GameMastery Guide Cover!

Monday, October 5, 2009

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

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

James Jacobs
Pathfinder Editor-in-Chief

Snagged from the Vault: Pathfinder #23—The Impossible Eye

Monday, April 27, 2009

It is with the greatest pleasure that we are able to bring you some fantastic art with which to start your week. Featured here is the cover to Pathfinder Adventure Path #23: The Impossible Eye, painted by Jesper Ejsing. Valeros looks like he's really gotten in over his head this time!

Vadid and Nahk
Preview Purloiners

Imprisoned by Flame
A world of fire and wonder awaits! The path of the planes is fickle and the PCs' road home proves far more difficult than any had anticipated. Emerging from the pleasure plane of Kakishon reveals all the wealth and terror of a vast efreeti palace tightly sealed by ancient magics and situated at the heart of the incredible City of Brass. In this lavish citadel of sculpted flame, the PCs find hints into the burning obsession of their hidden foe. But will their discoveries be of any help to their imperiled world, hidden away in some distant reality? And can they ever hope to escape a prison that has, for untold centuries, imprisoned some of the most powerful creatures of a realm of endless flame?

Artist: Tyler Walpole	Artist: Ben Wootten

Art of Dragons Revisited

Friday, January 2, 2009

So with all of the snow we've been having lately, I thought it'd be appropriate to show off some cold-weather-appropriate artwork. As it turns out, we've got just the thing in the upcoming Dragons Revisited—an entire chapter on white dragons! There's a chapter on all ten of the classic dragons, in fact, but it's those white dragons I'm afraid about whenever I wander outside these days.

James Jacobs
Pathfinder Editor-in-Chief

Dragon on Dragon Action

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

With the runaway success of Classic Monsters Revisited, it was pretty much just a matter of time before we started work on the second in what is going to be a series of books that takes well-known monsters from the game and examines them in detail, ten per book. The fact that there are ten dragons in the core rules made the subject for the second book in the series a no-brainer. Check out the cover illustration for that book, Dragons Revisited, here!

James Jacobs
Pathfinder Editor-in-Chief

Amiri Just Loves Fightin' Dragons!

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

As the title and art may suggest, our iconic barbarian just loves tusslin' with great winged wyrms! This lovely bit of art is just one component of the cover to Pathfinder #15, "The Armageddon Echo," unfettered by logo or iconic image. Unfettered, I say! I hope you enjoy!

Jacob Burgess
Online Retail Coordinator

"There Are More Things In Heaven and Earth..."

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

In the past few weeks we've talked and teased a lot about what's in the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting hardcover. There have been mentions of peoples and races and countries and organizations, but what's beyond that? In fact, what's beyond Golarion? Does "campaign setting" have to mean just one land, one world, one planet? Or might it mean a whole reality?

The Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting tackles just that question. Personally, I've always been fascinated with planeswalking, and my favorite adventures usually take place in realms beyond the mortal world... and I think James wrote something about a demon once somewhere. It also turns out that the credits for this monster feature Todd Stewart, a modern expert and the go-to guy for fantasy cosmologies. So we got Todd to tackle a new take on the realms beyond the mortal plane. Welcome to the Great Beyond.

Chapter 3 of the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting delves into the realities beyond reality, the domains of the gods, and the organization of the spheres. Aside from deities both familiar and new, there are discussions of new races, non-godly powers fit for worship, musings on planar dragons, a complete map of the spheres, and details on more than a dozen planes (each an entire realm brimming with planar adventure). Looking through the chapter, a few tantalizing headers scroll by: "Norgorber: The Reaper of Reputation," "Sivanah: The Seventh Veil," "Thirteen Demon Lords," "Six Empyreal Lords," "The Whispering Way," "The Maelstrom"—the list goes on and on. In fact, for all you planeswalkers out there, here's a taste:

The Maelstrom/Limbo
Collectively referred to as the Maelstrom, vast swathes of uncharted, unclaimed terrain borders and surrounds each of the Outer Planes. Mysterious and dangerous wild lands untouched by the gods, these regions lack the cohesive stability present in all of the other planes; even the hellish depths of the Abyss possess a structure that the Maelstrom does not. Rather than some ever-changing sea of randomness, when viewed from the edge of another plane, the Maelstrom appears much like that of its adjacent neighbor. The differences grow more profound further away from the stabilizing anchor of the borderlands, eventually falling back into the mutable freedom of perpetual change. The Maelstrom defies the efforts of mapmakers, as its very character shifts and flows like the tide of an unseen ocean, to which the borderlands are but shores and calm shallows.

Crystalline forests melt like candle wax into shallow brine seas with jewel-like icebergs, and then sublimate to vast parched deserts, all within the stretch of days. Still, islands of stability do exist within the depths of the Maelstrom. These islands are ruled by petty gods, exiled fiends, and fallen celestials, and even the rare stronghold of a mortal wizard or priest-king can be found holding itself against the metaphysical lapping tide.

Creatures wandering in from the structured planes, long since grown native, populate the Maelstrom's borderlands, often possessing characteristics and behaviors at odds from their origins. Deeper still, chaos beasts, chaos incarna, and the mysterious serpentine proteans thrive within an environment of plastic potentiality. Claiming to be the first children of the Outer Planes, the keketar, imentesh, and naunet proteans worship godlike beings they refer to as the Speakers From the Depths, whom scholars speculate to be something akin to a pair of conjoined gods or a single dualistic entity.

The Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting hardcover and several infinities worth of new adventures hits shelves this August!

F. Wesley Schneider
Pathfinder Managing Editor

A Glimpse Into the Heart of the Beast!

Friday, June 13, 2008

The Pathfinder Campaign Setting Hardcover is soon upon us and the anticipation around here is palpable (tastes like pancakes, incidentally)! Getting to see, and be a part of, the flurry of activity here is a great part of the job! Allow me to foster and nurture some of that anticipation in you by sharing some of the fantastic art that is going into this beast of a book. Enjoy!

Jacob Burgess
Online Retail Coordinator

Meet Freezemaw!

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

One of the early lessons I learned working on adventures for Dungeon was that RPG players have an extra level of demands when it comes to dragons. You can throw pretty much any other monster into an adventure without worry, but if you want to include a dragon, you'd best be sure said dragon has a history and personality. And honestly, the readers are right (as they often are). Dragons shouldn't be throwaway encounters. They shouldn't just wander by as a result of a wandering monster result. In Pathfinder, I'm going to try to make sure that whenever we have a dragon appearing in the adventure, he or she has a story. Especially, as in the case of Pathfinder #5, when the dragon appears on the cover.

The white dragon on the cover is Arkrhyst—called Freezemaw by the Shoanti—an old white dragon who has lived on Rimeskull for 50 years. In his youth several centuries ago, Arkrhyst was a great and hated enemy of the Shoanti; his raids on the nomads of the Velashu Uplands and the western Storval Plateau were legendary, and many of those tribes still sing of these dark times, and of the countless heroes who sought out his home on Rimeskull to defeat him. None accomplished this goal, but as Arkrhyst grew older, his urge to raid grew less. Content now with the reputation he earned, he sleeps for years at a time on his considerable store of treasure, dreaming of his youthful rampages.

Of course, Freezemaw's only one of many menaces that wait for PCs brave enough to seek out the legendary dungeon of Runeforge in Pathfinder #5—but he's certainly one of the adventure's more memorable villains!

James Jacobs
Pathfinder Editor-in-Chief

Dragons of Golarion

Monday, December 3, 2007

So in Pathfinder #4, we finally get around to talking about dragons in our world. We knew going in that this volume's adventure would feature Pathfinder's first official dragon fight (immortalized by Wayne Reynolds in the alternate cover to Pathfinder #1), but we didn't want to stop there. Dragons are the name of the game, and we needed to make sure that ours were distinct enough so that they looked different, but at the same point they had to look like dragons. That meant horns, sharp teeth, long necks, wings, the works. And further, we needed to know about their history, gods, society, clans and bloodlines, physiology and psychology, language, variants, and more.

Fortunately, Mike McArtor is not only exuberant when it comes to dragons, but he's also a great writer (and should it come to it, I know where he lives if his promised words end up being late). They weren't, and in Pathfinder #4 you'll be treated to "Dragons of Golarion: The Myth and the Flame," an article that covers the basics of the dragons of our world.

Oh, and it's got head shots of all ten classic dragons; the five chromatics and the five metallics. Wes will only let me show you two of those ten, so I guess I'll go for the two big guys: gold and red. Check out their majesty!

James Jacobs
Editor-in-Chief, Pathfinder

Wayne Does It Again!

Monday, October 15, 2007

Wayne Reynolds just delivered the cover painting for Pathfinder #5: Sins of the Saviors, and man, is it a doozy! Looks like Valeros has learned a valuable lesson about what it means to play meat-shield for the party when there's a dragon involved.... Click the image for a larger version.

James Sutter
Assistant Editor, Pathfinder

Conquering the Vale

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

There are a lot of things I like about dragons. They're iconic, they fly, they have breath weapons, they're deadly in melee, and they're incredibly intelligent (for the most part). Unfortunately, this usually puts them in the role of "boss monster" or lone combatant. Fighting against a host of dragons either feels a bit out of place or is reserved for very high-level characters. True dragons are also kind of a pain to generate, unlike other monsters.

For GameMastery Module W1: Conquest of Bloodsworn Vale, I really wanted to include a dragon-like monster that was easy to use and could be used in a group, without having to resort to the oft-overused half-dragon template. Enter the flame drake. This offshoot of dragonkind is a degenerate cousin of true dragons that breeds true. Like true dragons, these drakes have breath weapons, can fly, and are dangerous in melee. Unlike true dragons, however, flame drakes are less cunning, prove far less resilient, and do not age like true dragons, making them easier to use both alone and as part of a group (in their case, a rampage of 3–12).

Flame drakes in particular (and there will be other drake types) can unleash a ball of flame that works like a fireball every few rounds. They also have a rather nasty bite that deals a bit of fire damage with each chomp. Finally, flame drakes can call on their draconic heritage a few times per day to take an extra move action. All in all, they're a nasty critter that falls solidly in the CR 5 range. Dangerous? You bet, but nothing that a group of PCs set on taming the deadly wilderness of the Bloodsworn Vale can't handle. Their master, on the other hand, is another story entirely.

Jason Bulmahn
GameMastery Brand Manager

...And the Dragon Comes in the Niiiiiight!

Friday, April 27, 2007

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

James Sutter
Assistant Editor, Pathfinder