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Yeah, it's got all the old information, plus a lot more, especially in the nation sections--plus there's a TON of new maps and illustrations. Having seen this book in layout, I can only say that it's so clearly superior to the original (which was still pretty cool!) that I can hardly believe it.
Seriously, from the design side, it often comes down to the fact that a person of a given CR is generally supposed to have a certain amount of treasure according to the rules. To my mind, it stretches credulity less to say that the the skilled (but not rich) soldier has an exceptionally well-balanced sword (since that's what his livelihood depends on) rather than that every enemy you meet on the road has a big ol' pouch of gold swinging from his waist. The way the economics work, there's just not that much for certain classes to spend money on until you can afford magic items. Masterwork weapons allow you to give treasure without flooding the local economy with cash (or without having every soldier haul around a wagon filled with trade goods... though I know I always like to haul a few chickens into battle, just for luck). Now, as for the argument that enemies should have treasure tied to their flavor rather than their CR... that's a game balance issue, and any arguments should be taken up with previous editions of the game. :)
The main reason we don't just attach the sample chapter PDF to the product page is because we want to show it off. As you can see from some of the other comments, there are folks that read the webfiction that don't subscribe or read the normal blogs, and if they see a sample chapter here and buy a book, that helps the line immensely. The whole point of the free web fiction is to raise the visibility of Pathfinder Tales and get folks invested. While it's true that a free sample chapter gives you slightly less content than a free sample chapter AND a new chapter of a short story, if previewing 4 sample chapters a year helps us justify paying thousands of dollars to provide the other 48 weeks a year of free fiction and art, that's a pretty sweet deal! Plus, with all the sample chapters after this one, you'll get *brand new* illustrations of main characters from the novels. So there will *still* be value, even if you've already read the book!
I'm reading Winter Witch at the moment - it's cracking along! It's a fine romp so far.In the future, would it be possible to have these before they ship to subscribers? finished winter witch almost 2 weeks ago Yeah, that's the plan, but we didn't have the idea until after WW was already shipping, and didn't want it to be left out. In the future, we'll aim to have these show up right around the release date.
Wow, I guess I'm lucky I was the first to get snowed in, otherwise I might still be there with Wes, trying to share that little office couch. He thinks just because he's the manager, that means he gets to be the big spoon...
Just so everyone knows, this sort of appeal *does* work! Fan reaction to web fiction stories by particular authors has a definite impact on whether you'll see those authors (or characters) show up in a longer work like a Pathfinder novel. So if you like something, let us know! In fact, at the risk of hijacking the thread... who among the webfiction authors so far would you like to see a novel from? Which characters do you connect with most? You can pick more than one of each.
So it has been a long time. When are we going to finally see the rest of the new Iconic's? As soon as the schedule quits making Wes bleed from his eyes. By which I mean as soon as we have time--probably after the holiday madness. Trust me, we enjoy doing them as much as you enjoy reading them, they take a lot more time than a normal blog!
That date is not an accident. Stay tuned!
If you haven't yet finished the book, don't read the following spoiler regarding magic in the novels! Spoiler:
To address the whole question of why people don't cast raise read more in the novels (such as with Liv, in this instance), you have to consider the logistics. Yes, it's possible to bring people back from the dead, but it's extremely difficult because: 1) It's expensive. 2) You have to find someone capable of casting the spell, which is difficult in our generally low-magic world. 3) You have to find that person quickly, as every day that goes by raises the caster level. In this case, you've got a bunch of folks who, while skilled in their own way, aren't exactly rich. They're also out in the middle of nowhere in enemy territory. They can't go back into Whitethrone and start asking around for the highest-level cleric in town. Even if they think there's someone in one of the big Linnorm Kingdoms cities who can do it, it'd likely be too late by the time they get there (i.e. the required caster level would have become too high--there certainly aren't a bunch of 16th-level clerics hanging around your average town, let alone willing to drop five grand on a charity case). I suspect that nobody in White Rook has ever been brought back from the dead, and while Declan's probably heard about it, I doubt he's ever met anybody who's been the recipient of such a spell. You will definitely see the raise dead issue come up in future novels, but it has to make sense for the setting and characters. In Golarion, raise dead--like many luxuries in our own world--is generally reserved for rich people in urban environments.
There's no Paizo sign, and we rent the space from the company on the other half of the building; they're the ones with the sign. If you've ever been in an office before, you've seen the inside of ours. The only difference is that there are RPG books everywhere and plushie monsters and Cthulhus and things all over the place instead of lame motivational posters. We used to have a lot of motivational posters, but they got left behind at the old office. I... I guess we weren't motivated to take them?
Whoa whoa, you can't just say something like that and not give any details..The Great Beyond is a planar sourcebook for the Pathfinder Campaign Setting.Sorry - meant to say, Will there be a hardcover sourcebook for the outerplanes? I have the Great Beyond - was just wondering if Paizo has any inclination to produce something bigger and crunchier. Oh, I'm pretty sure I just did. :D It'll likely be at least six more months until I'm able to say more.
The Great Beyond is a planar sourcebook for the Pathfinder Campaign Setting.Sorry - meant to say, Will there be a hardcover sourcebook for the outerplanes? I have the Great Beyond - was just wondering if Paizo has any inclination to produce something bigger and crunchier. It could certainly happen someday, long after Great Beyond is out of print, but for now GB is the best resource to our planes. Now, if you want *novels* dealing with the planes, I can hook you up...
BAH! Don't try to fool us, Sutter -- I've heard from several reliable sources that last year you showed up dressed as a half-elven princess, and insisted to be called "Princess Stacy"! ;PYeah, there's no cosplay or gaming or anything... it's just a bunch of industry folks talking about business. Which is AWESOME if you have business to conduct, but probably pretty boring for the average fantasy enthusiast. :POk, how could there be a world fantasy con in Columbus and I didn't know about it.I believe World Fantasy is an industry con and not one to which the general public have access. I could be wrong, but my impression was that it's for authors and publishers and distributors and such. Psh! If I were going to attend a party in drag, I would *clearly* call myself "Jamie."
Ok, how could there be a world fantasy con in Columbus and I didn't know about it.I believe World Fantasy is an industry con and not one to which the general public have access. I could be wrong, but my impression was that it's for authors and publishers and distributors and such. Yeah, there's no cosplay or gaming or anything... it's just a bunch of industry folks talking about business. Which is AWESOME if you have business to conduct, but probably pretty boring for the average fantasy enthusiast. :P
They all sound like they have bittersweet endings. Does anyone one of those stories have an ending with good at least winning 50% of the battle Paizo? That's probably just a result of how we described them... I'd say several of these have undeniably happy endings. Maybe not ewok-level happiness, but definitely positive! Noble Sacrifice is probably the happiest in that regard. Give it a shot and see if you agree!
It's definitely not large print--we just compared Prince of Wolves to a wide swath of other mass-market paperbacks and decided we were a touch on the small side. (Fortunately, right about then we all got unsolicited emails offering to increase our font size a full point in just three weeks, with a complete money-back guarantee. It suggested that our current readers might be secretly unsatisfied with the size of our font... what else could we do?)
In my mind, the Stacks are only sort of a part of the Ring--you can see how the otherwise symmetrical walls bulge in toward the middle there. My thought is that the Ring districts are all the same height in that outer hexagon of stone, and then where Highside Stacks protrude into the Core the walls rise up into this crazy collection of high towers. Most of the Ring is totally enclosed, but from the towers you can look out on all the open-air districts of the Core, as well as down into those parts of Cavalcade where the ceiling is broken. Sorry that was unclear! The towers of Highside definitely stretch way above everything else in the city... you can see that somewhat in the map on page 52, though of course that's an artist's interpretation and not to scale (the actual towers being a narrower patch, and MUCH taller).
The funny thing about this blog post is that we print our novels in the old US of A, so Sutter longingly looking at the port for Winter Witch is futile. Which makes me smile. Hey, James, watch for an Old Dominion truck instead. :) It appears that the warehouse staff have led me on a classic snipe hunt... *shakes fist* CURSE YOU, ALVAREZ!
On a more serious note, and in lieu of locking down a civil discussion: please be aware that in discussing the morality of homosexuality/nontraditional lifestyles, you're actively discussing the worth and morality of an unspecified number of Paizo employees. This makes some of them sad. Sad Paizonians have trouble focusing. Unfocused Paizonians make new Pathfinder books ship later. Just sayin'. :)
Nice guy. I didn't get much of a chance to talk to him, since he was exceptionally busy, but he was always friendly and good about giving the new intern a say in staff meetings, which he totally didn't have to. The time I wrote a feature article that was going to be my big debut, and then got scooped by Sean Nelson (of Harvey Danger, who wrote a similar article but was already famous), he apologized, paid me for the piece anyway, and gave me a new assignment. As editors go, you can't get any classier than that. :D
It's already been posted in another thread, but if you approve of the original link, you might be interested in the It Gets Better Project: http://www.youtube.com/itgetsbetterproject I'd also drop in my two cents and say that the colloquial versus scientific meaning of phobias and the exact nature of Fred Phelps (who, despite some good works before he descended into frothing madness, is one of my prime examples of real-world evil) are only tangential to the important one which started this thread: recognizing and showing solidarity with queer kids (because whether or not you agree ideologically with who they are, they're still children who need to be nurtured) and giving ALL kids some hope for the future. In my experience, middle school and high school are the years when humans first learn to feel better about themselves by inflicting pain on others. It's our job as adults to mitigate that as best we can.
The It Gets Better Project is wonderful. I tend to agree with Dan Savage about a lot of things--I actually worked for him briefly when he was the Editor-in-Chief of Seattle's The Stranger--but I think this is far and away the most excellent, important thing he's done. Every kid, queer or otherwise, should see something like this. And I would hope multiple iconics would make a video, though I'm not sure things ever DID get better for Seltiyel...
That's what comes into being several hours after you eat an ENTIRE peryton. They don't digest well....and not to mention their...other habits... HA!
I guess the problem is that if Paizo were make a PDF of this, they would want to have it their usual trade dress and formatting and so on, I guess. The ePub format, however, is designed to be free of this, so that it can be used on as many devices as possible, so this has probably not been done and would require additional work - a lot more than just converting it to a PDF with some kind of tool, which basically anyone can do himself. Bingo. Given the format the webfiction appears in each week, it's easy enough for the web team to convert it directly to ePub format. If we did it up as PDFs, each story would have to go through the whole layout process, which would a) tax the art department further and push back print projects, and b) totally eat up any profits we make from the ePub versions. (At $0.99 each, it's hard to pay for much art department time... those folks are worth a lot more than us editors.) The more you know!
Honestly, if you have some folks that are great roleplayers but don't care about the rules/math side of things, have you considered just making their rolls for them? I've played in games where the GM does all the rolling in secret, and it's a different experience, but still a lot of fun, and one which allows the players to focus solely on roleplaying. Of course, it puts more pressure on you, but even if you have to get fast and loose with the rolls and modifiers, it doesn't sound like those players will care. If folks want story, give 'em story. You can always have the players who like the math continue to roll their own.
Did anyone else notice the "avalible at Target" bit at the end. Maybe Paizo should take a page from that playbook and try distributing to stores like Target and Wal-Mart with their intro set. The day Paizo has anything Pathfinder-related in Target and Walmart is the day I go home early, fill the bathtub with crisp new hundred-dollar bills, turn the lights down low, and just soak for a bit... (And I'm at the low end of the totem pole--I can only imagine what management's reaction would be...)
I really loved (and continue to love) Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles (four books, starting with Dealing with Dragons). They're probably considered young adult novels, but the world-building is so fantastic that I still enjoy going back and reading them, and the writing is quite clever. The main character is a princess who's totally dissatisfied with the role of princesses, and so decides to go volunteer as a dragon's assistant to keep all the knights and nobles from constantly telling her what's proper. Very funny, very engaging, and a totally excellent female lead. (My girlfriend also read them as a kid, and said that it rocked her world to find an *actual* strong female protagonist.)
Exactly. There aren't always walls between the various abutting Ring districts, but from either the outside or the Core, the ring districts are almost completely walled off. Think of Kaer Maga as being kinda like the Pentagon, and you'll be reasonably close. (And Bis isn't actually open to the Core--the Warren is the only place where the big stone ring-wall has been shattered enough that they had to fill it in with other structures.)
You'd have to email Vic to request adding things to the Community Use guidelines, but I'm pretty sure that if you're just printing out the iconic images for your character sheets at home, nobody has a problem with that. It's no different than holding up the APG for your players.
Folks around here got real, real busy. :\ After things calm down a little, and we finish shipping things for the holiday rush, I suspect you'll see more.
In my imagination--and again, this is just my take--the ground floor of Kaer Maga *is* mostly open, though there are probably some pillars and the occasional wall segment strewn around there (and likely incorporated into the structures... why build four walls for your house when you could build three?). That said, the ceiling height of the various districts varies considerably (and changes within the individual districts as well). In Bis, the ceilings are incredibly high, and in the southern districts you can actually see sky in places, but I imagine that Ankar-Te and Oriat are a lot lower-ceilinged... probably no higher than 20 feet in many places, with larger structures naturally built in those areas where the ceiling is higher. If I had to pick the district that has the lowest ceilings, I'd guess that it's Tarheel... nothing over there is more than a few stories. All of which is a long way of saying: If you levitate somewhere on the ground floor, you can probably see quite a ways over the rooftops, but nowhere near as far as in a normal city. And after the ground floor, the higher levels get quite cramped and twisted.
Yup, that's the good ol' carbuncle: the monster that flees enemies by faking its own death or levitating 10 feet in the air (thus making it impervious to anything except those creatures with a rake, a broom handle, or a throwing rock readily available). The full art in Pathfinder 31 is better, but I still can't get over those nervous eyes and stubby little arms... I imagine him going "WUB WUB WUB WUB WUB WUB" while he levitates. As for Eando--I meant a collected edition of the first three AP journals. At the moment, we don't have any plans to use him in web fiction, but I wouldn't be surprised to see him pop up again somewhere. Such as in, say, the Serpent's Skull adventure path...
Hey everyone! Congratulations again to everyone who entered--if there's anything I've learned about writing contests, it's that whether or not you win, the fact that it *made you write a story* is the biggest reward. Unfortunately, as much as I wish I could read all the entries (especially the Kaer Maga ones!), I can't in good conscience do so. Not because it's unfair somehow, but because the pile of writing samples I have on my desk from professionals--folks with a dozen Star Trek or Dragonlance novels under their belt--is growing far faster than I can handle. So in the best interest of Pathfinder fiction as a line, I'm going to abstain. ...at least until next year, when Pathfinder Chronicler does the second annual contest? :)
Hey folks! For the geological information: It's my understanding that the Storval Plateau was already a plateau in Thassilonian times. The geological upheaval you're remembering from the fall of Thassilon is the one that created the Varisian Gulf (which wasn't always flooded--that region sank in the resulting chaos). As for the map: the real truth of the matter is that fully mapping Kaer Maga would take an entire map folio, as you'd end up with at least 8 different overlayed schematics of each level for the various vertical levels. In the end, in the interest of having space for text, giving GMs some room to invent their own areas as necessary, and keeping me from going totally nuts, we elected to map only the ground floor, which is the part outsiders see most anyway. Everything that's shown between the two wall lines is in fact *inside* the walls themselves. The ground floors of the Ring districts tend to be pretty open in their layout (and some, such as the Bottoms and Cavalcade, are actually open to the sky where the upper levels/ceiling fell in long ago). In most such districts, however, the layers above the ground floor are a lot more claustrophobic and hive-like, with the exception being places like Bis where the entire district is pretty much one enormous chamber (hence the need for the balconies). Hope that helps!
"Mirrors and Burnstone" is a decent short SF story on its own and I find it annoying that the author seems to have been chosen because she has introduced LGBT themes via her work. Just to clarify, Nicola wasn't chosen because of the LGBT themes in her work--all the authors were chosen based on how fond of (and familiar with) their work I am, how important and influential they are to the genre, general audience name recognition, etc. In the introductory bios, since I didn't want to just have a generic "they're famous 'cause they're famous!" entry for everyone, I really tried to focus on what I thought each author was best known for, or the areas in which they've had the most significant impact on the genre. For instance, Salvatore is best known as somebody who blew the roof off of "tie-in" fiction, while William Gibson is probably the single biggest founder of cyberpunk and modern internet culture, China has been saddled with poster-boy status for the New Weird, and Cory Doctorow is as well known for his innovations in publishing and internet punditry as for his straight-up SF. Those are all things that distinguish the authors and help set them apart, but they're *not* the primary reasons the stories were chosen. I also completely understand why some of the stories didn't work for you--I'll admit that this is a weird book because it's specifically *not* taking the authors' absolute best stuff, and I've been hoping that the interviews and its value as a teaching tool will make up the difference with folks, both authors and casual readers. (To me, it's as much a "how to write" book as a short story anthology.) But I'm really glad you enjoyed some of the stories, and I hope that overall you found it worthwhile!
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