As long as folks are giving feedback on the use of subsystems in Adventure Paths... I'd love to hear about more recent examples. Once we published the 2nd edition of GameMastery Guide (remastered into GM Core), we've tried hard to make sure the subsystems we use in adventures either come directly from GM Core, or are built on those bones (typically atop the Victory Points mechanic) so that GMs and players are, in theory, as familiar with those rules as they should be fore things like combat.
I suspect that the fact that these rules ended up in the GM book and not the Player book is part of why some players aren't as familiar with these rules (either because they avoid looking in the GM book, or because the GM tells them to do that).
With recent Adventure Path Player's Guides, I've been trying to have us include a "Subsystems" section that tells the players what GM Core subsystems play roles in the Adventure Path they're about to go on, and thus should check out the rules for in advance.
Things like the caravan rules from Jade Regent were created in a different time, where we didn't have the existing structure of subsystems like this in play, and as we looked at building new adventures that were more than just "fight monsters take stuff" at their core, we DID get more experimental with those systems. Sometimes they worked great. Sometimes they did not. Even in the early days of 2nd edition, before we had the rules for 2E subsystems in place to really work with, early Adventure Paths struggled a little bit (including the remastering of Kingmaker—but that one's kingdom rules also suffered as a result of the deadly combo of employee resource shortages and the pandemic throwing everything into chaos)... but for the past few years I feel like we've been doing a much better job at leaning in to and relying upon the GM Core subsystems.
If the use of those (research, influence, chases, infiltrations, etc.) are still pain points... I'd love to hear about why they are, ESPECIALLY if they're still pain points after the GM has worked with their players to make sure they know how those subsystems work beforehand!
Not sure if this has been covered, but would this AP make a good follow on from seven dooms for sandpoint?
I'm currently running that for my group and they have expressed an interest on continuing with their characters (if they survive bwahaha) and I'd rather use an AP than create my own stuff due to time constraints
Yes. Seven Dooms for Sandpoint is an excellent one to go before this one—you'll want to let your players pick ALL their mythic callings and 5 free mythic feats in between Seven Dooms and Revenge, but otherwise they'll be good to go.
There's a few places this manifests, and it's generally handled a bit less "fiddly." The main way it manifests is during the "choose your charter" portion of creating a kingdom. This is part of the narrative that sets up how your sponsor helps to support your kingdom when it starts out—particularly the "Grant" charter option on page 508. Rather than give out a bunch of points or gold, this option just boosts your kingdom's Economy.
For a bit more context—session length is generally not something we use as an "official" metric for published adventures like we do for Org Play scenarios, since a session's length AND how long any one group tends to take on each encounter AND how much any one group/GM enjoys going off script and taking their time in emergent play stuff that expands beyond the scope of the written adventure's expectations all make an official number of sessions for the published adventures sometimes tricky to anticipate. Knowing how many levels of play are covered in an adventure is the best way for a GM to predict how long each session will be, but if they're new to a group that's gonna be tricky too.
And from the office of expectation management... while these adventures are individually shorter than they'd be if there was only one... they're still not what I'd call "short" adventures, personally, especially considering we publish much shorter adventures all the time as Org Play scenarios.
So... yah; sorry about potential confusion when we were advising Maya on this subject. In hindsight we on the narrative team should have gone with something more like this—relying upon your table's individual playstyles to translate session lengths after we say "this adventure is 1 or 2 or 3 or more levels of content."
There is not, since vainglory and divination focus is a "home-brewed" thing that she worked on outside of the whole paradigm that First Emperor Xin and the original runelords built their traditions off of.
If there were, I think the best virtue would probably be modesty. But again... the traditions the runelords and Xin drew from only incorporated seven virtues. If it were eight, then the Sihedron would be an eight-pointed star and vainglory would have been part of the thing from day one.
Maegar is an exception to the tradition—he's a swordlord, but he's chosen to keep his own surname, since he's establishing a new community in the Stolen Lands and for political reasons (the same reasons why the PCs are allowed to build thier own kingdom) he's not using the Aldori name because Varnhold is intended to be it's own thing.
First off, thank you SO MUCH for the adventure feedback. Even late, feedback is great—it's really difficult getting actual customer feedback on adventures compared to player-facing rules content. That said... here's some behind the scenes reality talk in the spoiler:
Spoiler:
For Adventures, the bulk of the onus for playtesting is on the author. The development process we put them through is what stands in for playtesting in the official capacity. We'll now and then do our own playtesting of particularly tricky encoutners or material, but the concept of actually playing an adventure before it goes to the editor is a myth. There's literally no time to do that in any sort of schedule that makes sense.
Again, the whole point of the developer pass, where someone on the Pathfinder narrative team takes the author's work (be it freelanced or written by a different employee) is to seek out and solve as many of the issues and problems that a playtest might trigger, which includes incorporating any notes the author provides as part of the process. We have NEVER had a "playtest the entire adventure on company time using company employees" step in any of the adventures we've published, all the way back to the start of Pazio before I worked here and before Pathfinder was even a thing. The only exceptions I can think of is the Beginner Box products, which were put through a very rigorous playtesting procedure for the entire product, and for edition changeovers like we did with Doomsday Dawn and some of the 2nd Edition starfinder adventures, but my experience working on Doomsday Dawn was that it was like 95% feedback on the rules and the player-facing options (as you would expect and want from a playtest of new rules) and 5%, if that, narrative/adventure feedback.
We do pay attention to feedback from folks about issues with adventures though! Especially when it's posted respectfully, and/or on the paizo forums, or vairous discords, or reddit, or in person at conventions, or via reviews... anywhere we can get feedback, great! Folks aren't as eager to give lots of adventure feedback as they are player-facing feedback though, so... yeah, it can be difficult to get feedback on adventures. And when we do, it's often so late after the product is out that the earliest we can institute that feedback is often for adventures that release years after the one being discussed. For example, Triumph of the Tusk came out last year, but we're currently in the process of finishing up development for adventures coming out next year—so that's about a 2 year gap.
It's not a perfect system, but it DOES work. I mean... if it didn't, we would have stopped publishing adventures years ago, but we haven't—we've been continuously publishing adventures every month for the company's entire lifetime of over 2 decades. Even through some pretty overwhelming extenuating circumstances that make sticking to a schedule a challenge (aka edition changes, OGL scandals, pandemics, and more).
Again, in closing, thank you for the feedback! Please continue giving us adventure feedback—the sooner and closer to the adventure's publication, the better!
We often cut the secondary articles in Adventure Path compilations like this, especially in cases (as with the Findeladlara article) the material isn't directly "load bearing" for the adventure itself. This is one of the many ways we keep costs down for hardcovers (every page we save can translate into a significant cost savings, depending on overall page count), but also to be frank one of the benefits of buying the first run of an Adventure Path too.
Part of this is perhaps because your players are getting better at the game—but another part is that we've taken the feedback that the adventures were "too tough" to heart and have skewed things back a bit... especially for 1st level portions of adventures where things can be extra tricky.
The goal of most of our published adventures is not to present things tailored toward new players nor toward very experienced players, but at an average experience somewhere in the middle. This way, any one GM can more easily adjust the adventure to be tougher or easer as needed to make for a more entertaining and enjoyable experience for their players.
It's also worth noting that our adventures assume a group of 4 players. If you have more than 4 players (or to be precise, more than 4 PCs), then things are also going to be easier than expected.
That said, a quick look at Book 1 of Shades of Blood reveals to me that most of the encounters are Low or Moderate. I didn't see any Trivial ones, and did see 3 Severe ones, so it might be your GM has already done some work at adjusting the adventure as presented and maybe went a bit too far in adjusting things toward the easy side? So... simply from a what I'm seeing in print side of things, Not sure what to say there... unless I did miss some Trivial ones in my quick flip-through of the pages.
Pretty much every adventure and Adventure Path going forward from War of Immortals will have some elements of that meta-event in there somewhere... in some cases in pretty minor ways, and in others in more significant ways. This event's one of the biggest things we've done for the setting, after all, and it was never intended to be a one-time-only thing.
But the two in the spoilers above are where the BIG THING happens on screen for players to see.
I had this issue with 5E not too long ago, but regarding creatures with much less context available outside their monster entries. Paizo generally expands on their material in ways closer to 2E D&D (my highest compliment), but you do have to know where to find it. I'm hopeful that we'll get some Fiendish Codex kinds of books like the upcoming Dragon book for those creatures that are less region-specific.
I would be over the moon for a 2E rendition of The Book of the Damned with sections devoted to each kind of fiend. Loved that book, and the format for the monster-centric books in 2E is even better organized IMO.
Well they have a book for undead like this already and are releasing one for dragons and an elemental plane focused ones so one covering fiends/demons seems very possible.
Already have one one for elementals (Rage of Elements), and also one for animals/beasts (Howl of the Wild). I suspect we'll continue to do this sort of book too. There will be no shortage of monster flavor.
I don't see why there has to be a push and pull between the two. PDFs don't have page count issues, and I'd gladly pay more for a larger book with 30% more monsters and 100% more descriptive text.
PDFs might not need to worry about the cost of paper, but they still cost something to make. More content means more art, writing, editing, layout, and so on.
That's not even getting into the sales analysis of what sells in large quantities vs what doesn't, which is not something I know.
It's also worth noting that the time it takes the writers, designers, developers, artists, and editors to produce a book is pretty much identical whether or not it's a PDF or print book. Our production schedule is pretty packed as it is. That's why we don't do many "web supplement" type things beyond the Adventure Path Player's Guides.
Here's 4 reasons why monster entries in the Bestiaries have more rules text than they do flavor text.
PAGE SIZE: We try to keep monsters fitting on a single page (or in the case of families of monsters, to keep those whole things fitting on full pages), so that the next monster in the alphabet (or monster family) starts at the top of a page. For the alghollthus, they have 2 pages, and that's it—it's easier to adjust and manipulate the flavor text than it is rules entries, so often that's why the flavor text is shorter.
ART SHAPE: Sometimes monsters have art that's wider than expected. The ugothol on page 12 is pretty non-intrusive to the text, fitting quite well into the white space below the sidebar above, but the vidileth has those tentacles that reach in to violate the text flow. That means you get fewer words on a page. From a readability and reference stance, it's always better to have a section start at the top of a page, so in this case we adjusted the flavor text as needed for the vidileth so that it ended at the bottom of page 12, so the stat block can start at the top of page 13. Makes it easier to navigate. We can't ALWAYS make these pretty copy-fit stunts work, but we try our best.
WORLD LORE: While in 2nd edition Pathifnder we've abandoned the 1st edition philosophy of trying to keep the rule books world-netural, the rulebooks ARE still meant to be applicable for any game world a GM is using for their Pathfinder game, be it one set in Golarion or some other setting. Flavor text for a monster needs world context to support it, especially in a case where the creature isn't a real-world animal that we can assume that a reader is familiar with. So, the more flavor text we provide, the more we lean into its role and impact in our setting, and that can make things a little more awkward for GMs who don't use Golarion for their games. So by not doing too much flavor text in the Bestiaries, and instead leaning into that in other publications that are more deeply-reliant on the setting when appropriate, we try to make these monsters a bit easier or less intimidating for a GM to use in any setting.
STAT COMPLEXITY: The more complicated a monster is, the longer its stats are gonna be. We've truncated stat-block size significantly from 1st edition (which already truncated it significantly from 3.5 OGL stats), but complex monsters, like the vidileth, are still gonna eat up a lot of space. It's a catch-22. The more complicated a monster gets, the more flavor text it wants in order to contextualize it, but the bigger its stats grow and thus the less room we have for flavor text. We often allocate two pages for monsters we know are going to be particularly complicated, but every time we do that, we reduce the overall number of monsters in the Bestiary by 1 (if not more), so it's all a question of balance.
I’ve received my copy of Lost Omens: Shining Kingdoms and Xoanthurund did indeed get canonized, so you must have respect around the Paizo offices after all.
Speaking as the guy who did that canonizin', can confirm that we do in fact think James is a pretty okay dude.
I mean, he's no ALMIGHTY XOANTHURUND, THE GREAT GRAY DEATH, BLESSED ARE THOSE CALLED TO COWER BEFORE ITS TERRIBLE GLORY, but, well, who is?
OOOH! OOOH! I know the answer to who is!
Spoiler:
ALMIGHTY XOANTHURUND, THE GREAT GRAY DEATH, BLESSED ARE THOSE CALLED TO COWER BEFORE ITS TERRIBLE GLORY is.
Mythic campaign, 3 books, and starts at level 1? Seems low level for a campaign about the players becoming "hero-gods"
Mythic content in 2nd Edition breaks into two categories, roughly equating to levels 1–10 (mythic callings) and levels 12–20 (mythic destinies). This Adventure Path will focus on the mythic calling side of things. We chose Iblydos as the location for several reasons, but the mythic-facing one is that this is the place on Golarion where mythic hero god traditions are so front and center to everyday life that if we were to do any adventure set here, regardless of level, it would thematically need to address that element and include it in some way in the game.
Mythic, in Pathfinder, does not automatically equal high level.
You're right—that IS something she's associated with and a re-look at the article on Nocticula that's appearing in this volume DOES build off of the entry in Divine Mysteries, what I got lost in the proverbial reeds was some "OGL creeping"... back in that era, some folks were confused that the OGL redeemer couldn't be a champion of Nocticula because of alignment restrictions.
That's not an issue in the Revised rules, since alignment is gone and champions are no longer referred to as "redeemers" (or paladins, or other names for that matter); they're just champions, and the remastered worshipers of Nocticula can be holy.
Nocticula's areas of concern remain artists, exiles, and midnight. That isn't expanding to include "redemption" in this article (nor was that part of her areas of concern in Divine Mysteries).
In any event, Nocticula is very much one of my creations and additions to the lore, from her initial version as a demon lord to her current version as a Goddess, and as a result I've got a lot invested in making sure how she's presented in various books matches up. The writer of the Nocticula article had access to the article from Divine Mysteries as well. There ARE times when we have miscommunications between departments (despite how hard we work at minimizing them, they crop up now and then—that'll happen when you have dozens of folks working in a shared world), but in this case, I've been pretty involved in guiding and developing Nocticula's lore so that should all be pretty seamless.
Thank you, that allays all my concerns. I look forward to the focus on Nocticula's specific areas of concern, I am very interested to see what we will get there. Since, as I said before, I play a redemption cause Champion of Nocticula in PFS, it'll be nice to expand on her belief system. It's only important for me that she doesn't lose that part of her lore where she also inspires demons (and other evil-doers) to redemption by her own example. I'm greatly looking forward to this...
It's more important to me that she stays on course, so never fear!
You're right—that IS something she's associated with and a re-look at the article on Nocticula that's appearing in this volume DOES build off of the entry in Divine Mysteries, what I got lost in the proverbial reeds was some "OGL creeping"... back in that era, some folks were confused that the OGL redeemer couldn't be a champion of Nocticula because of alignment restrictions.
That's not an issue in the Revised rules, since alignment is gone and champions are no longer referred to as "redeemers" (or paladins, or other names for that matter); they're just champions, and the remastered worshipers of Nocticula can be holy.
Nocticula's areas of concern remain artists, exiles, and midnight. That isn't expanding to include "redemption" in this article (nor was that part of her areas of concern in Divine Mysteries).
In any event, Nocticula is very much one of my creations and additions to the lore, from her initial version as a demon lord to her current version as a Goddess, and as a result I've got a lot invested in making sure how she's presented in various books matches up. The writer of the Nocticula article had access to the article from Divine Mysteries as well. There ARE times when we have miscommunications between departments (despite how hard we work at minimizing them, they crop up now and then—that'll happen when you have dozens of folks working in a shared world), but in this case, I've been pretty involved in guiding and developing Nocticula's lore so that should all be pretty seamless.
It's the standard type of deity article we've been doing in Adventure Paths since the 2nd one, where we did an article on Desna back in "The Skinsaw Murders." Well... I guess that's a tricky one since in the 3.5 days the articles were longer and included prestige classes. What I mean to say is yes... it's a 6 page article that includes all that stuff you've come to expect.
One of the primary reasons why we generally do just those 1 page entries for deities like this in the lore books is BECAUSE we do bigger dives into deities in Adventure Paths. For a long time, we were doing two of these per Adventure Path. Now that they're shorter 3 part ones, we generally do only 1 of them, or maybe none of them, and are focusing more on specific deities for the campaign. In fact, at least for me, when I'm outlining a new Adventure Path, part of the "What is this one about" factor is "what deity article can we spotlight in this one?"
Nocticula kinda has replaced Sarenrae for me as the redemption goddess of choice, so I have hopes that aspect of her also finds its place in the article. :)
Not really. Nocticula isn't meant to be a goddess of redemption, despite the use of "Redeemer" in her title (no differently than Desna is a goddess of music, despite the word "Song" being in her title, or Shelyn being a goddess of flowers despite having "Rose" in her title). She's a goddess of artists, exiles, and midnight, and that's the focus of her faith and thus the focus of her article. That said, she and her faithful are welcoming about exiles and others who are cast out of their societies, which is adjacent to redemption—they don't seek to "redeem" those cast outs as much as seek to provide them with a safe place to live and be creative once they've chosen to change their ways. They don't actively go out to encourage redemption. That remains Sarenrae's thing as far as a theme goes. But still... a worshiper of Nocticula would for sure be more into helping someone redeem themselves than being intolerant and make assumptions that they're tricking you.
I just want to repeat how much I am looking forward to the Nocticula article, after we always only got a single page in the 2E write-ups about her in the books. I am currently playing a redeemer Champion of Nocticula in PFS, so this will be a huge help. I hope we get aphorisms, relations with other gods and a good long expanded section on how best to play a cleric of champion of her.
It's the standard type of deity article we've been doing in Adventure Paths since the 2nd one, where we did an article on Desna back in "The Skinsaw Murders." Well... I guess that's a tricky one since in the 3.5 days the articles were longer and included prestige classes. What I mean to say is yes... it's a 6 page article that includes all that stuff you've come to expect.
One of the primary reasons why we generally do just those 1 page entries for deities like this in the lore books is BECAUSE we do bigger dives into deities in Adventure Paths. For a long time, we were doing two of these per Adventure Path. Now that they're shorter 3 part ones, we generally do only 1 of them, or maybe none of them, and are focusing more on specific deities for the campaign. In fact, at least for me, when I'm outlining a new Adventure Path, part of the "What is this one about" factor is "what deity article can we spotlight in this one?"
We won't be announcing anything new in the Adventure Panel. It's focused on 2025 things, all of which have been announced for the adventure line. That said, Dead God's Hand is still something we're working on—I know that feels hollow to say and to claim but it's true. We just don't have any actual news to report on it at this time, and are instead focusing more on the Hellfire Crisis stuff and Starfinder 2nd Edition.
I just noticed this on the keynote at Paizocon: That guy on top of the mirage dragon looks *exactly* like Krune. He has the spear with a little green ribbon, is bald, his clothes are gray with what looks like gold accents. Like, is he back??
Well, in the keynote today, they said this will introduce 4 new mythic Destinies, so maybe one will be elemental!
Assuming you're talking about the four we're introducing in Revenge of the Runelords, the office of expectation management notes that none are elemental themed. They are instead all themed around elements of the campaign itself. We'll chat more about them soon!
One of the handiest narrative tools there is in Pathifnder is that on the other planes, things can just be what they need to be for funsies or because it feels right. The bones in the Boneyard are there because a boneyard needs bones. Whether they're manifestations of previous realities remains, echoes of all the dead who have perished in the current reality, remains left by the countless eons of living creatures who have died in that particular plane, mirrors of all bones on all worlds that have decayed to powder, the final remains of those judged to remain in the Boneyard in their afterlife, trophies claimed by something unknown... or something else entirely... they're there.
Note that both of these two DO have stats, and they're pretty closely matched in power in a spot at the top end of the system of whatever edition they're statted up in, so whether or not one would win the other in a fight with the rules in play depends in part on luck and location and tactics and resources and all that, just as in any combat that plays out at the table.
But from a story perspective, I'd be more interested in the ramifications of Xanderghul winning that fight than in Baba Yaga winning the fight.
So i love that the description of the book, states twice, that Xanderghul is the most powerful of all the Runelords.
Makes me so excited to read his state block.
Also wonder if Sorshen will be stated too.
Back in 1e she was CR 27 and James said that Xanderghul would be CR 28.
But I'd love to see their 2e versions.
Not yet ready to go into spoilers, but in 2nd Edition, level 25 is the cap for things. Of course... a mythic NPC of any given level is more dangerous than a non-mythic NPC of the same level...
Out of curiosity.. if a War broke out between Xanderghul and Baba Yaga. In your opinion.. Who wins?
So i love that the description of the book, states twice, that Xanderghul is the most powerful of all the Runelords.
Makes me so excited to read his state block.
Also wonder if Sorshen will be stated too.
Back in 1e she was CR 27 and James said that Xanderghul would be CR 28.
But I'd love to see their 2e versions.
Not yet ready to go into spoilers, but in 2nd Edition, level 25 is the cap for things. Of course... a mythic NPC of any given level is more dangerous than a non-mythic NPC of the same level...
At the very least I'd love to see an article that has all 7 Runelords stated at the height of Thassilonian Empire in 2e.
From the office of expectation management...
Spoiler:
...something like this (which would take 14 pages for the stats and probably another dozen pages to stat up all of their unique weapons and artifacts and items) is about 20 pages more than we have room for. There will be stats and items, but only those that directly apply to the Adventure Path.
Depends if it's an OGL dragon (bronze, AKA the "rusty dragon" of Sandpoint) or a remastered dragon (REDACTED), the latter of which I can't talk about yet. Oh. Wait. I guess I can, since Luis said so above.
Remastered = despair dragon. For... reasons. Which will become clear eventually.
Until that fella's out, I'll go with the mirage dragon.
When an eshmok is in wasp form, they gain a tendril melee strike that does damage and can cause eshmok infection; the tendril strike is detailed under their Change Shape ability.
After a couple play throughs I’ve noticed only now there is not an actual space or room called “the abomination vaults.” Do folks just consider the entire Keep and Dungeon the AV or like room G17 perhaps?
The entire dungeon complex is collectively called the Abomination Vaults.
Also, since James is here and mentioned names, do you guys at Paizo follow a particular naming scheme for characters, places, and the like? I ask this because I always felt like Paizo names had an unique "texture" to them making them sound like something in-between fantasy and sci-fi naming schemes.
I wouldn't be surprised if its just "it sounds cool so let's use that one" too though.
Everyone has their own methods for generating names; after working here for a few decades, I've developed a weird skill where I can recognize with relatively good accuracy which employee or long-term freelancer is the one who likely named something, as a result. We have some guidelines for how to name core ancestry characters (which we try to give examples of in their ancestry entries), but the overall advice we give our writers and try to abide by ourselves is to avoid Easter Eggs and unintentional accidental meanings. Google searches are your friend here, so you don't accidently name something after a famous thing (fictional or otherwise) that will not only color the perception of what you're naming, but could open Paizo up to legal worries in a worst case scenario (which is one of the reasons, for example, we won't name a character something like Batman Gandalf). It's also a good idea to say the name out loud, and even better, show a friend the name as a word and ask them to say it out loud. That's a good way to tell if the way you're spelling the name makes it work, and if you have a friend who's particularly irreverent that's even better because they'll find the accidental embarrassing names quickly.
It's also worth obeying the structural rules for the language you're writing in (or the culture whose linguistic and naming traditions you're taking inspiration from), because that's how words work. When you're creating a nonsense word to be a new name, the Keyboard Mash method is a fine starting point, but you should then refine that name so that it looks like how it would be actually written and can be said by a human mouth. Even if it's your goal to present that sort of thing, the written version should be something that humans can say out loud.
Given that hair splitting definition from my brother-in-tiny-but-still-formidable-dinosaur-arms, then Golarion is NOT a setting based on Intelligent Design. Evolution is a thing in the setting, but absolutely gods and mortals can create life in many different ways where the story wants.
In my mind, Golarion and Androffa were meant to be in the same universe from the start because that's how I justified giving so many deities and names and concepts from my homebrew to Paizo in those early scrambling days to get a brand new campaign setting off the ground without skipping a month between the last magazine and the first Pathfinder Adventure Path.
There IS some more info coming soon about Androffa in Pathfinder... but not as it stands today. The Androffa of today I would prefer to leave mysterious, because the more we detail it, the more we have to change names like "Sekamina" and "Mediogalti" and "Magnimar" and "Sandpoint" and "Kyonin" and "Karzoug" and so on because we "used" those for Golarion.
In a situation like this, where a haunt or hazard or the like is listed as having a specific weakness to a type of damage, they can be damaged by it—this type of damage is removed from the blanket list of object immunities. It's kinda unclear, for sure, but that's the intent... a presentation choice we kinda have to make because otherwise we'd have to really bloat the list of immunities by reprinting all the object immunities content each time. The 2nd paragraph under "Damaging a Hazard" on page 99 of the GM Core mentions that hazards might have exceptions like this.
That's basically us saying that what we present as these areas are meant to play out in encounter mode and the GM shouldn't be distracted by tracking further exploration through the sprawling, immense structure. The Witchbole itself is too big and too complicated to map out in the context of this adventure, so we gloss over the "connective tissue." You can still use exploration activities inside the Witchbole if you want, but as written, they don't have a role since the only things that happen in the adventure are standard encounters.
If you as the GM want to add more encounters in the Witchbole, there's PLENTY of room to do so! But that sort of expansion not only is beyond the scope of the adventure, but risks your players starting to feel like your'e stalling, hitting them with "filler" encounters, or trying to make them waste their time so they won't be able to complete the adventure before Treerazer wins.
The border should for sure be something that *detect magic* can pick up, since it's certainly not a natural feature, but it also shouldn't give the PCs any extra tool or resource to figure out what's going on beyond what's already an option for them presented in the adventure... other than to potentially confirm to them that the weird blockade that feels unnatural is indeed unnatural.
Unless we specifically say so in the text, we avoid setting time limits to adventures. The PCs should be able to rest and recuperate unless otherwise mentioned, but keep in mind that the longer they take, verisimilitude and each individual group's preferences might push for adjustments and developments beyond the initial situation presented in the adventure. If your group or you as the GM like to present more reactive locations that adapt and change according to the PCs' actions, then the GM should be up front with the players and the table should expect it, at which point the players will be able to make their choices about when to stop to rest and when to press onward and manage their resources. (And of course the GM's free time and energy and interest in adjusting things should be a factor!)
But again, as presented, the PCs can stop to rest if they want/need to.
That is for sure a coincidence, but also an interesting one.
Spoiler:
While in the real world there's obviously duplicates in names all the time, in fiction it's weird to have things do that, so we do try to avoid it. But that said, every person who creates for anything has their own style and method and preference in how to create nonsense words that are names for things like this, and if you have someone, like me, who ends up naming literally thousands of NPCs and locations and monsters and gods and more, you'll now and then see some similarities in word construction—especially given when I make up names, I generally don't just jumble letters together, but construct the names in a way that sounds "right" to the situation at hand OR simply sound fun to say to me.
The syllable "Vlor" is one of those I happen to like, so it gets used now and then.
This is also, for example, why the name "Staunton Vhane" got used twice in Pathifnder—once for a villain in Magnimar, and once for a villain in Wrath of the Righteous. Neither of those two have any links or connections other than I recycled the name from one to the other accidentally (the name itself was the name of a warlord villain from my homebrew in a campaign I ran back in college).
I'm now curious if the character on the cover is Liralarue, almost all of the elements are similar
** spoiler omitted **
Quick question, I know other sins for the Runelord archetype being introduced in this AP have been hinted, but will the player stats for these be given in any particular volume or scattered throughout the AP across all three volumes?
(That said, the NPCs in these adventures are built as NPCs, not as PCs, and do not use the archetype's rules exactly as written.)
I think they were asking if other sins would be added to the schools for the Runelord archetype (like say Vainglory)
If that's the question, then no. There are only 7 categories for the arechetype; adding more devalues and goes against that theme. (Vainglory not being among the seven is a specific story and plot point that would be eroded and made less interesting if it got added to the archetype.)
I'm now curious if the character on the cover is Liralarue, almost all of the elements are similar
** spoiler omitted **
Quick question, I know other sins for the Runelord archetype being introduced in this AP have been hinted, but will the player stats for these be given in any particular volume or scattered throughout the AP across all three volumes?
I'm now curious if the character on the cover is Liralarue, almost all of the elements are similar
Spoiler:
That's exactly who she is. (I mentioned this here and there in other threads and on a stream I think, but yup... she's got a cover-worthy role to play in this Adventure Path.)
1) I've personally not looked too much into the Battlecry! rules yet (none of the adventures I've worked on or am working on directly interface with these rules) so I can't give advice on this question at this time, other than I suspect it'll be a fair amount of work for a GM to swap things over if they don't want to use the rules included in Kingmaker.
2) There are no plans to update the Kingdom Management rules at all. Those community-made patches are a good place to go if you're looking for alternatives.
Creative Director
