EDIT: As for the notion of "stealing a soul from Pharasma," that's not how it works. Remember, Pharasma is also the goddess of birth and fate. She knows if it's a soul's fate to be resurrected (aka reborn) into life once or a thousand...
How much is this still true in the age of lost omens?
It was/is kinda presented that the gods' collective ability to predict the future has become a mess, if it is still semi-functional at all.
(and that status quo is kind of necessary for storytelling as a concept to work. Omniscience is just anti-narrative.)
Playing through Stolen Fate seems to canonize that the future of mortals is rather unknowable in the current age, even to the entities created just for that purpose. The Norns themselves are unable to see fate anymore, nor can they "manipulate the weave" like they used to.
From my campaign notes, they said they are still able to know / learn of a mortal's "destiny" but even our GM struggled to grok what level of future-insight that even means. The Norns clearly did not posses the kind of insight or foreknowledge they used to, or thought was sufficient.
** spoiler omitted **...
It's still true. Pharasma being able to know when and how a creature will be resurrected or not is a different thing entirely from prophecy and telling the future.
(As a fun aside: The element of "prophecy no longer works" in the game is, to a certain extent, a nod toward the fact the Age of Lost Omens is the first point during the world's history that PCs are in the mix. It's the point where the world goes from being a non-interactive historical narrative exercise in world building to an interactive gaming exercise where the unfolding of current events, aka Adventures, is determined by the players of the game. And players are real good at doing things the GM doesn't expect or can't predict! Getting rid of prophecy in particular is our attempt to make it apparent to players that what happens isn't writ in stone, and for their games, their choices matter. Prophecy takes agency away from characters, and taking agency away from players makes for a less fun game. Also, prophecy as a story element is a pretty tired cliche anyway, and removing it is one way we challenge ourselves to do better. :D)
James Jacobs the story to this AP and the explanation of Xanderghul's Return.
I love it.
Cool! It's nice to almost be able to talk more about it. It's been something that I've been noodling over ever since we first started talking about [REDACTED] in-house several years ago.
The amount of time it takes for a soul to be judged is variable. In some cases, it's instant. In others it takes weeks or months or years or even centuries or more. To the souls who stand in line, the perception of time passing is different than for mortals—it's simultaneously instant and eternal.
In game play, that means that the actual decision is in the GM's hands—or in the case of a PC, in that PC's player's hands. THEY get to decide if the soul in question has been judged and thus can't be brought back to life via the normal means and instead need a huge quest or a divine intervention to take place. And that choice doesn't have to be made until the resurrection attempt is being made.
When it's an NPC doing the task, no big deal if they waste their time and resources, but if a PC is doing so, it's good for the GM to let the player know if the soul's been judged at some point before any actual resources are expended.
Also, note that a soul can always choose not to be resurrected, and that this choice is DIFFERENT than being judged. As long as the soul isn't judged, they can choose freely if they want to be pulled back to life. Personally, I think it's best to allow the soul to recognize the source of that attempt, otherwise it gets kinda potentially gross for a bad guy to kill someone, then resurrect them right into a prison or worse. And the whole idea of a bad guy that kills, resurrects, kills, and so on over and over and over, while a compelling idea for a horror movie villain, is kinda awful for a tabletop RPG about heroic PCs, in my opinion (since such a fate, if it can exist in game for an NPC, should be something that threatens a PC as well). At the very least, make sure your group is all okay with such a potential fate before including it in your game!
EDIT: As for the notion of "stealing a soul from Pharasma," that's not how it works. Remember, Pharasma is also the goddess of birth and fate. She knows if it's a soul's fate to be resurrected (aka reborn) into life once or a thousand times or more or anywhere in between, and doesn't intervene at all, regardless of who's doing the resurrecting, and it doesn't bother her. She's beyond time, and she knows that eventually all things die. She's patient, but also merciful and doesn't begrudge those who seek methods to extend life beyond death via things like resurrection or Sun Orchid Elixirs or fountains of youth. The main exception here is undeath, because that method is actively destructive to the cycle of life and death in that it corrupts a soul and takes it OUT of the cycle, potentially forever, but even temporarily it's damaging. But when a soul of someone who created a lot of undead (or the soul of an undead creature themselves) finally moves on to the Boneyard, she doesn't hold grudges and lets those souls move on to the afterlife after judgment or be resurrected.
SECOND EDIT: Most of this is not just to build an interesting world, but primarily to enable agency to players of the game. Death is an awful thing to happen to a PC, and if the player wants to keep playing, there should be ways they can come back. At the same time, there needs to be narrative guidelines to explain why Every Single Bad Guy the PCs defeat doesn't just get resurrected by someone. The more that happens, the less death is a factor in game and becomes trivialized. Making resurrection an exception for NPCs and more of an opt-in or opt-out for PCs (resources depending, of course) keeps that from being trivialized. Even then, there are some players who WANT the death of a PC to stick, and that's why the player is the one who gets the say whether or not their PC gets resurrected.
Let's for at least a few months be pretty careful about spoilers for this one, including the typical "just list the new monsters by name" stuff, folks. Use the spoiler tags, please, and thanks!
Dead God's Hand also suffered from scope increase due to the writer turning in a lot more pages than was asked for. James Jacobs said that in most cases once you hit 5-6 levels of play that's where it becomes AP rather than Adventure.
James was speaking to Pathfinder adventures vs Pathfinder Adventure Paths. On that side of the Gap, we're sticking with the format of an Adventure Path covering a minimum of 9 to 10 levels, with a standalone adventure covering (at most) 5 to 6 levels. Things that land in between will either be trimmed to be a standalone or expanded to be an Adventure Path.
Starfinder is a different game, and things we do on the Pathfinder side should not be assumed to be the status quo for the Starfinder side.
This topic DID just come up in a meeting both teams were in earlier today though! I hope that we can consolidate the terminology going forward at some point in the future to avoid confusion... but in the end, keeping an eye on how many levels of play an adventure covers will be your best bet. Don't get too caught up in the semantics of what is an adventure or what is an Adventure Path, is my advice for now, I guess?
The in world reasons are spoilers meant for players to discover as they play Revenge of the Runelords, but I expect once volume 1 is out next month folks will spread the word online. That's fine, but please use spoiler protocol when talking about it!
But from a meta-reason... he's back simply because the Runelords Adventure Paths are popular, and we've never given players a chance to face off against Xanderghul at the peak of his powers as a full-strength mythic arguably the most powerful wizard on the planet mode—or at the very least folks wanted to see his full stat block, which we haven't to date published. That will change by the end of the year.
Personally, I'm pretty happy with the reasons/justifications in-world for how I have him come back to threaten the world once again. Not everyone will be, but that's just because not everything is for everyone. But here's hoping Revenge of the Runelords delights more folks than it annoys! :-)
All that said, I'm eager to see the speculation. I won't be commenting, of course, but I'm curious to see if anyone picks up on some of the hints and clues we've been publishing over the last several years about this storyline (it is, after all, one I started noodling on and building upon more than three years ago, after all!).
That said, we don't micromanage our artists to this extent. When we order art of a monster, such as a dragon, we'll include a reference illustration, which is typically the illustration from the Monster Core or Bestiary or wherever the monster was first illustrated well enough to serve as reference, and often ask the artist NOT to paint an exact duplicate of that specific creature (this is more common when sending reference for humanoid creatures, though). The belly scales of a creature, such as a dragon, are generally presented as a lighter color than the rest of the scales, in large part because that's how animals work and it looks right and it gives some depth and variety to the illustration.
The exact hue of colors is variable. Even more so in remastered dragons, but the same goes for dragons from the OGL era. Not illustrating every dragon of the same kind identically is 100% intentional.
Yup; the timing of my post was awkward since a different blog post came out shortly after, but keep in mind that blog posts aren't written day and date minutes before they're posted to the site—folks ARE listening and considering and having internal discussions but still don't have anything to report yet, hence my request for patience. The changeover is months ahead of us still (next January). But since I'm not personally involved much in the org play side of things (spinning all the standalone adventures, Adventure Paths, special projects, and other stuff focused on the print side of the narrative team is more than enough to keep me busy) I can't personally speak to the details over there is all.
So... yeah, keep letting us know your feedback, but also please continue to be patient as well.
After some thought, I dont hate the AP changes as much as I did initially. I dont like what i see as a lack of engagement between AP releases. Having AP volumes every month kept me more "in the loop" on what was going on. Now i think ill be surprused when someting comes out.
I have no opinion on PFS.
-Skeld
Having APs be hardcovers that are self-contained will, in theory, also make it easier for us to promote and preview and build anticipation for them as events too, which should help foster more engagement and excitement (not sure if this is what you're speaking to, specifically, but it's something that I feel like we could do better at, and having them be hardcovers should help us there).
We do read the posts. Even if we don't reply to all of them. Please keep giving feedback, and know we are listening. Hopefully we'll be able to give an update soon but for now all I can ask is for folks to be patient and continue giving feedback in as moderate and well-reasoned a way as possible. Getting combative and insulting and antagonistic due to fear and frustration is understandable—it's a passionate topic, after all!—but it's somewhat counterproductive.
Please be patient. We are listening and considering.
We haven't yet provided full and exact details on the locations and story progression and all that for Hell's Destiny (or Hellbreakers, for that matter) because those are spoilers. Most of what we've said are:
Hellbreakers: Focuses on the eastern side of things and mostly on the Isger/Cheliax confrontation.
Hell's Destiny: Focuses on the bigger picture stuff, starts in Corentyn but has a LOT of travel throughout Cheliax and beyond. I don't believe we've listed all of the exact locations and the like that feature in this, again, because of spoilers... but also becasue we haven't really had a chance to do a big deep dive preview or chat about these Adventure Paths on their own... it's always been in the context of larger picture stuff with bigger overarching topics (be it the Hellfire Crises meta-event or the adjustments to the Adventure Path going from softcover to hardcover).
As with all Adventure Paths, we'll have much more to say once we get closer to when they're actually coming out. Which in this case is still months away in the next year.
And just looked at the text and can confirm that PCs should reach 6th level in this one, although ...
Spoiler:
...there's only a couple of 6th level encounters at the end. It's not one where you'll likely reach 7th level!
Which does make this on the longer side of a standalone adventure. Probably the LONGEST side, similar to Crown of the Kobold King. Once you start doing more than 6 levels in a book, its length and scope wants it instead to be an Adventure Path.
I'm preparing to run through Chapter 3 of Prey for Death, and as I have a 5 player party I was running through encounters and tweaking the ones that I thought would need a boost. I figured I'd adjust the final fight at the Nexus by adjusting Soleil to be Elite, and when doing so I noticed that Soleil's perception in the book (29) is already equivalent to the perception for an Elite Phoenix (29). For a 4 player party the Elite adjustment would put this encounter neatly at 120 XP for a Severe encounter (without the adjustment it's 110 XP). This made me wonder -- was Soleil just intended to be an Elite Phoenix? Or is it common to adjust only the initiative for monsters like this?
Soleil is not meant to be an elite phoenix, and technically should have the standard initiative of Perception +27. (Note that Soleil's level is 15, the same as the standard Monster Core phoenix.)
A +2 bonus to initiative will have a minimal impact all on its own, fortunately, since a +29 roll is within the High range for a 15th level creature, so feel free to simply assume that Soleil is just a little bit better at perception than the typical phoenix if you roll with that initiative and then use all the other standard 15th level Monster Core stats.
If you do want to boost Soleil with the elite adjustments, do so normally—whether or not you boost that Perception up to +31 is up to you!
I am curious if it would be possible to play Revenge of the Runelords with an evil party intent on usurping Xanderghul's power and resurrecting the ancient legacy of the last incarnation of Runelords to take over New Thassilon and bring about a new age of (evil) Thassilon dominance over Golarion?
If so, the players could portray four Runelord aspirants (wizards of Sloth, Gluttony, Greed, and Wrath) who are accompanied by two martial/rogue/cleric allies.
As possilbe as it is to play devil worshiping Thrune agents in Hell's Rebels, anti-pirate paladins in Skull & Shackles, human-hating goblin raiders in Rise of the Runelords, or worsihpers of Deskari in Wrath of the Righteous.
It can be done, but it's not the point of the adventure path, and you're setting your GM up for a LOT of work to rebuild, rework, and in some cases rewrite extensive sections of the story... almost to the extent that your GM might be better off using this Adventure Path as reference for stats, maps, and background lore and doing an entirely different campaign for your group.
You can also paint a house with a hammer instead of a paintbrush, but it's not gonna work as well and will take a LOT more work and has a real strong risk of ending up being frustrating and disappointing... but if you pull it off, you have some fun bragging rights and a cool story to tell! :-P
Dead God's Hand is not an Adventure Path. It's long, but not that long. It's gonna be a standalone adventure.
Can you tell us what level the PCs should be at the end?
If I recall correctly, you start at 1st level and end at 5th level. Maybe 6th level? Been a bit since I've finished developing it and I'm not at my work computer now to confirm...
All of that said, the post wording left me with the question: Why are hardcovers easier to reprint? I’ve always seen paperback as preferred for reprints.
Because it's a single product that goes out of print, rather than 3 products that go out of print at different times. And because it being a single product makes it easier to reprint (since you reprint ONE thing and not THREE things). And because stores and distributors are more eager to buy hardcover products because they look better on shelves. And because the bigger a book gets, the less structurally sound it becomes if it remains softcover.
Yet another question: Is it intended that Zungur's Destructive Croak ability does not allow for a saving throw? The default swampseer from Monster Core allows a DC 19 basic Fortitude save.
There should for sure be the basic DC 19 save for that ability.
Another question: in area C5, the text talks about an everlight crystal:
Quote:
As long as one of the PCs carries a torch or lantern (or the everlight crystal, if they found it earlier in the adventure), they can all see just fine, ...
However, there is no other mention of such an item anywhere in the adventure. Can I assume this is a relic of something being cut, or should there be such a crystal somewhere?
The everlight crystal did get cut, since we ended up not having room to include its rules in the text, but then a reference to it stubbornly stuck in the text later. Just ignore its reference.
The Sporespawn of Treerazer has the melee attack "fungal lash" and the damage entry reads "and corruption".
What means corruption? Is this a missing feature?
That "and corruption" should have been removed. We had to streamline this stat block at the last minute; just ignore it. The bludgeoning and poison damage do the job fine as-is.
So in light of the recently announced AP changes, Stand-alone adventure paths, maybe with some light suggestions toward how they might be linked (think Rusthenge --> Seven Dooms) when possible seems like the way to go. Facilitate GMs stringing paths together, but don't link paths closely in either theme or plot.
We'll for sure be letting folks know about these links, just as we did with Rusthenge to Seven Dooms to Revenge of the Runelords... but the tricky part will remain that we can't talk about links in detail before we announce everything in the series. Kinda like how for a year I was all "Maybe put your Seven Dooms PCs on hold for a bit because there's a great follow up coming later," when the space between that and Revenge of the Runelords changed during production (so we could release Runelords AFTER War of Immortals and its mythic rules were out).
Also, I’m not sure why either of you, as participants in the thread haven’t at least already said “I hear you, and although not my sphere of influence I’ll let the appropriate people know to look in….”
My excuse is that I've been on vacation for several days and won't be back to work until Wednesday.
And beyond that, this is also a holiday weekend too.
Don't forget the most egregious example of lack of internal consistency in expectations: Second Darkness. Council of Thieves was primarily a poor set-up with the opening speech; Second Darkness required the PCs to completely shift their motivations after the first two adventures.
And don't forget that in the many, many years since things like Second Darkness and Council of Thieves that we've learned a lot about what is and isn't good for an Adventure Path. It's more helpful for us to learn from more recent mistakes or choices that didn't resonate than for things that are several editions behind us these days.
Don't mistake "let's test our feet and try new things" (such as Second Darkness's attempt to leave a gap for GMs to fill and make the story their own, or the growing pains of switching from one game rule set to another in Council of Thieves) for willfully taking steps to make our products worse. We're constantly working to improve the product, which means correcting for errors we did before but also trying new things.
Wait what parts are explicitly OGL and should be scrubbed/altered?
Very few,but mostly things like spells and magic items. Like, if a creature had magic missile prepared in the first version, in the remastered version they'd have force barrage.
I've mentioned elsewhere, but from the office of Expectation Management: Dead God's Hand is going to be a standalone adventure, NOT an Adventure Path. It'll be a bit longer than the standard 128 page standalone length, but not up to the 256 page Adventure Path length.
And I should note that the feedback of "there's too many sidetrips in this Adventure Path that get in the way of advancing the plot and feel like space fillers" is a pretty well-heard and common complaint—I'd say that most customers do NOT like this sort of thing in an Adventure Path, and was one of the many many many factors we considered when we decided years ago to shift to shorter Adventure Paths.
I feel this points to the "many sidetrips" having to be a feature of an AP rather than a bug, aka sandbox AP a la Kingmaker. This way it can be both extremely popular and go from level 1 to 20 as PF2 KM did.
The complaints about "many sidetrips" and "lack of a central story" were among the greatest number of complaints we got from the first version of Kingmaker, which is a big reason why we never again tackled a fully sandbox-style campaign like that one in the Adventure Path line. They're a LOT harder to do (particularly in a monthly, serialized format) than plot-focused Adventure Paths too.
TL; DR What's changed is the world stage, rising costs for production and shipping, customer buying habits and preferences, and a healthier work/life balance for...
James, I know Gatewalkers was repackaged, along with a few others, as a hardcover ( I have a copy). Is there a plan to do the same with the upcoming Runelords AP, or will that be decided once the sales data for the softcovers is available?
Any of the previous Adventure Paths could potentially be repackaged as a hardcover. The latest one we announced is Season of Ghosts, which will be out early next year. It's years too soon to start considering plans like these for Adventure Paths that aren't even out yet.
TL;DR: full 20 level Adventure Paths are possible, but unlikely and won't happen often at all.
Out of interest, what changed? These seem very solid reasons to move from 20-level APs to 10-level APs - but you guys did 27 consecutive 20(ish) level APs, 30 if you count the Dungeon APs. Wouldn't these reasons also have applied 10 years ago?
A not-complete list:
Spoiler:
A 6 part adventure path has 5 parts that can shed buyers before the new one starts.
A 3 part adventure path gives buyers twice as many opportunities to get excited about an adventure path.
Producing 3 part adventure paths improves the quality of life of developers at Paizo and allows us to share the load easier.
It takes longer to play a 20 part adventure path, so they're more intimidating.
It took us a while to change because at the time it was going well and we were very much in a "this isn't broken, let's not 'fix' it," but with each year that progressed and Pathfinder as an RPG and campaign setting grew more and more solid and less fringe, it allowed us to get more and more experimental with the Adventure Paths. We tried the switch to 3 part ones in Starfinder and the results were promising, so a little bit later we did the same to Pathfinder and the results are also of the type that compels us to keep doing 3 part Adventure Paths (or should I start saying, 256 page Adventure Paths, starting next year) going forward.
Also, what changed? Customer buying habits, the devastating decline of the monthly magazine/periodical print market, Covid and its impacts on shipping, and more recently all this uncertainty and constant changing in the tariff and shipping scene.
In the end, the BIG savings for customers between a 3 part Adventure Path and a 1 part hardcover is going to be in the shipping costs.
TL; DR What's changed is the world stage, rising costs for production and shipping, customer buying habits and preferences, and a healthier work/life balance for Paizo employees.
I'm really excited by this change. I'm not a big fan of small softcovers, and i've been having a blast with hardcovers for Kingmaker and Seven dooms at Sandpoint in the past.
I suppose that transition also covers Starfinder?
Starfinder made this transition a while back, so... yup!
It would be very interesting to know what’s changed here. Paizo has been doing monthly Adventure Path episodes for the best part of twenty years; I can think of plenty of potential advantages of the shift, but none that wouldn’t also have been advantages 5, 10, 15 years ago.
A non-trivial number of people buy the first issue and none of the rest. With this change, you have to buy the whole thing.
-Skeld
Which means less people will buy it. Not more.
Or it means more people will buy it, since they won't feel left out becasue they happened to get to the store the day after book 1 sold out and they didn't want to buy book 2 without owning book 1.
We'll see, of course, but from what I can tell, hardcovers will make things healthier for the Adventure Path line overall. Fingers crossed, of course, but we haven't made this decision lightly or on a whim.
This will be the final book before the new format ? I will miss the individual books names
For the most part, the creative energy we put into naming one of the individual books will now be reapplied toward naming individual chapters in the hardcover. The Adventure Paths won't be split into separate internal "books" going forward, which allows us much more creative freedom to present the different chapters of the story in more logical ways.
Back to confirm that updating the Player's Guide will happen. It won't be that different though but will take into account the Tian Xia Character Guide as makes sense in addition to adjusting any OGL content (such as changing the word "paladin" to "champion") that's needed.
I guess there is still possibility for some kind of premium 1-20 hardcover book (or even going experimental and skipping some levels again whether thats 1-3 or some level skips between 1 and 20. *shrugs*), though 10 levels at once is probably better for lot of tables. I do still like having grand coherent 1-20 campaign even if it includes lot of sidetrips to fill space for 20 levels xD
Doing another 1st to 20th level Adventure Path has ALWAYS been a possibility, but...
Spoiler:
...we need to do these responsibly for the story and the budget and our own ability to produce things on schedule with the staff we have. We need to make sure we do so with a story that requires and wants that, and also that fits into our production schedule. Which means IF we were to do it we'd have to start working on it even earlier than normal. Since we're currently about to start thinking about Adventure Paths in 2028, and are already working on and developing some that are in 2027, and have still only announced half of those that are in 2026... the point at which we'd announce something like a full 1st to 20th level Adventure Path is quite a bit in the future.
We know it's something that some folks want. I know it's somehthing I'd like to do at some point. But they're going to be few and far between, becasue the shorter ones are more advantageous to do in pretty much every other way.
(And I should note that the feedback of "there's too many sidetrips in this Adventure Path that get in the way of advancing the plot and feel like space fillers" is a pretty well-heard and common complaint—I'd say that most customers do NOT like this sort of thing in an Adventure Path, and was one of the many many many factors we considered when we decided years ago to shift to shorter Adventure Paths.)
TL;DR: full 20 level Adventure Paths are possible, but unlikely and won't happen often at all.
I would like to humbly request that you keep putting the numbers on the spines. My local game store stores adventure paths on the shelf spine out and in order making it easier to find the newest or a given installment. I also like being able to put them on my home bookshelf in order without having to remember which came after the other.
Since we're moving away from the monthly cadence, the magazine-inspired spine numbering makes less sense. But an even bigger concern is that by numbering things like that we can give the false impression that you have to have the previously numbered one of a line in order to use the currently numbered one. While I do empathize with and understand the value of being able to stock them in order, spine out, by their numbers... numbering these going forward would defeat the purpose of them being self-contained and could imply that you have to have all of them in order to run any of them.
Personally, I of course would LOVE for everyone to keep buying every Adventure Path! But since the new format is leaning into self-contained campaigns rather than sequentially presented serialized stories, keeping numbers on the spine isn't really an option.
Out of curiosity, will the AP volumes continue to be numbered?
They'll continue to be numbered in their product code (the number that starts with PZO in tiny writing in the back), but they will no longer have numbers on the spines. I suspect folks will continue to use numbers to refer to them for a while, and we likely will internally since we often don't have a title set in stone when we start brainstorming them, but yeah, the numbers on the spines are going away.
So Hellbreakers will be #222 and Hell's Destiny will be #223, meaning just one code per hardcover? Or will Hell's Destiny be #225 and whatever comes after it #228?
Not quite.
Hellbreakers will be PZO15222-HC. Hell's Destiny will be PZO15223-HC. And so on—we won't be "skipping" numbers. That number appears in tiny print on the back cover down by the UPC code, but we won't be printing a standalone #222 anywhere on the book, and now that we're moving forward with the announcement I suspect the store pages will shift away from that as well.
Question: When the AP first came out, the tian xia world and character guide were not yet out. Since it is now out, will there be changes to account for that both player side and GM side? I don't know if there would be an updated Player's guide or not.
Season of Ghosts should work just fine as-is with those books, and the few changes that did get made were done so as part of the remastering process.
So the Player's Guide will not get an update either then?
The Player's Guide will get an update, since it's currently an OGL thing and we need to adjust it to be an ORC thing. In THAT case I might mention some of the new ancestry options and stuff from the Tian Xia Character Guide. But I'm not 100% sure that a revised player's guide is on the schedule. I'll double check and try to make it happen if not, but I can't promise.
And as for the branding—the term "Adventure Path" isn't going away. Even when they're one book things, they're still Adventure Paths, just as all our previous hardcover versions have been.
Out of curiosity, will the AP volumes continue to be numbered?
They'll continue to be numbered in their product code (the number that starts with PZO in tiny writing in the back), but they will no longer have numbers on the spines. I suspect folks will continue to use numbers to refer to them for a while, and we likely will internally since we often don't have a title set in stone when we start brainstorming them, but yeah, the numbers on the spines are going away.
I use "campaign" as a generic term for any sort of game where you play PCs through several levels to finish a story that encompasses more than a single adventure; it's not really an official Paizo term for the two print adventure lines we do for Pathfinder, which are:
Pathfinder Adventure Path (the one where you play through 10 levels or so)
Pathfinder Adventures (the one where you play through 3 to 4 levels or less, or is an anthology)
I wish there were plans for occasional (biennial?) cohesive level 1-20 APs.
Just saying.
While we don't have any announcements for a single book 1st to 20th level Adventure Path... the first two Adventure Paths of next year, "Hellbreakers" and "Hell's Destiny" are designed to be parts 1 and 2 of a single larger story that lets you play the PCs from the 1st one in the 2nd one relatively seamlessly and that continues the overarching story. Hopefully this sort of two-part thematically linked offering will delight folks who have been waiting for another chance to start at 1st level and play all the way to 20th!
So is the (stand-alone) Adventure line going to still be a thing or is it getting combined with the Adventure Path line?
The standalone Adventures are still very much a thing. They're shorter and offer different styles of play, and will continue to do so alongside the now-in-hardcover Adventure Paths.
So — does this mean “soon”? For a certain value of soon?? Someone said GenCon above — that’d presumably be NEXT GenCon?
The GenCon mention was for the 3rd Adventure Path of next year, beyond which we haven't said anything about that Adventure Path.
Dead God's Hand is a standalone adventure, not an Adventure Path. We'll have more to say about it later as well, but it's done being written, done being developed, and art has been ordered, so it's on its way.
Hopefully this also means that APs are easier to keep in stock. I'm trying to build a complete collection of APs and there are two or three where I'm missing a volume or two. Having them all combined would make collecting a lot easier.
This is one of the main reasons for the change, in fact. Cutting the number of things a store has to order and stock from 12 a year to 4 a year is going to be an enormous help in keeping adventures in stock in your FLGS and the like.
Are they going to keep the Adventure Path branding, I wonder? I mean, if they are releasing APs in a single volume then they are functionally similar to, if longer than, the Pathfinder Adventures line of modules.
Yes. The format is changing, but the function and role of the Adventure Path is not changing. They'll continue to offer 9 to 11 levels of play (depending on the story) while the standalone adventures will continue to focus on shorter things or anthologies.
Ignore references to that opportunity. That should have been cut. It was originally an opportunity the PCs had to take in order to reach the optional Warden's Den, but the adventure was running long and that opportunity complicated things so it got cut late in the process. Instead of it being it's own opportunity, it got rolled into the Map the Amaranthine Oubliette opportunity as part of the reward for reaching 5 or more victory points there.
Question: When the AP first came out, the tian xia world and character guide were not yet out. Since it is now out, will there be changes to account for that both player side and GM side? I don't know if there would be an updated Player's guide or not.
Season of Ghosts should work just fine as-is with those books, and the few changes that did get made were done so as part of the remastering process.
Creative Director
