In Pathfinder #17, the PCs visit the elven homeland of Kyonin. We'll be providing a gazetteer of this nation for GMs to use to expand adventures set in this verdant kingdom. As you can see by the two pictures here by Andrew Hou, though, Kyonin isn't just an idyllic sylvan setting with beautiful elven villages—there's a dark side to Kyonin as well. The fiend-haunted forest of Tanglebriar, empire of the demon Treerazer (that's his palace Witchbole shown in the not-so-friendly illustration), lies deep within the kingdom's borders, providing a constant source of high-level adventure opportunity for the brave and foolhardy.
In Pathfinder #17's adventure, "A Memory of Darkness," the heroes get to travel to the idyllic realm of Kyonin, the homeland of the elves. But as you can see here in Steve Prescott's cover illustration, Kyonin's not wholly a nice and happy place. Particularly down south, in the demon infested reaches of Tanglebriar, where bebiliths and other menaces replace bears in the "Reasons to fortify your campsite" list.
For the first twelve installments of Pathfinder, we introduced our twelve iconic adventurers. With Second Darkness, our third Adventure Path, we're switching tactics. Since there's only 11 core classes (we kind of cheated with Seltyiel a little, making him our "iconic multiclass" character), starting with Pathfinder #13 our cover characters are instead iconic NPCs from the current adventure path or campaign. Of course, that means that we'll be needing to walk a thin line between showing off our new characters and spoiling key plot points for the adventures themselves. Second Darkness is a good example, since the nature of the main bad guy race isn't obvious immediately in play, but by the end of the first adventure, it should be. It's a small spoiler to players who see the cover, but that's less important than having an eye-catching cover in the first place, really.
But there's a world of difference between showing off an illustration of a character and posting an extensive back story for that character. For the iconic heroes, this was never a problem since they don't actually appear in the adventures. Going forward, though, it's probably not a good idea to spell out exactly what an NPC's role in the adventure is. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that just because an NPC shows up on a cover doesn't mean that NPC is a bad guy. We'll be putting potential allies of the PCs up on the cover now and then as well.
Pictured here, for example, is an elven general named Allevrah. She's a pretty important member of Kyonin's military forces, and has certainly seen her share of battle (note her clipped ear—the result of a close call in a battle against a babau assassin—wound whose scar she wears with pride as a trophy). Her role in Second Darkness is pretty important—important enough that we chose to illustrate her on the Gen Con alternate cover to Pathfinder #13, but if you want to know what that role is, I'm afraid you'll have to play the adventure!
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