Get Ready to be Goblified

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Last year, while planning the class deck schedule, a most Gobtastic plan was concocted. In addition to supporting Organized Play using Ranzak, Ekkie, and our newest promo goblin Tup, we could create playable versions of all the main goblins from the We Be Goblins! RPG modules. To celebrate, we could also do a short Season of the Goblins (then called "We Be Card Goblins!") based on the first couple of adventures. Little did we realize that two of our coolest fans, Tyler Beck (cartmanbeck on the boards) and David Jacobson (aka Theryon Stormrune), would beat us to it. When we at Lone Shark Games saw their work, we knew there was absolutely no point to us redoing it for Season of the Goblins. But let's hear it directly from them!

David: Back before there was a DriveThruCards custom Card Creator and before there was a Skull & Shackles Base Set, I had wanted to take the We Be Goblins! module and turn it into a card game adventure. Unfortunately without the ability to create cards, my vision was limited on how to proceed. My thoughts turned to proxying cards but that wasn't practical on the required scale. Over a year passed and through the HawkCon meetings, I met Tyler Beck. Somehow the subject came up and I found a kindred spirit. Now, Tyler is a creative fiend. He loves to throw ideas onto "paper." I soon discovered that he had a lot more done with We Be Goblins! than I had. So I started working with him to polish and fit the work into the current structure of the game. And around that point, the Card Creator came online, allowing us to create some of the proxy cards we needed to bring the adventure to life.

Tyler: While David was designing his version of We Be Goblins! for Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, I unknowingly was working on a very similar idea. I had decided that PACG is fun, and goblins are fun, and so PACG plus goblins would be even more fun! By June 2015, I had started writing card text, and by the time July rolled around, I was finished with my first draft of the scenarios, as well as five goblin characters. I decided that I wanted to do something more with them than just play with my friends: I would go to PaizoCon and run the game there! I emailed Tanis and asked her if she'd be interested in writing up a special boon for those who play in my special goblin-themed games at PaizoCon, and she was tentatively excited about the idea. Once I ran into David at the HawkCon event, I knew I had the perfect person to get my crazy ideas boiled down into really clean card text, and we started working together on the cards. David's meticulous editing made a huge difference, and we quickly had a great set of scenarios all printed up, and we went into playtesting mode. We each ran the game for our friends, and everyone had a blast (especially those who played Mogmurch)! Eventually Tanis acquiesced to my idea of making the event a sanctioned game, and she ended up writing up an absolutely amazing special boon for those who would play in our game at PaizoCon. Unfortunately, I found that I would not be able to attend PaizoCon, and all would be lost... except that I had an excellent proxy!

Wait, not those proxies.

David: A couple months before PaizoCon 2016, Tyler asked me if I would run the We Be Goblins! event at PaizoCon. It was my first PaizoCon, but we had put in a lot of time into our work and I wanted to make sure it was a success. So I agreed. We'd have three sessions with two tables each session: one run by me, one by Tanis. I kept reading about it in the blogs leading up to PaizoCon. It made me nervous and excited. Tyler and I kept creating and refining our cards with the Card Creator, and then had two finished sets made. Then I got to Seattle and it was a big success. The players enjoyed the adventure and gave us great feedback. I changed a few things between sessions based on what people thought and how it played. I think that was one of the most important things about the journey of our work. So I made notes and headed back home. We had planned on creating a second adventure based on We Be Goblins Too!

Even got Gaby "goblified"!

But Paizo's Season of the Goblins had been announced, apparently making our work (and future work on the second adventure) moot. So Tyler and I started working immediately on our other ideas. Again, his creative madness had started and I was just trying to keep pace with the new adventure.

Tyler: Then we got tapped on the shoulder as Lone Shark was planning on adapting the We Be Goblins! module for the mini-season. They had seen our work and realized that it would be a great starting point. So we were asked if we'd be willing to contribute to the design of the Season of the Goblins! mini-season, and we were happy to take on the challenge. One major question was how to make it work with Pathfinder Society Adventure Card Guild play. We had designed these scenarios to be played with goblin characters, but for organized play, any legal character would need to be allowed. David came up with the idea that any non-goblin character may have been transformed into a goblin by the work of the dark deity Lamashtu, and we were off! We had designed these scenarios to be played with a mountain of custom cards, including custom goblin characters and decks, boons like allies Bruthazmus and Goblin Raider, and banes like the monster Shopkeep's Daughter and henchman Ven Vinder. PFSACG play would be problematic if every table needed so many custom cards, so we pared it down to only the most useful cards. Then we sent it over to Keith Richmond to do his magic.

David: And then it was time to head to Indianapolis for Gen Con. Again, I wondered how it was going to look and how it was going to play. Tyler and I hadn't seen a copy of the adventure yet. I had signed up to play sessions of Season of the Goblins! as well as volunteer in the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game section of the Sagamore ballroom. And just like at PaizoCon, it was a big hit. Paizo had wanted to limit the tables to 4 players, but every session had 5 to 6 players per table with three tables having been "goblified" as we called it. The changes that Keith had made were a perfect match to the original material and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. People had fun. The new characters from the Goblins Fight! and Goblins Burn! decks played well alongside other class deck characters.

But at least for me, nothing really matched the excitement of hearing that Mike Selinker liked our original work, and seeing our names at the top of the credits page. It makes all the work worth it: the hours reading and re-reading our adventure and card text, getting cards printed and reprinted, playtesting and fixing this card or that card.

Keith: I want to thank Tyler and David again for being great fans and playtesters, whose excitement and hard work led to a fun event at PaizoCon and made this season a breeze to develop. I like to think I've added a couple cool twists, like "Goblifying" the boxes by shuffling in the Goblins Fight! and Goblins Burn! cards if you have them, and rewarding access to the goblin promos, but the overwhelming bulk of the work is theirs. The first adventure of Season of the Goblins, We Be Goblins! is available now. We Be (Card) Goblins Too! will be available sometime in the next month. Enjoy the Gobbling!

Tyler Beck, David Jacobson, and Keith Richmond
Adventure Card Game Contributors and Adventure Card Game Designer

Illustrations by James Martin and Jeff Carlisle
War! Huh. Yeah, it's pretty good for us.

P.S.: Aside from all the Goblin happenings, September sees the release of the Warpriest Class Deck. To pique your interest, gaze upon some of the awesome art.