Today is the final day of the Advanced Race Guide playtest. If you haven’t posted your comments on the playtest document, get them on the playtest messageboard today.
I want to thank everyone who participated in the playtest and commented on the first iteration of the race builder. Your feedback is going to help us improve the system so that we can make a truly excellent tool for GMs to build races for any Pathfinder game.
So what did we learn from the playtest? A lot of things! Here are some of the highlights.
First off, as we suspected, some of our initial pricing was off. While costing all of the core races at 10 points in the system helped us create a rough baseline for standard races, it also created some problems with individual racial ability and trait costing. Some abilities were too cheap and others were too expensive. Those abilities are being reexamined and the values will be more balanced and intuitive in the final race builder.
Second, we learned that we needed to open up some of the prerequisites and expand the options presented the final race builder. Many people pointed out that the Tiny size option being limited to the fey type was far too restrictive. A number of playtesters had some really interesting ideas that required Tiny creatures of types other than fey. My personal favorite was the idea that many of you had to create a race of toy solider constructs. On a related note, we learned that may of you were very eager to make dragon-type races, not just dragon-themed races using the humanoid or monstrous human type. You can expect to see the ability to create dragon-type races in the final document.
Some of the best feedback from the playtest came in the form of the actual races that the participants built and the suggestions of racial abilities that folks came up with. Reading through those fun and exciting race builds, comments on those builds from other playtesters, and the very long wish list of racial abilities that people wanted to see gave us lot of ideas for expanding the system. We are looking forward to seeing any additions you post today.
It’s been a long, frosty weekend and we’re still a little lethargic, but lets start things back off right. Check out what’s coming around the corner in the final installment of the Serpent Skull Adventure Path with Pathfinder Adventure Path #42: “Sanctum of the Serpent God.”
In penance for yesterday's blog post being all mean about not giving out new art and punishing folks and all that, I present to you four more monsters from the upcoming Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Bestiary 2! What do these monsters all have in common? They're all based on monsters that come from mythology or the public domain—see if you can recognize any of them! Look for Bestiary 2 in bookstores, hobby stores, and on paizo.com in November.
There's a line when it comes to what sort of material we put in our products. We try not to tread over the boundary of what might be offensive, provoking, or generally beyond what you might see in a PG-13 rated movie. But every now and then we test those limits—or abjectly bound past them. In Pathfinder Adventure Path #39, the ol' "questionable content" line gets a little hazy; not because of sex or violence, or whatever have you, but because of religion.
There's no doubt religious elements influence the characters and plots of the Pathfinder RPG—clerics, paladins, monks, and witches are playable classes after all, and untold armies of cultists have fallen before legions of adventurers. But we've long danced around one religious tradition with a lengthy history of involvement in sword and sorcery fantasy: voodoo.
We've kept away from this topic—one I've personally wanted to cover since back in the Dragon magazine days—for several reasons, the primary one being that vodou is a living religion practiced and respected in several parts of the world, and no one here knows enough about it to judge what might be offensive. What we do know about, though, are films like The Serpent and the Rainbow and stories like Robert E. Howard's "Hills of the Dead" or "Black Canaan." We also know the "juju zombie," a toughened up zombie who's been in RPGs for years and years (with a name inspired by African fetish magic and in, coincidentally, Bestiary 2). So, motivated by the Advanced Player's Guide's presentation of the oracle, a divine caster who worships a pantheon of patrons and cultivates a host of strange abilities, now seemed like a perfect time to test our luck and take a swing at a new tradition of magic inspired not so much by real-world vodou but more by voodoo films, stories of bayou magic, and swamp and sorcery fantasy.
All of this comes together in Mike Shel's article in Pathfinder Adventure Path #39's "The Path of Juju." Now, oracles can look forward to a new juju mystery allowing them to tap into the mysterious secrets of nature's deadliest wildernesses, while casters of all types might create a host of strange new magical items, from soul trapping powders to the infamous ganji doll. It's all in there, ready for GMs looking to tell tales of swamp magic and mystery or PCs ready to challenge the cities of men with the true power of their ancient beliefs.
First up, an update from last Monday's post: We're all feeling much better around here. Physically at least. (The various stresses and psychoses of the editorial pit are more the topic of an encyclopedia set than a blog post... so moving right along.)
If you read Pathfinder Adventure Path's monthly Bestiary, you probably already know what a sucker I am for monsters, especially when we can double-dip, combining cool creature design with beasts from real-world folklore and mythology. Well, just a heads up, the Bestiary in Pathfinder Adventure Path #34 hits the swamp monster mother load! To spill the beans on the majority, we've got the ahuizotl, the river-dwelling eye-ripper of Central American; the leshy, the legendary green man of Slavic myth (which, as you can see by the art, I ended up taking a weird but open ended turn with that all you druid players might be particularly intrigued by); and, my personal fav, the nuckelavee of Orcadian legend—the second time I've developed this monster for a d20 game—who, thanks to artist Scott Purdy, looks INCREDIBLE!! I absolutely love bringing these monsters, with pedigrees as vaunted as classics like chimeras and goblins, to the game table, so expect a few more lethal legends by the end of the Kingmaker Adventure Path, and plenty more in the future.
Illustrations by Scott Purdy
And if you have any other obscure folklore or mythological monsters you'd love to see make their way into Pathfinder Adventure Path, don't hesitate to drop a suggestion in the thread for this post (along with a link so I can read more!).
Huh. It's been a while since I've talked about an Adventure Path in the blog, I just realized. Looking back, seems the last time we talked about an Adventure Path at all was on January 6th, in fact. AIEEE!
Now... sometime soon I wanna share with you some excerpts from Merisiel's journal that have come into my possession... excerpts that catalog her joys and frustrations over the foundation of her new nation in the northeastern River Kingdoms... but I'm still deep in the process of translating it to English from Elven and excising all the racy parts that the MAN won't let me put on the blog.
So, since I don't have the time yet to post that preview of the kingdom-building rules that'll be appearing in Pathfinder Adventure Path #32, why don't I show off some of the art from the first Kingmaker adventure instead? Let's see... how about pictures of two of the more ferocious war chieftains your PCs will be dealing with during the course of "Stolen Land?" Names withheld to prevent the not-so-innocent...
And I promise to make public Merisiel's journal soon! Stay tuned!
Illustration by Kyushik Shin
Illustration by Eric Belisle
Illustration by Scott Purdy
PS: Yes... the third picture is of a carbuncle. For real.
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