A few months ago, one of our store blogs introduced you to the wonders of Litko acrylic gaming accessories. The response was so overwhelming that we decided to join together with Litko to bring a few of their products into our GameMastery brand of gaming accessories.

We started with an all-new product designed specifically for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: GameMastery Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Condition Tokens. Having trouble keeping track of which conditions are on your character? Grab a set of these 1"-square color-coded laser-etched acrylic tokens and put an end to the confusion.

We've also introduced the GameMastery Invisible Character Pack—perfect for reminding everyone that your character can't be seen. With ten different figures in the set, there's sure to be one for you!

Another favorite is the GameMastery Flying Figure Stands, a pair of two-inch-high stands that raise figures with a 1-inch-round base above their peers. A platform on the bottom of the stand can be used as a die tray to show the current elevation of the flying figure, or as a place for another figure.

Finally, check out the GameMastery Torch Bearer Pack, which gives you three torches on stands that that are designed to snugly fit 1-inch-round bases, and are perfect for showing which characters in your group are carrying the light sources.

(For assembling the last three products, we recommend Craftics #33 Thick Acrylic Cement, a solvent that bonds acrylic better than any glue, and dries clear!)

Gamer soaps are nothing new to paizo.com. Our own warehouse manager, Jeff Strand, makes all-natural gamer soaps with his wife under the Two Strands Soapworks brand. And at Gen Con this year, we found another company doing its best to help the world's geeks stay squeaky clean: Geeky Clean! makes a broad line of geeky soaps with cool things stuck in the center. We've got seven styles of their soap in our warehouse now!

• Bar Trek is scented with a subtle Acai Berry and Satin fragrance, and contains a black d20.
• Barbarian Scrub contains a gentle dusting of exfoliating apricot seeds with the valiant scent of spiced oranges; it comes with a random game die in the middle.
• Cure Light Wounds comes with a white d20 and is made with real peppermint oil for that tingly all-over refreshment!
• Health Soap is scented with a fiery Nag Champa incense oil and moisturizing coconut oil, and comes with a random game die in the middle.
• Mana Soap emits the ethereal scent of coconut, contains gentle exfoliating spheres that will cleanse your delicate hands, and packs a random game die in the middle.
• Sexterity Soap is deeply scented with a lush blend of peach, cherry blossom and white jasmine, and houses a random game die.
• Zom-B-Gone is a lilac-scented bar that will whisk away your survivalist stench; it comes with a neat skull and crossbones in the middle.

So get your clean on with one of these creative and oh-so-geeky soaps!

My friends, we live in an era of RPG accessory wealth. Never in my 30-plus years of roleplaying have I had the cornucopia of gaming accessories available to me that I have today. This week, I'd like to highlight items from two companies: Savage Mojo's new Gamescapes battlemats, and new vinyl D&D mats from Gale Force 9!

Savage Mojo has had dozens of PDF accessories available here on paizo.com, but they've just recently partnered with Cubicle 7 to bring the world printed Gamescape Mats. The first five GameScapes are called Battlemat Terrain, and are available in print or as PDFs. The print edition is a double-sided 24"x32" mat, with hexes on one side and squares on the other, while the PDF edition is a 26-page high-resolution file that lets you choose either hexes or squares.

Battlemat Terrain: Desert Steppe is perfect for a whole host of battlegrounds, from a raid by Mongolian horsemen to stormtroopers attacking a desert planet. Wherever a rich red rocky landscape is suitable, whether it's modern Afghanistan or a fantasy wasteland, this is one stunning backdrop for the fight.

When the titans of your imagination clash, they can do it on the finely detailed Battlemat Terrain: Grasslands. The ground isn't cluttered with mountains or prerendered buildings—use this set for any game where a stretch of grass is what you want, from fantasy to sci-fi, western to waterworld (well, maybe not that last one).

Whether it’s a frost giant assault on your northern fortress or Arctic commandos striking at Ice Station Alpha, Battlemat Terrain: Ice Realm is the place for your troops to do battle—terrain so realistic you’ll want mittens to keep the frostbite at bay!

Wastelands are deadly places, and none more so than the Battlemat Terrain: Wasteland. Blasted rock as far as the eye can see, beautifully recreated as a set of tabletop map tiles. The perfect kill zone for your minis to fight it out, whether it's roleplaying or tactical gaming.

Some dragons are large, others huge. You get a few gargantuan and colossal ones now and then, but they've gone one step further... a dragon so big that it is your tabletop. Battlemat Terrain: Scaling the Great Dragon allows you to fight on the back of a mile-long dragon—one of those set-piece encounters everyone will talk about for years to come.

Meanwhile, Gale Force 9 has released two new vinyl gaming mats that are the perfect accessories for your table. They're officially licensed Dungeons & Dragons products, but can easily be used with any fantasy roleplaying game. The Caves of Chaos can be home to a dangerous cult, shelter for a horde of marauding orcs, or a hiding spot for fabulous treasures. The map shows three entrances to a network of caverns and chambers, rich in details including fire pits, a primitive throne and monstrous statuary. Branching openings allow the map to serve as the beginning of a greater system of tunnels.

Market Square lies at the heart of any rural village, growing town or bustling city. Merchants and traders from every land come to sell their common goods and exotic wares. If adventures seek basic supplies, a rare reagent or even information for their next quest, they are sure to find it here. This map depicts a number of intersecting streets lined with vendor booths and stands. A proud statue stands in the middle of the square overseeing all of the shady dealings. Numerous buildings surround the square, including a livestock pen and a burnt-out ruin.

As I've said many times before and will surely say again, one of the coolest things about Gen Con is discovering cool new things for the online store. In this case, two different companies came by the booth and dropped off copies of their latest Pathfinder RPG–Compatible efforts to sell in our booth and to bring back for paizo.com. Well, our Gen Con shipment has arrived in the warehouse, so now it's time to unleash these new products upon you!

First up is Interaction Point Games and the three products in their Kingdoms of Legends product line. The Kingdoms of Legend World Guide is a Pathfinder Roleplaying Game–Compatible campaign setting based on an alternate history Earth of the early 15th century. Human empires dominate the landscape while the elves, dwarves, and gnomes struggle to hold on to ancestral homelands. The Greek gods are real, known by various names in different locales. Piracy, war, political intrigue, and danger are commonplace. Heroes are desperately needed in all corners of the globe! The Kingdoms of Legend: World Guide contains an overview of the setting, introducing 41 different countries in Europe. Also included are two new half-races, new feats, numerous languages, and more!

Another Kingdoms of Legend product is All Hands on Deck!, which helps to create maritime drama. Included are deck plans of two iconic 15th-century vessels, a new base class, new prestige classes, new feats, and new magic items. There's also an extensive list of historically based equipment appropriate to nautical adventuring, including gunpowder weapons. Just like the heroes and villains who wield them, they can be unpredictable, but are sure to add explosiveness to any game!

The Hidden Threat is a Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Compatible adventure in the Kingdoms of Legend for four 1st-level heroes. A group of novice adventurers responds to the desperate call of the castle steward. A wild animal is loose beneath the keep just as the lord of Turnberry is set to return for the winter. The embarrassing situation needs to be dealt with—and quickly! The heroes soon find there is more to this situation than first meets the eye. Drawn into the midst of a conspiracy, the PCs must fight to neutralize a threat to the safety of the entire castle.

All three of these Interaction Point Games releases are available in print and PDF editions.

The folks over at Conflict Games have created a new competitive roleplaying system for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. The Conflict Roleplaying Rulebook focuses on tactical combat versus other players and teams. Driving the combat are clearly defined objectives, and the only thing that limits your character is your team’s ability to execute a strategic plan—and of course, the opposition. You can purchase the rulebook by itself, or go all in and get the Conflict Skirmishing RPG Boxed Set, which also contains the Keeper's Keep Battlemap and the Area of Effect Templates, both of which can also be purchased separately.

Because the Dungeons & Dragons HeroScape sets feature repaints of exisiting D&D Minis, I've been buying them to add variety to my collection. Sadly, the earlier HeroScape releases use bases that are slightly larger than the usual minis. Fortunately, with the new Warriors of Eberron Expansion Set, Wizards of the Coast has adjusted the base sizes to match the D&D Minis, making this set even easier to drop into my weekly Pathfinder game. (The large figures still have those funky large HeroScape bases, but they could easily be rebased with the standard round bases if you feel the need.)

Veterans of the Last War come to Heroscape! The hordes of evil must be stopped. Goblins, ogres, mindflayers, and fire giants! The warriors of Khovaire are summoned to the greatest battle of all time. Will the Warriors of Eberron be enough to stem the tide? Iconic characters and monsters from the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons joins forces with the ultimate build-and-battle miniatures game to bring new dimensions of fun for everyone! Each booster contains 5 non-random, pre-painted plastic figures, 6 HeroScape stat cards, and a new treasure token.

Here at paizo.com, we sell them as a complete set of four different packs. Between them, you'll get 4 Wyrmlings, a squad of 3 Warforged Soldiers, 4 Goblin Cutters, an Iron Golem, a Werewolf Lord, a Mind Flayer Mastermind, an Ogre Warhulk, a Warforged Wizard, a Human Shadow Assassin, a Dragonborn Paladin, a Hobgoblin Sorcerer, and a Fire Giant, plus 4 Treasure Glyphs, 3 Lycanthrope Markers, and 2 Shadow tiles.

Comparing them to their D&D Minis equivalents, the Goblin Runner from Against the Giants is painted almost exactly like the D&D Mini. Dungeons of Dread's Goblin Picador has been repainted slightly, as has War Drums' Goblin Blackblade, but the Lolthbound Goblin from Demonweb has a very different paint scheme here, fitting more easily into the average fantasy campaign. The warforged all have a blue motif painted onto their armor or robes. The four dragon wyrmlings—red, white, black and blue—look pretty much exactly like their D&D Minis counterparts. My favorite upgrade here is the new paint job on the Shadowdancer from Blood War, who gets a nice dark blue cape to go with her dark brown armor. All in all, Warriors of Eberron will be a nice addition to my prepainted miniatures collection!

A while back, we introduced you to Campaign Coins. The notion of using physical coins to represent the mounds of loot commonly found in fantasy RPGs excited us so much that we convinced King of the Castle Games to bring them into our GameMastery accessory line and allow us to distribute them around the world!

At Gen Con earlier this month, we added a new set of items to the line-up. Our new Trade Bars offer a high-quality fantasy monetary system using actual metal bars—it's much more immersive than scribbled numbers on your character sheet. Trade Bars create more opportunities for creative roleplaying as you hand over cash at your local tavern, bribe a town guard to look the other way, or pay passage to the next exotic port! They come in three different packs of 12 copper-toned bars: denominations of 1, 2, and 5; 10, 20, and 50; and 100, 500, and 1,000.

GMs everywhere, reward your players with hard cash the next time they plunder that long-forgotten tomb! They've earned it!

To help promote the launch of the Pathfinder RPG at Gen Con last year, Erik decided to make up some badges to hand out to people who came to our booth each day. We figured that people would like them, but we had little idea that they would become so popular that people would be seeking them out here on the messageboards and on eBay! Our three badges from Gen Con 2009—Seoni, a Gray Maiden, and a goblin—quickly became part of Paizo collecting history.

So for 2010, we decided to go from 3 badges to 4, and we decided to print a lot more of them... and we still ran out by about lunchtime each day! Fortunately, we had the foresight to order some extras to offer on paizo.com for those of you who couldn't pick up a set at Gen Con!

The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Gen Con 2010 Pin Set was created to celebrate the launch of the Pathfinder RPG Advanced Player's Guide. They feature two of our iconics from the APG—the Summoner and the Oracle—as well as two of our favorite crafty little goblins from the GameMastery Guide.

These complete sets are few in number, and once they're gone, they are GONE! So get 'em while you can... and then we'll all have to wait until next August to see what Erik will cook up for Gen Con 2011!

It's time to unleash four new Super Genius Pathfinder RPG Compatible PDFs on your gaming table!

The Genius Guide to Feats of Divine Might provides new feats for characters focused on divine powers and spells. Clerics, druids, rangers and paladins gain a range of options that let them adapt their divinely granted abilities. There are also numerous feats for nonspellcaster characters that are devout followers of a god; using these feats, a campaign can include priests who are not clerics, allow gods of battle to be served by fighters with access to the War domain, and have temples filled with celestial sorcerers.

If you want some extra alchemical love for your game, check out Krazy Kragnar's Alchemical Surplus Shop. Kragnar is the new owner and chief salesman of a shop that buys alchemist fire past its use-by date, thunderstones that don’t meet military specs, and refurbished tanglefoot bags, and passes the savings on to the customer. Kragnar has also pulled together some new items, from the cacophonous boompot to the subtle clocktinder, available only here!

Mythic Menagerie: The Kingdom of Graves presents a collection of monsters with a common theme: undead with a place at court. Lords, knights, maidens-in-waiting, couriers, and even siege engines, all hailing from the black courts of the dead. The foes within range from CR 3 to CR 15, so they can be used to augment the ranks of any undead encounter with something the players haven't seen before, or form the frame for a whole new threat should the GM decide to create a literal kingdom of graves. Augmented with zombie soldiers, ghoul squires, and wight generals, the monsters provided here can form the backbone of an entire campaign arc.

Finally, The Genius Guide to the Vanguard is a new base class blending martial and arcane power, focusing the character’s skill and effort into mastering a single weapon with which he has a strong arcane bond. His powers—and their limitations—provoke echoes of the magical warriors whose exploits first fired our fascination with fantasy fiction and brought us to the gaming hobby!

I'll never forget oohing and aahing over the Brom artwork on the cover the original Dark Sun box set for Dungeons & Dragons back in 1991. It helped define the feel of the dark desert world of Athas, bringing a new type of fantasy gaming to the tabletop. The last official 2nd edition Dark Sun product was released in 1996, and then the setting languished until Paizo released the 3rd edition of the campaign world in 2004's Dragon Magazine #319. Now, six years later, Dark Sun makes its 4E debut in a series of products from Wizards of the Coast.

Aimed at players and Dungeon Masters, the Dark Sun Campaign Setting explores the heroes and wonders of Athas, a savage desert world abandoned by the gods and ruled by terrible sorcerer-kings. Use it to build Dark Sun heroes and thrilling D&D adventures set in the Seven Cities of the Tyr Region, the Ivory Triangle, the Sea of Silt, and monster-infested wastelands—or plunder it for your own campaign! The Dark Sun Campaign Setting provides exciting character options for 4E players, including new races, new character themes and class builds, new paragon paths and epic destinies, and new equipment. It has rules and advice for handling survival challenges, arena encounters, desert terrain, and adventure creation. It also presents a short, ready-to-play introductory adventure.

The Dark Sun Creature Catalog collects the most iconic and dangerous monsters of the Dark Sun campaign setting into one handy tome. It also contains other hazards and threats found in the desert wastelands and dungeon tombs of Athas. The creatures and threats presented herein make worthy encounters for Athasian heroes or the heroes in your homebrew campaign.

For an adventure on Athas, check out the Marauders of the Dune Sea. Now that Tyr is free of Kalak the Sorcerer-King, opportunity abounds in the city and the surrounding wastes. But some see Kalak's fall as the beginning of Tyr's end, and the unpatrolled deserts nearby are rife with danger. Outlaws openly defy the city's Revolutionary Council and threaten outlying holdings. If Tyr is to thrive, heroes must arise to tame the lawlessness and evil that threatens the free city. This stand-alone D&D 4E adventure is designed to take characters from 2nd to 5th level.

Finally, you can deck out your gaming table with some Dark Sun–themed Dungeon Tiles in the new Desert of Athas set. Though designed for use with the Dark Sun Campaign Setting and the Marauders of the Dune Sea adventure, it'll work well in just about any desert setting. This accessory contains six double-sided sheets of illustrated, die-cut terrain tiles printed on heavy cardstock, allowing you to create desert oases, sandstone vaults, and other dungeon and wilderness fixtures. Some of the tiles can be combined to create 3D terrain elements. It's an easy and inexpensive way to include great-looking terrain in your game.

Mutants & Masterminds was one of the first games to take the core d20 system and morph it for use in a genre other than fantasy. In this case, it was the superhero genre, and over the course of the intervening years, M&M has captured the core of the superhero marketplace by continuing to evolve from its d20 foundation while still maintaining enough of the base rules that make it familiar to most gamers. And now, the folks at Green Ronin are taking the Mutants & Masterminds game system to a new level in the form of the DC Adventures Hero's Handbook. Mixing the DC Universe with the third edition of Mutants & Masterminds is about as good as it gets!

Join the never-ending battle for truth and justice in the world's greatest super-hero universe, using the world's greatest super-hero roleplaying game! Take on the roles of legendary DC heroes like Superman, Batman, or Wonder Woman, or create your own! Get started right away with a wide selection of hero archetypes, or build from scratch using a comprehensive creation system. The Hero's Handbook provides everything you need for hours of adventure in the DC Universe, including all the rules of the game, an overview of the original comic-book setting, and details on major heroes and villains, complete with game information. It's all presented in gorgeous full-color, with art by some of DC's most famous illustrators. Experience super-hero adventure in the world that defined the genre—become a hero of legend with the DC Adventures Hero's Handbook!

When we first announced the Kingmaker Adventure Path, I expected a few of the third-party Pathfinder RPG publishers to create some (unofficial) tie-in products. Sure enough, Jon Brazer Enterprises, before now mostly known for Traveller material, soon announced Book of Beasts: Monsters of the River Nations.

JBE's River Nations are lands of low character filled with raiders, fey, plant creatures, and dangerous animals, both magical and mundane, and so Monsters of the River Nations features new creatures with a focus on semi-aquatic animals and plants. They're ideal to throw at players exploring dangerous wilderness or starting their own nation on an unclaimed stretch of land. Monsters of the River Nations also contains new region-appropriate NPCs, haunts, templates, diseases, and more.

You might also want to take a look at Jon Brazer's other Pathfinder RPG–compatible products, all currently available as PDFs. Book of the Faithful I: Power of Prayer gives you religious character concepts ranging from those that have lived their whole lives surrounded by their faith to the newly converted. There are also seventeen new thematic feats, a new magic item and three pieces of equipment ideal for the faith seeker's enlightenment and protection.

Book of the Faithful II: The Worshiping Swords details nine swords, each containing the soul of a faithful follower that chose to serve their god for all time—one sword for each alignment. The Worshiping Swords gives your players unique weaponry to obtain, use, or destroy.

JBE also has released Encounters and Maps: Cave of Kobolds, Kobold Ninja Random Lists: Necklaces, Signet Ring Emblems and Earrings, Kobold Ninja Random Lists: Cleric Titles and Elf Male and Female Names , and Player Races: High Goblins.

One of my all-time favorite card games is DaVinci Editrice's classic Spaghetti Western-inspired Bang! I love the way the game develops as players try to suss out which among them is secretly the sheriff, and who the deputies, outlaws and the renegade are! Bang! is a game of bluffing, subterfuge, guesswork, and good old-fashioned fun!

Bang!: Wild West Show is an expansion that contains eight VERY wild new characters. Among them, you'll find one that draws cards from other players' hands instead of the deck, one with 9 life points who cannot use Missed! cards, and one that "draws" when it's killed and stays alive if the draw doesn't come up spades—'cause you need a spade to bury him! The expansion also includes a set of game changing cards that come into play when there's a Wells Fargo card on the table, and crazy cards like the Wild West Show that lets you play Missed! cards as BANG!s—and vice versa—and a card that lets you swap your position with another player at the table!

When I started my GMing career back in 1981, I used a piece of scratch paper to track the initiative order. Once Third Edition came out, I needed a way to keep track of people delaying and such, so I started to use index cards. Today, I use the GameMastery Combat Pad, and I can't imagine going back to those clunky methods for tracking initiative!

The Combat Pad is the ultimate tool for managing combat in your favorite roleplaying game. It is a wet- and dry-erasable board with a steel core, so the included magnets stick right to it! It's portable—about the size of a sheet of paper—so you can take it anywhere you're gaming.

Use it to quickly and easily track turns. Write the character's names on the player magnets using a wet- or dry-erase marker, then place them in initiative order. Use blue magnets for PCs, green magnets for friendly NPCs, and black-bordered magnets for enemies. Hash marks label positions from 0 to 35, making it easy to put the magnets in the correct initiative order. When the order changes, simply slide the magnets to their new places.

For tactical groups, delaying and readying guides make it simple to synchronize attacks—enemies beware! Slide the magnets to the proper column and avoid the confusion common with other initiative tracking methods.

We sold out of the previous version of the Combat Pad a while back, so—even though the original won an ENnie award for Best Gaming Aid in 2007—we took the opportunity to make it even better. In addition to a cleaner look with a larger space for more magnets, it's now also much sturdier than before. Plus, it's printed on both sides, and it now comes in a reusable plastic storage sleeve.

And if you need more magnets for those truly epic battles, be sure to get the GameMastery Combat Pad: Extra Magnet Pack for even more magnetic markers!

Can you believe that Kobold Quarterly has reached the ripe old age of 14 issues? It seems like only yesterday that friend of the company Wolfgang Baur brought over the first issue of KQ and we all feverishly pored over its contents. Today, KQ is all grown up and shiny, and if Kobold Quarterly #14 is any indication, it has a long and bright future ahead of it!

Speaking of shiny, treasure is the theme for this huge 96-page Gen Con issue. Paizo's own James Sutter wrote an article statting out come of the cool new magic items and spells found in our first Pathfinder Tales novel, Prince of Wolves, including stats for Radovan, the tiefling bodyguard. There are also articles about magical perfumes, paper treasures, middle-class magic, figurines of wondrous power, and hoard magic! Feature articles include a piece about using Aasimars as a PC race for 4E, an ecology of the Tengu co-written by Paizo's own James Jacobs, new paladin powers, and an article on taking the 4E skill challenge mechanics onto the battlefield.

And that's still just scratching the surface! There's an article on paladin codes; Ed Greenwood talks about making memorable characters; Michael Kortes reveals the secrets of ancient tongues; Monte Cook looks at the classic war that wages in a GMs head between story and letting the dice lie where they roll; and Tim & Eileen Connors weave a mini-adventure, "The Amber Heart," for the Pathfinder RPG. And there's much, much more!

If you haven't picked up Kobold Quarterly in a while, you should do yourself a favor and check out this packed Gen Con issue! Now I'm off to add riffle scrolls into my Kingmaker campaign!

To help your gaming tables come to life, the artists over at Pathfinder Paper Minis have released two new sets!

We reckon that there are still thousands of players working their way through Rise of the Runelords, our first-ever Pathfinder Adventure Path, and Callous Jack is there with new minis for them. Pathfinder Paper Minis: Pathfinder Adventure Path #2 includes 43 key NPCs and monsters from "The Skinsaw Murders". You'll find the Skinsaw Man, Iesha Foxglove, Justice Ironbriar, the Scarecrow, Xanesha, thirteen skinsaw cultists, seven scarecrow ghouls, five carrionstorms, four goblin ghouls, four Sandpoint Watchmen, three faceless stalkers, a ghoul bat, and even a diseased rat!

Meanwhile, Ashton Sperry is increasing the number of mini monsters on your table with Monster Set 3—Ogres. You'll find ten unique ogre paper miniatures: four standard ogres, an ogre lieutenant, an ogre chieftain, an ogre degenerate, and three ogre "musicians" performing a skull jig!

Check out the whole line of Pathfinder Paper Minis and dig in to an inexpensive, fun way to bring your battlefields to life!

One of the best parts of Gen Con each year is the bounty of new products hitting the streets. Our friends over at Reaper joined in with eight new Pathfinder Miniatures to the hordes of hungry gamers.

Of course, the most anticipated miniatures were the iconics for the six new base classes from the Pathfinder RPG Advanced Player's Guide: Alain, Iconic Human Cavalier; Alahazra, Iconic Human Oracle; Balazar, Iconic Gnome Summoner; Damiel, Iconic Elf Alchemist; Imrijka, Iconic Half-Orc Inquisitor; and Feiya, Iconic Human Witch. These minis were flying out of our booth all weekend!

In addition to all the APG iconics, Reaper has now rereleased the last original Crocodile Games miniature, Hook Mountain Ogre #2. And fans of the Council of Thieves adventure "The Sixfold Trial" will be interested in the all-new Visbaronetess Delour Aulamaxa.

Reaper also showed off some upcoming miniatures at their Gen Con booth. Over the next few months, look for Almah, from "Howl of the Carrion King"; the Eagle Knight of Andoran; the Red Mantis Assassin; and my personal favorite, the Jabberwocky from the cover of the upcoming Bestiary 2. At the show, people who purchased $50 worth of product could take away a free mini of Varian Jeggare, one of the lead characters from our first Pathfinder Tales novel, Prince of Wolves. A few weeks from now, we'll have a small quantity of this mini available on paizo.com for those who couldn't make it to Gen Con this year.

We're really excited about the miniatures coming out from our partners at Reaper. During the convention, we had a great meeting with them, and we've got some really cool Pathfinder minis coming through the end of this year and into 2011!

Gen Con is over, and Paizo had a great show with the release of the Pathfinder RPG Advanced Player's Guide and Pathfinder Tales: Prince of Wolves. And one of the highlights of every Gen Con for us now is the start of a new season of Pathfinder Society organized play, and we've kicked off Season Two with four new adventures!

In Pathfinder Society Scenario #2-01: Before the Dawn—Part I: The Bloodcove Disguise, you are sent to Aspis Consortium-infested Bloodcove to gather supplies for a nearly doomed Pathfinder mission nearby. Disguised as ordinary merchants, you have little time to gather what you need and get out before the Consortium discovers and destroys you. The Bloodcove Disguise is the first scenario in the two-part Before the Dawn campaign arc.

The second scenario in the Before the Dawn campaign arc is Pathfinder Society Scenario #2-02: Before the Dawn—Part II: Rescue at Azlant Ridge. With supplies in hand, you rush from Bloodcove to the Pathfinder expedition site at Azlant Ridge only to find it under siege. You must brave the newly discovered halls beneath the ridge in order to find the key that might save everyone.

The third scenario released at Gen Con 2010 is Pathfinder Society Scenario #2-03: The Rebel's Ransom. The Ruby Prince of Osirion sends you to the Parched Dunes to find what became of a secret Pathfinder expedition sent there to recover artifacts for the Ruby Prince himself. What you find there may very well end the Pathfinder Society as you know it.

Finally, in Pathfinder Society Scenario #2-04: Shadows Fall on Absalom, one of the Pathfinder Society's most beloved venture-captains, Drandle Dreng, is nearly killed in a failed assassination attempt on the grounds of the Grand Lodge itself. Your mission to catch the assassin is complicated when you learn he is the son of an influential Pathfinder. Can you catch the assassin before his blade strikes again, while avoiding the outrage of your peers?

Even if you weren't able to attend Gen Con this year, you can play the scenarios that everyone enjoyed at the convention!

Erik and I have been toying with the idea of doing Pathfinder novels for quite some time. We first tested your appetite for Pathfinder campaign setting fiction with the Pathfinder Journal in each Pathfinder Adventure Path volume, and the response was very positive. Last year, we had friend of the company and novelist Dave Gross write the six-part Pathfinder Journal for the Council of Thieves Adventure Path, where Dave introduced half-elf Pathfinder Varian Jeggare and his devil-blooded bodyguard, Radovan, to the world. And now Dave's duo is starring in our first-ever Pathfinder Tales novel, Prince of Wolves.

For Varian Jeggare and Radovan, things are rarely as they seem, yet even they aren't prepared for what they find when a search for a missing Pathfinder takes them into the gothic and mist-shrouded mountains of Ustalav. Beset on all sides by noble intrigue, mysterious locals, and the deadly creatures of the night, Varian and Radovan must use both sword and spell to track the strange rumors to their source and uncover a secret of unimaginable proportions, aided in their quest by a pack of sinister werewolves and a mysterious mute priestess. But it’ll take more than merely solving the mystery to finish this job. For shadowy figures have taken note of the pair’s investigations, and the forces of darkness are set on making sure neither man gets out of Ustalav alive...

By the time you read this, our Gen Con booth will have been overrun by a flood of gamers anxious to get their hands on a physical copy of the Advanced Player's Guide for the Pathfinder RPG. The buzz for this book has been growing and growing over the past week or so as our subscribers have devoured their PDFs. We wanted to provide you with a huge host of options for your characters, so Jason and the team have possibly crammed more crunchy goodness into the Advanced Player's Guide than has ever been stuffed into a book of its size before. Not only do you get six new base classes that have been extensively playtested by more than 50,000 of your fellow gamers, but you get archetypes—a new idea to tweak classes from the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook to give them a new spin. This book raises a mountain of great ideas for characters and NPCs alike!

Explore new and uncharted depths of roleplaying with the Pathfinder RPG Advanced Player’s Guide! Empower your existing characters with expanded rules for all 11 Pathfinder Roleplaying Game core classes and seven core races, or build a new character from the ground up with one of six brand-new, 20-level base classes. Whether you’re designing your own monstrous helpers as an enigmatic summoner, brewing up trouble with a grimy urban alchemist, or simply teaching an old rogue a new trick, this book has everything you need to make your heroes more heroic.

The 336-page Pathfinder RPG Advanced Player’s Guide includes six new base classes: the monster-hunting inquisitor, the explosive alchemist, the noble cavalier, the prophecy-haunted oracle, the monster-crafting summoner, and the hex-weaving witch; more than a hundred innovative new feats and combat abilities for characters of all classes, including Steal, Point-Blank Master, and Bouncing Spell; variant class abilities, rules subsystems, and thematic archetypes for all 11 core classes, such as the antipaladin, the hungry ghost monk, and the urban ranger; hundreds of new spells and magic items, from phantasmal revenge to the Storm King’s Cloud Castle; a wealth of fantastic equipment, such as fireblast rods and fortune-tellers’ cards; new prestige classes like the Master Chymist and the Battle Herald; and a ton of other stuff that is sure to make your next game memorable!

So pick up your own print copy of what must be the hottest book at Gen Con Indy 2010, or buy the PDF for under ten bucks!

Players love to have their characters explore the various parts of the outer planes, and no plane is visited by adventures more than Hell. This domain of the various lawful evil devils is perfect for the crusading paladin, the ranger who counts outsiders among his favored enemies, or the wizard who is searching for some artifact. But the outer planes are hard to convey to players, since their laws are different from the plane where the characters live and their landmarks and architecture are gruesome and awe-inspiring. So leave it to GameMastery Map Pack: Hellscapes to set the mood so that your player's next trip to Hell becomes truly memorable!

GameMastery Map Pack: Hellscapes contains 18 full-color 5 x 8-inch map tiles, stunningly crafted by cartographer Corey Macourek, that combine to form a variety of nightmarish landscapes suitable for any diabolical RPG adventure. The locations include:

• Lake of Fire
• Ferryman’s Crossing
• Road of Skulls
• Flesh Bridge
• Ice-bound Souls

One of my favorite parts of our GameMastery Item Cards line is that each deck contains a bunch of items we've never done before. This month, the Serpent’s Skull Deck brings a host of new items that'll come in handy for folks playing in the new jungle-centric Serpent's Skull Pathfinder Adventure Path: Monkey Paw, Peg Leg, Parrot, Egg, Bolas, Machete, and a host of other cards that will bring life to any jungle adventure you may run!

Claim forgotten treasures and lost lore with this thrilling new assortment of 54 unique GameMastery Item Cards. From mysterious serpentfolk relics to the regalia of the Gorilla King and the trappings of tribal civilizations, the exotic items in this set add a delightful dimension to any Item Card collection and bring a great sense of immersion to any fantasy campaign!

GameMastery Item Cards allow heroes to keep track of their equipment in style, and the set is completely compatible with all of Paizo's other GameMastery Item Card sets. Each of these full-color cards features a beautiful portrait of an item on one side with space on the back to keep notes. GameMastery Item Cards are compatible with any fantasy roleplaying game.

If you're reading this blog, there's a high likelihood you enjoy writing. After all, most of us gamers read voraciously—whether it's novels, comics, or gaming supplements—and the desire to create and transcribe your own ideas is a natural outflow of that. From aspiring novelists to Game Masters writing up their campaign notes to players keeping detailed campaign journals on messageboards, gamers are an extremely literate group, and it only makes sense that any number of us could go on to become quality authors. Except for one thing.

Writing is hard. Like, really hard. And worse, it's intimidating—the more you read, the easier it is to feel like there's no way you could possibly match the masters on your bookshelf. So why even try?

With Before They Were Giants, my new anthology from Planet Stories, I've tried to combat that perception. In this book, I've collected the first-ever short stories from 15 of science fiction and fantasy's coolest and most influential authors (or influential on me, anyway), showing how folks like William Gibson, China Miéville, Larry Niven, and Piers Anthony all got their start, back when they were just fans themselves. In addition, all the stories come complete with new interviews from their authors, critiquing the stories, offering advice and anecdotes, and expounding on what they know now that they wish they'd known when they were first beginning to write. Many of these stories are so rare that they've never been reprinted, lost in back issues of out-of-print magazines. (China Miéville's first effort, for instance, was not "Looking For Jake," as all my internet research showed, but rather a story he'd published long before that, which not even the internet knew about. Such undiscovered gems are the sorts of things that make an editor's heart beat faster.)

In putting this anthology together, it's been my hope to satisfy the die-hard fans (who need every story by their favorite author), the casual reader (because hey, if they weren't my favorite authors, they wouldn't be in the book!), and particularly the aspiring writers, who can use the advice and encouragement of these groundbreaking authors to take their own first steps into greatness. But frankly, I think the best way to talk about this book is to let the contents speak for themselves. In alphabetical order, the stories are:

• Piers Anthony: "Possible to Rue"
• Greg Bear: "Destroyers"
• Ben Bova: "A Long Way Back"
• David Brin: "Just a Hint"
• Cory Doctorow: "Craphound"
• William Gibson: "Fragments of a Hologram Rose"
• Nicola Griffith: "Mirrors and Burnstone"
• Joe Haldeman: "Out of Phase"
• China Miéville: "Highway 61 Revisited"
• Larry Niven: "The Coldest Place"
• Kim Stanley Robinson: "In Pierson's Orchestra"
• Spider Robinson: "The Guy with the Eyes"
• R. A. Salvatore: "A Sparkle for Homer"
• Charles Stross: "The Boys"
• Michael Swanwick: "Ginungagap"

It's been 2 years in the making, but I couldn't be prouder. I hope you'll find the book as inspiring as I have.

James Sutter
Fiction Editor
Paizo Publishing