Illustrations by Mauricio Herrera and Peter Lazarski. Widescreen version here.
Long Live The Gorilla King!
Friday, January 14, 2010
It's no secret that I love gorillas, apes, and monkeys. My avatar here at Paizo is a monkey, my personal Facebook icon for a long time was a Bili Ape, and I'm always calling my kids little monkeys. (They are the Savage Horde, after all.) When I asked the art department to create a series of wallpapers, you can only imagine my delight when Crystal showed me the wallpaper below. It's about as perfect a wallpaper as I could ask for: the Gorilla King, swarms of monkeys in the background, and all of the Pathfinder hardback covers. It's been on my computer since Crystal finished it a week ago, and now it can be on yours.
We try to mix up what we do on the inside covers of Pathfinder from Adventure Path to Adventure Path. Those interior pages are prime real estate, after all, what with being the first thing you see when you open the book, their extra sturdiness, and what not. There's precedent for leaving these pages blank or just putting in some design—like we sort of did in Rise of the Runelords—but that's boring. On the other hand, we could do what the Modules and Companions do, and chock these pages full of charts, tables, cover art, and standard maps. But you know what? Pathfinder Adventure Path has more class than all that. So we tend to err on the artsy side. We've done tales from the marid storyteller Shazathared, we've done illustrative maps, we've done cast lists and power charts. This time around, for Kingmaker, we're doing wanted posters. With the often-comic illustrations of Peter Lazarski launching these side quests, every volume of Kingmaker includes eight optional missions, hunts, and errands. As these are meant to be wanted posters, and with a few folks already making their own, we thought it'd be cool to slip a few more of these out into world.
However, we live every day in paralyzing terror of saying or showing something on here that might be interpreted as a spoiler. Therefore, so as not to cripple any of the AP's upcoming encounters, I've only attached character headshots here. Who are they? Well, your GM knows (or soon will), all you sneaky players, so you'll just have to wait and find out!
Illustrations by Peter Lazarski
That said, if folks chime in and want the monsters too, maybe, just maybe, we can be convinced to take a short jaunt on the wild side and release some of those too.
So we're putting the final touches on the last volume of Council of Thieves as I write this post. Which also means that I'm finally starting to work on the next Adventure Path, Kingmaker. The authors have, of course, already been hard at work and we've already got four of the adventures in house in one shape or another—but the grisly process of development and editing can now start in earnest.
And so I thought I'd show off some art from the first Kingmaker volume, Pathfinder #31. Something new that's going on the inside front and back covers of every volume of Kingmaker. What could a crazy bearded man, a farmer's wife, a hungry tatzylwyrm, and an angry wild boar have in common?
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