some of the incredible artwork going into his magnum opus, we just had to jump in and make miniatures for it! We had already started making metal minis as part of the Compleat Encounter line, so it was fairly easy to get the Ptolus line going. We made twenty miniatures over the next year or so, and when we started to create our own campaign setting in 2007, Monte allowed us to add the figures from this line to the minis we already had from the Compleat Encounter line, creating the Pathfinder Chronicles Miniatures line. (Two of the Ptolus miniatures were deemed too different to be included in our setting: the Arcane Pistoleer and the Leonine Warrior.)

• Expand Paizo into areas of gaming outside of RPGs that would spread our risk around.

The first Titanic product, Kill Doctor Lucky.

As I mentioned in the 2005 blog, we'd started Titanic Games, a sister company to Paizo, partly as a means to publish some of the more successful Cheapass Games in high-quality editions. The first product from Titanic was the Kill Doctor Lucky Deluxe Edition, released in October 2006. With a full-color fold-out board of the Lucky mansion and painted wooden tokens to represent the characters, it was an instant success, and continues to sell well for us; it's now in its third printing! We also started work on a couple other Titanic games that would appear in 2007.

• Use our strong position in the distribution chain to help other publishers get their products into game stores, taking a bit off the top for our efforts.

We were fortunate to add several wonderful sales partners to our roster in 2006, companies which we are still representing into the distribution trade today!

In January, we added Cheapass Games to our distribution efforts—a logical move due to the formation of Titanic Games. Instantly, Paizo's catalog grew by more than 75 products.

We also joined up with Dead Gentlemen Productions, the folks who created the critically acclaimed movie The Gamers. As big fans of their movie, we were super excited to help get the DVD into game stores around the world.

We'd met Steel Sqwire at Gen Con that year, and we loved their Flip-Mats and their wire area-of-effect templates. We started off simply distributing their products, but we eventually added them to our own GameMastery line; to date, we've released 44 different Flip-Mats.

Paizo's 2006 Gen Con crew. We shared our booth with Looney Labs; they're the folks in the white lab coats.

At the end of the year, we also started selling an accessory from Open Mind Games that also ended up becoming a GameMastery staple: the Combat Pad, which revolutionized tracking initiative with an innovative write-on/wipe-off magnet system.

• Increase paizo.com sales by expanding the scope of products available on the website through partnerships with other publishers, who would in turn bring in new customers for us.

The paizo.com online store had a number of huge milestones in 2006, the biggest of which was the addition of the old TSR PDFs. Because of our connection with WotC through Dragon and Dungeon, Wizards was very open to letting us sell the whole catalog of PDFs. This created a lot of buzz among our community, and the cash flow was very welcome.

Our new web store manager, Phil Lacefield, Jr scored us another D&D coup—Milton Bradley's Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Adventure Board Game and its two expansions, Eternal Winter and Forbidden Forest! This board game wasn't generally available in the United States, but Phil found a source in the UK that let us bring these cool D&D collectibles to folks here in the US.

Products like these helped paizo.com sales nearly double in 2006. This led to myself, Vic Wertz, and Jeff Alvarez augmenting the warehouse crew as they fulfilled orders, especially during the Christmas season.

At Gen Con, Paizo raked in 4 golds and a silver at the ENnie Awards:

• Best Cartography: Silver Medal for The Shackled City Adventure Path
• Best Adventure: Gold Medal for The Shackled City Adventure Path
• Best Campaign Setting/Setting Supplement: Gold Medal for The Shackled City Adventure Path
• Best Supplement: Gold Medal for Dragon Compendium, Vol. I
• Best Free Product/Web Supplement: Gold Medal for Age of Worms Overload

Lisa, James, Erik and Jason at the 2006 ENnies.

Sarah Robinson snaps a photo of Wes reacting to his White Elephant gift at the Paizo holiday party. Web Store Manager Phil Lacefield Jr. Jr. Jr. throws a... um, let's go with "Vulcan gang sign."

With all of the successes that we had in 2006, it should have been a year of rejoicing; Jeff, Erik, Vic and myself had been keeping the cancellation of Dragon and Dungeon to ourselves as the four of us planned out how Paizo would survive this turn of events. Eventually, we could keep silent no longer and we brought the rest of the employees up to speed. One of our biggest fears was that we were going to lose a bunch of employees as they headed out to look for more stable employment, but we needn't have worried: not a single employee left the company once the cat was out of the bag, a true testament to the loyalty and dedication of our staff.

By the end of the year, our plans were in full swing, and I sent a long email to our lawyer asking him to look into trademark registration for something called "Pathfinder." But that's a story for next year...

Employees who started in 2006 (in order of hiring date):
Phil Lacefield Jr, Web Store Manager
Michelle Barrett, Special Project Coordinator

Employees who left in 2006 (in order of their end date):
Rob Head
Keith Strohm

Lisa Stevens
CEO

Paizo 2006: Behind the Closed Door

As summer 2006 approached, I had plenty of reason to be optimistic about the future. Paizo had (barely) survived the loss of Star Wars Insider, Amazing Stories, and Undefeated magazines, but things on the Dungeons & Dragons front were considerably sunnier, or at least I thought so at the time. For much of the previous year, then-publisher Keith Strohm had been warning me that the tea leaves suggested we might soon become "the Dragon and Dungeon company," and while that represented a significant reduction in the company's original scope, it did put the focus purely on magazines that were under my personal control, and I felt confident that the teams working with me on those magazines could handle a little adversity. We'd just completed a creative relaunch and visual re-design of both magazines that was generating significant good will with an approving audience, and I had big plans for the two magazines I had read for virtually my entire life. To make things even more interesting, Keith left the company to pursue a new relationship in Chicago, and I was promoted from editor-in-chief to publisher of the whole company. I was eager to apply the same improvement standards that we brought to the magazines to the entire company. Our relationship with Wizards of the Coast was going strong, and I was ready to make "the Dragon and Dungeon" company a creative and financial success.

Sure, we were approaching the end of the Dragon and Dungeon licenses, too, but with the popular relaunches behind us, subscriptions on the rise, and powerful wind in our sails from the Shackled City and Age of Worms Adventure Paths, there seemed little reason for concern. In the five years since we'd started the company, every single issue of both magazines had sailed through approval meetings with our pals at Wizards of the Coast (in all that time, the only final layout item they ever rejected was a single panel in a cartoon strip), most of whom were former colleagues and personal friends. Heck, several of them used to work in the periodicals department that eventually became Paizo, or had left Paizo to rejoin the mothership, so going over there for business meetings always seemed like a bit of a reunion. I was riding high in the early couple of months of my publisher-hood, and although Paizo faced some clear challenges, I had big plans for the future.

Unfortunately, Wizards of the Coast had big plans for the future as well, and they didn't involve working with Paizo Publishing. In fact, they didn't involve printed magazines at all. Much to my surprise, our 2006 year of "retrenchment" and building on past successes was about to become the most stressful year in the company's history, and one of the biggest turning points for my own career.

A ratty old collection of Dragon magazines stuffed in the back of a comic longbox I received as a gift as a grade-schooler cemented my love of D&D and inspired me to a lifelong dream of editing Dragon magazine one day. From that point in about third grade, virtually every academic and professional decision I made was aimed at learning the necessary skills and making the right contacts to one day put me in the editor-and-chief seat at Dragon magazine. My heroes were people like Kim Mohan and Roger E. Moore, and I watched the careers of folks like Wolfgang Baur and Dave Gross, studying them for patterns and paths others had taken to the position I so desired. By 2006 I'd finally clawed my way into that role, the culmination of more than 20 years of hard work and concentrated effort. I had finally arrived, and my preference was to remain editor of Dragon as long as humanly possible. I wanted it to be my career. I wanted to leave a lasting mark on the magazine that had been such an important part of my life. For someone who had lived so much of that life dedicated to a plan designed to get me to exactly where I was, I hadn't really planned much about what might happen after Dragon magazine.

That seemed like a solid strategy until the day in late spring when Lisa Stevens called me into her office to discuss a phone call she'd just had with the higher-ups at Wizards of the Coast. As soon as I saw the tears streaking down her face, I suspected that the call had not gone quite as expected. Lisa was in shock. Not only would Wizards not be renewing our license to create Dragon and Dungeon magazines, but they were going to cease publishing the magazines entirely. There was some vague chat about Wizards wanting to start a kind of online subscription program tied to their upcoming edition (something they'd been very cagey about, and about which we'd only heard the barest of rumors by this point), but the upshot was that in just a few months, the magazines as printed products would be dead and buried.

And I was the one who would get to shovel the grave dirt onto their corpses.

Not exactly the role I had been prepping for since third grade. While Lisa's tears showed her human concern for the business we had built and the employees she referred to as family, I wasn't quite ready to think about any of those big-picture concerns, yet. I was still fixated on the massive sense of rejection I felt from folks who had been my coworkers at Wizards, and whom I still considered close friends. I was worried about my own career, and about the fate of two pillars of D&D that had helped support the brand (and my own gaming hobby) for decades. I couldn't even contemplate a world without Dragon and Dungeon magazines, even as I had just been told that world was coming. Soon.

I don't remember a lot of the details about that conversation in Lisa's office. I do remember numbly wandering out of the building to take a quick walk to gather my thoughts. It was a gorgeous day, and I'd lately been in the habit of taking a half-mile walk on my lunch hour, so my slipping out must not have seemed odd to my co-workers, who had no idea what had just transpired. I walked down Richards Road to an old abandoned residential hospital that had a nice lawn behind it facing a gorgeous wall of trees. I sat down on that lawn for a half-hour, going through the ramifications of the day's news, and building a huge list of questions and next-steps in my head.

What will happen to Paizo?
Will the members of the editorial staff land on their feet if the company collapses?
How do we let them know? When?
How in the world am I going to explain this to the readers?
How can we end Dungeon magazine in the middle of the Savage Tide Adventure Path?
Will the prisoners who send me mail every week blame me for canceling the magazines?
Where do we go from here?

In the days and weeks to come, a lot of those answers grew more and more clear. Paizo would go on. Once we came up with the idea behind a "monthly Adventure Path book" (not yet called Pathfinder), the management team resolved to chart a path to the company's survival that kept every employee intact. We'd already experienced a bunch of layoffs, and to transition the company into its new form in 2007, we'd need all hands on deck. To their credit, Wizards of the Coast graciously extended our license by a few months so we could bring the Savage Tide Adventure Path to its proper conclusion, and even though it's fair to say things between the two companies were very awkward for a while, everyone still remained friendly and cordial. I wrote a cover-my-ass editorial directly to the prisoners, laying out their importance to the magazine, lest I incur some unfortunate vendetta.

Telling the editorial staff was the most difficult part of the transition for me. It took us several weeks, perhaps even months, before we had our business plan for what would come next, and in that time we decided not to tell the editorial staff about the potentially fatal blow to the company (holding that secret for so long was probably the most soul-warping experience of my life). We were worried that once the staff knew the end was in sight, they might abandon ship for a more stable career somewhere else (perhaps even at Wizards of the Coast). And we needed the staff focused on the magazines if we were going to bring the Paizo Era to a close with the style and care that we knew these magazines required.

So it was with a lot of trepidation that I walked into the "editorial pit" and closed the door behind me. That door had only closed once before, when I had to tell the staff about the loss of Amazing Stories and Undefeated several months earlier, and all knew it was a grim omen. Everyone gathered around the editors' cubes, and I dropped the bomb as gently as I could. They had concerns and questions of their own, it's fair to say, and everyone in that room could probably write an essay as long as this one to explain what was going through their own minds upon hearing the news.

I know what was going through my mind. "You guys are the best. The magazines are better now than they've ever been. And we're about to make something even better together, to chart a new future for the company where we will be masters of our own destiny. But you've got to stay at Paizo for us to pull it off. Please don't leave. Please don't leave. Please don't leave."

Six years later, it seems almost silly that I was so concerned. The vast majority of the folks in that room still work at Paizo today. James Jacobs, Jason Bulmahn, Wesley Schneider, James Sutter, Sarah Robinson. That's basically my editorial management team these days at Paizo, and they were all there that day, all scared out of their minds, but all ready for what was right around the corner.

These folks are among my best friends, and among the strongest employees Paizo has ever had. Yes, I was worried about a life without Dragon and Dungeon magazines, but I was even more worried about a Paizo without these pivotal employees.

They all stuck around, and they've all made innumerable contributions to Paizo Publishing and the project that would eventually become Pathfinder. I tend to think of that day "behind the closed door" as a real bonding moment for the staff, and the first day of the new Paizo Publishing.

Erik Mona
Publisher

Nightglass Sample Chapter

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

by Liane Merciel

In Nightglass, a young boy in the shadowy nation of Nidal is taken from his home and trained by the sadistic magical academy known as the Dusk Hall, transformed into a living weapon in the service of the dark god Zon-Kuthon. Many years later, now grown to manhood, Isiem is sent to Cheliax to help put down a rebellion by the winged, inhuman strix. Yet as he conducts his grisly work, Isiem begins to question his life under the shadow of the Midnight Lord, and wonder who the real monsters are...

Chapter Thirteen: Reprisals

The whooping woke him.

It had been the better part of a week since Isiem had talked to Orwyn and the others around the timber wagons. Both he and Oreseis had spent the intervening days asking questions under a succession of guises. Mostly Isiem chose illusionary identities whose mysterious disappearances, like the Pezzacki half-orc's, could easily be laid at the Hellknights' door; when such people vanished, it burnished their knights' reputation for ruthlessness and raised few questions about where they had gone. Sometimes, so that people would not wonder why the Nidalese never showed their faces, he went undisguised.

But whatever face he chose, and whomever he approached, Isiem learned little about the strix. Wild rumors and speculation abounded, but accurate observations seemed scarcer than waterfalls in the desert.

Some said the strix were winged devils in more than name—that the diabolists of House Thrune had deliberately summoned them from Hell and set them loose on the people of western Cheliax so that they could offer protection from the threat they themselves had created. Some said the mine overseers had struck a secret bargain with the strix, allowing them to feast on lazy and unruly workers in exchange for leaving the others unmolested. A few claimed—never when they knew Isiem was listening—that the strix were not living creatures at all, but rather Nidalese thralls who had escaped from the shadowcallers' control and hid in the deep recesses of Devil's Perch because no light could reach them there.

The only sure thing anyone knew was that the strix had murdered Chastain, her daughter, and everyone accompanying them—and that the outrage demanded retribution.

That thought leaped to the fore of Isiem's mind when he heard the whoops that morning. Pushing off his blankets, he went to the window and pulled the curtain to the side.

The street below was crowded with cheering men gathered around four sweat-stained riders on lathered horses. A dark-winged figure staggered on foot between the riders, and two more broken, winged forms dragged in the dust behind them. The ropes that bound the corpses were not tied around their ankles, but threaded through gashes in their calves.

Fastening his shadowcaller's robe as he went, Isiem hurried down the stairs.

Every citizen in Crackspike seemed to have mobbed the street. He glimpsed the Hellknights pushing forward through the fray, Posie's girls leaning bare-shouldered on their balcony, and miners and laborers who had come fresh from their work, wearing clothes sweated through and caked with dust so many times that the men seemed made of mud.

The creature who had attracted all their notice seemed oblivious to the crowd. The strix hobbled between the riders with his head lowered between his enormous, bedraggled black wings, unresponsive to the curses hurled his way or the occasional gob spat on him by a spectator. The riders and their horses, spattered with similar missiles, were less restrained; they answered with imprecations fiery enough to burn a Hellknight's ears, or—if the spitter was foolish enough to be identifiable, and in reach—vicious blows from their quirts.

Isiem ignored them, along with the occasional shrieks from the bystanders they struck. It was the strix that interested him.

This one was a juvenile, he guessed, and male. Head to toe, it was the color of coal. Its eyes were enormous and eerily luminous, reflecting a green-violet iridescence in the bright hot sun. There were no whites or pupils that Isiem could see, although it was difficult to be sure with the creature's head bowed. Its ears were thin and sharp, lying flat against its skull. It went barefoot, its toes and fingers alike tipped with short translucent talons, and its clumsy pigeon-like gait suggested that it did not often find reason to walk upon the ground.

Above all, however, it was the strix's wings that commanded attention. Bent and broken, they still towered over the men on horseback. The feathers were a glossy, oily black, touched with a peacock shimmer like the plumage on a loon's throat. There was an undeniable grandeur to those wings, even as the creature who bore them tottered crippled and diminished on the earth.

"How did you catch him?" one of the whores called down.

"Hunting," the lead rider shouted back. "This one"—he jerked the strix's rope as if the creature were a balky dog on a leash"—thought he'd catch a few of our mules for dinner. That was his mistake. The other two came to free him. That was theirs. They didn't care to be taken alive, so I thought it only right to oblige them."

"Are there any others?" Paralictor Erevullo asked.

The rider hesitated, winding and unwinding the reins around his hand several times before answering. "I can't be sure," he admitted, "but I don't think so. These two rushed in blind, they were so upset we'd caught their friend. Any others would've done the same, if they were out there. Anyway, we didn't see no more."

Erevullo nodded curtly. He gestured with a gauntleted hand to the battered strix. "We will take that one. In the name of Her Imperial Majestrix Abrogail II."

The rider opened his mouth to protest, then closed it, returning the Hellknight's nod even more brusquely. "What about the others?"

"Sell them to your tavern to stuff as a showpiece. Cut them apart and sell the pieces as keepsakes. Or just throw them by the roadside and let dogs feast on the corpses." Erevullo shrugged. "They are of no use to us. Do as you will." The paralictor turned his flinty eyes on Isiem. "It is said that the Kuthites of Nidal are unrivaled in extracting information from their charges. I trust this reputation is well founded."

"It is," Isiem answered.

"They don't speak no civilized tongue," the rider interjected. "Just screeches and devil squawks. We couldn't get nothing sensible out of none of them."

"Language is no obstacle," Isiem said. He turned to Erevullo. "Is there somewhere we might work without interruption?"

The paralictor waited for the rider to untie the strix's rope from his saddle horn. Upon receiving it, Erevullo tossed the mudstained hemp to Isiem. "One of the alehouses has a cellar. They were using it as a dungeon of sorts. It's yours." He motioned to one of the other Hellknights, a signifer whose clean-shaven scalp was tattooed with spiked swirls of red and black. "Odarro. Show the shadowcallers where they will work."

"This way." The bald signifer turned on his heel, leaving the riders and the crowd to look on in confusion that soon turned to abuse of the two remaining strix. Whether their victims were alive or not, the people of Crackspike seemed all too happy to beat them and spit on their feathered remains.

Tugging his captive along behind him, Isiem left them to their sport.

The cellar Erevullo had spoken of was beneath the Long-Bottomed Lady, the largest of Crackspike's three ramshackle taverns. It was a cramped and dingy space, illumined by wobbly shafts of light that spilled through the tavern's floorboards. Barrels of beer and jars of white whisky crowded every available inch. A coating of sandy grit clouded the vessels, although the tavern always drank through its stock within days.

It was only on account of the liquor that the owners of the place had undertaken the trouble of digging a cellar and laying in a wooden floor. Spirits were unconscionably expensive in Crackspike, which had to import all its necessities across miles of hard road. The owners of the Long-Bottomed Lady wanted to protect their investment, and the easiest way to keep thirsty miners from stealing their beer was to sit on it.

Isiem wondered whether his work would dent their appetites. He doubted it. If anything, strix blood seemed to whet thirsts in Crackspike. And there would likely be a great deal of blood before he was done.

He wanted to begin gently, though. Confidences won through trust were worth more than secrets extracted through torture; the latter were often fragmentary and peppered with lies. Many Kuthites chose to rely on torture anyway, but Isiem valued effectiveness above piety.

The strix are proud warriors—for all the good that does them...

The cellar had no chairs. He rolled two of the smaller barrels from their nooks, arranging them so that they faced one another across a short space. Touching the small clay talisman of a ziggurat in his pocket, Isiem murmured the words that would grant him the gift of tongues. He'd prepared the spell with the intention of questioning some of the miners whose Taldane was shaky, but it would serve as well with the strix.

"Speak to me," he said. The words had an odd, doubled echo as they left his lips. Isiem heard his own voice clearly, but just as clear were the stretched, shrill vowels and harsh plosives of the strix's tongue. He was never sure what the listener heard—but it hardly mattered, as long as he was understood. "What is your name?"

The strix gave him a hostile, unblinking stare. It did not sit on the barrel as Isiem did, but perched on top, its clawed toes grasping the wooden edge. In this light its eyes showed no iridescence; they were yellow as a hawk's. Faint striations of darker gold, converging in the center of each eye, expanded and contracted as it breathed.

"You should answer me." Isiem drew the holy symbol of Zon-Kuthon out from under his shirt and let it rest pointedly upon his chest. "Sooner or later, you must. And ‘later' will come at a cost."

"I am not afraid. Pain is nothing." The strix's voice had the same odd echo as his own: familiar human words twinned to piercing shrills and whistles only barely recognizable as speech. Its true voice seemed extraordinarily hoarse; judging from the chapped skin around the strix's lipless mouth and the sunken, bruised-looking circles around its eyes, that was a symptom of its recent hard use rather than the creature's natural tone.

It made the creature's bravado even more wearying. The strix would break. Under the ministrations of a Pangolais-trained torturer, all men broke. And all dwarves, and all orcs. A strix would be no different, however alien its appearance.

Isiem had had his fill of breaking brave rebels in Westcrown. It was tedious, the progression from braggadocio to stoicism to abject begging. Such men clung to loyalty and principle as though it were a raft that could save them. It never did, but the Nidalese wizard had long lost his taste for snapping their fingers to make them let go.

"I could show you otherwise very quickly," Isiem said, "but I will give you the chance to help yourself first. Again: what is your name?"

"Kirraak," the strix cried. Whether it was a name or a curse, the spell didn't translate it.

Isiem decided to accept it as a name. "Kirraak," he repeated, altering the sound to fit on a human tongue. "How were you captured?"

For a long time the strix did not answer. Its chest heaved with silent, desperate breaths. Then it cocked its head downward and veiled its eyes with semitransparent membranes that slid across them from the side, instead of lowering vertically like its true eyelids. "Stupidity. They left a hurt mule behind. I wanted it. Some of their dogs wanted it too. I was butchering the dead mule when the dogs came upon me from behind. They kept me from flying." The strix motioned toward one of the black wings hanging broken from its back. Up close, it smelled of dust and wild oily feathers and a rank undercurrent of infection. "I could not escape when the men came back to see what their dogs were quarreling over."

"And your companions?"

"Untie me." The strix lifted its head and held its arms out, showing him its rope-chafed wrists. The coarse hemp was spotted with blood, red as Isiem's own. "Untie me, and I will say."

Kirraak tensed as Isiem drew a small knife to cut its bonds. The muscles at the bases of its wings flexed, and it crouched slightly, gathering its strength. Isiem noted its tension but continued sawing at the rope.

He wasn't surprised when the strix attacked. He was surprised at how fast it was. Isiem was already ducking away when Kirraak snapped the last few strands between its wrists, but he barely had time to put a barrel between them before the strix seized a nearby bottle of brandy and hurled it at his head. The bottle shattered on the wall inches away, raining liquor and glass shards. One splinter nicked Isiem's chin, another his cheek.

"Krevaar!" the strix screamed. "I tell you nothing!"

Isiem didn't waste his breath on a reply. He shielded his eyes and dodged behind a second barrel. Another bottle hurtled past, clipping the side of his head, but the strix itself did not come. Glancing back, Isiem realized that the strix's wings gave him the advantage in this confined space; Kirraak flinched every time the wounded appendages struck anything, and the creature could hardly move without smacking its massive wings into a wall or keg.

It had fashioned a crude sort of knife from the remains of a broken bottle, though, and Isiem guessed that might prove more lethal than its ineptly thrown missiles. If the strix got close enough to use it.

He kicked a wine rack toward his adversary, sending bottles tumbling everywhere. Two of them slammed into Kirraak's infected wounds, eliciting an ear-splitting shriek and causing the strix to drop its improvised blade.

Isiem seized the chance. Thrusting a hand in the strix's direction, he chanted quickly, nearly tripping over the familiar words in his haste. Magic gathered in him like lightning and lanced out, surrounding the strix in a crackling black halo. Needles of dark energy stabbed into Kirraak.

The strix collapsed, keening in agony. Its makeshift knife cracked under its body, cutting into the creature's arm and chest, but it hardly seemed to notice this insult compared to the wracking pain of Isiem's spell. As the strix's shrieks gave way to whimpers, and then into insensible sobs, Isiem straightened and brushed the glass flinders from his hair.

"You should have answered my questions," he told the strix without rancor. He had not, of course, really expected that Kirraak would. The rebels in Westcrown seldom did; why would a strix be any different? This was just another step in their dance, predictable and inevitable.

Kirraak made no answer. Isiem hadn't expected one. He picked through the shattered glass and liquor pooled around the semiconscious strix, selecting several of the longest, smoothest fragments and laying them atop a nearby barrel. He was careful to arrange them where the shafts of wintry sunlight made them glint in the cellar's gloom.

When he had all the shards he needed, Isiem retied the crippled strix's arms and tossed the rope over a rafter, hoisting Kirraak up onto its clawed toes. Standing in that partly suspended position wouldn't hurt immediately, but in a few minutes it would start to ache, and in an hour or so it would become unbearable.

As an afterthought, and as a courtesy to the Long-Bottomed Lady's guests, Isiem gagged the strix with the wine-sodden remnants of a burlap sack. Then he started another, simpler incantation, and passed a pale hand over the stained rips in his robe. The torn threads knitted back together; the stains faded from the cloth. In moments there was no evidence of his prisoner's defiance.

The illusion of infallibility was crucial to the fear a skillful torturer inspired. Nothing his victims did could be seen to hurt him, or even interrupt his plans. Everything that happened in his domain had to serve his purpose. The strix's struggles, the shattered bottles, the wasted brandy—all of it, as far as the world would ever know, was part of Isiem's designs.

Isiem picked up a sliver of glass and drove it through the joint of the strix's infected wing. Pus and dark blood spurted out. Kirraak screamed again, weakly; its head jerked up once and fell back down, limp.

Coldly Isiem took a second sliver of glass from the barrel and held it poised, waiting for the strix's eyes to flutter open again.

Everything had its purpose.

∗ ∗ ∗

"Why did you let it fight back?" Oreseis asked.

Isiem shrugged, spooning pork-flecked oat mush from the pot the Hellknights had brought up for them. To preserve their air of inhumanity, the Nidalese did not eat where anyone might see them; instead they requisitioned food from the Hellknights and sent their waste back the same way. The subterfuge worked well enough, but he could wish the Hellknights indulged in better fare. The Chelaxians subsisted on iron rations boiled in conjured water: oat mush, barley porridge, wheat gruel dotted with shreds of dried apples or rock-hard sausage. Practical, and perhaps good for discipline, but even by the standards of a Nidalese ascetic, a Hellknight's trail dinner was a sorry meal.

Still, he'd choked down worse. Isiem thrust his spoon into the gruel and sat on the side of his bed. "I always give them the chance to fight."

Oreseis had already finished his own meal. He sat with his spellbook propped up on bent knees, making a half-hearted pretense of studying the next day's magic. "But why?"

"So I can be justified in what comes after." Seeing that the other shadowcaller did not understand, Isiem sighed and set his spoon down. "By giving my captives a choice, I give them responsibility for what follows. If they choose to answer readily, they escape pain. If they choose defiance, they suffer for it ...but they know that it was their choice."

"How virtuous," Oreseis said, smirking.

"Maybe." Isiem swallowed a mouthful of gruel, trying not to taste it. The pork, somehow soggy and tough at the same time, actually made it worse. "But it is useful. Men who feel culpable for their own suffering are conflicted. Guilty, angry, distracted. Easier to break." He took another bite, wondering if Oreseis would believe the lie.

It was easier to break a man who felt he'd brought his own woes upon himself. But not precisely for the reasons he'd given.

The true reason Isiem gave them the chance to fight was because putting the choice on the victim—putting the fault on the victim—removed it from his own conscience. Framing the torture as the consequence of the victim's decision, rather than his own, absolved the torturer of guilt. And after Westcrown, Isiem could not work without that absolution.

Oreseis closed his book and stretched his legs. "Erevullo wants one of us to help his signifers enchant their devilstongue relay." Seeing Isiem's puzzlement, he added: "It's how they intend to communicate with Citadel Enferac while the passes are snowed in. Evidently their usual methods tend to get intercepted by strix spears."

"So I've been told. What's this relay?"

The younger shadowcaller shrugged. "I didn't see the thing clearly when they were unloading it, and of course its magic is unfinished, but it appears to be a brazier of gold and iron, set with rubies and black stones. Obsidian, maybe. I couldn't see clearly. Erevullo told me that they burn the tongues of devils in its flames, and thus carry their messages through Hell back to Citadel Enferac, where other braziers exist to receive the infernal words."

"Can anyone use it, or just diabolists? Does every relay communicate with every other? How much of a delay is there between sending a message and receiving one?"

Oreseis gave him an incredulous look. "How would I know? I've never used it. I haven't even seen it in any meaningful way. But obviously we should learn more."

"Yes." Isiem considered it for a moment. "Offer to assist the Hellknights with their relay. Learn what you can. The Umbral Court will be grateful for your report."

Oreseis tilted his head slightly, studying him. "You're the better wizard."

"Making you the less obvious spy."

"And the less adept one." The younger wizard's mouth twisted into an expression that was not quite grimace and not quite smile. "Don't mistake me. I'm honored that you offer me the opportunity. But should I miss some detail that you would have caught, the Umbral Court will be displeased with us both. I cannot imagine the relay is that simple, or Erevullo would not have asked us to help with it—nor would he be so cavalier about giving us the chance to study it."

"Or he wants us to take note of Citadel Enferac's efficiency," Isiem said pointedly, "so that we understand how valuable they are as allies and how dangerous as enemies. We could second-guess his motives for hours and it wouldn't matter. What matters is that we have the opportunity to learn more about this device, and you have the skill to study it without arousing suspicion." He softened his tone slightly. "You do have the skill, you know. The Umbral Court would not have tasked you with this assignment if you were lacking."

"Why won't you do it?"

Because I don't want to go back to Nidal. Knowing a secret valuable to either the Hellknights or the Umbral Court would give them a reason to hunt him down, and Isiem intended to offer them none. But what he said was: "Because I have a strix to break."

"Ah." Oreseis nodded. "That need not delay you long. There is a quicker way. Quicker, and holier."

"Oh?"

The younger shadowcaller stood, put his spellbook away, and retrieved something else from his pack: a round object, about the size of his hand, muffled in black velvet.

He held the nightglass up, still veiled. "Send one to the shadow, and he will give us all his kin. Another nation under Zon-Kuthon."

Purchase the whole novel here.

Coming Next Week: A brand new, standalone story from Isiem's training at the Dusk Hall!

Liane Merciel is the critically acclaimed author of the independent fantasy novels The River Kings' Road and Heaven's Needle, both set in her world of Ithelas, as well as the Pathfinder Tales short story "Certainty,". She is a practicing lawyer and lives in Philadelphia with her husband Peter, resident mutts Pongu and Crookytail, and a rotating cast of foster furballs. For more information, visit lianemerciel.com.

Illustration by Eric Belisle.

Elementary Solutions: Bestiary Box Preview

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

While I enjoy painting miniatures, and I'm a fast painter, I'll be the first to admit that painting minis is a time-consuming art. GMing takes a lot of time all by itself and not everyone has the time or talent to make minis fit the evocative stories their imaginations conjure. Also, minis can be expensive. Even with the release of the Pathfinder Battles minis line, we realize that sometimes cash-strapped GMs needed a less-expensive way to make their game tables look as exciting as the stories in their head.

Enter pawns. These were first released with the Pathfinder Beginner Box, and once GMs everywhere got their hands on these easy and inexpensive ways to populate their Flip-Mats and Map Packs, we knew folks would want more.

That's why we started working on the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Bestiary Box. This set is chock-full of over 300 tokens from the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary ready to punch out, slide on a base, and challenge your player characters.

Utilizing much of the art from the Bestiary, we were confronted by many art challenges in populating this box. Some of the art from that book just didn't fit templates for the pawns. Other times we lacked art for some of the monsters presented in the book. What was the solution? More art!

Here's the first preview of some of the new art for the Bestiary Box—elementals. In the coming weeks we'll look at some more of the new art for this set. Until then, enjoy these elemental gems.

Illustrations by Tyler Walpole

Stephen Radney-MacFarland
Designer

Grand Convocation Preview Highlights

Monday, June 25, 2012

This week’s blog is not only going to be my last sneak peak blog for the Grand Convocation, but is also going to be a change of pace from our last few, in-character updates on the upcoming Grand Convocation. Today we’re going to talk about it from an event standpoint.

For those who don’t know, the 2012 Grand Convocation will be running at PaizoCon, and will be the premiere Pathfinder Society event. What we haven’t discussed in detail is exactly what the event will comprise, so today I’m going to talk about that!

The Grand Convocation takes place Friday evening. Check-in for the event will begin at 6:30 P.M., giving players time to get in while GMs and volunteers finish up their prep. Each player will get a nametag, along with a special faction mission for the event.

At 7 P.M. the Grand Convocation officially opens. From here players will be able to participate in a series of ongoing events:

Side Tables: Each side table will give players a relatively quick event to experience, and each table may award a special Chronicle sheet depending on how well the players did during the event. These events may also be staffed by important NPCs, so in order to complete some faction missions, the players will need to attend these events and meet with the NPC.

Quests: Throughout the Convocation, venture-captains will be recruiting parties for dangerous missions. Players can expect to join a quest while they are waiting for the side tables, or resting and relaxing at the Pathfinder Social. Each player can expect a 45-minute to 1.5-hour event that awards a Chronicle sheet for completing the quest.

Pathfinder Social: As a rest-and-relaxation area, the Pathfinder Social will also have timed events occur. Players can interact in a live-action environment, without any enforced rules system governing their actions. This is a non-combat zone. Several faction-mission-related objectives will be found here.

Faction Missions: Each faction present at the Convocation will have a specific agenda, and players will be asked to aid their faction in promoting this agenda. We’re going to keep the specifics on the faction missions a mystery for now, but the results of these missions will directly impact a small part of Season 4 of Pathfinder Society!

Surprises: There are also a few other things planned but I don’t want to spoil all the surprises. Suffice it to say, there should be some very happy players by the time the Convocation ends.

The above events will wrap up by 10:30 P.M., at which point players will partake in a final event to close out the Convocation. As for what this finale entails... well, you’ll just have to show up and find out for yourself!

Mike Brock
Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator

Pathfinder Battles Preview: The Runelord's Apprentice

Friday, June 22, 2012

This week I want to show off another never-before-seen miniature from the upcoming Rise of the Runelords set of Pathfinder Battles prepainted fantasy figures. We've come very close to revealing the entire set, but we still have a small handful of beasties and bad-guys still to be revealed.

So let's start with a bang by revealing the one and only Khalib, apprentice to Runelord Karzoug himself! This high-level transmuter was once one of Karzoug's greatest apprentices, and indeed it was to be Khalib who would rescue Karzoug after the disaster that ended the runelords' empire in ancient days. That plan failed, and now Khalib has been freed from prison because the newly awakened Runelord needs all the help he can get against the player characters.

Khalib appears as a major villain in the last chapter of the Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition campaign. He's packed with ancient magic and 10,000 years of bitterness, and when you put his beautiful miniature on the table, he won't soon be forgotten!

By my count, we have only a couple miniatures left to preview in the next few weeks. Tune in next week for another major villain, and then shortly thereafter for a look at what proved to be—by far—the most challenging miniature (production-wise) in the entire set. Can you guess what it is?

You'll know soon enough!

Erik Mona
Publisher

Lisa Stevens Gamerati Interview

Thursday, June 21, 2012

A few weeks back Paizo CEO Lisa Stevens joined a hangout on Gamerati+ where Gen Con owner Peter Adkison and numerous other participants asked her a variety of questions about Paizo, Pathfinder Online, her gaming history, and whatever else came to mind. Check out what was asked and what insider info she had to share!

You can check out the rest of the video interview at the Paizo Publishing channel on YouTube. Thanks to Ed Healy for putting this interview series together. You can find more news and interviews from gaming industry luminaries at Gamerati.

F. Wesley Schneider
Editor-in-Chief

A Tomb of Winter's Plunder

by Tim Pratt

Chapter Four: Poison and Knives

"I will not," Alaeron said. "I won't risk my life to enrich you."

Rodrick clucked his tongue in disappointment. "Ah, you misunderstand me! To go down into the linnorm's treasure chamber is to risk death, certainly. But to refuse is to ensure your death. Because if you do not, I will cut you down where you stand. Ah, ah! Don't reach for any of your little vials or potions, please. Then I'd have to cut off your hands, and you'd have a terrible time gathering riches for me with your stumps."

"We can divide the coins and gems that remain here," Alaeron said, feeling desperate but trying to sound reasonable. "We can take the armor off Uncle Brant, that's valuable, surely—"

"The sword is the most important thing, I think," Rodrick said. "I've heard great things about that sword—it has a blade of living ice, Simeon said, whatever that means, and was reputed to possess its own intelligence and give wise counsel. If you see any rings or cloaks or helms, I'll need those too. Feel free to scoop up any particularly fine gems—they're worth more than gold by weight."

"What if I wake the linnorm?" Alaeron said. "Then you risk your own death as well."

"I suspect the beast will spend long enough killing you to allow me to escape," Rodrick said. "I'm good at escapes. But I have great faith in you, alchemist! Surely you have some tinctures there that will allow you to move silently, to be fleet of foot, and so on?"

Alaeron did, of course, but who knew how perceptive the linnorm was, or how deeply it slumbered?

But what choice did he have? "All right," he said finally. "But what proof do I have that you'll let me live when I return with your treasure?"

"I'll have no particular reason to kill you, then," Rodrick said. "I don't have any particular qualms about killing people, but it's not something I go out of my way to do—it's messy and unpleasant. I'll settle for knocking you out and leaving you in the tomb, fear not. And even if I'm lying... what choice do you have?"

Alaeron looked at the hole gaping in the wall, and crept inside.

He crawled partway down the slope, then paused. He wouldn't be able to take Rodrick in a fight, and the thief wasn't nearly as stupid as Alaeron would have preferred, but the alchemist might still win in a battle of wits. "Make yourself comfortable, Rodrick," he said, raising his voice just enough for it to carry. "You should be feeling the effects soon."

Rodrick's voice drifted down from above. "You're wasting time, alchemist. Hurry along and bring me back my sword."

"It's not a terribly fast-acting poison," Alaeron went on, crouched in the tunnel, watching the opening at the top. "But it's not the slowest, either."

"What poison? There were no poison traps here."

"That 'potion' I gave you. It was a toxin, of course. That's why it didn't allow you to see in the dark. That's not what it's meant to do. It's meant to kill."

Rodrick snorted. "A sad attempt at a bluff. You drank from the same vial."

"Yes, and after we came down into the dark, I also drank the antidote, along with a real potion of night vision."

"You lie," Rodrick said, but there was just a hint of doubt. "Why would you poison me? We were working well together, you said so yourself."

"I decided to poison you the moment you murdered that poor huldra girl," Alaeron said. "You were clearly dangerous, and needed to be stopped."

"Listen, you can't trick me, I'm a trickster, I—"

"The first symptoms are fairly subtle," Alaeron said, allowing his voice to take on a lecturing, pedantic tone. "Slight tremors in the hands and lips. A sensation of cold in the hands and feet, though for some, the hands and feet sweat instead. Racing thoughts, and difficulty concentrating. Some nausea. The need to urinate. An unusually rapid heartbeat."

Alaeron was experiencing most of those symptoms himself—understandably, as they were the effects of stress and physical exertion—and it was a fair bet that Rodrick would be feeling them, too.

"I suppose this is where you tell me that if I race back to my horse and up to the retreat, a dip in the healing waters will cure me?" Rodrick said.

"Oh, no. You'd be dead long before you make it that far. Possibly before you reached your horse. I'll just wait you out, I think. It's quite cozy here, in a rabbit-in-a-burrow sort of way."

"All right. Say I believe you. What do you want in exchange for the antidote?"

Alaeron considered. "Nothing. I can't say your death would bother me overmuch. I'm not a murderer, but at this point the poisoning could be construed as self-defense, albeit a bit... retroactive."

"I can come down there and kill you and take the antidote."

"You're welcome to drink from every vial in my pack," Alaeron said. "The antidote is in one of them. Though none of the vials are too clearly marked—I use an organizational system of my own devising." Alaeron felt in his pack until his fingers touched a vial with the shape of a spiral cut into the cork stopper. He took that silently from his pack, opened it, and took a sip. The extract made his tongue tingle, and his heart immediately began to race even faster. His senses grew sharper, every root and speck of dirt in the tunnel appearing in crystal clarity, almost seeming to vibrate.

Rodrick came sliding down the tunnel, a dagger in each hand, and tumbled into Alaeron, bowling him over. The stopped halfway down the slope, having rolled sideways in the narrow space. Alaeron's head pointed downward, with Rodrick on top of him, one knife to Alaeron's throat, and the point of the other near his belly.

"I am faster and more agile than any mixer of potions, alchemist." Rodrick’s face, rendered in black and white and shades of gray by Alaeron's altered eyes, was sweaty and smeared with dirt. "You will give me the antidote, or I will slice open your belly and leave you for the linnorm—I'm sure the stink of your entrails will wake him just as well as the scent of frying bacon wakes me."

"I find your argument compelling," Alaeron said, trying hard not to talk as fast as he wanted to. His muscles thrummed with excess energy, like wires under tension. The potion he'd taken was a powerful stimulant, one he used to fuel days-long sessions in the lab, conducting his researches. "If you'll climb off me, and let me get my pack..."

Rodrick rolled aside but kept the knife near Alaeron's belly as the alchemist sat up. Alaeron felt in the pack and withdrew a small metal flask, one of the few potions he'd brewed that would work on people other than himself. "Here you are."

"Ha." Rodrick wiggled the dagger, making Alaeron wince. "Drink from it yourself first."

"The problem among modern adventurers," he said, "is a lamentable lack of trust." He took a swig from the potion.

"Now give me your pack," Rodrick said, "so you can't drink another antidote, hmm?"

"No trust at all." Alaeron slipped out of his pack and handed it over.

Rodrick shoved the pack up the tunnel behind him, then plucked the flask from Alaeron's hand. He took a drink. "Huh. This tastes like..."

"Lavender, mainly," Alaeron said. "Which doesn't taste as good as it smells."

Rodrick yawned, then looked alarmed. "What? What have you..." His eyes drooped, and he slumped over, cheek pressed against the dirt of the tunnel floor, knives falling from his hands.

The sleeping potion would keep him deeply unconscious for a couple of hours, at least. Alaeron's sip of the potion had acted to counteract the powerful stimulant he'd ingested earlier, with the result that he was now just a little bit sleepy, instead of dead to the world.

He listened hard, but heard no sound of stirring from the linnorm's chamber. Alaeron searched Rodrick—the man had an astonishing quantity of knives hidden about his person—and helped himself to all the smaller weapons, as well as Rodrick’s coin purse, adding them to his own pack.

He considered how nasty he wanted to be. He could cut the man's throat—but Alaeron had never killed a man in cold blood before, and didn't savor the prospect. A time-delay bomb placed near the linnorm's chamber would give Alaeron time to get away, and serve to wake the beast, which was another way to take care of Rodrick—but that was still murder, just more indirectly, and the linnorm would certainly rise from the earth, lay waste to the countryside, and so on. Better to let sleeping wyrms lie.

That went for Rodrick, too. The thief didn't even know Alaeron's name, and had only seen his face in flickering torchlight. The odds were good they would never meet again, and the alchemist could take steps to improve those odds.

Alaeron settled for stealing Rodrick's boots, tying the man's ankles and wrists with the laces, and climbing back out of the tunnel as silently as possible. In the upper chamber, he collected the jewels and gold the linnorm had left behind. There was enough to buy him another night at the retreat, and give him another opportunity to steal a sample of the waters... but Rodrick would wake up eventually, and Alaeron would be better off leaving the vicinity before then.

He considered Uncle Brant's armor, but the prospect of taking it off the skeleton and then dragging it out of the tomb was both unpleasant and daunting, as sleepy as Alaeron was. He doused the torches and took the lantern with him, down the branching corridors, up toward the surface world's light. When he came upon the dead huldra, he cut a bit of her hair, and took a few scrapings of the bark from her hollow interior, for later study—the remains of the fey were hard to come by, and could be powerful reagents. He did his best not to get any of Simeon on his shoe when he passed into the entry chamber.

Best to let sleeping linnorms lie.

Alaeron emerged, blinking, into the late afternoon light. It was nearly dusk. He shouldered the door to the barrow closed, and though it didn't magically seal, it would, at least, keep passers-by from wandering in. He paused beside a nearby tree, chipped some of the bark away to reveal white wood, and carved the words "Beware the linnorm." There. That was the best he could do. Not that most graverobbers were terribly literate.

He stole Simeon and Rodrick's saddlebags and slapped the horses to send them running away, though he left a waterskin for Rodrick at the base of a tree—he wasn't a monster, and the gesture might mollify the thief's rage. Alaeron saddled his own horse and made his way south through the hills, heading in the general direction of Almas.

As night fell, he saw a campfire, and took a chance on introducing himself. The men around the fire greeted him warmly enough when he offered to share the fruit and dried meat he'd taken from the stolen saddlebags.

They were a motley lot of adventurers, a grizzled bearded veteran, a boy barely old enough to shave, a pale girl with tattooed cheeks reading by firelight, and a surly half-orc lurking off in the trees by himself. "Where are you bound?" Alaeron asked.

"The boy and I are going north," the old veteran said. "To the land of the linnorm kings. My old homeland."

"We're going to slay a linnorm," the boy said brightly. "Snowbeard says all you have to do to become a king there is carry the head of a linnorm through the gates of a village. His brother's a king, he stole the head of the monster Snowbeard killed when they were young, and—"

"He doesn't need to know our history," Snowbeard snapped.

Oh, my, Alaeron thought. He generally gave the gods little thought, but this certainly seemed like some deity's idea of a good jest. Alaeron considered telling Snowbeard there was a linnorm rather closer. But the practical difficulties of transporting the head of a dead monster all those leagues to the land of snow and ice would be hellish. Why, the stink alone, as the head began to rot... Better to let them make their own way.

"I'm thinking of going north myself," Alaeron said. "Farther east, though, to Numeria. I hear there are amazing relics just scattered all over the ground up there, amid the wreckage of some ancient cataclysm." He would have to go home first for provisions, but he'd been pondering a trip to Numeria's capital, Starfall, for a while, and it was even more tempting now. The Black Sovereign's realm was an unlikely destination... which meant even if Rodrick woke with a taste for vengeance, he wouldn't look for Alaeron there.

The tattooed woman closed her book and looked up for the first time. "Numeria? I am bound in that direction as well, though my destination is the Worldwound. We will likely travel the same route. Would you care to journey together?"

Alaeron hesitated. She was comely under those tattoos, and clearly quite intelligent, but... "I think, for now, I would prefer to pursue my quest with no company other than my own. I fear I am a... poor adventuring companion."

The woman shrugged and went back to her book.

Alaeron leaned back against a fallen log and looked up, watching the smoke from the fire drift up toward the stars, thinking of monsters, and holes in the earth, and the open sky.

Coming Next Week: A glimpse into the life of an elite Nidalese spellcaster and Cheliax’s pogroms against the strix in a sample chapter of Nightglass, Liane Merciel’s new Pathfinder Tales novel!

For More of Alaeron's adventures, check out City of the Fallen Sky, available now!

Tim Pratt's writing has won a Hugo Award, a Rhysling Award, and an Emperor Norton Award, as well as been nominated for Nebula, Mythopoeic, World Fantasy, and Stoker Awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies such as The Best American Short Stories and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, as well as two short story collections of his own. He novels include the contemporary fantasies The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl and Briarpatch; the Forgotten Realms novel Venom in Her Veins; and seven books in the Marla Mason urban fantasy series (as T. A. Pratt). He edited the anthology Sympathy for the Devil, and the forthcoming Rags & Bones anthology with Melissa Marr. His books and stories have been translated into French, Czech, Dutch, Russian, Greek, Korean, Spanish, German, and several other languages.

Illustration by Carlos Villa.

Knowledge Check (Mobile Devices)

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

You'll be shocked to learn that design team is juggling a lot of projects as of late. We're winding our way toward completion of the NPC Codex, and I have a bunch of Map Pack and Flip-Mat projects in various stages of development. I've also been thinking a great deal about helpful Pathfinder apps. While we have a couple that are reaching exciting milestones, I'm not ready to talk about those yet.

But to help us serve you better on the app front, I'm on the hunt for information. Toward that end, this week's design blog is a poll. What kind of mobile device do you use? Or, more importantly, what mobile device do you use or want to use when running Pathfinder mobile apps?

Take the survey here, and help us make sure that we give you tools on the devices that best reach our audience.

Lastly, for those of you who do not know, we already have two Pathfinder apps available for iPhones, iPads, and tablets. You can find iCrit and iFumble in the App Store (for Apple devices) and Google Play (for Android devices). If you have these and use these apps, feel free to tell us in the comment field below about your experiences with those apps and how you would like to see them improve. The more information we can get on these apps and how you use them the better!

Stephen Radney-MacFarland
Designer

Suitors and Rumors, Part 2

Monday, June 18, 2012

As we get closer to this year’s Grand Convocation, more and more news seems to be springing up. This week we’ve received another update from Grandmaster Torch.

Esteemed Pathfinders,

As the Convocation approaches, this year is becoming far more interesting; yet more special guests have been added to the list of attendees. I’m still putting together what the motives of these newcomers are, but I wanted to share what I’ve found thus far.

Olaf Kvaran: Junior Pathfinders on the grounds of the Grand Lodge reported that Kvaran showed up at the peak of a furious torrential downpour. Laden in thick Ulfen furs, this man spoke of an impending disaster before being rushed to meet with Ambrus Valsin. Following that meeting, this overbearing Ulfen warrior has been added to the roster for this year’s Convocation. What dire prediction does he know that I do not?

Karla Gessner: Never before have I heard of such a pious and upstanding woman. Having studied in the famed Seventh Church of Iomedae, Karla Gessner only recently completed her training. Unlike most of her fellow students, this woman has remained in Absalom. After several meetings with the head priest and Ollysta Zadrian, Gessner has somehow managed to get her name on the guest list. An interesting turn of events!

Alexander Bedard: The influence of Andoran continues to spread, as I see a member of the nation’s People’s Council has managed to secure a spot at the Convocation. Alexander Bedard was formerly a worker of the port authority in Augustana, and I have met him on only a handful of occasions. The man speaks of nothing but his boats, but otherwise he understands the delicacies of balancing personal power with Andoran’s so-called democracy. Could his presence be part of a larger Andoren agenda?

Keep your ears open,
Grandmaster Torch

A few more tales have been spun by Pathfinder Larius Kaludju, and, while he insists that he won’t be able to attend this year’s Convocation, it appears there’s plenty going on in Absalom to keep aspiring and veteran Pathfinders alike occupied.

Another day, another mission.

Like any good Pathfinder, I’ve done my fair share of work for the Blakros family. On my last stop through the fair city of our Grand Lodge, I ended up playing a game of cards with a janitor in the depths of the famed Blakros Museum. After a few hands, the man opened up and started complaining that the vaults were overflowing and the museum was running out of storage space! I couldn’t believe it, and I truly wonder where the family plans on storing all their precious finds.

There’s also a juicy tidbit floating around town that tunnel diggers have been commissioned by Lord Gyr to start expanding the sewer systems. It’ll be nice to have some new sewer lines in the city, as I’ve had enough encounters with kobolds, spiders, and worse in these damned sewers!

Anyway, that’s about it for my tales. I’m off on a new mission to the Mwangi Expanse, but before I ship out, I’ve got a meeting with my old friend Urmas Sirola and his lovely wife, Venla. Kind of strange, considering Venla’s been doing a lot of work with the Blakros as well. I’ve even heard a rumor that she’s made her way into the family’s social circles and is helping them with some of their new acquisitions.

Of course, you didn't hear any of this from me.

Larius

Mike Brock
Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator

Pathfinder Battles Preview: Sing, Sing, Sing!

Friday, June 15, 2012

The August release date of the new Rise of the Runelords Pathfinder Battles miniature set approaches, and you can tell by the rising sound of chittering and singing on the horizon. "Goblins chew and goblins bite! Goblins cut and goblins fight!" the chanting goes, growing nearer and nearer. Your dog begins to bark with anxiety, casting watery eyes toward the back door. Out in the yard, you hear your horse whine in fear.

The goblins are coming. Their song haunts the darkening skies.

With the first adventure in the now-classic Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path, our own James Jacobs created a brilliantly demented twist on goblins, and their haunting (and yet somehow hilarious) song about killing dogs and horses, bonking baby heads, and stewing flesh solidified goblins as the Pathfinder monster in the minds of roleplayers everywhere. That song put us on the map.

In the goblin raid encounter that starts the campaign, all the goblins attacking Sandpoint sing James's little ditty, but the one leading the song is the Goblin Warchanter, a female bard with a whip and a nasty attitude.

Here she is in all her plastic glory, screaming at the top of her little lungs. This common miniature is a great addition to the several other goblins in the set, and helps to set the scene in style with the campaign's very first series of encounters. We've even drawn out the location of Sandpoint's Swallowtail Festival on the new GameMastery Flip-Mat: Town Square, which has several perches and crannies for the Goblin Warchanter to seek refuge once the player characters interrupt her song.

But here's hoping they don't do it too rapidly. The last line of the song goes "We be goblins, you be food!", and it's always important to remind the player characters of their proper place in the world.

Don't you agree?

Erik Mona
Publisher

Get Your Free RPGs!

Thursday, June 13, 2012

Free RPG Day is this Saturday! Be sure to swing on by your friendly local game store to get your copy of Pathfinder Module: Dawn of the Scarlet Sun, written by our very own James Jacobs, along with tons of other free offerings from the greatest in gaming. Our offering this year, Dawn of the Scarlet Sun, is built to tie in perfectly with the Pathfinder Battles: Champions of Evil Encounter Pack, which, along with the pregenerated characters included in the module, give you everything you need for a day of adventure at your favorite gaming den. So be sure to check out the Free RPG Day website for a complete list of retailers participating in this weekend’s excitement. See you at the game store!

F. Wesley Schneider
Editor-in-Chief

Meet the Intern: Savannah

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Hello all!

I'm Savannah Broadway, the newest resident of Internistan, which was established by my fellow intern, Jerome. For those of you that were wondering, he's still alive and well as far as I know—our schedules don't often overlap, lest we be forced to knife-fight to the death over the computer. I don't know if you all remember the pictures of the desks of previous interns, but our realm has relocated to the warehouse. On the plus side, this means access to a lovely set of windows that mostly overlook bushes and bit of the parking lot, and getting to listen in on whatever music the warehouse crew is currently playing.

I'm new to the state of Washington, having temporarily relocated here from tiny southern Illinois. Next fall will be my junior year at Southern Illinois University Carbondale studying Creative Writing and working in the Preservation lab. I've been into reading and writing for as long as I can remember, but I started roleplaying games about two and a half years ago. Since then I've loved the storytelling aspect of the game, both as a player and a GM. I enjoy running bards, barbarians, a few sorcerers, and once a chaotic good necromancer with an undead dodo familiar named Percy.

Working at Paizo (even for the week or so that I've been at it) has been a blast. The first time I pulled into the parking lot I saw that the car next to me sported a pair of fuzzy d20s and knew that I had found the right building. My tasks so far have been writing summaries for some of the Pathfinder Tales, working on maps, and updating the infamous Rules Database. Also on the list is braving Cosmo, who hasn't quite given up on insisting that I bring him coffee and likes to try to act like a ninja. On another note, you'll be able to see my very first work for Paizo in the upcoming Pathfinder Adventure Path #59: The Price of Infamy.

All in all, I'm sure that this summer will be a blast. The database may be intimidating and the mouse wheel may refuse to scroll down, but I can't think of any other place I'd rather intern. With any luck, I'll see you all at PaizoCon!

Welcome to our newest Intern, Savannah!

Savannah Broadway
Editorial Intern

A Tomb of Winter's Plunder

by Tim Pratt

Chapter Three: Coils in the Dark

Rodrick struck off the dead girl's head with his sword, the blade clanging against the stone floor as it severed her neck cleanly. Her head rolled until the hilt of the dagger hit the floor and arrested its motion. Alaeron choked back a scream. Had the scoundrel gone mad?

Rodrick turned the dead girl's torso over with his foot, flopping her over on her belly and revealing her back—

—which was nothing but a hollow shell lined with wood, like the interior of a rotten tree or a walnut shell. She was an emptiness.

"Some kind of monster," Rodrick said. With the tip of his sword, he prodded at a lump in the back of the girl’s skirt, lifting its hem just far enough to reveal a tail like a fox’s. "Guarding the barrow, I'm sure. I knew there was something unnatural about her right away—I liked her, and wanted to protect her, and didn't think at all about how valuable she would be to certain slave traders of my acquaintance. I knew she must be bewitching me somehow." He glanced at Alaeron. "I'm too good at being charming to be easily charmed myself."

Rodrick, charming? Ha. "I've heard of creatures like this," Alaeron said. "She's fey. Huldra, I think they're called, or hilders—but they are creatures of the far north. She may not have been a guardian of this tomb, you know. She could have been a prisoner, her spirit bound to some cursed or magical object in the barrow—"

"Monster," Rodrick said. "Now a dead monster. Why are we still talking about her?"

"I just prefer not to kill, without provocation, creatures who are capable of holding a conversation with me," Alaeron said. "She may have been charming us because she needed help, and wanted us to save her—"

"I suppose that's why you didn't kill her, and I did. Let's go. There must be loot here somewhere."

"But why would a huldra be here at all?" Alaeron muttered. "They're from the north, the lands of the Mammoth Lords, or the White Witches, or the—"

"Linnorm Kings," Rodrick said, bending to retrieve his dagger from the huldra's eye. "Yes, Simeon said something about that. Apparently when Brant was a boy, raiders from the Land of the Linnorm Kings laid waste to his little fishing village. Brant survived, nursed vengeance in his heart, and so forth. When he was grown, he led an expedition to raid the raiders. You have to admire the old boy's confidence, don't you? Apparently they ended up exploring some ruin called the Spire of Snow or the Frostbite Citadel or something similar, slaying a dragon inside—"

"Linnorms aren't dragons, exactly," Alaeron said. "Related, probably, but—"

Rodrick rolled his eyes. "Fine, they slew the linnorm, though it killed or cursed everyone else in the party, and Brant alone escaped unscathed. He came back with all manner of valuables, not just the gold and jewels that made the family fortune but rarer things: a sword with a blade of ice, a bell that summons blizzards, a petrified linnorm egg, a magical ring that lets you conjure a mystical twin to do your bidding, and other wonders. That's what old Brant took to the grave with him, along with a hoard of gold and jewels, or so the story goes. If even half of it's true, I'll be a very wealthy man."

"We will be, you mean."

"Of course." Rodrick didn't even bother trying to sound sincere.

"That explains the huldra, at least. She must have been bound here, or enslaved to serve Brant even in death, or—"

Uncle Brant hasn't aged so well.

"Dead monsters bore me," Rodrick said. "Live ones are more interesting. Let's see if we can find some."

They proceeded into the depths of the barrow, following the twisting corridors, and investigating a couple of dead-ends that terminated abruptly in deep pits. Even along what seemed to be the proper route there were traps, more ingenious than the spiked log, but Rodrick proved adept at spotting them. They encountered a shelf bearing stone skulls that spat acid, an ordinary-looking room that Rodrick said would have flensed them alive if he hadn't discovered and pressed some hidden buttons to deactivate the concealed blades in the walls, and a door that sprouted dozens of bone spears when Rodrick prodded the wood with his sword. Nothing Alaeron couldn't have coped with himself, of course, but it was nice to have a strapping thief to handle the stray acid droplets instead.

"We make a fine team," Alaeron said, after Rodrick set off a bear trap with a tossed stone.

"You've done exactly nothing except open a door," Rodrick said. "In that respect, you're no worse a partner than Simeon was, I suppose." He slipped into another chamber, and whistled.

Alaeron joined him in the next room, and in the lantern's pool of light saw part of a massive stone throne, occupied by a skeleton dressed in elaborate black armor. They'd reached the main burial chamber, then, and after only a few hours—these modern tombs were so much more manageable than the vast crypts of the ancients.

"There are torches on the walls." Rodrick lit a taper from his lantern and carried it through the dark, igniting two torches and filling the room with flickering light.

The throne stood in the center of the room, and behind it were stone shelves and platforms holding... well, the wreckage of smashed treasure chests, mostly. Bits of shattered wood and twisted metal. A scattering of coins and precious gems remained, probably enough to buy a small house in Almas, but not the riches they'd expected. Alaeron wondered what sort of remarkable valuables the room had originally contained, if the original looters hadn't bothered to stoop to pick up these gold coins and jewels.

"Someone got here first!" Rodrick said. "But how? None of the traps were sprung, the doors were unbreached, I don't see how—"

Alaeron squinted at the shadows at the far end of the room, then picked up the lantern and advanced. "Look at the wall," he said, holding the lamp aloft.

He and Rodrick stared together at the great hole that had been smashed through the wall, a ragged circle easily ten feet to a side. Alaeron pushed the lantern through the hole, revealing a tunnel of packed dirt that angled down and away.

"Graverobbers digging a tunnel to break in, perhaps?" Rodrick said.

"Or it might be the work of interlopers from the Darklands," Alaeron said.

Rodrick chewed his lip. "We should investigate. If there's any chance of finding the treasure... But to take a light into those tunnels could be dangerous. If there are subterranean monsters down there, light would be a beacon to them."

"I have a potion that lets me see in the dark," Alaeron said. "It's rather more expensive than a torch, which is why I didn't use it before—"

"Excellent. We'll both drink it."

"I could go down on my own," Alaeron began, but Rodrick cut him off.

"Ha. And find the treasure and a convenient path to the surface? No. Let's take the potion together."

Alaeron shrugged, took a vial from his pack, drank down half of it—it tasted of carrots, mainly—and then handed it to Rodrick. The extract would have no effect on the thief, since like most alchemists' preparations it only worked for the creator, but he'd let Rodrick figure that out on his own. The thief drank, made a face, and handed back the vial.

"In we go," Alaeron said, and slipped into the tunnel.

"I'm not sure it's working," Rodrick said doubtfully behind him, but Alaeron shushed him. His own vision had already altered, allowing him to see the tunnel clearly, albeit in black-and-white. Roots poked down through the top of the tunnel, and an earthworm dropped from the ceiling before Alaeron's face and wriggled away.

The passage was angled steeply downward, and crumbling—it seemed more like an animal's burrow than a tunnel hewn by human hands. Alaeron had terrible visions of being buried in tons of dirt as he slid forward, going as silently as possible, trying not to lose his footing and roll down. The tunnel ended abruptly, in a huge cavern—occupied by something almost equally huge.

A great serpentine body filled almost the entirety of the space, its coils moving slowly in steady breath. Far above, Alaeron thought he could discern a head, its huge eyes closed in sleep. The chamber was filled with gold and gems and other things, most of them nestled under the great beast's body or its huge forelegs, each digit tipped with a claw like a greatsword.

After a long moment of staring, not even daring to breathe, Alaeron turned and scrambled back up the tunnel, pushing past Rodrick and clambering back into the burial chamber, where he knelt, gasping and trembling.

Rodrick arrived after him. "Your stupid potion never worked for me. What's wrong with you? What did you see down there?"

"Did you say one of the treasures Uncle Brant brought back was a petrified linnorm egg?" Alaeron said.

"So Simeon told me."

Alaeron lifted his head and looked into the rogue's eyes. "The egg hatched."

Rodrick blinked. "You're lying. You're trying to trick me—"

"Didn't you smell it?" Alaeron said. "The stink of a vast beast?"

"I thought that was you," Rodrick said, and gave a weak smile. Alaeron laughed despite himself. The thief sat down on one of the shelves of stone. "Well, then. Where do we go from here?"

"Out, and swiftly," Alaeron said.

"You corrected me earlier, when I called a linnorm a dragon," Rodrick said. "That suggests you know something about the beasts—more than I do, anyway."

"Just what I've read in books. I've never been farther north than the south shore of Lake Encarthan."

"Books about linnorms were presumably written by people who survived encounters with them," Rodrick said reasonably. "What did they have to say?"

Alaeron sighed. "They're huge, of course. Eighty, a hundred feet long? I think it depends on the variety, and no, I don't remember the different types, or have any idea which kind our linnorm is. It doesn't matter. A battleaxe can kill you just as well as a mace. The beasts are intelligent, but generally cruel—gluttonous, greedy, lovers of treasure, obviously, since it took everything from in here into its hole. The thing must have cleaned out this chamber when it was smaller. Made itself a nest, then grew." Alaeron shook his head. "I do remember reading that they can hibernate for centuries, for so long that people living nearby forget they're even there, until the linnorm bursts forth to devour everything in the surrounding landscape. For now, we’re lucky, and this one appears to be sleeping."

"I imagine news of this beast would drive down the price of property hereabouts," Rodrick said thoughtfully. "What sort of treasures did you see in its chamber?"

"I hardly took a complete inventory," Alaeron said. "I saw a sword hilt protruding from beneath its belly. Some sort of black cask, big as a sea chest, under one of its claws. Gold, jewels, ingots of precious metal, bits of statuary... I couldn't say more specifically. I was too busy trying to control my bowels."

Rodrick stroked his chin. "How deeply is it sleeping, do you think?"

Alaeron stared at him. "You can't possibly mean to go back down there and try to steal from the monster?"

"Of course not," Rodrick said. "I can't even see in the dark." He drew his sword and smiled, showing all his teeth. "I want you to go down there and steal from the monster for me."

Coming Next Week: Pilfering a linnorm's hoard in the final chapter of Tim Pratt's "A Tomb of Winter’s Plunder."

For More of Alaeron's adventures, check out City of the Fallen Sky, available now!

Tim Pratt's writing has won a Hugo Award, a Rhysling Award, and an Emperor Norton Award, as well as been nominated for Nebula, Mythopoeic, World Fantasy, and Stoker Awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies such as The Best American Short Stories and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, as well as two short story collections of his own. He novels include the contemporary fantasies The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl and Briarpatch; the Forgotten Realms novel Venom in Her Veins; and seven books in the Marla Mason urban fantasy series (as T. A. Pratt). He edited the anthology Sympathy for the Devil, and the forthcoming Rags & Bones anthology with Melissa Marr. His books and stories have been translated into French, Czech, Dutch, Russian, Greek, Korean, Spanish, German, and several other languages.

Illustration by Carlos Villa.

Preview: Player Character Folio

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Now that the Advanced Race Guide is just about ready to ship out to subscribers and stores everywhere, it's time to take a look at another product that is due to release very soon, one that will give you a great new way to record your new dhamphir bard!

The Player Character Folio is 16 pages of character sheet glory, containing spots for you to record not just your vital statistics and gear, but things like your family history, adventure record, and how many dragons you've slain. Normally, we would just put up some artwork from the product, but the Player Character Folio has a few tricks inside, so we thought it best to show off a few photos of the actual folio.

As you can see, when you open the folio, it's got a two-panel cover that opens to reveal a folder pocket with some handy reference tables and your main page, which contains all of your vital statistics. We designed it this way so that these numbers would always be available to you during play, no matter what page you happen to be on.

Here you can see the first spread of the folio, which is naturally dedicated to combat. Of course, all of your vital statistics are still at your disposal.

Here is a closer look at that vital statistics panel, open to the page for spellcasters to record their important information.

Record all of your vital background info on this spread, including a map of your hideout and a character sketch!

Finally, we give you all the room you need to record the gear carried and worn by your character. Of course, there are a number of other spreads in this book, including my personal favorite, in which you can record the various achievements you have accomplished during play, but if you want to see that list, you'll have to wait for the Player Character Folio to hit store shelves in July.

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer

Suitors and Rumors, Part 1

Monday, June 11, 2012

This week, we’ve got another Grand Convocation update, which I’ll let Grand Master Torch tell you all about:

My Trusted Associates,

It has come to my attention that, in light of Major Maldris’s recent rejection of a Blakros marriage, various special guests have been admitted into this year’s Convocation. As you may know, I pride myself on reliable intelligence, and I pass this information on to each of you, hoping it will make attending the Convocation easier on you.

Damian Kastner: A maralictor of the Hellknight order, Kastner has been invited by the affluent Paracountess Zarta Dralneen. Damian is also a devout member of the Hellknight Order of the Scourge, and it appears he acts in deference to the wishes of the Paracountess. He is a respected member of the Hellknights and a near-perfect specimen of human perfection. I wonder what the Paracountess has in mind by inviting him?

Garyth Pammenter: You have likely not heard of this wily rogue, as her exploits are kept discreet by our allies in the Blakros family. Garyth is responsible for some of the greatest heists in history—all from Blakros holdings. The family has maintained a feud with this dashing thief for years, but it appears that she opted to return all of her ill-gotten gains for a chance to attend the Convocation and meet with Michellia Blakros. I have no doubt that the meddling of Guaril Karela had something to do with this attendance.

Mikhail Hofer: I had no clue of this man’s identity until one of my agents reported his attendance at this year’s Convocation. As a graduate of Korvosa’s Acadamae, Hofer runs a prominent business in Absalom, though he spends most of his time selling minor spells to esteemed noble families. Despite a clearly bumbling nature and moderate appearance, Hofer has been sponsored by the Sapphire Sage Amenopheus, as an attendee to the Convocation. Interesting...

Theodric Alverteen: While I try to leave politics out of my dealings, the old man Theodric Alverteen is a perfect example of the decline of Taldor. Once a prominent noble, Theodric left Taldor to go on a worldwide hunting excursion. Now finished seeking trophies, the old man has come to Absalom to show off his many conquests. I had the opportunity to meet him at a recent gala, and I can say that his mental faculties are not... entirely present. Why Gloriana Morilla would sponsor his membership to the Convocation is something I cannot even begin to fathom.

Yours in trust,
Grand Master Torch

In addition to the words of the Grand Master Torch, there have been many whispers throughout Absalom about the current state of the city. Many of these happenings have been compiled by expert Pathfinder and renowned bard Larius Kaludju. We hope to share more of these in the coming weeks.

Gather round, children, and hear the tale that I have to pawn, about Absalom at the time of summer’s dawn.

The people are going to bed early, hoping to hide out in their homes, as a terrible shadow stretches out from the Cairnlands. My guess is that we’ve got another uppity siege tower working some bad magic, and so far, no adventurers have returned from it. Rumors abound that this tower only appears in the late hours of the evening and remains until the wee-hours of the morn’. They say the screams can be heard all day long, but I think that’s just other bards trying to make it sound more dangerous than it actually is!

On a more upbeat note, the Absalom Menagerie is now closed for construction. Apparently, the warden is looking to do some new renovations in preparation for adding more space to their jungle wing. I, for one, look forward to going back, once the Menagerie has reopened; there’s nothing like seeing a child trying to pet a tiger!

I also hear that the Menagerie recently imported some exotic magical animals from the south, but everyone’s been hush-hush on that bit of info.

Larius

Mike Brock
Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator

PaizoCon 2012: PaizoCon Events are Up!

Monday, June 11, 2012

The Events List for Paizocon is now live! Check it out, sign up for the lottery for limited-space events, and mark your day-planner for those seminars you couldn't bear to miss!

Lottery event sign up opened on Thursday, June 7, and will close on Wednesday, June 13, at 2:00 PM Pacific Time.

We'll all be there—will you?

James Sutter
Senior Editor

Pathfinder Battles Preview: The Golem's Got It

Friday, June 8, 2012

I've spent the week in New York City at Book Expo America, chatting with booksellers and distributors about Paizo's exciting upcoming products. I was very pleased to receive an early print sample of the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path Anniversary Edition hardcover to bring to the conference, and it was fun to watch everyone's mouths fall agape as they took in the gorgeous book. I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to claim that Rise of the Runelords is one of the most beautiful RPG books ever produced, and I'm so pleased with our team at Paizo and all of our freelance writers and illustrators for putting out such a great celebration of 5 years of Pathfinder and 10 years of Paizo Publishing. It really is a sight to behold.

A great campaign needs great miniatures, of course, and in this regard our partners at WizKids keep hitting it out of the park. I've been sharing early looks at the Pathfinder Battles Rise of the Runelords 65-figure set for months, and as we draw closer to the set's August release, I'm amazed that there are still so many cool miniatures left to reveal.

This week's miniature is the Stone Golem, a critical encounter as the campaign builds up to its climax.

This Large, rare figure packs a heavy punch. He's got his fists raised to pummel your player characters into the ground. The great thing about golems is that they can look like just about anything their creator wants. That's quite a handy bonus when it comes to miniatures, in that a unique-looking golem can easy double as another type of creature as needed. In this case, we pulled the crowned skull face directly from the creature's illustration, which has the helpful side-effect of making this guy a great substitution for any kind of undead behemoth you might need.

Speaking of undead behemoths, after a full week of day-to-night meetings at the Book Expo, I am TIRED and am looking forward to getting some shut-eye on the long flight to Seattle.

I'll have another Pathfinder Battles preview next Friday, so keep your eyes on this space!

Erik Mona
Publisher

Unveiling the Shackles

Thursday, June 7, 2012

When we started working on the Skull & Shackles Adventure Path and Wes drew up his incredibly detailed map of the Shackles, we knew we’d have to fill out this huge region if we wanted to do it any justice. Thanks to Mike Shel and all the excellent work he did on Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Isles of the Shackles, we had a cornucopia of locations and adventure sites to put on the map. Factor in all the cool islands and seaside towns visited throughout the Skull & Shackles AP, and what we ended up with is a lot of locations throughout the Shackles.

Like, a lot of locations.

Each volume in the Skull & Shackles Adventure Path pinpoints the important islands visited in that adventure, and Isles of the Shackles maps out the big islands detailed in that book and their major cities, but beyond that, readers have yet to receive an exhaustive map that features all of the heretofore mentioned locations in the Shackles. This blog post remedies that.

The downloadable web supplement is a huge PDF map of the Shackles featuring tags for all of the locations heretofore mentioned in Pathfinder products. The map is highly spoiler-intensive since it gives the precise location for over 150 islands, towns, and sites of interest throughout the Shackles. Thus, it should go without saying that this map is meant only for those who aren’t players in a Skull & Shackles campaign or a campaign set in the Shackles. Otherwise, this map will prove an indisputable boon for GMs and readers interested in the Shackles who have no qualms with discovering each and every location in the region in excruciating detail. You can find more information on all of these exotic and often treacherous sites in Isles of the Shackles and throughout the Skull & Shackles Adventure Path.

Download the Isles of the Shackles map supplement here!

Happy trails and safe sailing!

Patrick Renie
Developer

Field Report: Book Expo America

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

This week, Paizo publisher Erik Mona (that's me in the picture!) and Sales Director Pierce Watters are in New York City for Book Expo America, an annual conference of booksellers, librarians, publishers, and book distributors that's one of the largest conventions in North America. We've been attending Book Expo for about five years, and in that time it's been amazing to see how the profile of our favorite roleplaying game has changed.

Back when we launched, we had to really explain Pathfinder to just about everyone who approached our booth. To make matters a bit more complex, we're in the "Diamond Alley" of Diamond Book Distributors, our book trade distribution partner, who mostly distributes comics and graphic novels. With a booth next to the likes of IDW, Image, and Oni Press, most folks coming to our booth wanted to know about our comics and trade paperbacks.

These days, things have changed considerably. Not only is Pathfinder well known to book distributors and librarians as a highly successful and very popular tabletop roleplaying game, but many of them come up to tell us about their Pathfinder RPG campaigns! Oh, what a difference a half-decade makes, as they say (they do say that, right?).

This year we've got some absolutely wonderful treats for Pathfinder fans at the show, including early looks at actual printed samples of HUGE summer releases like the Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition, the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary Box, the Player Character Folio, every single page of the first issue of the upcoming Pathfinder comic book from Dynamite, and more!

If you're one of the lucky folks attending the show this year, please swing by the booth to say hi and check out the cool new products! (In the likely event that you are NOT at Book Expo America, don't despair, we'll have all this stuff at PaizoCon and Gen Con as well (where you will even get to buy most of it—there are no book sales at BEA, which is first and foremost an industry trade show).

But even though most of you can't make it to Book Expo, I wanted to drop by the Paizo Blog today with some sweet pictures of some of the most exciting products we're showing off at this year's show.

And I don't mean books, or comics, or even little plastic figurines.

I'm talking about GOBLIN PLUSH, BABY!

Say hello to my little friends:

That's right, later this year these cute little monsters will be making their way to the marketplace! They stand 10 inches tall, and while soft and adorable, they're rigid enough to stand on your game shelves or on guard over your bed, protecting your dreams from evil dogs and horses. We've got three goblins in production right now. The ones in the background are prototypes, and will change a bit before production, but I wanted to at least hint at the variety in store.

This guy looks exactly like he will when he ships later this year, complete with his eerie smile, earring, arm band, belt, and shorts. The other two goblins (with slight variations to their facial expressions) will follow shortly thereafter, with the plan being to release all three varieties by the end of the year (and more in the months to follow!).

Since the cameras are flying fast and furious at Book Expo, we wanted to take this chance to let the goblins out of the bag ourselves, lest you find the news too incredibly awesome to believe.

Believe it, my friends. The (plush) goblins are coming.

And they are hungry!

Keep your eyes on the Paizo Blog for more details about these awesome plush creatures as they develop, and post your suggestions for additional goblin looks you'd like us to try out in the future in the comments below!

Erik Mona
Publisher

A Tomb of Winter's Plunder

by Tim Pratt

Chapter Two: A Damsel with the Dead

Alaeron had been prepared for a violent reaction, and so when Rodrick drew his sword, he tossed back a vial of extract—the one he'd planned to use to help him creep through the barrow undetected. Rodrick was fast, and Alaeron's preparation might have been useless if the man hadn't been standing in the ruin of his dead friend, which necessitated careful footing rather than a headlong charge.

Alaeron shivered as the extract—which tasted strongly of wormwood—took effect. The only change from Alaeron's viewpoint was a certain fuzziness around his peripheral vision, but Rodrick paused, frowning, and Alaeron moved as silently as he could to the far side of the entry chamber.

"Invisibility," Alaeron said, and Rodrick snapped his head around, looking straight at the spot where Alaeron had spoken... which was why the alchemist never stopped moving, creeping back and forth as he talked. "I find it makes conversations with armed men more pleasant. I am not here to fight you. I was in the forest gathering botanical samples—I'm an alchemist, not a wizard, if you were wondering—when I noticed the barrow had been disturbed. I investigated, and heard your friend trigger the trap there."

Rodrick knelt and snuffed out the lantern, plunging the room into darkness, except for faint illumination around the door.

Alaeron moved toward the door, hoping Rodrick would hesitate to approach the light. "Ah, making yourself just as invisible as I am. That's good. I can tell already you'll be a great ally." He listened, but heard nothing, not the faintest scrape of leather on stone or the clink of shifting chainmail. "I gather from the blood on the barrow door that there was some magical ward your friend's blood was able to overcome?" Only more silence. "And that, with his death, you feel you cannot continue, as you have discovered another warded door? I only came in, you see, because I know how you can open that door—"

Something cold touched Alaeron's cheek, but he had the strength of will not to flinch. "Is that a dagger blade?" he said, moving his lips as little as possible when he spoke.

"It is," Rodrick breathed in his ear. "Tell me how you can open the door."

"If your friend's blood is the key... at the risk of being indelicate, he still has lots of blood, now more accessible than ever. It would be trivial to gather some and use it to loosen the wards."

The knife moved slightly, the flat of the blade against his cheek gradually becoming the stinging edge. "Of course I still have his blood," Rodrick said. "But I don't have his knowledge. Only Simeon knew which runes should be daubed with blood—and marking the wrong one could set off some horrible trap. But perhaps I can profit from this trip anyway. I'm sure some of your potions are valuable."

Most of Alaeron's potions would have no effect on anyone but himself, being fuelled by his own aura, and the few that could be used by others didn't have beneficial effects, but Alaeron didn't point that out. "Ah, well, of course," he said. "But I can read the runes, so I know where to put the blood."

After a long moment, Rodrick chuckled, and the knife withdrew. While Alaeron tried to decide whether or not he could move, the light of the lantern flared anew. "Prove it," Rodrick said, crouching by the inner door, sword sheathed, dagger in hand.

"We should formalize our arrangement," Alaeron said. "I will accompany you into the barrow, lending my considerable skills to your enterprise, and we will divide any relics or treasures we find equally."

Rodrick's ethics leave something to be desired.

"That's fine, if you can actually get us in."

"Move away from the door." Alaeron knelt and dabbed his handkerchief into a bit of Simeon's readily available blood. Rodrick narrowed his eyes. Seeing a bloody bit of rag floating through the air, moved by an invisible hand, was probably unsettling. "Bring the light closer," Alaeron said, and Rodrick held up the lantern while the alchemist squinted at the markings on the door. They were far less weathered on the interior barrier, which made them much easier to read.

Not that Alaeron could read them, really. The language seemed Northern, but the Mammoth Lords and Linnorm Kings didn't produce much written work, so Alaeron had never learned their writing. But he'd seen the runes Simeon daubed with blood outside, and now he saw the same pattern here, on a different part of the door, so he thought it was worth a try. It was strange to find Northern runes here, so close to the Inner Sea, and focusing on that anomaly was a nice alternative to thinking about how he might soon be pulped or fried by a magical trap.

But the door swung open at the touch of the blood, and Alaeron stepped back, keeping an eye on Rodrick in case the man decided to take a stab at Alaeron's invisible kidneys. "There. Do we have an agreement?"

"All right," Rodrick said. "But only because there may be more runes inside that need reading. I get first pick of the loot. You get my cast-offs."

"I woke up this morning expecting no profit beyond a few herbs," Alaeron said. "The prospect of any treasure at all is delightful to me." He was confident that he could manipulate Rodrick into taking shiny but less valuable items. Alaeron filled a vial with more of Simeon's blood, just in case there were further wards inside.

"In we go, invisible man." Rodrick stepped through the opening, lantern in hand. Alaeron followed, keeping an eye out for traps. The corridor, just wide enough for two men to go abreast, was angled steeply downward, suggesting that much of the barrow was dug into the ground, or built into natural caverns. There were faintly glowing lights ahead—luminous crystals or fungi, of the kind cultivated by builders of subterranean lairs. "You don't seem terribly upset by the death or your friend," Alaeron said.

"What? Oh, Simeon. I see. You're under the impression that I'm a rich idiot, like he was."

That was quite true. The fact that Rodrick knew that much was worrisome. Rich idiots were generally so used to being treated like brilliant paragons that they never doubted themselves, or expected anyone else to doubt them, either.

"I'm not a rich idiot," Rodrick said. "I'm an impoverished genius. I've been posing as a wealthy brat, and cultivating Simeon's friendship for weeks. I knew he was wealthy and had poor judgment, which meant some opportunity for profit would present itself. When he told me about the barrow of his avaricious uncle Brant, crammed with all the pillage Brant was too greedy to pass on, I knew that was my target. I convinced Simeon's parents to send him to the retreat—he was always sickly. The waters may even have done him some good, so at least he died in good health. But I wanted him at the retreat because it's so close to the barrow. "

Alaeron recalled that he wasn't supposed to know anything about these men, and tried to ask an appropriate question. "But if Simeon was wealthy, why would he agree to go graverobbing with you?"

"Oh, I lured him into a crooked card game at the tavern in the village south of the retreat, run by a man I know called the Ratter. Simon went deeply into debt, and his father's rather strict, and wouldn't have approved. I presented this as a convenient way of paying what he owed. I didn't expect him to die. I was going to play it straight. Why not? Ratter had agreed to split half of Simon's payment with me. But now that the poor boy is dead... at least I'll get a good price for his horse."

"You, sir, are a scoundrel," Alaeron said.

"There's no sort better to raid a tomb with," Rodrick said.

The corridor turned sharply, and something deeper in the tunnel whimpered. Rodrick put down the lantern, raised his dagger, and darted around the corner, Alaeron close behind him.

In a small alcove in the wall stood a petite young woman dressed in a blue-and-white checked dress, her blonde hair disarrayed, her face beautiful and smudged with tears, her eyes blue and wide.

"Have you come to save me?" she said. "I've been trapped here for so long!"

Rodrick lowered his dagger. "Of course," he said. "How did you come to be in this terrible place?"

"I can't remember." She shook her head, eyes spilling tears. "I was alone in the dark, I was so frightened..." She broke down in sobs.

"Would you like to escort her outside?" Alaeron said.

Rodrick snorted. "And leave you creeping through here on your own? I think not. We'll both take her."

"Please don't fight," she pleaded. She looked at Alaeron. "I only wish to be free of this dark and terrible place."

"Oh, am I visible again?" Alaeron said.

"As of a few moments ago," Rodrick said. "I assumed you knew."

"Yes, of course, I was just... distracted." Alaeron frowned. Something was... wrong. How had this woman gotten sealed inside the barrow? Had it been looted before, and then used as a headquarters by bandits with a penchant for kidnapping milkmaids? And why didn't any of those questions seem more urgent?

"I will lead," Rodrick said. "You, my dear, can follow me, and the alchemist will bring up the rear—"

"Oh, no, I'll go last. I don't wish to be in the way if there are dangers." She eased out of the alcove, sliding along the corridor with her back to the wall.

"Duck, alchemist." Rodrick said it casually. Alaeron acted without hesitation, dropping to the stone floor. Rodrick let fly with his dagger and put a hand on his sword. Alaeron scrambled to one side and turned to see the beautiful blonde crumpled on the floor of the corridor. She'd sprouted a dagger from her left eye socket.

"You killed her!" Alaeron shouted.

Roderick drew his sword. "Yes, of course I did. That was rather the point."

Coming Next Week: Frank discussions on the finer points of tomb raiding etiquette in Chapter Three of Tim Pratt's "A Tomb of Winter's Plunder."

For More of Alaeron's adventures, check out City of the Fallen Sky, available now!

Tim Pratt's writing has won a Hugo Award, a Rhysling Award, and an Emperor Norton Award, as well as been nominated for Nebula, Mythopoeic, World Fantasy, and Stoker Awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies such as The Best American Short Stories and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, as well as two short story collections of his own. He novels include the contemporary fantasies The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl and Briarpatch; the Forgotten Realms novel Venom in Her Veins; and seven books in the Marla Mason urban fantasy series (as T. A. Pratt). He edited the anthology Sympathy for the Devil, and the forthcoming Rags & Bones anthology with Melissa Marr. His books and stories have been translated into French, Czech, Dutch, Russian, Greek, Korean, Spanish, German, and several other languages.

Illustration by Carlos Villa.

Advanced Race Guide Preview: It's Almost Here!

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

The Advanced Race Guide will be shipping out to subscribers and stores in the very near future. As we wrap up our previews of this mighty tome, it’s time to for a peek into Chapter 4 and the rules for building your own race.

This section of the book received a good deal of playtesting late last year and we made a large number of tweaks and changes to take that feedback into account. For example, the core races do not all add up to the exact same point value as they did in the playtest. In addition to showing you how the existing races are built, we included a number of examples of new races that you can build using this system. Take a look at the Kasatha.

Kasatha

Hunters and raiders of the wasteland, the clannish, four-armed kasatha guard their territories by way of lightning-fast raids and terrifying assaults. As young adults, some members of this race roam the world for a full year looking for adventure and treasure to bring back to their clans. A renegade few decide to forsake their clan and spend their life adventuring.

Illustration by Rayph Beisner

Type   Humanoid (kasatha)	0 RP
Size   Medium	0 RP
Base Speed   Normal	0 RP
Ability Score Modifiers   Flexible (+2 Dex, +2 Wis)	2 RP
Languages   Standard	0 RP
Racial Abilities Defense Racial Traits   Defensive training, greater   Desert runner	4 RP 2 RP
Feat and Skill Racial Traits   Stalker	1 RP
Movement Racial Traits   Jumper   Terrain stride (desert)	2 RP 1 RP
Other Racial Traits   Multi-armed (4 arms)	8 RP
Total	20 RP

While more powerful than most races (which usually have a cost of about 10), a kasatha makes for an interesting addition to any game, either as a PC (perhaps one level lower than the rest of the party) or as an exotic NPC or even a villain. The above format is written for the race builder in particular. Here are the racial traits in a more traditional layout.

Kasatha Racial Traits

+2 Dex, +2 Wis: Kasatha are both nimble and wise.
Medium: Kasatha are Medium creatures and have no bonuses or penalties due to their size.
Normal Speed: Kasatha have a base speed of 30 feet.
Defensive Training, Greater: Kasatha receive a +2 dodge bonus to their Armor Class.
Desert Runner: Kasatha receive a +4 racial bonus on Constitution checks and Fortitude saves to avoid fatigue and exhaustion, as well as any other ill effects from running, forced marches, starvation, thirst, and hot or cold environments.
Stalker: Kasatha always treat Perception and Stealth as a class skill.
Jumper: Kasatha are always treated as if having a running start when making Acrobatics skill checks to jump.
Desert Stride: Kasatha can move through difficult terrain in a desert environment at their normal speed. Magically altered desert terrain affects them normally.
Multi-Armed: Kasatha possess four arms. While all of the arms can wield weapons, all but one are considered off-hand weapons. Kasatha take the normal penalties for two-weapon fighting when using more than one weapon.

Well, that about wraps up the previews of the Advanced Race Guide. Grab a copy, and explore the exciting race options that await you within.

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer

The Kickstarter Chronicles

Monday, June 4, 2012

Since Paizo and Goblinworks first announced the Kickstarter project to fund a technology demo of the Pathfinder Online MMO game, one of the most common questions both on our forums and on the Kickstarter project page has been: how will this work with Pathfinder Society Organized Play?

Backers who pledge at least $15 will receive the PDF of Thornkeep, an all-new Pathfinder Roleplaying Game sourcebook written by industry superstar Rich Baker, containing not only a gazetteer of the River Kingdoms “hive of scum and villainy” that will play a prominent role in the online game, but also a massive dungeon with levels designed by Baker, Paizo Lead Designer Jason Bulmahn, Paizo Creative Director James Jacobs, and Paizo Publisher Erik Mona, and if the project nets $175,000, all levels of the dungeon will be included in the printed version of the book with an expanded page count.

And we plan to release Chronicle sheets to give Pathfinder Society characters venturing into the dungeons beneath Thornkeep an in-world benefit for surviving the dungeons within. The fact that all backers will have the opportunity to select the theme of each dungeon layer beyond the first means it’s a rare chance for Pathfinder Society GMs and players to help decide what adventures their PCs will take part in. And by backing the project, you ensure that you’ll have access to those levels when they’re released.

So make sure you check out the Kickstarter project, consider backing it, and spread the word to your fellow Pathfinder Society members. The project ends this week, so don’t wait. This is your chance to help make the Pathfinder Online game a reality, and decide the flavor of an all-star multilevel dungeon that promises to go down in Pathfinder history!

Mark Moreland
Developer

Pathfinder Battles Preview: Bone Chiller

Friday, June 1, 2012

This week I'm revealing one more prepainted plastic miniature from the upcoming Rise of the Runelords set in our Pathfinder Battles line produced in conjunction with WizKids. We're in the home stretch now, with only a few miniatures left to reveal, so I'm slowing down the pace a bit to make up for the explosion of early reveals over the last few months. As my mother and work supervisors have always told me, I've got to learn to pace myself.

So if it's to be only one miniature this week, it's got to be something big and cool and scary. It's got to be something that, to my knowledge, has never before been produced in prepainted plastic.

It's got to be the Wendigo.

The rare Wendigo appears late in the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path, menacing the player characters as they approach the campaign's endgame. The new hardcover Anniversary Edition features lots of new illustrations, and a brand new shot of the wintery Wendigo facing off against Valeros is one of my absolute favorites in the new book.

Incidentally, printer samples of the Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition hit my desk earlier this week, and it's fair to say that not only is it one of the most beautiful Pathfinder products released to date, it's one of the best-looking RPG books I've ever seen. And I'm not just saying that because I love it like an only child.

A book of that quality deserves really kick-ass minis to go along with it, and I think the Wendigo is one of the most interesting and unique figures in the set. For starters, its Large size allows it to tower over many of the other figures. That size gives the sculptors more space to work their magic, so from the antlers to the severed leg stumps (mounted in a clear plastic base to give a floating effect), this guy is packed with interesting details. WizKids also outdid themselves on the Wendigo's paint steps. Check out the creature's bloody hands! They even went so far as to apply a shinier paint to the Wendigo's eyes, to give them a glassy, eerie look.

He's awesome. And he's going to scare the pants off your player characters!

We still have several more miniatures to reveal in the weeks leading up to the set's August release. We'll have samples of the entire set on display at Paizo Con, so if you're planning to head to that event, prepare to bask in the set's glory in person.

I'll be there, and so will the haunting Wendigo!

See you next week!

Erik Mona
Publisher