Looking Back on Four Years of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Last week, a bunch of us attended the GAMA Trade Show, the hobby game industry's annual spring showcase event. I did a few interviews there, including this one from noted Pathfinder ACG fan Eric Summerer of the Dice Tower, where I lead off with some information on Mummy's Mask, Goblins Fight!, and Goblins Burn! before launching into other stuff Lone Shark Games is doing.

Going to GAMA always makes me reminisce, because it was four years ago almost to the day when I walked into GAMA 2012 with a wine box containing a humble prototype called "Saints" under my arm. Lead Developer Chad Brown and I had whipped up a set of cards based on a concept by me and my friend Rian Sand. It carried with it a modern horror story, but fundamentally it could work with any sufficiently adaptable story-based property. We weren't sure what we were going to do with it, but we resolved that we would know that by the end of the show. My first meeting was the one I wanted to work out the most, with Paizo's Erik Mona and Jeff Alvarez.

Across the table in my hotel room, I said something like, "Now, this game isn't Pathfinder. But you guys are smart enough to know what it would look like if it was Pathfinder." After playing for an hour, Jeff and Erik looked at each other and—after a bit of uncomfortable silence where they figured out who was gonna talk first—Erik said, "This is amazing. We have to talk to Vic and Lisa, but I think we want to do this."

Illustration by Wayne Reynolds
Cover Image for the Rise of the Runelords Base Set

A week later, our team had a plan to make a game with our friends at Paizo. It would require a year of investment as we rebuilt the game to work with the richest set of material we could imagine. The game expanded in its reach: Originally designed to scale from low-level metahuman to moderate-level metahuman, now it had to scale from fresh-faced cub adventurer to near-godlike titan of sword and sorcery. The stories would be big, based on Paizo's vaunted Adventure Paths. And we picked probably the biggest story we could right out of the gate: the modern classic Rise of the Runelords. This set would take Chad's personality: expansive, complex, and all-inclusive.

By the GAMA Trade Show of 2013, Chad, Gaby Weidling, Paul Peterson, Tanis O'Connor, and I had finished design on the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Rise of the Runelords Base Set, edited by Vic Wertz and Judy Bauer, and made into a real-looking game by Sarah Robinson and her team. I showed up to GAMA with a pre-production copy—the only pre-production copy. Sales savant Cosmo Eisele and I tucked ourselves in a tiny room in the top floor of the conference center at Bally's. I mean, it was no bigger than the interior of a VW Beetle. We showed the game to distributors and retailers five at a time at a nonstop clip. At this point, we guessed we had a pretty good game. Maybe a minor hit with people who'd stopped playing the Pathfinder RPG. Maybe bigger, if the cards broke right.

I think you know how that went. To our surprise, the Rise of the Runelords Base Set blew the walls off Gen Con 2013, becoming the number one hit of the show. It was a vastly bigger reaction than we imagined we'd get. Most interestingly, only a small portion of the game's fan base had ever played the Pathfinder RPG, or for that matter any RPG. What Paizo and Lone Shark created was a new genre, if only we managed to get more of it done.

As we came home from Indianapolis, our teams agreed we needed to make another base set that could show off some more tricks that the system could perform. We settled on the pirate-themed Skull & Shackles—and were already two months late on our design. With ships and sharks galore, this would become Gaby's set: rollicking, inventive, challenging to figure out. Emblematic of the set was our first promo character, the highly popular goblin Ranzak.

To make our lives more difficult, we also began a line of seven Class Decks that would allow for a new style of organized play. What that style of organized play would become was anyone's guess. Tanis hopped over from Lone Shark to Paizo to figure that out. What emerged was the groundbreaking Season 0 of the Pathfinder Society Adventure Card Guild. Season of the Shackles was Tanis's "set": adventurous, clever, mildly strange [also winning and fun at parties—Tanis]. I don't mind saying that we barely knew what we were doing, but it worked. People came out in droves to play with strangers at conventions and retail shops.

By GAMA 2014, we had picked up some new friends along the way. UltraPRO created a line of boffo accessories, including playmats, deck boxes, and deck protectors. WizKids gave us six sets of miniatures in which we embedded promo cards for all our iconic characters. And DriveThruCards constructed a fantastic community card creator so that all our fans could make their own cards.

Meanwhile, the Lone Shark team grew. We added designers Liz Spain and Keith Richmond to the club right as we were developing Wrath of the Righteous. GAMA 2015 saw the release of Paul's set: gigantic, intricate, over the top. Everything that could happen in a PACG set happened here: army battles, mythic power, retainers, characters introduced midway through the adventure path. Wrath had no limits.

We continued pounding away at the corners of the game with three new waves of Class Decks, now available in a monthly subscription. We followed up Season of the Shackles with a new tier system for Season of the Righteous, written by Keith, Tanis, and I. And Tanis introduced a whiz-bang new format for tournaments at Gen Con: the PACG Open.

Oh, and there was this cool thing from Obsidian, developed in collaboration with us. Pathfinder Adventures is the digital realization of everything that's cool about PACG, without any of the less cool fuss and bother of setup and cleanup. You'll get it in just a few weeks.

By GAMA 2016, we were closing the books on Mummy's Mask, which became Liz's set: crafty, historical, just a little insane. The team also started work on wave 5 of the class decks, bringing our total of developed class decks to a mind boggling 20 decks. (You don't know yet what #19 and #20 are. Stay tuned.) By GAMA 2016, adding together all the sets, expansions, class decks, guild adventures, accessories, and miniature sets, we were almost at 100 different things we'd designed or approved for PACG. It's a very big game with a whole lot of ways to play.

All that in four short years. More soon, I promise, including what we hope will be Keith's set in 2017. It's been a fun ride, so thanks for coming along!

Mike Selinker
Adventure Card Game Lead Designer