What's In the Box?!

Thursday, May 15 2014

Illustration by Milivoj Ceran

When we decided to make this month's Pathfinder Campaign Setting volume, Occult Mysteries, the development team had perhaps the most fun I can remember in almost 4 years at Paizo coming up with the different setting-specific mysteries we wanted to explore in the book.

One of the largest challenges was determining what, in a world where magic, gods, divination, and the afterlife were demonstrably real, constituted the "occult." In our world, research into demons and devils is certainly occult, but is it in a world where one of the most powerful nations in the Inner Sea is openly and proudly in cahoots with the legions of Hell?

In the end, we decided that "occult" in Golarion meant anything that wasn't known to the general population. So while your average commoner pig farmer doesn't know how to cast a spell, he's aware that magic exists. He's not, however, likely to know that some magicians can augment their spellcasting by quickly analyzing the mathematical constants that bind reality together, or that if the stars are in the right alignment certain types of magic are more potent than normal.

As much as we wanted to reveal a lot of the hidden truths behind some of Golarion's longest standing mysteries (Why did the gnomes leave the First World? Who created the multiverse? What's the deal with the Aucturn Enigma countdown clocks in Osirion?) we also wanted to maintain the mystery that has inspired players, GMs, and ourselves and our writers to use these mysteries as jumping-off points in their own adventures. Thus, we made sure that every answer we provided left another (sometimes several) in its place.

Subscribers have already started getting their copies of Occult Mysteries, and the discussions about what reveals they're most excited about and what questions these revelations have raised are exactly what we'd hoped for. Make sure you pick up a copy of Occult Mysteries and see what lies hidden just below the surface of the Pathfinder campaign setting.

Illustrations by Helge C. Balzer and Dmitry Burmak

Mark Moreland
Developer

All the Legs!

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Illustration by Dmitry Burmak

There's something I'm sure many of you don't know about our Art Director Andrew Vallas. He has a thing for creatures with multiple limbs—multiple legs, specifically. At least six to be sure. To keep our awesome Art Director happy, I made sure to order a few multi-legged creatures for the Bestiary in Pathfinder #69: Mother, Maiden, Crone for his enjoyment. Not that the whole bestiary is a chorus line of horrible monstrosities, mind you. (There are only really two monsters that fit the bill, but considering the centaurs of the Dvezda Marches in Iobaria are each bringing four legs to the party, there are a lot of legs to make a bipedal creature jealous.)

First up to represent additional limbs is the kokogiak. When I first presented the idea of a ten-legged polar bear the reaction was close to, "Really, Daigle?" But then I supported my brief dip into mania by explaining that I got the idea from Innuit myth (also spelled qupqugiaq), and that it's a creature that makes a person think that their loved one is lost out in the snow in order to lure the target out of safety and into its jaws. Next up is the svathurim. That is what you get if Thremyr made a frost giant into a centaur-like creature and infused them with insatiable hatred. Jason Nelson did a great job designing these two (and two other monsters in the Bestiary), so pick up Maiden, Mother, Crone to see what else is to be found in the wilds of Iobaria.

Illustrations by Milivoj Ceran