Have you ever wondered just what is inside those siege castles outside Absalom? Have you ever smelled the heady stench of troglodytes in the morning? Have you always wanted to join the Pathfinder Society, but could never figure out just how to impress them? Or do you want to know just a little more about the Advanced Player's Guide?
Well, you're in luck! Free RPG Day is almost upon us! On Saturday, many of you can go to your Friendly Local Game Store and pick up all sorts of free RPG products, including Paizo's own offering, Master of the Fallen Fortress, by yours truly. Check the official Free RPG Day Retailer Locator to see if stores in your area are participating.
(PaizoCon attendees will each get a free copy of the module at the show, and, starting Monday morning, everyone will be able to download a FREE PDF or buy a $5 print edition right here at paizo.com, so no need to despair if your store isn't on the Free RPG Day list!)
So what's all the hoopla about? Master of the Fallen Fortress takes a group of 1st-level PCs into one of the ruined siege castles that litter the Cairnlands outside Absalom. While it's a standalone Pathfinder Module, the adventure can also be used as an introduction to Pathfinder Society Organized Play, Paizo's constantly evolving, worldwide mega-campaign. And even better, it gives a preview of the six new iconic characters from the upcoming Advanced Player's Guide, statted up as pregenerated characters to get you right into the action!
Adventure is coming your way this weekend, just around the corner and down the road. Defeat the Master of the Fallen Fortress, rescue a captive Pathfinder, and on the way, say hi to Alahazra, Alain, Balazar, Damiel, Feiya, and Imrijka for me!
(To allow GMs to prepare to run Master of the Fallen Fortress on Free RPG day, we're releasing the Chronicles Sheet and pregenerated character sheets as a free download here (1.2 MB zip/PDF).)
I'm playing an alchemist in Josh Frost's Tuesday night game. Though I've played many caster characters in my day, including some with item creation feats, the alchemist class is very reliant on consumable items—the mutagens, bombs, extracts, potions, and alchemical items it creates. Inspired by Crystal Frasier's use of our GameMastery Item Cards for her character's scrolls, I started to assemble a collection of potion and alchemical cards for my character, Maro. However, given the number of formulas he knows, plus three mutagens, bombs, and the many alchemical items already in the game (plus more to come with Adventurer's Armory later this month), I ended up with more than 20 cards, and given that on any round I might be using any of them, sorting through them wasn't as efficient as I'd like. So I built a one-page alchemist tracking sheet.
Using a combination of item card art, public domain art, things I drew myself, and some manipulation with a graphics program, I now have a sheet that shows Maro's three mutagens, his bombs, bottles for his known extracts, and bottles for 12 of the most common alchemical items he may make, buy, or carry. Now when he prepares a Dexterity mutagen (which he calls his "snake potion"), I draw one box by the green mutagen bottle, and mark it off when he drinks it. Each day, I draw a box by his bomb bottle for each of his daily uses and mark them off as he throws them. Boxes go by the alchemical items he has and are likewise marked off. The last section is extracts and potions, which serves a dual purpose as he can create an extract or potion from any formula he knows. If he makes a potion, I draw a box by it and write "P" in it so I remember it's a potion (usable by anyone in the party); if he makes an extract that day, I draw a box with an "E" in it so I know only he can use it.
This tracking sheet also makes it easy if the other PCs need to grab a potion while Maro is unconscious; presumably he's explained which potions are which or labeled them, and any ally trying to find a cure wounds potion on his unconscious body can immediately tell what to look for and if he has any available. It also prevents the ally from trying to drink his extracts (which don't work for anyone but him).
The tracking sheet I use actually has the names of Maro's mutagens ("bear potion," "gorilla potion," and "snake potion") and formulas (cure light wounds, disguise self, enlarge person, expeditious retreat, jump, shield, and true strike) on it. I thought as a generic tool for any alchemist the sheet is more useful without those names so you can customize the list for your alchemist (or potion-brewer) PC, so the version here has blank spaces in those areas. If you want to type your potion names onto the tracking sheet instead of writing them by hand, the font I used is "The Alchemist" by S. John Ross's Cumberland Fontworks (see page 2 of that link). He has some really cool fonts on his site (and some other gaming stuff). The fonts are free for noncommercial use, and he gave permission for Paizo to use the font in this blog post. Thanks, S.J.R.!
Several of us at Paizo have iPhones, but some of us flaunt that fact a bit more than others. Take Managing Art Director James Davis, for example—since he got his iPhone, we very rarely see him without at least one earbud stuck in an ear, and he heads back to show me some (admittedly cool) new app he found once a week on average.
Of course, the good news is that his iPhone obsession sometimes results in cool stuff we can share. Such as these three Pathfinder iPhone wallpapers! Check 'em out!
There were a fair number of rules that had to be cut from the Beta Playtest Edition of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Prestige classes were one of the unfortunate casualties. Fortunately, along with the magic of the Internet, we can release these rules to you for playtesting and review. This document will be available on Monday, October 27th from paizo.com, but in anticipation, we thought we might give you a sneak peak at one of the classes in the document. Take a look at some of these new powers for the duelist prestige class.
Precise Strike (Ex): A duelist gains the ability to strike precisely with a light or one-handed piercing weapon, adding her duelist level to her damage roll.
When making a precise strike, a duelist cannot attack with a weapon in her other hand or use a shield. A duelist's precise strike only works against creatures with discernible anatomies. Any creature that is immune to critical hits is not vulnerable to a precise strike, and any item or ability that protects a creature from critical hits also protects a creature from a precise strike.
Parry (Ex): At 2nd level, a duelist learns to parry the attacks of other creatures, causing them to miss. Whenever the duelist takes a full attack action with a light or one-handed piercing weapon, she can elect not to take one of her attacks. At any time before her next turn she can attempt to parry an attack against her or an adjacent ally as an immediate action. To parry the attack, the duelist makes an attack roll, using the same bonuses as the attack she chose to forego during her previous action. If her attack roll is greater than the roll of the attacking creature, the attack automatically misses. For each size category the attacking creature is larger than the duelist, the duelist takes a –4 penalty on her attack roll. The duelist also takes a –4 penalty when attempting to parry an attack made against an adjacent ally. The duelist must declare the use of this ability after the attack is announced, but before the roll is made.
Riposte (Ex): At 5th level, a duelist can make an attack of opportunity against any creature whose attack she successfully parries, so long as the creature is within reach.
No Retreat (Ex): At 9th level, enemies adjacent to the duelist that take a withdraw action provoke an attack of opportunity from the duelist.
Make sure to stop by on Monday to grab this free pdf to add to your game. The playtest period for these rules begins on November 24th and will run through December 7th.
For those of you who don't know, tomorrow is the second annual Free RPG Day. Created and run by the good folks at Impressions Marketing, Free RPG Day works with hobby game retailers and RPG publishers to create in-store events that give away new RPG quick start rules and adventure modules. This year, the event is worldwide, meaning gamers in Canada, England, Germany, Scotland, Spain, Costa Rica, Chile, and the United States will be able to get their hands on a copy of Paizo's Free RPG Day module, D1.5: Revenge of the Kobold King.
It should have been the end. When the bloodthirsty adventurers burst into his throne room and mercilessly cut him down, the tale of Merlokrep, last king of the ill-fated Truescale Tribe, should have ended. But the fates weren't yet finished with the Kobold King, and now a dark power has brought him back from the beyond to wreak his vengeance upon those foolish adventurers who destroyed his tribe.
Revenge of the Kobold King is compatible with the 3.5 edition of the world's most popular roleplaying game and takes your heroes back beneath the haunted trees of Darkmoon Wood and into an ancient Azlanti crypt in search of the all-too-familiar monsters that are brutally murdering the people of Falcon's Hollow. This adventure returns to Darkmoon Vale, an area of the Pathfinder Chronicles campaign setting visited in D1: Crown of the Kobold King and E1: Carnival of Tears, and further detailed in the soon-to-be-released Pathfinder Chronicles: Guide to Darkmoon Vale. Revenge of the Kobold King is a 5th level dungeon adventure written by Paizo's Organized Play Coordinator, Nicolas Logue.
Though you'll be able to download the module for free and purchase a copy from paizo.com starting this Monday, we highly recommend you attend your local Free RPG Day event to get a physical copy at no cost. Go out and tell the world about Paizo and the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Get involved and run Revenge for hungry gamers right there at your local store. If your local store isn't participating, tell them about it. Make sure they're involved next year!
Paizo supports Free RPG Day and we want our readers, customers, and fans to do the same. Thanks for your support and we hope you'll like what Nick has in store for you deep beneath the Darkmoon Wood.
In a few short weeks, we'll begin shipping the first part of Pathfinder's second Adventure Path—Curse of the Crimson Throne. As with Rise of the Runelords, we've created a 16-page Player's Guide to help you not only build your characters for the new campaign, but also to help introduce you to the city of Korvosa, where the majority of Curse of the Crimson Throne takes place.
And as in the case of the Rise of the Runelords Player's Guide, the Curse of the Crimson Throne Player's Guide is free as a PDF. Even better? You can download it right now! (7.6MB zip PDF)
This 16-page product is packed with all sorts of flavor and crunch. An overview of the city of Korvosa, the largest city in Varisia, starts things off, including notes on the various districts and the important NPCs your characters might rub shoulders with. Notes on how all the core races and classes are represented in Korvosa come next, followed by some new equipment, weapons, and armor (some of which first appeared in the Runelords Player's guide, but others, like the sawtooth sabre, the doctor's mask, or the xxx, are brand new!). Several new feats are sprinkled throguhout the PDF as well (including one that gives fans of the crossbow some badly needed attention). The last few pages present several different background traits you can select for your new character to give him a instant "in" into Curse of the Crimson Throne's first adventure, "Edge of Anarchy." Oh, and the Golarion calendar is finally in print here as well—no more sifting back through blog posts to find out what day of the week and what month it is!
So go download your free Player's Guide, break out the six-sided dice, and start rolling up some stats! Korvosa's going to need all the heroes she can get before this Adventure Path comes to its concludsion!
James Jacobs Pathfinder Editor-in-Chief
Sneak Peek: Seven Days to the Grave
Friday, February 15th, 2008
Enjoy this interior art from Curse of the Crimson Throne Chapter 2: "Seven Days to the Grave." Just don't breathe too deep...
For Pathfinder #5, we asked a small army of authors to send us some spells and magic items that had a "Thassilonian" feel to them. As it turned out, we got about twice as many as we really had room to print. Rather than just cut the second half out and throw it away, we decided to cut the second half out and throw it into a free web enhancement for Pathfinder #5. Pictured here is just one of those items—a fragment of the Gluttonous Tome, a powerful artifact that has some pretty major ties to Zutha, the undead Runelord of Gluttony. WARNING: Some of the magic items may not be wise for your PCs to use. They were, after all, invented by the runelords and their minions!
To download a free PDF of the Pathfinder #5 web supplement, click here (180 KB zip PDF).
Last week you saw Wayne's awesome white dragon fight for the cover of Pathfinder #5. This week, we've brought you the whole thing as a downloadable desktop wallpaper—including the newest iconic! Who is this well-equipped wizard? Only time (and, perhaps, a blog post in the imminent future) will tell....
It's a fact: sometimes there's just too much good stuff to fit in a given volume of Pathfinder. While we here on the Paizo staff squeeze and condense as much as we can to make sure that each book is 100% concentrated awesome, print still has certain limitations... after all, sliced tree can only hold so much ink. That's why, from here on out, you can expect to see free supplement downloads to go along with specific volumes of Pathfinder popping up irregularly on paizo.com. Whether it's an alternate version of a map, an extra stat block, or a new item, whatever we put online will add to the adventure without being essential—just us doing what we can to offer a little bit extra to the gaming community.
Today, that's an alternate map of Magnimar, tagged with 30 new streets and places of interest, courtesy of mapping fiend Wes Schneider. We hope to shortly have a spot on the Pathfinder homepage where you can easily check to download the latest free content, but until then, click here (1.1 MB zip PDF) to download a high-res version of the map.
In the past, each time we've shown off the cover to a new volume of Pathfinder, we've been immediately deluged with requests for it as a downloadable desktop background, which we inevitably put up a few days later. This time we figured: why wait? After all, there's a long weekend coming up, and we wouldn't want your monitor to have to go without new Wayne Reynolds art for all that time. So here it is: the cover to Pathfinder #4, featuring everyone's favorite butt-kicking cleric of Sarenrae, Kyra. Looking at the stone giants Wayne's dreamed up for us, it's kind of amazing the heroes ever win, isn't it?
With Pathfinder #2 currently on the proverbial slow boat from China, here's a sample spread from the bestiary to whet your appetite. Introducing: the boggard! Download the 528 KB zip PDF.
Now that the first volume of Pathfinder is out the door to the printer, take a few moments to check out this gorgeous sample spread (284KB PDF), pulled from one of the volume's supplementary pieces on ancient Thassilon. And remember—there are 94 more pages where these came from...
Tomorrow, June 23rd, is the first annual Free RPG Day, where you can stop by your local game store and pick up a free product. As mentioned in the post from April 24th, you can pick up the very first GameMastery Module, D0: Hollow's Last Hope tomorrow as part of this exciting event.
Hollow's Last Hope is a prequel to D1: Crown of the Kobold King and covers much of the lead-up to that adventure, taking brand-new 1st-level characters up to 2nd level and getting them ready for the challenges the kobold king has in store. The adventure also features a plot that allows it to be run as a stand-alone event. Here is some of the text from the back cover:
The Town of Falcon's Hollow Needs a Miracle The plague has come to the town of Falcon's Hollow, and not even the town's priest can abate its wretched course. With the coughs of the sick and the wails of the dying echoing through town, the local herbalist uncovers a cure, but she needs some brave heroes to retrieve the ingredients. Finding the cure means risking the dangerous Darkmoon Vale, infiltrating a witch's haunted hut, and delving the ruins of an abandoned dwarven monastery.
Due to its smaller size, Hollow's Last Hope does not include pregenerated characters. We wanted to make sure you could run the adventure as part of Free RPG Day festivities, though, so to help on that end, we've put together four ready-to-play PCs. You can download a PDF of these PCs right here.
To find a game store near you that is sponsoring the event, go to freeRPGday.com. If you miss out on Free RPG Day, but still want to get your hands on the module, you can order a physical copy through our store (for a small fee) or you can download it as a free pdf starting Monday.
One of the biggest challenges when starting a new campaign is getting your players invested in the world. Sure, you may have set up the adventure and prepared all your notes, memorized your maps and picked out accents for the various local NPCs the party will meet... but what about your players? They can't exactly read the same source material you are without tripping over spoilers, and sitting down for a three-hour lecture about the local history and customs of their home region isn't most groups' idea of a fun first session. So how do you get that information across?
For Pathfinder, we've made it easy. Instead of all that hassle, you can just hand your players the Rise of the Runelords Player's Guide (which you get as a free bonus if you sign up as a charter subscriber before the first book ships in August) and let them go to town, entirely spoiler-free. What's more, each Adventure Path to come will have its own specific player's guide filled with information to help players get their bearings in the world and craft unique, interesting backstories for their characters... so much so that DMs will probably want to pick a copy up for themselves as well.
Inside the player's guide, you can expect to find:
Full-page maps and art of Sandpoint (the starting town from "Burnt Offerings") and Varisia (the whole region the Adventure Path takes place in), plus detailed write-ups on both.
World-specific information on the core races—the things that make elves, dwarves, and all the rest unique in Pathfinder and GameMastery Modules.
How to tailor the core classes to Varisia, and specifically to the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path. Trying to decide which deity or favored enemy to pick? Unsure what your wizard's motivation to go adventuring is? This section's for you.
New world-specific feats.
New non-magical items and weapons popular in Varisia. (What the heck is a "star knife" or a "dogslicer," anyhow?)
Since this is one of the first detailed looks the public will be getting at Varisia and our campaign setting as a whole, all of the information in the player's guide will eventually be available online for free download in addition to the printed version. But after seeing the amount of art and information presented in this 16-page booklet, you might not want to wait... particularly since it's likely cheaper than any of the snacks at your gaming table (and free to subscribers).
Still not excited? Pathfinder editor and Adventure Path veteran Wes Schneider, who's writing the guide, kindly offered this preview quote which shows that, despite its mysterious monuments, rich adventure, and fierce independence, the land of Varisia isn't for everyone:
Savagery and regressivity epitomize the disfigured lands of Varisia. Jagged mountain chains break the worthless, dusty clay at queer and reckless lengths. Tangled forests grow wild with titan weeds—the flora of these fecund briars little more than tenacious brambles. Blasted reaches of cracked earth and rolling scrub form the parched paradises of all manner of backward savages, including the doomed final generations of humanity's brutish ancestors. And everywhere the land bears the scars of a forgotten people whose eroding ruins and savage attempts at artistry litter a landscape already scarred by its own geological leprosy. —Darvayne Gios Amprei, Merciless: Abendigo, Belkzen, Varisia, and Other Hells
And now, by popular request... Pathfinder desktop backgrounds! While a desktop is obviously a totally different size than a book, and certain design elements are still being finalized, these three images are perhaps the best preview to date of what the first three Pathfinder covers (including the alternate cover for volume 1) will actually look like. So while you're waiting for "Burnt Offerings" to release, why not download one of these and throw it up as your wallpaper? After all, as far as we're concerned, everyone could use a little more Wayne Reynolds art in their lives...
What's better than a high-quality, full-color, 16-page adventure? A free one, of course!
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
On June 23rd, gamers celebrate a whole new holiday just for us: Free RPG Day. On that Saturday, gamers across the country can stop by their friendly local game shops and pick up free roleplaying products. Seeing how much we love free stuff here at Paizo, we couldn't help but get involved. Come the 23rd, the first GameMastery Module, D0: Hollow's Last Hope, will be available for free at these stores.
When we first heard about this event, we were pretty excited, but pulling it together in time turned out to be a real challenge. While we kicked around several ideas, we quickly decided that, since D1: Crown of the Kobold King is for 2nd-level parties, it only made sense for us to get players to that level with an introductory adventure. In fact, the plot of Crown seemed to beg for it, as the adventure takes place in a forbidding forest and a ruined dwarven monastery but doesn't spend a lot of time getting the PCs there. But therein lay a new roadblock—we didn't want the free adventure to be mandatory for full Crown enjoyment, and vice versa. So we thought hard, and hit upon a unique plotline for Hollow's Last Hope—the quest for a plague cure—that could stand alone and still allow DMs of Crown to strip out the free adventure's plot and tack the extra encounters seamlessly onto the beginning of D1.
Once that was figured out, the biggest hurdle became the time crunch. Because we found out about Free RPG Day late in the game, we all—particularly Wes Schneider and me, who teamed up to write it—had to pull together and work hard to get the writing, art, layout, etc. finished in half the time normally allotted for such a project. (And believe me, the work difference between a 16-page module and a 32-pager isn't as large as you'd think.) But in the end, we didn't cut any corners, and managed to put together a product that looks as great as it reads—cartographer Chris West and the artists over at UDON continue to astound us with their work, particularly on such short notice.
As for what you can expect to find in the module itself, I won't spoil things too much, but manipulative worgs and animated cauldrons that dance around and swallow people whole sound like fun to me. We also made a concerted effort to sprinkle the module liberally with details tying in with Crown of the Kobold King, as well as tidbits that'll go farther toward building up our game world. For instance, though the hut you search in Hollow's Last Hope belongs to a relatively low-level witch, rumor has it that she actually studied under a much more notorious hag from the north... someone whose name you might just recognize...
For more information on Free RPG Day, go to www.freerpgday.com. If you somehow miss out, check back here soon for more information on how to score your own copy of the module.
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