Second DarknessFriday, May 2, 2008
With Pathfinder #12, we'll have introduced our twelve core "iconic" characters, the heroes you'll see going up against the bad guys in all Pathinfder products. These iconics are basically meant to be stand-ins for your PCs, but once we hit our 11th one (Lini the gnome druid), we'd covered all of the core classes. Our 12th iconic will be our "iconic multiclass" character—a fighter/sorcerer (keep an eye for his debut on our blog in a few weeks), but after that, we didn't really want to dilute our iconics by coming up with new ones. Nor did we want to put the same characters on the cover over and over.
Instead, with Pathfinder #13, our cover characters are transitioning from PCs to NPCs. Just as Karzoug appeared on the alternate Gen Con cover to Pathfinder #1, going forward, we'll be putting important NPCs from the adventure on the cover. In some cases, this NPC will be that adventure's primary villain, but in others the NPC may end up being an important ally. Pictured here is the cover to Pathfinder #13, which unveils our first drow character as well—whether or not she's destined to be an ally or an enemy isn't something I'm going to spoil here. But, come on. She's a drow! And look at that crossbow! You can't get into the good-guy meetings with that kind of accessorizing going on!
James Jacobs
Pathfinder Editor-in-Chief