I most often enjoy writing heists, investigations, and urban exploration. PF1—War for the Crown #131: Chapter 2
She got on the team and then just outlasted the competition, with some help from the rest of the party, allowing the hometown team to win. Zarukt lamented that Basalisk had 'gotten soft' in the past 150 years . . . a lot (He kept failing checks to know about the game and our in-universe explanation was that he was familiar with 'old' Basalisk. "When did they start using PADDING in these helmets?! Dwarves today have gone soft!") Dwarf kids these days don't know how good they have it. Back in the Quest for Sky, we had to walk uphill both ways to fulfill divine commandments! And *every* basilisk player had to wear their visors down! And the ball was a knot of vipers! Pfah! Soft indeed!
A few thoughts: There are a variety of answers. Sky King's Tomb calls a lot of this into question through the PCs' discoveries and dialogues, and the Adventure Path doesn't provide an absolute answer because it's up to each group to decide for themselves. Whether you condemn the priests, condemn the deity, condemn the circumstances, or something else, it was a messy period in history with no clean answer. What will the PCs uncover, what will they share with the world, and how will these discoveries shape dwarven society and the Lost Omens setting going forward. You decide.
Torag's complicated alignment and ethos have been a talking point in Pathfinder circles for most of a decade, as he's always pushed the envelope (or perhaps blurred the line) on what it means to be or redefine "Good"—certainly as it regards fighting the enemies of one's people. When I joined the Adventure Path team and took over the Sky King's Tomb project, I made a conscious effort to have the Adventure Path explore more of Torag's faith, especially the ramifications of his violent edict on the past and present. I made sure the Adventure Path calls attention to these quandaries, presenting the dilemma(s) to the PCs and exploring the ideas while leaving it open to the players to judge what's right and potentially challenge old dogma.
James has it right. Other backgrounds will very likely have a +0 modifier, though your GM might decide that some have a different modifier. For example, the Criminal background could easily have a –1 or –2 modifier. And as both James and the Player's Guide note, events in the adventure will have a much bigger impact on the group's Reputation than their starting score.
I don't believe there's been any decision for or against milestone advancement in future APs. Partly this is an experiment, partly it's a good fit for the campaign, and partly it's the developer (me) preferring the types of adventures it supports. For me, Pathfinder's second edition is a little easier to achieve the necessary XP metrics without too many "filler" encounters—compared to the game's first edition, which was fiddly enough in encounter design that I found myself needing more encounters overall and more story awards to backstop the intended progression. Given I lean toward campaigns of exploration, interaction, urban intrigue, and infiltration, milestone leveling helps ensure I include only those encounters that I know will enhance the story, expand the setting, or create interesting memories, rather than shoehorning five fights into the middle of a social gala.
The more that a campaign involves raids, dungeon crawls, and other combat-heavy premises, the more confident I am in using classic XP tracking; I know I'll have no shortage of interesting scenes that will make efficient use of space as combats so often do. TLDR: XP tracking vs milestone leveling isn't set in stone for future Adventure Paths, but an Adventure Path will be consistent in that choice from start to finish. Which method gets used will often reflect the Adventure Path's needs, and as developers, we're watching for feedback about what's working well and what needs improvement.
One thing I would have skipped is the blocks of the dwarven deities. Because these are already accessible on AoN and a simple reference to the site would have cut on word count that could then be used for even more other PG goodness. Unlike the printed Adventure Paths, Player's Guides are digital products whose word counts aren't restricted by page count and page space. Instead, they have soft limits based on how much the team can reasonably write, edit, and lay out during the project window. Because a Player's Guide aims to make information as accessible as possible—don't want to force folks to jump across many sources—and the adventures reference these deities periodically, adding dwarven pantheon information made sense here.
I don't care about ancestry/background/gender, all PCs in my group if I run this will be required to have a beard. Weirdest mental image I've ever had for a leshy, an elf, an iruxi, and a skeletal dwarf, but more power to you and your group!
Sounds good, and I appreciate your keeping feedback constructive.
Of course, at my table, good luck getting my players to actually follow the guidance. Mark of the Mantis? Sure, let me bring my pixie psychic. <rollseyes> As the author for both these adventures, I both strongly judge your players and heartily congratulate them.
This is a really great players guide, absolutely lovd the little paragraphs of context for the different recommended ancestries <3 It think that's something we can work on in the future. This table was inspired by the one James included in the Kingmaker Player's Guide, and the format is still new enough and sufficiently qualitative that I relied more on intuition and my knowledge of major scenes in the Adventure Path, rather than a particular science. As a peek behind the scenes, I wrote the ancestries, backgrounds, and Highhelm overview about 9 months ago to help the playtesters for 193. The class and skill sections came about 7 months later, which might have introduced a little dissonance. I wonder how they will describe the kind of characters that fit future APs and those that are not appropriate after Remastered gets rid of alignments. Remains to be seen! Certainly I've found myself using alignment shorthand in some outlines just as a way to start discussing a group's or NPC's morality, but that quickly shifts toward exploring the figure's motivations, values, and methods. Likely the next Player's Guide I write will explore not-alignment kinda like I did with classes and skills in Sky King's Tomb: talking about broad objectives and myriad ways the PCs can address them.
This Adventure Path's Player's Guide is now available!
It’s not quite what you’re looking for—more a place for monstrous coexistence than benevolent monstrosity—but you might appreciate Pol-Duraxalis in Iblydos, which gets some brief description through a hero-god entry in PF #144 backmatter. In a similar theme, consider Kaer Maga in Varisia as an option. And for slightly less rough-and-tumble destinations, Absalom is a remarkably cosmopolitan place where the occasional bugbear won’t cause a fuss.Is that polis where Iapholi is from? I adored her. That's the one!
It’s not quite what you’re looking for—more a place for monstrous coexistence than benevolent monstrosity—but you might appreciate Pol-Duraxalis in Iblydos, which gets some brief description through a hero-god entry in PF #144 backmatter. In a similar theme, consider Kaer Maga in Varisia as an option. And for slightly less rough-and-tumble destinations, Absalom is a remarkably cosmopolitan place where the occasional bugbear won’t cause a fuss.
I can hypothesize the likely reason. I wrote the apocryphal subdomains for Heroes of the Streets, including the Espionage subdomain, published in 2015. Ulon was introduced in Ruins of Azlant, in 2017 or so. This meant that Ulon wasn't around for me to list as recommended deities for the Espionage subdomain in that article. Adding to that, the soft policy in Adventure Path design was to focus primarily on hardcover RPG resources, drawing on Player Companion content only rarely. Thus, Ulon doesn't list Espionage because 1) the Espionage subdomain might not have beeb on the author's radar while writing his article, and/or 2) referencing a Player Companion for a niche subdomain in an Adventure Path article didn't match the article's needs. I agree that Espionage would be a great fit for Ulon. Certainly for a home game, I'd think it an excellent substitution, GM approval willing.
John: "Vanessa. This outline. It's..it's just butterflies, all the way down." Vanessa: "Keep reading."John: "So...this Desna festival is really run by a cult of Urgathoa, and the butterflies are glamered deaths-head moths?" Vanessa: Nod nod nod John: "..." Vanessa: "..." John: "Seems legit." Vanessa: "Wait, you're not going to say no?" John: "Nah, but I will make suggestions. So maybe the Urgathoans don't realize that they're also part of the upcoming sacrifice, with Urgathoa planning for only the moths to survive. So partway through the adventure, the PCs have the opportunity to team up with the Urgathoans they just exposed, and..."
I loved the forwards as a look behind-the-scenes. I also miss the old Developer's Commentary Youtube Videos y'all did for Pathfinder Fridays. Those were fun. Diving into a lore topic for the better part of an hour didn't just let us share our excitement and a few secrets; it also let us hear fans' questions, concoct not-yet-necessarily-canon answers, and learn what excites the audience.
Based on my own design objectives, early work on the Player's Guide, and some playtesting a while back, I'm feeling good about how much this Adventure Path offers dwarves and non-dwarves alike. Too soon to say much more!
What I thought made the one-shots line unique was they could experiment with any theme, area of the world, subfaction, etc. without requiring you to invest the time into an entire book or books worth of content. They also got better and better with each release. Mark of the Mantis was phenomnenal. I'm super bummed they won't be back. I don't have any official word on one-shots to share; I contributed mostly on the writing side, only minimally on the strategic planning for the line. I'll echo thoughts that short adventures that provide unique pregenerated characters does open up some really interesting narrative possibilities that would be really challenging to manage in a longer adventure format. That said, these adventures also have some unique challenges, from ensuring the pregenerated characters' abilities and the adventure's obstacles align well to providing material that's narratively deep and sufficiently complex without being difficult to pick up and play in one sitting. And I'm glad you enjoyed Mark of the Mantis! It was fun to plan, test, and write. I love creating investigations, social intrigue, and (particularly in this case) heists, and I've been happy to see reviewers observe how readily it captured Assassin's Creed vibes.
Recycled from a response I gave in the Pathfinder Discord server: The first list are divinities I enjoy because I've worked on them. LG: Tsukiyo is far and away my favorite LG deity, and he’s a major contender for my favorite, period. I really appreciate his showing that there’s no one “right” mindset to doing good, and that being good involves demonstrating patience for those who mainstream society misunderstands or unjustly demonizes. NG: I will happily tell anyone who asks about Chinostes (Pathfinder #144). The Iblydan hero-gods have provided such wonderful flexibility in bucking alignment expectations and divine expectations, and Chinostes’s dual alignment and feuding cults create a narrative I would adore playing out in a module. CG: Eh? What's this chaotic good thing? LN: Give me any of the Primal Inevitables, each of which finds simple pleasure in studying and maintaining the multiverse’s peace in their own way. Valmallos and Otolmens are among my favorites, especially because Valmallos speaks so strongly to my askance glances at sorcerers’ natural magic while asking “Okay, but you can cast spells responsibly, right?” Meanwhile, I see gods (especially chaotic-aligned gods) chortling at how well the multiverse conveniently functions, all while Otolmens does her corrective calculations and stage-whispers “You. Ignorant. Fools.” N: It is such a cruel toss-up between the hero-gods Aerekostes and Drokalion. One’s an intelligent sword that yes, grants spells, and also sometimes loans itself to aspiring heroes. The other is a divine lion with roughly a 3 Intelligence and a zealous cult that thinks it’s glorious when their god chases and potentially eats them. CN: Acavna. She’s a neat take on CN, and I enjoy her Earthfall narrative and place in the Azlanti pantheon. Incorporating her herald into Basrakal was really fun. LE: Asuras as Paizo presents them are my jam. Just the sound of each asura’s self-righteous backhanding of the gods who created them through negligence and mishandling is a beautiful sensation, and asuras are a way for me to explore and celebrate the foibles of Golarion’s divinities. Maeha is likely my favorite. NE: Working with Adam Daigle, Mark Moreland, and Linda Zayas-Palmer on planning the Azlanti deities was among the most fulfilling meetings I’ve had at Paizo, and I quite adore some of those divinities as Adam ultimately fleshed them out in his article in Pathfinder #123. While I love Scal’s fallout with Earthfall, I’m mostly here for Ulon and his cult of conspiracies-within-conspiracies-wait-can-we-trust-each-other-even?!? CE: I find Chaotic Evil distasteful overall. I will, however, uphold the righteous goal of Ongalte to kill every other hero-god in the vain hope of restoring cyclopean glory. ——— Then for deities I enjoy but haven't worked on. LG: I really enjoy Vildeis’s no-pulled-punches take on evil, and her reckless devotion to purification feels like a very honest portrayal of the murder-zeal of so many paladins. Just overall, the presentation of LG as an almost alien “Whoa, calm down there” degree of holiness is intriguing, even I’d be off-put by it in real life. NG: Soralyon intrigues me. I really appreciate his shtick, especially in how it manifests in Magnimar’s monuments and their latent magic. CG: Keltheald gets my vote. I really like his pure dedication to exploration without any pretense or preachiness. LN: Alseta has always intrigued me, especially in her dominion of thresholds. Her very low-key approach nonetheless provides a sense of sacred structure to any transformation or transition, and I like it. N: It’s hard to say no to Nethys. I enjoy his ambiguous origins as a mortal, his dual nature, and his eccentric indifference to what his followers do so long as they do it with magic. That sort of mixed messaging inspires all sorts of rival sects and feuds—none of which are “right” yet all of which make for wonderful narrative. CN: I love what James Case did in presenting Hei Feng. The divine tengu is utterly endearing yet fearsome, all while straddling the line between indomitable strength and sheepish fallibility. LE: Dispater’s a delight. Not only does his home life spin off into delightful narratives, but he rules over one of my favorite cities in the Outer Planes and does so with soft-spoken style. NE: Zyphus has a sinister pureness. Yes, he’s a mistake. Yes, he’s evil. But his followers are so delightfully intent on creatively inflicting misfortune rather than, say, donning the closest skin-mask and whipping a knife around. No, for Zyphus, death is an art form, and I can see him holding up Olympics-style score cards whenever a PC dies to foolish circumstances. CE: Ragadahn is an intriguing angle on Chaotic Evil, in part because he has to play within the society of the First World (which I think is what makes him palatable for me). Ragadahn’s kinda your opinionated, aging uncle who rants unexpectedly at Thanksgiving, and tradition dictates you just let him talk himself hoarse before he eats a slice of pie and passes out to the football game. “I’m the lord of all dragons! I invented dragons! Kids these days don’t got no respect! I’m the god of all the oceans—even the ones I’ve never been in! I’m an uncontrollable force of destruction, you hear? My symbol’s the spiral, and I invented geometry, and I’ll destroy geometry if I damn well please!” // “Shhhh, shhhh, yes Ragadahn, you’re very fearsome,”
Oh hey, same here!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F4jH93Y6KP4 this video is pretty good to give you the idea. Think this came out before the book that expanded on starship combat a bit more, especially for magic users. Thanks for sharing the video—link added In running starship combat, I’ve noticed three recurring themes in what helps make a great experience: Variety: In deep space, two starships quickly fall into the same circling pattern, usually with one consistently outmaneuvering the other and firing at the same quadrant repeatedly. That’s good strategy, but it’s sometimes underwhelming gameplay. Good encounter design often involves adding terrain, complications, multiple foes that have to be prioritized, secondary objectives beyond damaging the foe, and so on. Add layers to the encounter for a memorable time. Description: Adding description helps bring the starship combat alive, as the encounter mechanics involves a lot of die-rolling—much like conventional combats in the 5-foot-square scale. But if you add banter, describe battle damage as the PCs experience it, and help narrate the PCs’ successes and failures, starship combat becomes more than a numbers game. Pacing: Keep it moving. It’s a new subsystem for people to learn, and that can slow down gameplay, and the slower the gameplay, the more likely you are to have folks zoning out. Having cheat sheets for starship roles (or the Starship Combat Reference Cards) helps compile key information for players’ use, meaning less flipping through the book. Helping encourage fast-paced decisions at the table keeps the round moving. Knowing when a gunnery check is so high that it doesn’t need to be calculated—just say it hits—saves some time and gives you more bandwidth for description. And most of all, starship combat doesn’t always need to go to 0 Hull Points; if things risk getting repetitive yet one side has obviously prevailed, consider hand-waving the last few rounds or having the enemy vessel surrender. Wrapping things up while the energy is high means everyone ends on a high note.
It's not just about being an experienced GM. Every group is different, and every GM has a different style. When I need to finish a game within a certain time period (like needing to finish an organized play game within a 5-hour slot), I'm mostly good about running a tight, fun game that wraps up in 4.5 hours. If I have no time pressure, or if I have players full of absurd and daring strategies, you better believe I might run that same adventure for 8 hours! Managing your group's infiltration planning might benefit from a few steps:
Glad you've enjoyed it! I encourage you to leave a review when you get a chance.
Glad you've enjoyed those Tabris-penned pages! I imagine the Pure Legion would provide an interesting (albeit biased) perspective, though the notion of a Knowledge-domain priest would be the better approach in most cases. Ooooh...or a 2-page section where the same concept or myth is examined and retold from four different scholarly traditions. For example, the battle to seal Rovagug as told by a Rahadoumi scholar, a Hellknight paravicar, a Sarenrite priest, and a Sarkorian god-caller.
I just realized this book is 216 pages, a significant bump in content! Thank you so much, Paizo! I'm literally going to buy two copies for that. I don't mind paying more if that's what it takes to get bigger books. I'm unsure where that information's coming from? I just checked the Interstellar Species files to confirm, and it's a 192-page book. Still tons of fantastic content, and larger than most of the 160-page books published over Starfinder's first few years, but not quite 216. Though don't let that discourage you from buying two copies! :-D
As far as I am aware, it was not printed in a book; the text is from the Paizocon 2016 Boon #10 Ley line Access; which is why I'm unsure of how cannon it is. These are ley lines I invented—at least I think I wrote these, as they'd have been my job at the time and match my style—as part of that boon because First Edition ley lines required some information about their location to determine what benefits they provided. I aimed for a flavorful array, and I don't believe any of them have featured in other works. Use them in your campaigns if you like.
Pregen link is now on product pageIs it intentional that two of the PC assassins are only carrying a single Sawtooth Saber? It means the Twin trait on each weapon is useless - it’s a relatively small damage bump to miss out on, but I did want to ask. Yes, that is on purpose. One of the assassins needs that hand for spellcasting, and the other just doesn't rely so heavily on the saber. Only one of the assassins has the magic items necessary to make good, cost-effective use of two weapons. While this is partly a limitation based on the gear the characters could afford, it's primarily because I aimed for each of the assassins to have a particular feel in combat, with just one of them feeling like that "classic" dual-wielder. Try them all for a sense of how varied Red Mantis Assassins can be.
I was also confused and a little frustrated by what the heck occult magic was when Pathfinder's second edition was in its early stages. Unraveling and understanding those differences was a big reason I volunteered to write the occult magic introduction in Secrets of Magic, which other folks have summarized early in the thread. My own bias aside, it's worth a read (and not just a summary), as are the other three magic tradition articles. We packed a lot of flavor into those few pages!
Turns out The Devourer is really just the picture frame itself. A behind-the-scenes insight into the Devourer art: Rather than an objectively omniscient look at the Devourer, as we have for the other deities, this is an in-world person's attempt to depict the Devourer. Just by faithfully approximating the Devourer's likeness, the portrait is literally collapsing under the entropic stress of trying to portray such a deity of nothingness.
Well, this piques my curiosity. Besides Distant Shores, where else has this lore appeared?I mean, the hero-gods are already something wholly unique and not drawn from the real world; Chinostes is especially fresh, as is Iapholi.I think they are Paizo's take on the Greek demigods. They seem to be unique in Golarion, but the concept is completely drawn from the RL Greek legends and feels to me rather shoehorned in Golarion. I wrote two additional pages about Iblydan hero-gods in the back of Pathfinder #144: Midwives to Death, which was an extended article where many developers each got two pages to write about whatever topic they wanted in this final Adventure Path volume for Pathfinder's first edition.
As for the rest, I’d love some peeks into historical eras. One I’ve floated in the past (and had shot down by James Jacobs, sadly) was an adventure or AP set pretty immediately after Earthfall, dealing with survival in the harsh, sunless world - with an excuse to show the rise of early Nidal as a potential feature. An Ancient Adventures book is one I've been pitching for a while now, as I love playing with (and playing in) Golarion's past. I'd love to see that come to pass.
I do not recall Community Manager being a title belonging to Sara Marie or anyone else for that matter, but I could be wrong. Check the credits sections of our products, especially in the past several years where folks directly involved in a creating book’s contents are at the front, and all staff are printed alongside the OGL at the back. Sara Marie is listed as “Customer Service & Community Manager.”
Veerkea is a retired member of the Veskarium military, though admittedly “part of the the Veskarium military” can describe a large fraction of the Veskarium. My understanding for Veerkea is that she was effectively a specialist called into low-combat situations, whereas Obozaya trained and operated more along the front lines of any given conflict. With a military as expansive as the Veskarium’s there’s hardly a typical military career. Anywho, I imagine Veerkea received the Soldier’s Due or its equivalent (see Obozaya’s backstory) before forging her own path, She and Obozaya likely have some common experiences and a mutual respect, even if their respective operations might never have crossed paths. As for how they work together? Stay tuned? :-P |
