Folks have a lot to say when it comes to tieflings, villains, and high-level challenges. Ecarrdian Drovenge, fresh from his shoot for the cover of Pathfinder Adventure Path volume #30, embodies all three and largely speaks for himself. A scion of one of the most powerful families in Westcrown and a son of the archfiend Mammon, few dare stand in the way of his city-shattering vengeance, but your PCs might be going toe-to-toe with him nonetheless in the upcoming endgame of the Council of Thieves Adventure Path.
Sometimes, art makes the choices for me. When we ordered the cover to Greg A. Vaughn's "Mother of Flies," we asked Steve Prescott to paint us a scene in a thieves' guild treasury involving the iconics in a fight against a six-armed stone golem. The art, as you can see here, is great!
Unfortunately, by the time I got to the section in the adventure where this six-armed menace made its appearance, I realized something. A six-armed stone golem (particularly one armed with a pair of tree-sized-swords) would be something like a CR 15 monster. Not really a fair fight to inflict on 10th-level characters, and certainly not good design to have the dude guarding the treasury be tougher than the adventure's actual boss.
So, in a last-minute brainstorm in Wes's office when he was probably trying to go home, he, Crystal Frasier, Lisa Stevens, and I figured out what to do with the situation. The result is a new monster from distant Vudra, the six-armed calikang, a race spawned from a deity's failure and doomed now to seek atonement for an ancient sin. We ordered an extra piece of art for this volume's Bestiary, I wrote up the monster that weekend, and everything fell perfectly in place just in time to ship to the printers.
As for the calikang itself? You'll just have to wait for "Mother of Flies" to find out what he can do!
Well, as any devoted follower of our messageboards or weekly chat room meetings knows, things have been pretty frantic here at Paizo. As it turns out, releasing about 1,000 pages of rules (between the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook and the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary) and moving offices to Redmond, WA, all at the height of the convention season, is a really good way to knock product lines off schedule. We've been scrambling to get things back on track, and I'm happy to report that we're making some really good progress there—in fact, Pathfinder Adventure Path volume #28 is just now heading off to the printer!
This volume's adventure was originally going to be a stand-alone adventure written by me for our Pathfinder Module line. When I kept not having the time to get it started, I realized that it'd make a perfect fit into Council of Thieves. Splitting the writing duty for it with RPG Superstar Clinton Boomer, we explore a "what if?" scenario in this adventure: What if a "nuclear reactor" used a powerful devil as its energy source instead of radioactive material? And what if that infernal reactor had a meltdown?"
Presented is a hint of what's in store for Westcrown when things go bad—part of Steve Prescott's incredible cover for the volume. And that's just what's going on up topside—just wait until you find out what's happening down below in the Nessian Spiral itself!
Snagged from the Vault: Dungeon Denizens Revisited
Friday, April 3, 2009
Closing out this week's blogs, we unveil a terrible creature that epitomizes the savage and insatiable hunger possessed by you, our ravenous readers: the bulette, illustrated here by Steve Prescott...
Of all the beasts that populate the wilderness, few are as feared as the bulette. Known sometimes as the landshark, the bulette is a sleek predator, moving as fluidly through earth as those primeval eating machines move through water. Bulettes possess insatiable hunger and view anything that moves as food. They hunt constantly, and when their attention turns to new hunting grounds they feed until nothing remains. They are the stuff of nightmares, the bane of the wilderness—a brutal, savage monster whose ferocious majesty was not evolved, but intentionally crafted.
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.
Pathfinder #15 is off to press, and you know what that means! Time to start working on Pathfinder #16! Pictured here is the cover by Steve Prescott for "Endless Night," the fourth installment of the Second Darkness Adventure Path. In the coming month, we'll be revealing more about this volume's contents (driders and demons and mothmen, oh my!), but for now, feast your eyes on a typical day for surface folk in a drow city.
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