Pathfinder Battles Preview: The Dog Days of Winter

Friday, December 21, 2012

Kyra and Seoni face off against this week's featured foes!

We're less than a month from the formal release of the Shattered Star set of Pathfinder Battles prepainted miniatures! Here in the Paizo offices, things are very, very quiet, as it seems just about everyone but me remembered to take the day off to have a continuous holiday between Christmas and New Year's Day. Well, my mistake is your reward, as all this silence in the office during the "Winter Break" has given me more than enough time to whip up a brand new Pathfinder Battles Preview Blog!

And since it's been a while since I've been able to hit my regularly scheduled deadlines for these mini reveals (and since we're running out of time before you'll have the figures in your hands yourselves), I want to make today's reveal a doozy.

Four figures this week, five if you include the latest repaint reveal for Goblinworks' Pathfinder Online Kickstarter Campaign, but more on that later.

First up this week, we've got a couple of dogs. Not dogs in terms of bad miniatures, of course, but dogs in terms of canine critters for your Pathfinder RPG enjoyment. Now, I've been collecting prepainted plastic miniatures for years, and if there's one thing I feel like I've got a lot of, it's dogs and wolves and various canines of all types and sizes. I don't really need more dogs, so if we wanted to include them (for whatever reason) in Pathfinder Battles, I knew they needed to be really, really special. I think these two figures ably fit the bill.

First up we have the Shadow Hound, a nasty evil outsider who appears in Bestiary 3 under a slightly more specific name. I'm not sure if the photo does full justice to this guy. He's got a base coat of black with some gray highlights that really pull out a lot of details for such a dark miniature. Gray fingernails and bright red eyes sell the ferociousness of this clever canine, and at the common rarity you'll easily be able to assemble a pack of them to threaten your player characters.

Speaking of hounds, what RPG campaign would be complete without a pack of fire-breathing flame dogs from the pits of Hell? Our Hell Hound (also at the common rarity) is a truly remarkable figure, sculpted in clear plastic and painted in tones of red, orange, and yellow that combine with the clear to give a true burning appearance. I absolutely love this sculpt, which is a requirement when dealing with a figure many players already have in one form or the other. At almost as large (or maybe even a bit larger) than a human, this is one unforgettable puppy.

From the unforgettable to the never-made-before in prepainted miniature form, we turn to the Ravenous Ooze, an uncommon slimy gray pseudopod eager to digest your metal bits (including most of your treasure). I love throwing oozes at my players, but the game has relatively few appropriate for lower-level charcters. At CR 4, the Ravenous Ooze is perfect to teach PCs respect at a relatively young age. Players have been asking for this miniature since we announced the launch of Pathfinder Battles, and I am thrilled to finally deliver.

I may be mistaken, but I believe this skulking murderer has likewise never been produced in prepainted plastic. We call him the Pallid Path Cultist, and he and his brethren play an important role in the opening chapters of the Shattered Star Adventure Path. The grayish clear plastic of the Pallid Path Cultist perfectly suggests his chameleon skin ability, which allows him to blend easily into his surroundings. WizKids did a terrific job capturing the dynamic pose we first presented in Bestiary 2, and again miniatures collectors who have been looking for a guy like this for years have much reason to rejoice.

Lastly, I'd like to remind everyone that we've got a fun Pathfinder Battles miniatures component for the Pathfinder Online Kickstarter Campaign from our friends over at GoblinWorks, who are raising money for their upcoming Pathfinder-inspired MMO. Crowdforger backers will receive several special repaint figures as thanks for their support, including the Bloodbriar Goblin Raider, Lava Lurker, Shadowfire Elemental, and Mudlord! And since the campaign just passed $500,000, we've revealed the next figure to be unlocked, the Moon Spider!

Please drop by the Pathfinder Online Kickstarter Campaign project page and consider joining up! If the campaign hits its ambitious $1 Million goal, you'll receive NINE figures (and a whole bunch of other awesome stuff), and if they manage to exceed that goal, there are even cooler Pathfinder Battles rewards in store!

And that's it for this week. I wish you all a fantastic new year filled with gaming and miniature delights. Next week we'll show off even more amazing figures from the Shattered Star set, and a few weeks after that, you'll have them in your own hands!

(And then we'll start previewing images from the NEXT set, which looks INCREDIBLE!)

Erik Mona
Publisher

RPG Superstar Round 1 Voting Update

Friday, December 28, 2012

When we first discussed the idea of letting the fans vote on their favorite wondrous items, we didn't know what kind of participation we'd get. The response has significantly exceeded our expectations! These numbers, current as of the posting of this blog, show just how excited people are about this contest:

Total number of votes so far: 203,909
Number of votes cast in first hour: 3,762
Number of votes cast by top voter: 3,690
Number of people voting more than 100 times: 505

Your dedication has blown us away, so we'd like to return the favor by offering a little messageboard bling based on your participation. If you're one of the top participating RPG Superstar voters, you will earn a new title that will appear everywhere on the messageboards while voting is open,and display exclusively in the RPG Superstar forums once this year’s voting has ended. The tiers for RPG Superstar voting titles are:

100 votes: Star Voter
500 votes: Dedicated Voter
1,000 votes: Marathon Voter
5,000 votes: Champion Voter

Some fans have expressed concern that they're just sorting the bottom of the pile and not having any impact on the actual rankings of the items that have a chance of winning. At first it's fun to see items that aren't ready for superstar status, but after a while it's hard to keep voting when you see more bad items than good. We've got enough data now to begin culling the herd, so today we're going to drop the bottom 25 percent of items from the voting pool.

Thank you all for your help in this groundbreaking effort, and remember, the more data we get the better the results are, so vote early and vote often!

Gary Teter
Senior Software Developer

Paizo Publishing's 10th Anniversary Retrospective—Year 10 (2012)

Laying Groundwork for the Future

Thursday, December 27, 2012

This blog entry is the elventh in a series of blogs commemorating Paizo's 10th anniversary.
Click here to read the first installment.

As I sit down to write my last retrospective blog, I find myself in a bit of a quandry. This is about stuff that happened this year, sometimes mere weeks ago. It's not ancient history—it's what I'm living through right now! That makes writing it up as a restrospective a little weird. Instead of providing the perspective of hindsight, I'm hoping that this blog will give you some insight into why we did what we did this year, why we're doing the things we've already announced for next year, and perhaps a little strategic thought about where Paizo will go in the future. Plans could change radically as the future becomes the present, but at least you can see some of what I'm thinking about right now.

Our first big rulebook of the year was the Advanced Race Guide. This book came about due to requests for us to do something similar to the "Savage Species" book that Wizards of the Coast did for Third Edition. Now, I have to let you in on a little secret: Erik has this thing about not wanting to replicate books from D&D's past. When you're brainstorming new books to do, it's really easy to fall back on ideas like "our take on Deities & Demigods" or "our version of the Psionics Handbook." More than once, Erik has said in these brainstorm sessions, "If, at the end of the Pathfinder first edition run, I look back and see a bunch of reimaginings of books that TSR and WotC did in the past, then I'm going to be very disappointed in us." Erik is constantly pushing the staff to come up with innovative ideas, no matter how nostalgic we all are for past books.

So when it came to the Advanced Race Guide, we had a quandry. D&D has always had race books. It makes sense, because everybody has to play a race. But we wanted this to be a bit different. We decided that the first third of the book would have lots of cool stuff for the core races from the Core Rulebook—things that would make you look at each race in a new light. The second half of the book would provide you with playable classes for every zero-hit-die monster out of the first three Bestiaries—every single one. And the last section of the book would give you a rules system to create your own playable races out of pretty much any monster. With all of these things done, Advanced Race Guide turned into a book that I am very proud of, and that's more than just "our version of Savage Species."

For the summer hardcover, we wanted something super crunchy for Pathfinder Society players, so we came up with Ultimate Equipment. Packed from cover to cover with nearly every piece of equipment we'd printed to date, plus so much additional material that more than half of the book is brand new, there's literally something in here for everyone. We were even able to sneak in some of the best wondrous items from the previous four years of RPG Superstar. It's lavishly illustrated with artwork drawn from the decks upon decks of Item Cards we've released over the years; of course, there were quite a few pieces that haven't been in Item Card sets (yet), so there's plenty of new art too!

Vic Wertz channels his inner Karzoug
as he shows off
the Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Deluxe Edition at PaizoCon!


Wayne Reynolds examines the printer sample of the Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Deluxe Edition.

In the end-of-year spot where we've previously scheduled new bestiaries, we decided to try something different this year. Inspired by Gary Gygax's vintage Rogues Gallery product, we decided to come up with a big book of NPCs, which we dubbed the NPC Codex. Our goal was to help GMs who need NPCs on the fly, providing them with a character for every Core Rulebook class at all 20 levels. Add in prestige classes, NPC classes, and our iconic characters at multiple levels, and the result is a ton of very useful characters. This is a book that's going to get a lot of use at my table!

As this year was both the 10th anniversary of Paizo and the 5th anniversary of Pathfinder, we had to do something cool to commemorate it! Our first Pathfinder products ever—and still among our most popular—were the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path volumes, which were originally written for the 3.5 rules system. The original books from that 6-volume arc are either sold out or almost sold out, so reprinting the AP as a single collection—something we do not and will not regularly do—was a viable option. James Jacobs combed through pages upon pages of posts in the Rise of the Runelords forums on paizo.com, reaping the benefit of five years worth of our customers' actual play experiences, and he spent months updating and fine-tuning the book. Then he turned it over to me, and I spent two weeks doing a development pass of my own. Sarah Robinson and her art team made it look super sweet, and Wayne Reynolds provided an awesome new cover. The large hardcover has sold very well and received lots of critical acclaim. We celebrated the release at PaizoCon with all six of the Runelords authors present as guests of honor!

Of course, we couldn't just stop there! We've always wanted to do a superdeluxe game product and the Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition gave us the excuse to pull out all the stops and really make something special. If you haven't seen the video of Erik Mona unveiling the Deluxe Collector's Edition, you really need to check it out! Words do not adequately convey how cool this product ended up! (We had to make it a paizo.com exclusive because if it went through the usual distributor and retailer markups, the price would approach $1000!)

For our regular Adventure Paths in 2012, we did two very different things. James Jacobs keeps a long list of potential themes for upcoming Adventure Paths, and we delve into its depths a couple times per year as we discuss what to do next. This time, I really wanted to return to more of a sandbox AP, since Kingmaker had been so popular. After looking through the ideas in James' list, we figured that pirates looting ships, establishing a secret base, finding lost treasure and thwarting an invasion would be the perfect backdrop for a sandbox game, and thus was Skull & Shackles born.

The second AP was all James' idea. He'd been wanting to return to Varisia for a while, and the details of what would become Shattered Star had been percolating in his brain. With the release of the Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition, the time was right to write our first "sequel" adventure path. Shattered Star was written as if the events of the previous Varisia APs (Rise of the Runelords, Curse of the Crimson Throne, and Second Darkness) had already happened. Of course, you don't need to have played through those to play Shattered Star, but if you did, you'll find little easter eggs throughout the text.

The Pathfinder Companion line had a revamp this past year. When we launched the line a couple of years ago, we wanted to provide players with a regular supplement that would not only give them some insight into the world of Golarion, but also give them some crunchy rules stuff that they could use with their characters. Wes Schneider and James Sutter had taken ownership of the line, and they had some ideas on how to make it better for players. They began by going to our messageboards and asking what kinds of things you'd like to see in the Player Companion line—what you liked and what you didn't like—then they rolled it into a new format and pitched it to the admin team here at Paizo. The result arrived this year starting with Varisia: Birthplace of Legends. It seems to have been received as a change for the better, garnering many very positive comments on the new look!

For years, we've been contemplating Pathfinder card games and board games, and 2012 saw the beginning of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. In April, we were approached by an old friend of the company, Mike Selinker, with the genesis of the idea that would become the Pathfinder ACG. He had a mechanic that he had been working on with another company which he thought could bring the feel of Pathfinder to a card game format. You'd have a character, form an adventuring party, visit adventure sites, defeat monsters and villains, and find treasure. As you explore, you'd make changes to the deck of cards representing your character, and those adjustments would carry over to the next time you played the game, essentially "leveling up" your character.

Fans at PaizoCon get the first look at "Project Swallowtail", aka the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game!

We decided that we'd base the challenges in the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game around our Adventure Paths, starting with Rise of the Runelords. (We code-named the game "Project Swallowtail" after the goblin fight in the beginning of Rise of the Runelords.) The first release will be a big box of cards representing monsters, items, spells, weapons, and more, including adventure scenarios to play through "Burnt Offerings", the first chapter of Rise of the Runelords; we plan to release subsequent decks for the other five volumes of the AP in a series of bimonthly releases, allowing us to produce a full Adventure Path in card form every year! The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game is currently in playtesting, where more than 300 players are helping us make the game the best it can be. In the next few months, the game will be finished, and we hope to release it at Gen Con 2013.

I've personally been spending a lot of time working with Paizo's new sister company, Goblinworks, and the Pathfinder Online MMO. At the beginning of the year, it was pretty much just Ryan Dancey, myself, and a plan. As the year progressed, we've assembled an amazing team and started building Pathfinder Online. Instead of putting together another World of Warcraft "MMO theme park" clone, we're taking inspiration from the Kingmaker Adventure Path and are creating a sandbox in the River Kingdoms that will allow players to seek out fame and fortune, and maybe even one day, own part of the world! This scope allows us to make an MMO with a team and a budget that are much smaller than those used to make most MMOs. Pathfinder Online is a different animal—it's going to be driven by the players in a process we call crowdforging, which is modeled to some extent on the community-driven process we use to make new products at Paizo. The end result is going to be an MMO that I am confident will not only break new ground, but will provide players with a Pathfinder experience that will be one-of-a-kind!

Building Pathfinder Online won't take the tens of millions of dollars that most theme park MMOs require, but it is still a pricey venture. We launched a Kickstarter in May that helped us to build a technology demo—a proof of concept that tests internal systems and demonstrates to potential investors that you can do what you say you can do. Our Kickstarter was a huge success, raising over $300,000 in 30 days and allowing us to start hiring staff to make the game. In the course of three months, a staff of fewer than 10 people put together an entire dungeon level, built a section of wilderness, created a tower and catapults, and three of our iconic characters, Valeros, Seoni, and Merisiel. Oh, and goblins. Lots and lots of goblins. With the Technology Demo complete, we were able to ensure enough funding to make Pathfinder Online possible.

A by-product of this Kickstarter was a product called Thornkeep. It started off as a simple project, with veteran designer Rich Baker creating the town of Thornkeep, a chaotic hive of scum and villainy which is going to be one of the starter towns in Pathfinder Online. He also created a small dungeon beneath Thornkeep and populated the wilderness surrounding the town. The book would also include a behind-the-scenes look at the building of our Tech Demo. As the Kickstarter progressed, we added stretch goals that resulted in new dungeon levels beneath Rich's original one. By the end of the Kickstarter, Jason Bulmahn, James Jacobs, Erik Mona and Ed Greenwood were each supplying their own dungeon level for the book, which had swelled to a full 96 pages! We also created Flip-Mats for the latter four dungeon levels.

The funding that we received after completing the Tech Demo will ensure that Pathfinder Online is going to happen, but to create the game as big and as fast as we all really want to, we need to hire about three times as many employees as our current funding allows. Rather than seek out a venture capitalist that cares more about profit margins and having a short-term exit strategy than about creating an awesome game that people will play for years, we decided to enlist the support of our community, so that we can keep making the decisions that the community wants us to make. So we recently kicked off another Kickstarter effort, this time seeking the funding we need to make the game bigger, better, and faster! As I type this, the Kickstarter is reaching the halfway point in both time and money, which means that we're likely to get the capital we need!

In conjunction with this Kickstarter, we announced another Pathfinder RPG product similar to Thornkeep; this one is called the Emerald Spire Superdungeon, and it's going to be Paizo's biggest dungeon ever. We've enlisted top Paizo staff members as well as many of our famous designer friends to help out. As of right now, we have dungeon levels coming from Rich Baker, Wolfgang Baur, Wes Schneider, James Sutter, Keith Baker, Ed Greenwood, Erik Mona, Mark Rein•Hagen, Jason Bulmahn, Frank Mentzer, James Jacobs and myself! And if we surpass our funding goal—which is very possible, as Kickstarters usually have a big surge in the last few days—more and more dungeon levels from other amazing designers will be added. This baby could get crazy.

Of course, the Kickstarter rewards include some cool things for the Pathfinder Online game itself, including giving away a new in-game item every day. At the higher reward levels, you can own a tavern in the game, name a spell or magic item after your character, or even have your character drawn by Wayne Reynolds and turned into a prepainted plastic Pathfinder Battles miniature for a future set! And there are more and more things coming down the turnpike. By the time this Kickstarter is done, we'll be offering one of the sweetest deals in gaming history! And most importantly, it will help us to make sure Pathfinder Online is done right, with input from the most important people: you!

2012 has also been a banner year for Paizo's licensing efforts. Our friends at Reaper continued to release two or more new unpainted metal miniatures each month; we now have a very impressive array of over 160 different miniatures to choose from. And Reaper's extremely successful Kickstarter for their Bones line of unpainted plastic miniatures managed to add several miniatures from the Pathfinder line into the Bones line, which means that in 2013, there are going to be some very affordable Pathfinder minis coming in the Bones line!

In last month's retrospective, I talked about how our partnership with WizKids, to make Pathfinder Battles prepainted plastic miniatures, came about. Well, 2012 saw the release of the first two full sets of miniatures in the line. One thing that most people don't know is that WizKids was planning to enter the fantasy prepainted plastic miniatures market on their own when talks with us started. They had a number of miniatures in various stages of completion that we adopted—and in many cases, greatly modified—and that helped us get Heroes & Monsters out as quickly as we did. For the second set, based on Rise of the Runelords, we were able to work with WizKids from start to finish, creating one of the most breathtaking sets of prepainted plastic miniatures ever! Our third set of minis, based on the Shattered Star, is set to release in January, and there's a lot more on the way for 2013.

Our friends at Lone Wolf have been doing a great job making Hero Lab the go-to program for creating Pathfinder characters. They make a great effort to get new rules elements into the program at superhuman speeds. We've seen more and more of our customers using Hero Lab to make character creation a breeze, and their release of a Mac version this year was very welcome. We also saw two new Pathfinder dice sets from Q-workshop with the release of the Carrion Crown and Serpent's Skull sets. Our friends at Diamond Select Toys created the much-requested Pathfinder Goblin plush, which has been selling off the hooks since its introduction at Gen Con this year! Also at Gen Con, we announced a deal with Steve Jackson Games to create a Pathfinder version of Munchkin for release in 2013. Drawn by John Kovalic and designed by Steve Jackson himself, this promises to be a hilarious look at the Pathfinder game!

On the language translation front, we already have strong licensees for French (Black Book Editions), German (Ulisses Spiele) and Italian (Giochi Uniti). We also have a few other languages in the works, including Spanish and Portuguese, that will likely be announced in 2013. These translation partners around the world, coupled with the ceaseless work done by our international Pathfinder Society Venture Captains and Lieutenants, have helped Pathfinder find a strong international audience. Pathfinder is now a global brand, and we are looking forward to continuing our expansion!

The last big licensing news of 2012 was line of Pathfinder comics from Dynamite Comics. We'd always wanted to do comic books, but we needed a great partner. When Dynamite approached Erik with an offer to chronicle the adventures of our iconic heroes, it didn't take too long to say yes! The first issue was released at Gen Con with a convention-exclusive cover. Author Jim Zub really captures the essence of our iconics and is helping us to fill in their backstories. James Jacobs is writing small Golarion-specific background articles in each issue, giving these comics a shelf life beyond your first read-through. We're halfway through the first six-issue story arc, and they're already working on the story that will begin in issue 7. I can't wait to see where Jim and the team at Dynamite take these comics next!

Richard Pett, Nick Logue, Brandon Hodge, and Greg Vaughan hang out at PaizoCon.	Pathfinder comic artist Andrew Huerta was on hand at Gen Con to sign comics and do sketches for fans!	Will Chase shows off our new goblin plush!	Lisa Stevens signs the Pathfinder Munchkin deal with Steve Jackson Games at GenCon.

At the ENnie Awards, Paizo won 7 golds and 1 silver. The awards received were:

• Best Aid/Accessory: Silver Medal to GameMastery Chase Cards
• Best Art, Cover: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Beginner Box
• Best Cartography: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Jade Regent Poster Map Folio
• Best Free Product: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Module: We Be Goblins
• Best Production Values: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Beginner Box
• Best Miniatures Product: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Battles: Heroes and Monsters
• Product of the Year: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Roleplaying: Game Beginner Box
• Best Publisher: Gold Medal

At the end of the 2011 blog, I mentioned the impending announcement of 5th edition that had us wondering what Wizards had up their sleeve, and what it would mean for Paizo and Pathfinder. Wizards made their announcement in January, and released the first playtest materials in May. At Gen Con, Wizards announced that 2014 was a likely release date for their new edition.

So what does this mean for Paizo? We've decided to stay the course. Pathfinder is doing amazingly well, with our products selling better and better each year, and our licensing partners are helping us make it the top RPG worldwide. We have a lot more that we want to explore with Pathfinder and we know that we have devoted fans and customers like you that want to go exploring with us. Paizo is good at making tabletop RPG products and we aren't deviating from that. We wish Wizards well with their edition launch; we will be creating cool Pathfinder adventures, expanding our Pathfinder campaign setting, and exploring new Pathfinder RPG rules while they do that. We will keep making Pathfinder until you tell us to stop.

We have already announced two rulebooks for 2013 that have me excited. The first, Ultimate Campaign, is one that I have been pushing for for years. It's the book that gives you rules for everything you do OUTSIDE of the adventuring in your campaign. It will have a robust character background generation system, "downtime" rules that help you keep track of what your characters are doing between adventures, an expansion of the kingdom-building system from Kingmaker, and much, much more! This is a rulebook that I've wanted since I first started gaming in 1981, and I'm thrilled that I'm finally going to get it!

The other book that has me jazzed is Mythic Adventures. One of the earliest RPG products I had a hand in was The Primal Order, the very first book from Wizards of the Coast, which presented a model for divine influence in fantasy settings. Now Paizo's own Jason Bulmahn has crafted his own system for divinity-touched characters that I think is really elegant. You can have your high-level characters work their way towards godhood, or you can introduce the rules earlier in a campaign to simulate a mythic hero like Hercules. We've been playtesting this product for about a month now, and the feedback has been great! Wayne Reynolds' cover for the book just showed up in house, and it is epic—or rather, mythic!

We're also planning a big change in our Pathfinder Module line for 2013. Pathfinder Modules—then under the name GameMastery Modules—were among Paizo's first RPG products to come out after the announcement of the cancellation of the magazines. Crown of the Kobold King kicked them off and since then, 62 modules have been published. At 32 pages, these adventures were great for short campaigns, or to insert into adventure paths. But in recent years, they seemed to get lost in the shuffle, so we've decided to make these adventures into individual events, starting by making them larger and packaging them with a poster map. The first, The Dragon's Demand, is a 64-page module by Mike Shel, due out in May. Expect us to push the boundaries a bit with these modules and make each one of them something that everyone is looking forward to!

One more change that you will see in 2013 is the retirement of the GameMastery brand. GameMastery predates every other Paizo RPG product, appearing on our first non-D&D product, Dark Elf Sanctum. Since those early Compleat Encounters, the GameMastery brand has adorned Flip-Mats, Map Packs, Item Cards, the Combat Pad, and a host of other gaming accessories. But we've decided that we should really brand them with the #1 RPG brand in the world, Pathfinder, since most of our customers are going to use them with our game. The name Pathfinder has much more cachet with retailers, so this should help us get our accessories into more stores. In preparation for this change, we decided to buy all of the rights to the Combat Pad and the Flip-Mat brand, which were previously produced under license from our friends at Open Mind Games and Steel Sqwire respectively. New Pathfinder-branded versions of these products will be hitting stores in 2013.

There's another major effort that has seen a lot of work in 2012, but that most people won't see until 2013: Paizo Game Space. For years, I've wanted to provide you with a means to play games with each other through paizo.com. There are a number of great virtual tabletops (VTTs) out there, but most of them require you to run a program on your computer. We wanted you to be able to play through your browser, anywhere and anytime. Earlier this year, Gary Teter finally had the time to focus on Game Space, and we announced it at PaizoCon. Since then, his team has been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work to get it ready for launch. We had hoped to release it in the later part of 2012, but it wasn't ready, and I don't like to release products before they are ready, even if that makes them late. Gary and his team are currently doing small-scale testing with outside participants, and all indicators are that this will open up to everyone early in 2013. We have big plans for Game Space, but like most things in the future, it will take time for those plans to be revealed. We are going to launch with a simple VTT and iteratively work on it in conjunction with you, our fans, to give you more options and a better and better experience over time. Just as the paizo.com website has evolved over time, Game Space will do the same. I can't wait to fire up my first game on it, or use it with a big monitor in my home game.

Sara Marie and Mikey Teter, with his official Paizo golem onesie!


The newest Paizo family member, Morgan Nicole Kenway!

I have mentioned in the past that Paizo is a lot like an extended family. We had our first intracompany marriage a few years back when Gary Teter married Sara Marie Rip. Earlier this year, they had what I like to think of as the first Paizo baby. Former employees Lisa Chido, Stacey Fiorito, Theresa Cummins, Josh Frost, and James Davis all had babies while they were employed at Paizo, but Mikey Teter is the first child of two Paizo parents. We all take great pride in Mikey. We also had our second intracompany marriage this year; longtime partners Crystal Frasier and Lissa Guillet were among the first in the state to be married after Washington voted to allow same-sex couples to wed. And Paizo's extended family grew by one just a few days ago when warehouse worker Mike Kenway and his wife brought Morgan Nicole Kenway into the world. We look forward to meeting her!

One other very cool thing happened at the end of 2012 that for me encompasses the adventure we have been on here at Paizo. In 2004, I had to lay off a number of employees to save a struggling Paizo, and one of the casualties was Jenny Bendel, our Director of Marketing. Jenny wasn't let go because of performance; she was amazing, but Paizo didn't have any money to spend on marketing. And if we didn't have money for marketing, we didn't have money for a Director of Marketing. So I had to lay Jenny off in a tearful meeting. She went on to do amazing things for computer game companies. We reconnected last year on Facebook, and when I saw that she was looking for a job earlier this year, I saw a way to correct an ancient wrong. I am really happy to say that Jenny rejoined Paizo a few months ago, and is already making a huge difference in our company. It gives me great pride that a friend whom I had to lay off can work with me again in a company that is growing and thriving. In many ways, the story of Jenny Bendel is the story of the old Paizo and the new Paizo. And that is very, very cool.

So where will Paizo go as we look into the next 10 years of our existence? We have a lot of cool things to do with Pathfinder, and I'm excited to see them come to fruition. There will be more licenses with companies that will allow us to expand the Pathfinder brand into different media—some are already in the works! I expect Pathfinder Society to grow even larger and better, becoming one of the main ways that Pathfinder fans can find and play with each other. Initiatives like Paizo Game Space will launch and continually improve, providing players with a new way to connect with their fellow gamers and play the game they love. And I expect that there will be more weddings and more babies. There will be triumphs and defeats. There will be life. And we will be living it together, with a sense of adventure and determination. I hope you will be there to live it with us. Here's to another ten years! I look forward to telling you the tales in 2022 as I write the blogs for Paizo's 20th anniversary. Thank you for indulging me in this trip down memory lane, and most of all, thanks for supporting Paizo and allowing us to do what we do!

Employees who started in 2012 (in order of hiring date):
Adam Daigle, Developer
Kevin Underwood, Warehouse Personnel
Matt Renton, Warehouse Personnel
Adam Lovell, Sales Representative
Jessica Price, Project Manager
Logan Bonner, Developer
Sonja Morris, Graphic Designer
Jenny Bendel, Marketing Director

Employees who left in 2012 (in order of their end date):
Dylan Green
Adam Lovell

Lisa Stevens
CEO

From Freelancer to Family

I first found my way to Paizo, like many of you, through Dragon and Dungeon magazines. I was just buying them off the rack, and after a while I figured it was time to get a subscription, so I headed over to the website and set that up. Shortly after I renewed for the next year, I heard the dreaded news that the magazines were going away. It was a particularly painful thing to read considering that very day I was ready to send in my very first pitch for an article.

Well, there went that idea—time to look elsewhere to pitch and keep trying to break into the freelance gig. I knew that being an unknown in this competitive world of freelance game writing there wasn't a place for me in Paizo's new endeavors, but maybe if I reached out to other game companies and built up a list of credits, hopefully good credits, I could get my chance. I transferred my leftover subscription credit to check out Pathfinder, knowing it would be great stuff. If I liked what that group was doing with Dungeons & Dragons, just imagine what cool things would come from having the freedom to do whatever they wanted!

Adam Daigle arrives at Paizo in style!

I knew some of the freelancers that Paizo used for Dragon and Dungeon, made friends with them online, and ended up getting invited into the WereCabbages, a guild of freelance writers and game designers. From connections within the group—which I learned a ton from—I got my first paid gig. After that, I kept working, never going more than a week or two without an assignment. It wasn't too long after that that Liz Courts reached out to a few of us with a task Wes asked her if we could help with. The task was to reformat all the spells and magic items from the SRD to the new format that was going to be used for Pathfinder Beta. I jumped at the chance, did my part of the work, and turned my section in well before deadline. Wes's response was, "You're a rockstar! What can I get you working on now?" I was elated. I let him know that I liked monsters and worldbuilding, and from that point on I was almost constantly writing for Paizo and for Pathfinder.

A little later down the line, I saw that Paizo was hiring, so I sent my resume. I didn't get the job then—the opening was filled by the ever-awesome Rob McCreary—but I was touched that Wes called me at home to let me know that they were going with Rob. That meant a lot. Despite being bummed that I didn't get the gig, it reaffirmed the awesomeness of the company, and of Wes. So, I kept writing, kept going to conventions and hanging out with the crew, and kept my eye on one day sitting here writing a blog about how I got started working for Paizo. (Whoa, that got a little meta.)

There was one other time that Wes called me to see if I was interested in a job, but the timing wasn't right to uproot myself from Texas and move halfway across the country. I hated to say no, but it was the right decision at the time. However, as time went on, I realized I should have taken the job. My day job, while it paid well, didn't really have much of a chance of giving me what I needed other than a big paycheck. I'd go to work, set up networks, cable offices, then come home and write all night before sleeping for a few hours and doing it all over again. So, when a little less than a year ago, Wes called me asking if now was a good time, I had no other response than, "Yeah. Now is a good time." I spent a few weeks tying up loose ends and packing my life into a truck before driving across the country to my new apartment (that I had never seen).

It was great getting here and having Wes, Sutter, Patrick, and Mark slip out of work to help me and my wife unload the moving truck. That showed great character for the company and the people I had regarded as friends even before working here.

The best thing about being part of the staff (instead of just a contributing freelancer) is that I already felt like part of the family. When I got here, other people kept asking me things assuming I had been here for much longer than I actually had. I was getting questions like, "This isn't your first PaizoCon with us, is it?" or "Were you at the last company party?" So it was good to know that the fact that I was finally here felt as normal to the rest of the crew as it did for me.

Adam Daigle
Developer

From Playing to Making Pathfinder

RPGs are something I should have gotten into early: throw collective storytelling, world-building, social gaming, miniatures and systems for doing all this into a beaker together and stir, and you've tailor-made a drug guaranteed to hook me immediately.

But for some reason, I didn't try it for most of my life. It wasn't until I moved out to Seattle and was working in the game industry that my boyfriend floated the idea of his returning to the Pathfinder campaign that our friends Lisa and Vic hosted, and he mentioned that they'd invited me, too. Flattered that this group of industry veterans was willing to let a newbie join them, I said yes.

My first act in the game was to offer to pay off a bunch of thugs who attacked us in an alley so we wouldn't have to fight them. A few of my fellow players were horrified ("Do you understand how much gold that is?" one of them asked incredulously. "You just paid for their retirement, a new wardrobe for each of their wives, their children's college educations"). Four years later, I like to think I've gotten a bit more savvy, but I'm still learning from them.

Meanwhile, however, I fell in love with Golarion. I also came to admire Paizo, a company, I felt, that was doing it right: forming a mutually beneficial and respectful relationship with their player base, building a well-thought-out game world, treating their employees well, portraying a diverse and balanced slate of characters, and having fun doing it.

There came a point when I was ready to leave Microsoft and Paizo needed a project manager, so I came on board. During my first few days here, as I geeked out over favorite books and movies with my new coworkers, I felt like I'd come home. I'm now GMing my own Pathfinder game, and playing in a campaign with another first-time GM, and am grateful on a near-daily basis that my coworkers are kind enough to answer my questions and help me pretend I know what I'm doing. The most uneventful day here is still better than the best days at most of my other jobs. It's amazing how the most Sisyphean task seems possible when you're surrounded by brilliantly talented and genuinely good people. I'm thrilled to be in a position to contribute to my favorite RPG, and can't wait to see what we do with the next ten years.

Jessica Price
Project Manager

Thieves Vinegar

by Kevin Andrew Murphy

Chapter Four: The Hall of Whispers

You might think that watching cultists devour a corpse would be the most horrible sight one could witness.

You'd be wrong.

The most horrible sight is watching those cultists throwing the corpse back up while a vampire vomits. This latter is particularly bad when you remember who the priestess seated me opposite. If I ever hear a bard say the words "bathed in blood" again, I swear I'll kick him.

I wanted to kick my brother, but he'd saved us. While the cultists dealt with their unexpected illness, he'd located a secret side door and unlocked it with a mithral chime, then bustled us through. When the door was safely latched behind us again, he began to explain about harmonics and sympathetic vibrations, but I really didn't care. I was covered with the blood of Zharmides the Godless while Norret didn't have a speck on him. He'd been standing safely out of range, painting the portrait.

Norret was actually quite pleased with how it had turned out, and I had to admit that it was well done, assuming one likes portraits of cultists slicing up dead naked wizards. I was in the back, holding the unicorn horn spoon in one hand and the vampire's lavalier in the other. Rhodel was there as well, holding Zharmides' damned snuffbox with the lions and lilies, like a treasure chest for a pixie pirate queen.

Norret was happy that he'd found such a good use for the canvas, while I was upset because Urgathoa's pepper mill was still amethyst even though Rhodel wasn't touching it.

"Hmm, interesting." Norret took it, holding it by the chain as it went white. He touched it with his bare fingers, watching it change to rose quartz.

He handed it back. While it was pink for a moment, it swiftly purpled. "But I'm not undead!"

"Probably another false positive," Norret speculated. "It may test for some other property. Perhaps Urgathoa's approval."

I was about to protest that I didn't know why Urgathoa, goddess of sickness and escaping your grave, might approve of me, but I bit my tongue. Plus I'd just had a vampire get sick all over me. "What was in that vial?"

"Syrup of ipecac," Norret replied, "a powerful emetic. It's made from the root of the ipecacuanha plant. Didn't I tell you?"

He hadn't, nor had he told me we'd be traveling through Korvosa's sewers.

He was still holding the map he'd purchased before, tracing imaginary lines on it as we made turn after turn through the stinking—but admittedly rather spacious—tunnels beneath the streets. I didn't like to think about why folks would need to build them so large.

Norret was mumbling to himself, counting his paces. Each time I started to breach the silence, he waved my questions away, lest I interrupt his rapidly expanding total. At last he said, "If we went left there, then we should be under it right about..."

We turned a corner, and found a wall with an unmarked iron door set into it.

"Perfect!" Norret said. He opened his box labeled Hessim, Newby, & Sage Paint Manufactory's Complete Pigment Panoply. He selected the smallest pot of paint—already half empty—took a nip of some elixir, and set to painting an intricate key on a page of his formulary. He blew on it to dry, then held up the book and shook it.

A complicated iron key fell into his hand.

Norret corked the tiny sample pot, cleaned the brush, and put away the set.

The key fit the lock like it was made for it.

Nella is a tricky one, that's for sure.

An iron staircase wound upward. Occasionally passageways branched off. Terrible screams and moans echoed from those halls. We passed a silver mirror, and in it I glimpsed Rhodel talking with two men dressed as guards. No one stood on the stairs.

At last we came to another door with a keyhole. Norret inserted the iron key. It turned.

It opened out into a library—an unusually round one—with the door a hidden panel disguised as a shelf of books. A moment later I realized that all the books were false. They were made out of bronze, the same as the busts of the dead wizards and the statues of the past headmasters of the Acadamae. The floor was black marble inlaid with silver circles and arcane diagrams, and the dome above was painted midnight blue and spangled with stars. In the middle hung a great glass lantern painted to look like the moon, but from this angle, it looked more like a skull.

"It's the columbarium," I breathed. "The Hall of Whispers...."

As I said the words, they were repeated, ghostly echoes whispering around the room.

"Oh!" exclaimed Norret. "A whispering gallery! I've read about these! Some interesting acoustical properties here...."

His words echoed around the room as well, hissing and whispering as they passed the bronze books and the effigies of wizards past. Then they were followed by other words, repeated whispers not spoken by my brother: "Ya thievin' packrats! Give back what ya stole!"

There, before an alcove with his bust, stood Zharmides the Godless–completely transparent. But this time, thankfully, with his clothes.

Something was wrong, subtly wrong, but I couldn't quite say what.

"Give it back!" he wailed. "Give back my iv'ry chest or I'll curse ya ta–"

Suddenly the scent of ectoplasm and roses manifested as another ghost appeared—one I knew—and I realized what was wrong. Zharmides looked like a ghost, but didn't smell like one. Ever since I'd died and come back, I'd had the ability to sense ghosts by smell. And this one didn't smell at all.

Rhodel stared eye to eye with her fellow ghost. "Boo!" she said as she reached up and flicked his hat.

Zharmides' bowler raised in the air, hissing, while lines of blood appeared, trickling down his face. His hat flew atop his bronze bust and turned into a pug-nosed orange tabby. "Marcat! No!" the dead wizard cried in a feminine voice.

Rhodel disappeared, smirking.

The ghost of Zharmides the Godless turned toward us.

"My mistake." Nella Cailean's illusion melted. "Never pick drama over believability. I should have just impersonated Headmaster Ornelos." She shrugged. "Anyway, I still want the little ivory chest." She held out her hand.

"Why?" I almost screamed. "Are all wizards mad? What's so important about a snuffbox?"

"Sivanah only knows!" she laughed. "But all the older instructors have them, so I intend to find out."

"And how'd you know we'd be here?"

"My main field of study is illusion, but I dabble in divination as well. I spy with my little scry..." She produced a sheet of paper and grinned at Norret. "I still haven't figured out your claw spell, but a page from an alchemist's formulary and a handwriting sample? Can't ask for better sympathy than that."

"I thought I felt someone was watching me," said Norret.

"And a whole lot more will be if you don't give me Zharmides' snuffbox." She paused. "And the vault key. I only reserved the columbarium for an hour, and you must have alerted half the spectral spies."

A knock sounded at a door on the other side of the chamber.

"Reserved!" Nella cried. "Summoning!"

"Acadamae security!"

Nella looked at Norret. "Give me the goods, and I'll get you out. Refuse, and you deal with the guards."

"So will you."

"I'm a student. I'm used to it. You?" She cocked her head. "Did you hear the screams in the halls below?"

"Fine," he agreed. "Just be quick." He placed the key and the snuffbox in her hand.

They disappeared up her sleeve. "Understood." Nella wove her hands in the air, muttering arcane syllables. My brother's appearance melted, reforming into the image of Arlunia Ehrmande, Lecturer in Charms.

The door opened and three hellspawn entered the chamber.

"You fools!" Nella screamed. "I summoned a drekavac, and now it's out of its circle!" She pointed at me.

"What's a drekavac?" the first hellspawn asked.

The second stared at me in horror. "You summoned a plague spirit?" He turned to Nella. "Are you insane?"

The third remarked, "Don't drekavacs have animal heads?"

"It's a greater drekavac!" Nella improvised. "A bloody drekavac! A child who died of the plague!"

So far as I knew, I'd only died of a fever, but Nella's lies were uncomfortably close to the truth. I was also acutely aware that I was still drenched in the blood of Zharmides the Godless.

"Professor Ehrmande, do you think you can hold it?" Nella asked breathily.

"I think so," said Norret in his normal, masculine voice.

The hellspawn stared at him. "Does she have the plague?"

Norret coughed.

"Save yourselves!" cried Nella.

The hellspawn ran out the door.

Nella produced a wand. "Hold hands and run for the Acadamae gates. This won't last long." She touched me with the wand and said a single word: "Fernseed." Then she touched Norret. "Fernseed," she pronounced again and he vanished.

We were invisible. We ran for the open door and out into the Hall of Whispers. We found the main entrance by following the cries of "Drekavac! Drekavac! Run!"

We were out on the lawn, out the front gates, and halfway down a side street before the spell wore off. The illusion of Arlunia Ehrmande lasted a little longer, but was gone by the time we found a bridge to cross the Narrows of Saint Alika.

By the time we got to the Old Quay, I was staggering. Norret covered me with his cloak, and I finally slept.

∗∗∗

Teleportation is an awful way to wake up, but it was followed by the realization that we were back in Galt, in the Primrose Suite.

Sweet Galt. How I'd missed her.

"Blue Liberty!" Dr. Orontius swore. "What happened, Orlin? You look like you were in the front row at a particularly spectacular beheading!"

I wanted to say, "No, a vampire got sick on me," then found that I already had. Before I hardly knew what I was doing, the whole story came out. Norret even had pictures, including his painting of the cult's feast just before they all threw up.

Dr. Orontius worked a small spell, making all the blood that covered me vanish, then Norret told the rest of the tale, including how he'd lost the snuffbox.

"'Nella Cailean,' you say?" asked Dr. Orontius. "Saucy little minx. Well, two can play at the scrying game...."

"Unless there's lead in the way."

"Well, yes," admitted Dr. Orontius, "but it's not that common."

"White lead is also the primary ingredient in flake white, which I used to gesso my canvas." Norret opened his case of pigments, revealing a full jar of white paint. "I used to be a soldier, so I'm familiar with the feeling of being scried on." Norret reached into the jar and removed a tiny chest. "I assumed you could clean this off."

"Splendid!" cried Dr. Orontius. "You painted the snuffbox in the portrait twice, once with mundane pigments, once with the marvelous ones?"

"Yes," said Norret.

Dr. Orontius chuckled heartily. "Knowing what I do, Nella should be heartily surprised when she discovers that her prize is a fake!" He repeated the blood-removing charm, but this time it stripped paint, leaving a pretty little ivory snuffbox, complete with gilded scrimshaw lions and lilies.

He opened the tiny chest, bringing it to his nose and sniffing. "Ah yes, dear Zharmides always favored Peshpetal Blend." He snapped it shut and held it to his heart. "I will cherish this memento and think of him always."

"You could cherish that and think of him too." I pointed to the portrait of the cultists devouring Zharmides' corpse.

Dr. Orontius looked uncomfortable. "Yes, well, perhaps I might use that to retrieve some fragment of his body."

"So what's the snuffbox for?"

"Clever boy." He pinched my cheek. "Perhaps one day, if you are clever enough, you might attend the Acadamae and learn that secret." He patted me on the head for good measure. "But presently, you must work. Breakfast won't fix itself!"

There is something wrong with a world where ghouls and vampires are more polite and grateful than a houseful of scholars. I went out to the garden, let out the chickens that had been cooped up all day, and took in a double helping of eggs.

The post-execution day omelets were late the next morning, but they were seasoned with thileu bark. I declared them "Omelets Korvosa." If I didn't need to tell the boarders about unicorn bone porridge, I didn't need to tell them about Urgathoa's pepper mill either.

I was beginning to fix lunch when the bell for the Primrose Suite began jangling. Dr. Orontius had some nerve. But when the wire pulled the spring out of the wall and slammed the bell into the ceiling, I realized something was seriously wrong.

"Rhodel, get Norret!" I raced for the Primrose Suite.

Norret was already there, staring at the door, his monocle pushed up on his forehead. A horrible banging and cursing came from the suite, mixed with the screeching of an owl. Norret was half-shaven, holding a mug and shaving brush.

He pushed the monocle back in place, spat in his shaving mug, and painted the doorframe with the resulting lather.

Norret pushed me down on the floor. The lather sizzled and exploded, the entire door and doorframe falling out into the hall. Plaster dust swirled through the air like smoke.

Through the new arch into the Primrose Suite, I saw Dr. Orontius being beaten over the head with a gold-topped cane by Zharmides the Godless. Meanwhile, a green winged monkey-gremlin-thing attempted to garrote our boarder with the bell pull while an owl clawed at it.

Norret still had his pomander orbiting his head. He hurled it at the gremlin, angling the opening just so. The thing screeched, blinded by thieves vinegar. It looked like a beribboned, clove-studded orange-peel hat had been pulled down over its eyes.

"Get the homunculus," Norret said. "I'll get the wizard."

I wasn't certain how I was supposed capture a flying manikin, but then I spotted a bell jar on the mantel. It was covering a clock the same size as the homunculus.

I used my spirit's hand to tweak its nose. The homunculus flew up as I caught it in the jar, clapping the open end down to the surface of Dr. Orontius's traveler's trunk. The thing raged against the glass, but it was too heavy for it to lift.

With a terrific thundering that rattled the windows and knocked all the pictures askew, Zharmides the Godless blew up—fortunately into flecks of shaving cream and shadows rather than blood and gore like the last time he'd been ripped apart. A torn scrap of parchment fluttered down, and Dr. Orontius's owl familiar caught it. He dropped it in my hands before taking his customary perch atop the bust of Nethys and looking at me expectantly.

I examined the parchment. It was half of a magical figure—half a circle, half a square, and the upper half of Zharmides the Godless, holding his cane in one hand, his arms shown in two positions, like an architectural diagram for a jumping jack. More sympathetic magic.

I turned. The lower half of the symbol was pasted inside the open lid of another large chest, an ivory one. But it was still possible to see that this one was scrimshawed with lions and lilies and filled with books.

"Thank you," Dr. Orontius wheezed, loosening the bell pull from his throat. "Your assistance is appreciated but was not strictly–"

"It's Zharmides' trunk," I said. "The real one. The little snuffbox is just a focus, isn't it?"

Dr. Orontius harrumphed, but he couldn't hide the guilty expression. "How was I to know—"

I cut him off. "You use the paintings when you teleport somewhere. By the same principles, you use your snuffbox to teleport your traveler's trunk to you later when you want it. Why go back to your library when you can have your library brought to you? Zharmides knew the same trick, but to get his books, you needed his snuffbox. Which would have all worked out fine, except he left his homunculus inside the larger chest along with a trap."

"A symbol," Dr. Orontius said, feeling the lumps on his head. "I'm not certain which one...."

I handed Dr. Orontius the upper half of the torn piece of paper.

Norret beamed like a proud parent. But he was actually just my brother, and someone had to have a head for business. "I don't know what deal you had with Norret," I said, "but I'll be making up a bill."

I stepped out over the rubble, adding, "There will be no further room service."

Coming Next Week: A sample chapter from Richard Lee Byers' new Pathfinder Tales novel Called to Darkness, starring the Kellid warrior Kagur and her quest for vengeance against the frost giant that killed her family!

Kevin Andrew Murphy is the author of numerous stories, poems, and novels, as well as a writer for Wild Cards, George R. R. Martin's shared-world anthology line. His previous Pathfinder Tales stories include "The Secret of the Rose and Glove" and "The Perfumer's Apprentice" (also starring Norret and Orlin), and "The Fifth River Freedom," the fourth chapter of Prodigal Sons in the Kingmaker Pathfinder's Journal. For more information, visit his website.

Illustration by Carmen Cianelli

Goblins Burn, Goblins Fight, Goblins Wish You Happy Holiday Night!

Monday, December 24, 2012

One of my favorite things about the Paizo community is seeing the creativity of our fans. This year we are particularly lucky because two of our fans sent in holiday gifts that they had made themselves.

Becky Barnes (Corvidimus) made this little dude with a variety of natural woods (no stains) to get the different colors (red=padouk, yellow=yellowheart, green=poplar, teeth=aspen, white=maple, pink=lyptas).

From Becky: "We have such a fun time with Pathfinder, we wanted to give a token of appreciation." You may recognize Becky's name from her amazing Goblin pumpkin, which we featured on the blog a couple months ago.

Seeing this package with such an amazing piece of art was a very nice little surprise, and I certainly didn't expect to get another package a few weeks later from another Pathfinder fan filled with more goblin ornaments! This time adorable little crocheted goblins from Amanda Mickelson.

Plastic skull ring gives this cuddly little goblin some fancy bling.	Along with the goblins, Amanda also sent a fuzzy wuzzy Old One.	And she even made something especially for Developer Adam Daigle!

Amanda has graciously provided a PDF of the pattern as well as a little bit of backstory she wrote to complement the goblin ornaments.

Download the PDF - (1.3 MB zip/PDF)

Of course, I wasn't surprised to see such fantastic work from Amanda. Back in July at PaizoCon 2012, she showed up with an adorable little goblin for Wayne Reynolds, which, upon seeing, Paizo Art Director Sarah Robinson knew she needed to acquire more of for a special little someone.

Sarah's niece shows off her new friends.

Photo courtesy of Wayne Reynolds and his goblin Toofpaste.

The Pathfinder community (that's all you fine folks reading this!) continues to astonish me. You all are some of the nicest, most wonderful customers, fans and friends a company could ever hope for. In recognition of your awesomeness, we'd like to give you something special for the holidays and that's why right now, on the Store Blog you can find a special Holiday Discount code to use with one paizo.com order along with some great goblin holiday art from Tyler Walpole.

Happy Holidays!

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

Paizo Tours the USS Nimitz

Sunday, December 23, 2012

A few weeks ago I gave Pathfinder fan and friend of many of us here at Paizo, Paris Crenshaw, a tour of our office. Last Saturday, Commander Crenshaw returned the favor by giving a bunch of Paizonians a tour of his workplace, the USS Nimitz!

The weather was quite frightful—pouring rain and freezing winds—but inside the supercarrier was delightful. Paris gave us an amazing tour, assisted by Lieutenant Commander Lucas Jung, RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32.

Approaching the USS Nimitz on the pier at the Naval Station in Everett, WA.

We paused for a group photo up in the flag mess where the Admiral's staff dines.

We stopped by the Admiral's office where the décor included a table whose surface was covered in challenge coins.

The fact that Pathfinder Society Challenge Coins would be totally awesome was not lost on any of us.

How can you knot be impressed by this fancy rope-work!

Winding our way through the ship we got to see the nerve center where the fleet is monitored from, the tactics center, and some other fancy control rooms. The banks of computers, switches, radar screens, and buttons made a truly impressive sight to behold, but sadly, no pictures allowed.

It was a good thing Paris and Lucas were there to show us around, as the interior is easy to get lost in.

Looking down the length of the ship.

Scuttle holes allow for emergency access in case regular exits are blocked.

Possibly the most exciting part of the tour was getting to go up to the pilot house, the bridge, and the air traffic control room at the very top of the ship’s tower. While we couldn’t sit in the Admiral’s chair on the bridge, we did get the opportunity to sit in the Air Boss’s chair and see what he sees from his perch in the air traffic control room.

Sutter feels the need, the need for speed.

Myself and my son Mikey by the USS Nimitz bell.

Everyone had a wonderful time and we are incredibly grateful to Paris and Lucas for showing us around. It was quite an amazing experience! (And of course, we left a nice big box of rulebooks for the crew to enjoy in their library after we left).

Sara Marie
Customer Carebear

Blood of the Night: Sate Your Hunger, Part 2

Saturday, December 22, 2012

This past Thursday we gave you a glimpse into the brand-new Pathfinder Player Companion: Blood of the Nightand offered up some pointers on playing your favorite bloodsucker. Now it's time for dhampirs and the dauntless vampire hunters.

So You're Playing a Dhampir...

Half-breed vampires, the dhampir first appeared in Bestiary 2 and were further embraced in the Advanced Race Guide (page 96, which begins 6 pages of new traits, archetypes, magic items, and more). Blood of the Night expands on those options, bringing these tainted souls fully into the Pathfinder campaign setting. If your GM is allowing dhampirs in her game, its time to decide if playing one of these accursed souls is right for you.

Illustrations by Diana Martinez

1. Begin with the Basics: Start on the inside front cover to get a run down on what it means to be a dhampir. All of the racial benefits and abilities of this mysterious breed appear right up front. Check these out and see if it seems like a dhampir character is right for you.
2. Know Your Ancestors: Dhampirs aren't their own full-fledged race, they're half-breeds. Just as elven culture impacts half-elves and orc society shapes half-orcs, dhampir characters stand to be shaped by their parentage just as much as any of these other races. With that in mind, players with dhampir characters should check out the overview of the vampiric bloodlines of the Inner Sea on the inside cover, and there more detailed write-ups on pages 6 to 12. This might also be a good time to decide your general feelings about full-blooded vampires, as dhampirs have a reputation for being among the greatest vampire hunters.
3. Know Yourself: The details of life as a vampire, secrets of this rare race, and suggestions for creating dhampir characters are presented on page 18 and 19. Now that you've chosen to be a dhampir, learn what that means and let that help shape the character you're planning on making. Additionally, now that you know a thing or two about your ancestry, decide whether or not you want to further connect yourself to Golarion's vampire bloodlines by selecting one of four variant dhampir racial options—the jiang-shi-born ru-shi, the moroi-born svetochr, the nosferatu-born ancient-born, or the vetala-born ajibachana.
4. Create Your Character: Now that you know what a dhampir is and how your vampiric heritage has affected you, it's time to make your character. Numerous character options can be found throughout the book in the form of new feats (28 and 29) and traits for dhampirs (19, 20, 21). If you've chosen to be an enemy of vampire kind, the various roles for vampire hunters on pages 26 and 27, as well as several of the spells and magic items on pages 30 and 31, can also help set your character's path.
5. Add Campaign Details: Although rare in the extreme, dhampirs can be found in many places throughout the Inner Sea Region. Learn about where your dhampir and the vampires of your bloodline fit into the Pathfinder campaign setting on pages 24 and 25. Additionally, if you're looking for vampires to hunt, check out the inside back cover for an overview of places in the Inner Sea Region (below, and beyond) in need of vampire hunters.
6. Consider Optional Rules: Even though many of the options in Blood of the Night are themed for vampires, dhampirs straddle the line between the worlds of the living and the dead. A dhampir character interested in highlighting his vampiric urges might work with the GM to employ the rules for hunger on page 22. Characters with a strong tie to a particular vampire bloodline might also find traits suggested for vampires that work well for them, and players should ask their GM if she'll permit them. Dhampirs are exceptionally rare individuals and norms for this race are few, so work with your GM to create the half-vampire hero or antihero of your darkest dreams.

Illustration by
Jorge Fares

So You're Not Playing a Bloodsucker...

Vampire hunters face a daunting, immortal foe, but fortunately Blood of the Night can help them in their quest to beat back the creatures of the night. Aside from many of the secrets and best-known details of Golarion's various vampire breeds, the Hunting Vampires section (page 26 and 26) presents four distinct ways to make a variety of vampire hunters, from spell-slinging arcane slayers; undead-killing bards, monks, and rogues; divine-focused hunters; and classic martial slayers. These builds direct players toward some of the strongest vampire-hunting options in the Pathfinder RPG, including more than a few options you might have never guessed work great against the undead. To really get the edge on the servants of darkness, Blood of the Night also presents a host of new feats designed specifically for vampire hunters (page 28), new spells (page 30), new magic items (page 31), and, of course, a hit list of lands in the Inner Sea where a vampire hunter can ply her trade. You don't just need to be playing the Carrion Crown Adventure Path to play a vampire hunter anymore—let Blood of the Night be your guide to hunting Golarion's deadliest hunters wherever your campaign and character concepts take you.

F. Wesley Schneider
Editor-in-Chief

Pathfinder Battles Preview: Do Clockwork Kings Dream of Electric Golems?

Friday, December 21, 2012

"Loooviiing yoooouuu...is easy 'cause you're beauuuuutiful. Doo dooo doodoo. Aaaaaaiiiiiiii"

Ahem. It isn't always this easy.

The height of a freelancer's satisfaction on any given project is often mute and unheralded. When a project is finally turned over, dutifully and painstakingly crafted over the course of months, only your developer, and perhaps your long-suffering spouse, are the ones who even know. In other words, the echo of popping champagne corks isn't commonly experienced by your typical RPG designer. Since you can't say anything, by the time a project does reach the public eye, from the initial murmurs of messageboard excitement to the dramatic unveiling of the finished product, you've usually moved well beyond the groundswell, that special creative place in your brain long-since vacated and re-inhabited with new assignments. And since words are cheap and art isn't, you're often surprised to find things have changed significantly since you last saw them, adapted to fit the artist depictions that aren't always what you remember describing. So when the gaming world starts to get excited, you often have to flip through along with everyone else, read what's become of your orphaned ideas, and figure it out all over again.

But then there's that rare time in a freelancer's life, particularly when you've cultivated a great relationship with your publisher and regularly attend the same conventions, when your excitement never quite gets a chance to quell, because they keep stoking those fires that got you so excited to work on a project in the first place. Most recently, Paizo has facilitated this with a growing list of awesome tie-in products unveiled at various stages of development, most of which stand a good chance of possessing snippets of your game design. With the introduction of the Wizkids' partnership with Paizo, this opens up intriguing new possibilities to see fantastic 3-dimensional depictions of your work, something I've always wanted to experience. Which is how I remember so vividly the first time I saw the Clockwork Reliquary.

Concept artwork for the Clockwork Reliquary.

The chance to revisit Azlanti technology was the reason I immediately jumped when I saw the outline for The Dead Heart of Xin. I had set myself up for this chance years earlier in some of my first works for Paizo: From Shore to Sea, and later the Sun Temple colony in Lost Cities of Golarion. But nearly all the Azlanti devices PCs experienced in those products were dormant or malfunctioning, only providing the merest hint of the incredible power wielded by Golarion's first advanced civilization. Given the chance to see some of that stuff working as it should, all set in the hallowed halls of the palace stronghold of Rune Magic's inventor and a true master of those arcane arts? Well... I could barely contain myself.

It wasn't long after I finished crafting the adventure (and turned over a month early, at that!) that I flew to Seattle for PaizoCon 2012, and visited a recently-transplanted Daigle and the rest of the crew at the offices. As usual for a working freelancer, most talk is on upcoming projects, but James and Erik called me over for a special little surprise: the initial sketches for the Clockwork Reliquary. I had worked hard to realize James' outline notes into a terrifying mechanical monstrosity that was at once ancient and advanced. As you'll see when the adventure arrives next month, I had settled on a technological design aesthetic inspired by the skeksis architecture and weaponry from The Dark Crystal. As a result, I remember having the most trouble with headless design and top-mounted arms the outline tentatively described, as I desperately wanted to avoid a "helicopter-head" creature. I even sketched it out myself as part of my turnover in a bid to prevent that depiction, in an almost-embarrassing drawing with more spidery legs that turned out surprisingly close to the finished rendition (admittedly done well before I knew who the cover artist would be, but shown here for your snickering amusement). I was really concerned with having the BBEG of the AP invoke the same kind of mind-numbing fear when you see a really good human-versus-dragon illustration. You look at it and and wonder "how in the world could a real person even survive for a second against that thing?" Not that my sketch depicts that, but I'm not an artist, and I was trying.

Of course, it doesn't hurt when you've got the master himself—Wayne Reynolds—working toward the same goal. When I'd heard Wayne was the cover artist, I was immediately embarrassed for my presumptions to do my own sketches, and I remember sheepishly asking Wayne at PaizoCon if he'd seen that terrible thing (mercifully he had not). But even without the visual reference, words and art connected perfectly through the descriptions he'd been provided, because his pencils sent shivers up my spine in a way I'd never experienced in seeing my work realized in two-dimensions—and I've seen a lot. The gangly arms were spot-on. The stilted legs. The clawed hands. The skymetal construction. The crystal coffin. (Fun Fact: 4 arms + 3 legs=7 limbs corresponding with Seven Virtues of Rule!) Most of all I appreciated the noticeable lack of too many gears. Despite my early enthusiasm for the steampunk genre and the creature's name, I never wanted this adventure to delve into that aesthetic, and, in fact, I had tried to skip gears entirely in my early designs which called for the various joints to be bonded not quite by clockwork, but by mini-miasmas of arcane energy. You can still see a hint of that attempt in my sketch, which would allow its individual limbs to orbit its body in weird magic ball-and-socket joints and prevent my "helicopter-head" dread, and it kept with my established Azlanti-stuff-always-orbits themes. Sure, I would liked to have seen a burnt-black skeleton and a transparent-green noqual crystal as originally designed, but those concerns vanished with the way Wayne conveyed the maliciousness of a partial skeleton without eyes or flesh to work with was just perfect, and the sloping, arched-back shoulders of its four clawed arms just conveyed the terrifying power of this mechanical horror. It was so... antediluvian... so... perfect. Truly an imperial monstrosity capable of leading a clockwork army to world domination!

But there was more! I think while James and I just sort of oo-ed and ah-ed and nodded in wide-eyed unison over just how perfect the depiction was, Erik tugged on my sleeve and led me—stunned and glassy-eyed—to his office, where he revealed that not only would Wizkids and Paizo be producing an accompanying miniature line for Shattered Star, but production was well underway... AND the Clockwork Reliquary would be one of them AND... well, he showed me the initial sculpt.

Like many Paizo fans, I grew up surrounded by action figures. Now as then, I've always been fascinated by a world in miniature. Star Wars was, of course, my first introduction, but I recall my first RPG purchase was a Ral Partha beholder mini when I was only 7 or 8 years old. Hundreds more followed. Scaled down, I could lord over these tiny figures like some deranged deity, a habit I'm afraid has never subsided in adulthood, as I still have an unhealthy habit for minis. And as I'd grown up chopping up and rearranging figures into variations that matched my imagination's own ideas—I remember a Ithorian head superglued to Obi-Wan's body as a "Hammerhead-Jedi-Knight-Bounty-Hunter" being a particular favorite—seeing something I'd imagined brought into the world in 3-dimensions was always some secret passion of mine. So imagine the thrill of seeing one of your creations actualized in the real world! Here we had a hunch nestled in James' head for years, entrusted to me to flesh out and build in imaginative words, descriptions, and statistics, then passed on the an incredible artist to realize in two-dimensions, and, finally, passed on to another artist—this time a sculptor—to realize in a third. I was speechless. Just as Wayne Reynolds had realized nearly every nuance of my Clockwork Reliquary designs, so, too, did the sculptor at WizKids realize every nuance of his concept drawing. The gangly-yet-powerful skymetal frame. Those oddly hunched shoulders that reminded me of the cocked hammer of a gun ready to fire. The howling skeleton encased in super-cool transparent epoxy. Those misleadingly dainty legs. The great details of Azlanti glyphs and Thassilonian runes and the ribcage-like reservoir and the scrolls flapping in the breeze and... *gasp.* I marveled, as your PCs soon will, at the sheer power of a reborn tyrant hellbent on reclaiming a kingdom lost 100 centuries before.

Just as I'd struggled in design with the Clockwork Reliquary's size before striking the right balance, so, too, does this mini take advantage of the best of both worlds. On paper, Large didn't seem quite imposing enough, and Huge didn't seem to fit the dimensions of a cradled skeleton and the gangly, whirling-dervish agility I wanted to convey for Xin's penultimate creation. As a result of those design assumptions, this mini is by far one of the largest Larges I've ever handled, suitably imposing and towering over PCs at just under 4-inches. Since the reliquary's longer arms are about 3 inches from shoulder to claw-tip, and bent at that, I'd say this mini gets the "gangly" theme I so wanted to convey down! The internal skeleton is fairly big in relative scale, but since The Dead Heart of Xin allows you to actually witness Xin's final moments, it isn't hard to assume that maybe the old emperor was maybe under the influence of enlarge person or other arcane augmentation, or we're simply seeing the distortion of the eldritch-warped crystal coffin. This was one bad dude, so anything's possible!

So here it is, Paizo fans! The Clockwork Reliquary, finally unveiled after 10,000 years of slumber, risen from the waves and ruins of Thassilon to claim the lives of your PCs before moving onward to world domination at the head of its clockwork army! Can they stop it, or will all of Golarion once again kneel before the skymetal tyrant? Erik was right last week when he called this figure "the coolest mini in the whole set, possibly the most complex and awesome-est prepainted plastic mini ever made for any set." I couldn't agree more, and I know your wait was worth it.

The Clockwork Reliquary is the primary villain of the Shattered Star Adventure Path's final chapter, The Dead Heart of Xin, on sale next month here at Paizo.com.

Brandon Hodge
Freelancer

RPG Superstar 2013 Round 1 Voting is Open!

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Today is the start of something new. In previous years of RPG Superstar, only the judges saw the wondrous item submissions, and the judges decided which ones would become the Top 32. This year, the wondrous items are public, and your votes help select the Top 32 finalists!

• To vote, all you need to do is log in to your paizo.com account and go to the RPG Superstar voting page. You'll be shown two random wondrous items submitted by novice designers, and you vote on which of the two you prefer.
• You can vote as often as you like.
• The voting period closes on January 15, 2013, at 2 PM Pacific time. That gives you plenty of time to look at several items each day and contribute many votes overall.

For the first time, the paizo.com community gets to take an active role in determining the Top 32. Remember, whether you vote 10 times or 100 times, every vote helps!

Vote now!

Sean K Reynolds
Designer and RPG Superstar Judge

Blood of the Night: Sate Your Hunger, Part 1

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Something besides the Krampus stalks the snowy, holiday streets this year. Just in time for the longest nights of the year comes Pathfinder Player Companion: Blood of the Night, a guide to playing vampires, dhampirs, and vampire hunters. Always wanted to play a character with a true bloodlust? Blood of the Night gives you a variety of gory options, from playing fantastically powerful actual vampires (and detailing what that means for a game) to slipping in more subtle bloodsuckers like dhampirs. But how do you know what type of bloodsucker is best for you and your game? Blood of the Night can help you answer that question.

Start with the For Your Character section

The first section of every Player Companion is the For Your Character spread, two pages dedicated to answering your questions, highlighting focus classes and topics, and helping you find the perfect options for you character. This is the place to start, particularly with the Questions to Ask Your GM section.

The biggest question here: Will we be allowed to play any monstrous characters in this campaign, including vampires?

Remember, the GM is the arbiter of what works in her game and what doesn’t, so if you want to play a character tainted by vampirism, talk to her and find out what works in her game. If the answer’s no vampires (or other powerful races), that’s still okay! There are still plenty of ways to play a bloodsucker. In fact, that’s what dhampirs were made for. See if your GM is okay with you playing one of these creatures, which are more evenly matched to the core races. If the answer to the vampire question is yes, though, that’s great too, and opens the door for not just significant options, but also new ways to play and things to consider regarding your character.

So You’re Playing a Vampire...

Illustration by Denman Rooke

If your GM is allowing vampires in her game, the first thing to decide is what type of vampire is right for you.

1. Choose Your Bloodline: Start on the inside front cover and get an overview of the four major types of vampires that haunt the Inner Sea Region. Choose which one seems most appealing to you. Each of these sections has tons of details on what distinguishes these undead hunters, along with how they come into being, their desires, secrets, roles, racial traits, and more.
• Want to know more about the mystical jiang-shi? Check them out on page 6.
• Want to play to tradition with the Dracula-like moroi? Flip to page 8.
• Looking for something more ancient and mysterious? Consider the nosferatu on page 10.
• Ready for the exotic, body-possessing vetala? Head to page 12.
  
  
2. Create Your Character: Once you’ve selected the type of vampire you want to play, you’ll want to follow a few steps.
• Build your character as normal, probably starting as a 1st-level core race, but talk to your GM about specifics.
• Apply the relevant vampire template (jiang-shi, Bestiary 3; moroi, Bestiary 1 [normal vampires]; nosferatu, Pathfinder Adventure Path #8; vetala, Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Inner Sea Bestiary).
• Refine your powers: From traits specific to each vampire breed (pages, 7, 9, 11, 13) to specialized feats (pages 16, 17, 28, 29), no two vampires ever need be alike.
  
  
3. Consider Hunger: Page 22 presents a new subsystem for hunger, whether it be the bloodlust of vampires, the carrion hunger of ghouls, the life envy of ghosts, or otherwise. Hunger brings the endless desires of the damned to the forefront of a game as never before, with penalties for fasting but also new benefits for the well fed.
   
   
4. Add Campaign Details: The Inner Sea Region is full of places vampires thrive, famous vampires you might somehow be tied to, and religions willing to help you indulge your desires. Learn about them on pages 24 and 25.
   
   
5. Learn How to Play Well with Others: Now that you’ve decided to play a sinister, lonely creature of the night, you’re likely headed into a game about cooperation and heroics. Pages 14 and 15 presents a primer on what it means to play a vampire in a Pathfinder campaign, with suggestions on handling alignment, how you might interact with other players, and things both you and the GM should keep in mind throughout the campaign to make sure that not just you, but all the players, have many unforgettable adventures.
   
   
6. Be Flexible: The base assumptions of the Pathfinder RPG were obviously not designed to support vampiric characters, but with the tools presented in Blood of the Night and a willingness to cooperate with your GM and other players, you’ll be set for a Pathfinder experience like no other.

F. Wesley Schneider
Editor-in-Chief

Thieves Vinegar

by Kevin Andrew Murphy

Chapter Three: Still Life with Snuffbox

I have never been so grateful for vinegar in my life.

Norret had taught me, as part of the science of perfumery, that there were seven basic scents. One of them, putrescence, was necessary in any truly fine perfume, but only the faintest note.

Putrescence was found in stinkhorn fungi and the carrion flowers of the Mwangi Expanse, but most commonly in putrescine and cadaverine, alchemical substances that came from corpses.

We were in the Gray District, the necropolis in the southeastern corner of Korvosa. More specifically, we were in Potter's Ward, the southeastern corner of that, used for the graves of the poor. The air was filled with greasy smoke. It smelled like someone was cooking rotting pork and it had caught fire. Except that in this case it was long pork. The only thing that smelled worse than the burning corpses were the ones that weren't yet burnt.

Some of those even stumbled around. I think they were zombies–I hope they were zombies–because the other alternative was that gravediggers and priestesses of Pharasma were beating still-living plague victims with shovels and setting them on fire.

I clutched my pomander orange and inhaled the floral notes of tansy and thyme, the camphoraceous notes of rosemary and lavender, the minty note of mint, and the sweet pungency of apple cider vinegar.

"Wizards are utterly mad, Rhodel," I told my spirit guide, or possibly the empty air. "Even crazier than alchemists." I held the pomander against the stench. "A 'keepsake,' Dr. Orontius said. A memento to remember his beloved school chum.…" I snorted and was immediately sorry because I'd snorted vinegar. Then I was less sorry because, once my eyes stopped watering, I realized I couldn't smell anything.

I glanced at another corpse and checked Norret's picture of Zharmides the Godless.

Nella had told us more about Zharmides, a convert to the Rahadoum heresies who spiced his divination lectures with tart comments on the gods, calling Blackfingers a two-bit snake-oil salesman and Pharasma a schoolmarm with an attendance fetish.

Nella wouldn't repeat what he said about Asmodeus other than mentioning that one particular string of blasphemies had reportedly made an imp faint.

I was sorry that he was dead, and even more sorry I wasn't finding his body. That was my job while Norret ran interference, helping the priests and priestesses of Pharasma blow up the zombies that seemed to be rising with some regularity. Our story was that we'd been sent to help by the temple of Shelyn, not that anyone seemed inclined to check.

When I wasn't looking at corpses, I amused myself—if that's the right word—by examining the potsherds the Potter's Ward was named for. Norret's art tourists' map noted that some believed the bits of broken crockery littering the soil went back to the time of the Shoanti.

I assumed this was a more relaxing pastime when there weren't zombies lurching around. Someone else with wild hair and glassy eyes lurched toward me, except this man had a wheelbarrow filled with fresh bodies. I was about to examine them when I took note of the gravedigger's brocade waistcoat. Not only was it too fine a garment for gravedigging, but it was covered with stylized Zs. Unfortunately, the pockets were all flat. Even the pocket square was gone.

"Where'd you get your waistcoat?" I asked.

The gravedigger beamed. "The master gave it to me."

"Who's your master?"

He paused, then said swiftly, "I have no master."

"Then whom do you work for?"

"I work for the Church of Pharasma. I am a simple fellow. I dig graves." His voice was as flat as a zombie's, assuming zombies could speak. He attempted to push past me with the barrow full of plague-raddled corpses. "Please move. I must bury these bodies."

To say that he was acting strange was an understatement. "Did you by any chance find a snuffbox? A little ivory one with gold fittings, same monogram on the bottom as you've got on your vest?"

"Oh yes. The— He was very pleased to get it. Said every nobleman should have one."

"So where's your master?"

"I have no master."

"Could you take me to your master?"

The gravedigger looked puzzled, then tortured. At last he whispered, "Only if you're one of the faithful?" His eyebrows rose hopefully.

"If I said that I was?"

"Then I would ask you for the password."

"What's the password?"

Rhodel certainly makes an attractive ghost.

"I'm not allowed to say." He looked frightened. "I am a simple fellow. I dig graves. Please move. I must bury these bodies."

I stepped aside. My skin prickled as if a whole gaggle of geese were walking over my grave, and I've been dead so I know what that feels like. I went to Norret and told him about my conversation.

"Drugged or enchanted," he concluded. "Duke Devore's formulary has a recipe for hypnotic perfume, but..." My brother flipped one of his monocles down and peered at the gravedigger. "Definitely enchanted. Mind-controlled—I've seen it on the battlefield. Give someone too many contradictory orders and the mind starts to break."

I didn't know if he was talking military orders or magical ones, or if there was much of a difference. "How do we find his 'master'?"

"We keep an eye on him and an ear out for this 'password.'"

When my brother said "keep an ear out," he meant this literally. He swigged some tincture of wolfsbane and grew ears as long and pointed as a wolf's. A bit of eavesdropping and spying on the addled gravedigger later, he said, "I am famished."

"You're hungry?" I gasped, still holding my pomander against the stench.

"No, 'I am famished.' That's the password."

It certainly wasn't one that easily sprang to mind, especially with how I'd lost any trace of my appetite, given the reeking corpses. But with that last clue, everything about the strange man fell into place. "I guess that tells us what he meant by a 'one of the faithful,' then?"

Norret nodded. "It would seem that the grave digger—or whoever's controlling him—is a worshiper of Urgathoa, goddess of gluttony and undeath."

I shuddered, but it made sense. Who else would be hungry in a graveyard?

Once the sun had set, our pomander oranges began to glow with will-o'-wisp light like little moons. We dodged one last patrol of Pharasmins as the priests swept the necropolis before locking the gates for the night–plague or no plague, even priests of the goddess of death needed sleep, especially after the day they'd had. Norret and I, on the other hand, would get no sleep, not just because of where we were but because Norret had prepared a pot of coffee Woodsedge-style—half coffee, half roasted chicory root.

We picked our way across the Potter's Ward, trailing the gravedigger and a cortege of figures we presumed were cultists. We hopped a low fence into Everyman's Ward, and finally slipped past a loose bar in the spike-tipped iron fence that led to the Gold Ward where the nobility were interred. Being a Galtan, it soothed my soul somewhat to know that the Urgathoans were desecrating the tombs of the nobility rather prying into graves of the common man, not that I think they were making that distinction.

Most of the mausoleums in the Gold Ward were grand affairs, with polished brass knobs, cypress wreaths, and even freshly cut flowers placed in urns outside. One mausoleum looked decidedly seedy and unkempt, neglected for many years, the doors falling off their hinges and the only flowers being weeds and lichen growing through cracks in the marble façade. The name Galdur was carved above the doors, and the last cultist was disappearing down the steps.

We followed and were greeted at the bottom by a lady in a tattered spattered gown like from the nursery rhyme. Her black hair was an obvious wig, though her ghoulish teeth were real enough, having been filed to points. The cultist smiled, letting us get an even better look.

"I am famished," I said, and Norret did as well.

"Then you are welcome in Urgathoa's Hall!" She smiled as if welcoming us to a holiday party. "You must call me Deaconess Gentle. How should I know you?"

"I'm Orlin, and this is my brother, Norret."

"Oh, an artist!" She took delighted note of Norret's folding easel and the multicolored alchemical stains on his clothes. "You must paint a portrait to immortalize this celebration."

Norret nodded in hasty agreement.

"So, what have you brought for Urgathoa's feast?"

"Brought?" I repeated.

"An offering to share! An unholy delicacy for us to consume for the delight of the Pallid Princess!"

I thought, then remembered my little horn spoon. "How about unicorn bone porridge?"

"Delightful!" exclaimed the cultist. "Did the beast scream as it was butchered?"

"I don't know. It died a long time ago."

"Well aged, then." She turned to Norret.

"I brought coffee."

She rolled her eyes but merely said, "Mistress Kissim brought funeral biscuits. I'm certain they will go well together." She gestured to one corner of the crypt. "I think you might set your easel up there. It will have the best view of the festivities. Do we need more candles?"

"No, the shadows are just right," Norret said.

"Well," the deaconess allowed, "none of them are hungry, but I'm certain that can be remedied later. I'm just so pleased we have an artist. Please, come in."

Norret nodded and did.

I might have expected many things of the cult of Urgathoa, but one thing I did not expect was a demented potluck. Cultists were milling about, placing food on the old sarcophagi like they were artists arranging still lifes—should the skull go beside the cheese tray or on top of it?—and everyone was chatting as if they'd gathered in some Isarn salon for a Crystalhue feast rather than in an abandoned Korvosan crypt for the blasphemous rites of the Pallid Princess.

Deaconess Gentle peered up the stairs. "Is there anyone else?"

"One more." The scent of roses and ectoplasm replaced the musty odor of the crypt.

Beside us appeared a vision of loveliness, a girl of no more than sixteen summers garbed in a green and ivory festival gown, a garland of pink noisette roses plaited into her golden hair. I'd only seen my spirit guide in this world once, when I was poisoned, but necromancers had told Norret and me that spirits had an easier time appearing to the doomed or the dying, or in certain places where the veil between worlds wore thin.

I hoped it was the third possibility, or at least that "doom" was more a warning than a certainty.

"How lovely you are!" The priestess clasped my spirit guide's hands, but not quite. "How may I know you?"

"Call me Rhodel."

"It is an honor to be graced by one of the incorporeal. Lord Galdur had feared that he would be the only one here to celebrate an ashenmorn."

"Ah nae." Rhodel laughed. "Orlin slipped his grave too."

"Indeed?" said Deaconess Gentle, blinking at me. "I took you for a living child. Forgive me."

"No need," I said truthfully.

"You shall have the place of honor." The priestess showed me to a chair at the upper left corner of the central sarcophagus, seating Rhodel just to the right of me before taking her place at the head of the "table." It was covered with a funeral pall. Seated opposite me was a rakishly handsome young man with dark hair, pale skin, and mismatched finery. Being from Galt, I was familiar with the look. It was what happened when you raided the wardrobes of dead nobles and had no eye for taste.

"Now, Master?" asked the gravedigger groveling at his side.

"Now, Alfoun."

The gravedigger whisked away the pall like a waiter uncovering a tray. I tried not to look at what was on the slab–who was on the slab–not wanting to see another plague-ravaged corpse. But then I did and I realized that, apart from liver spots, there were no marks on the old man's naked body. The mouth was open in a death rictus. Even so, I recognized it. I had been looking at it all day. It was the face of Zharmides the Godless.

"Oh, one without the plague!" Deaconess Gentle exclaimed delightedly. "Wherever did you find it, Lord Galdur?"

The young nobleman smiled, revealing pronounced eyeteeth, and petted the gravedigger like a faithful dog. "Good Alfoun brought it to me."

"Urgathoa has truly blessed us! Much as I enjoy the fruits of the season, it's nice to have a little variety."

"Shall I have the kiss of undeath now, master?" the gravedigger begged.

"No!" cried the pretty young woman seated to his left. "You swore your next bride would be me!"

"Patience, dear ones. Go eat some rats."

He said this last just forcefully enough. They both scurried off to one of the lower tables where one of the other cultists had indeed brought rats, roasted on a stick.

"There is a chair free now, my lovely." Lord Galdur gestured.

Rhodel vanished from her chair and reappeared in the one at his side.

Deaconess Gentle made brief introductions, then told Rhodel, "I'm so embarrassed. We didn't expect any of the incorporeal. How might we feed your pain?"

"Mayhaps a li'l pinch a snuff?" Rhodel asked. "Loved it in life 'n I kin still smell it in death."

Deaconess Gentle looked perturbed, but Lord Galdur reached into his pocket and gallantly produced a snuffbox. The snuffbox. Ivory, carved with lions and lilies. Even the stylized Z on the bottom. "A nobleman never goes anywhere without it."

"Ah, how pretty!" Rhodel exclaimed. "Lemme guess yer name. Is it Zander? Zaries?"

"It's Tyrnan," he said smoothly, "the fourth of that name. But I inherited this from my great uncle, Zellin Galdur."

I realized then that the vampire was a fraud—and likely about more than just the snuffbox. I suspected that if he had any noble blood in him at all, it was only because he'd drunk it.

"I've been ta the other side. I've met Tyrnan Galdur. All four." Rhodel took the snuffbox from him—actually, physically took it—and smiled. "Yer not him."

The vampire hissed like a cat, fangs bared, but this wasn't very frightening to a ghost. "And you, milady? Who are you, appearing like a Shelynite doxy at Urgathoa's feast!?"

"Ah," said Rhodel, "ye found me out. 'Tis true. I loved the Rose mosta' all. But I lived a long life, an' I prayed ta the Pallid Princess there at the end." As she said this, she grew older and older, the lines of age and care appearing on her face, then the sores of hag pox, the harlot's curse. "Kith me, handsome!" she slurred, her odor of roses turning to alcohol, anise, and the stench of sulfur as she grabbed him in a clench. Then she caught fire and exploded in a flash of fireworks and ectoplasm.

The vampire shouted and stood, his chair clattering behind him.

I felt something appear in my hands. It was the snuffbox, sticky with ectoplasm. I quickly put it in my pocket.

Deaconess Gentle retrieved her wig from where it had been blown off in the explosion. Beneath it, her hair was stringy and white. "The incorporeal—always so dramatic!" she exclaimed to the assembled cultists.

"Where is she?" hissed the vampire. "Where's my snuffbox?"

The priestess tugged the edge of his coat. "Lord Galdur, please. The ritual."

The vampire sat, glaring at me.

Deaconess Gentle placed one hand on my shoulder, then addressed her congregation, "My famished ones, this is Orlin. He's brought us a special delicacy. What was it again, dear?"

"Um, unicorn bone porridge."

Appreciative sounds issued from the cultists. The pretty woman who wanted to be a vampire brought me a bowl. I tried to ignore the fact that it was made from the top of a human skull and placed the little horn spoon inside.

Thick pasty gruel welled up. Norret had tried to make it look and taste like blancmange, but it only did insomuch as blanched almond pudding looked similar to stewed unicorn bones.

I offered the bowl to the priestess. She took a delicate bite. "It... has a lovely texture," she said politely. "Like rotten brains."

I was less disturbed than I should have been. "It's a little bland," I admitted.

She smiled. "I believe Lord Galdur may have a solution." She turned to him. "Might Orlin borrow your talisman?"

The vampire set down the glass of blood he had been draining from Zharmides' arm and addressed his priestess. "Does he have any skill as a chef?"

"A little," I admitted.

"Marvelous." He greeted me with a predatory smile. "Behold this talisman, sacred to the Pallid Princess." He reached up to his neck and touched his lavalier. "It makes the blood of the dead taste as sweet as that of the living." The pendant was amethyst, dark as Hymbrian grapes, a six-sided natural crystal capped with silver filigree in the shape of flies. "In the hands of a true chef, it can also produce sugar, salt, and spice. Yet that is not its only virtue. When touched by the undead, the Princess's crystal becomes the pure purple of royalty." He unclasped the chain, and held it out, then dropped it to pool on Zharmides' dead chest. "When touched by those bereft of Her blessing, it turns pale." The crystal clouded and color leached from it, transmuting from amethyst to milky quartz, white as leprosy. "But when touched by the living, it turns as pink as a baby's cheek."

The vampire bared his fangs in a feral grin. "Although you appear alive, Orlin, you smell of vinegar, like my cousins from the east." He stared at my neck. "Tell me, does your head come off?"

So far as I knew, everybody's head came off when you applied a Final Blade. "Yes, but I'd prefer if it stayed where it is."

"Just so," said the vampire. "I've heard it's troublesome to put your head back. But as youthful as I appear, I am older than I look."

"Same here."

"Indeed," agreed the vampire, "but from what I know, my eastern cousins are all women, not men. And never children. Touch the talisman and reveal Urgathoa's truth!"

He was trying to command me like his rat-chewing lackeys. But it was a litmus test. As awful as Urgathoa was, she still followed rules. The milky quartz of the pallid crystal would turn to amethyst for the dead and rose quartz for the living.

Of course, if you contaminated your sample, a litmus test could yield a false positive or negative. "Fine." I stood up and reached for the crystal while under my breath I said, "Rhodel...."

My spirit guide knew how to take a cue. I felt the cold touch as her hand overlaid mine.

I sat back down. While my fingers were closed around the crystal, they weren't touching it. Rhodel's were. Slowly I saw it clear and change from lavender to violet to deepest amethyst.

"Blessed child of Urgathoa!" cried the priestess.

The vampire sulked, even more so when I asked, "So what do I do now? Twist it like a pepper mill?"

As I said the word "pepper," a sprinkle floated down over the bowl of unicorn bone porridge, just like it had for Dr. Orontius. "Does it do thileu bark?" As I said it, it answered my question.

"If you add some fear's breath and hatefinger, I'll take that bowl, please," said Deaconess Gentle.

I'd never heard of these herbs, but Urgathoa's lavalier had, adding a sprinkle of each.

"Just nightfog and bloodroot for my wine," "Lord Galdur" grumbled sourly, holding out his glass of wizard blood.

Orders came in. It was almost like I was back in Isarn dishing up breakfast for our boarders. I fixed myself a bowl of porridge, seasoned it with sugar, cinnamon, and ginger, and tried to pretend I wasn't eating out of the top of someone's skull. It did taste like mother's blancmange now.

The festivities proceeded. Deaconess Gentle opened some moldering tome titled Serving Your Hunger, which I'd initially taken for a cookbook, and led the congregation in a ghastly chant made more horrid by the fact that most of the cultists were off key. Then she had me sprinkle Zharmides the Godless with thileu bark, after which she proceeded to pour Korvosan tawny port over the wizard's corpse and began to dish up slices of meat.

I didn't know whether this was the fate the gods had designed for those who mocked them or whether Zharmides had foreseen it and this explained his choice in religion.

As the cultists continued their ritual, I began noticing little oddities. For all that she looked the part of a priestess, Deacon Gentle seemed to fumble her way through the divine readings, sometimes stopping and having to repeat passages. Though the other cultists ate with gusto, all bore normal human features, and one or two even seemed a little queasy over the things they were shoving into their mouths. Only the vampire was actually undead, and despite the way the humans simpered and fawned over him, he too seemed to be trying hard to play a part—that of the world-weary undead lord.

They're new at this. The realization struck me suddenly, and for a moment I felt a little sorry for them. I wondered if their conversion was the result of the plague, or if they merely hoped to be rewarded by the vampire. Either way, it was a pathetic scene.

Then one of them began gnawing at a loop of intestine, and my sympathy evaporated.

I realized that Deaconess Gentle was looking expectantly at me. She was holding an empty plate, waiting for me to request a cut.

"Um, that's not how I... serve my hunger," I said as politely as I could, hoping I was saying the right thing.

"Indeed? And what would your kind prefer?"

Alarmed, I looked for Norret. The woman followed my glance. "Oh, the artist! Of course—he'll eat first, then you'll drink from his veins. Splendid."

My brother came over and saw what he was expected to do. Fortunately there was a line of cultists, and some were going back for seconds.

I got his attention when the priestess went to pour more port over Zharmides' body. I surreptitiously slipped my brother the damned snuffbox. He put it in a pocket and handed me a vial, jerking his head towards the bottle of port.

I unstoppered the vial and gripped it tight with my spirit's hand. It glittered like a diamond as I raised it in the air, but the cultists were distracted and drunk and didn't notice the drops dripping down as I added to Zharmides' seasoning. For good measure, I made sure a few drops got into the vampire's glass as well.

Then I pulled my spirit's hand back to my physical hand and stole a glance at the empty vial, pondering the label, written in Norret's neat handwriting: Syrup of Ip.

Coming Next Week: Things get truly gross in the final chapter of "Thieves Vinegar" by Kevin Andrew Murphy!

Kevin Andrew Murphy is the author of numerous stories, poems, and novels, as well as a writer for Wild Cards, George R. R. Martin's shared-world anthology line. His previous Pathfinder Tales stories include "The Secret of the Rose and Glove" and "The Perfumer's Apprentice" (also starring Norret and Orlin), and "The Fifth River Freedom," the fourth chapter of Prodigal Sons in the Kingmaker Pathfinder's Journal. For more information, visit his website.

Illustration by Carmen Cianelli

RPG Superstar 2013 Round 2: Archetypes

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

The submission period for Round 1 wondrous items is over! The tech team is preparing the voting software as we speak. So what's next?

• Public voting begins this Thursday, December 20, at 2 PM Pacific time! Unlike in previous years, anyone can log in to paizo.com and vote on entries. Your votes will separate the good entries from the bad and determine the best competitors to move on to Round 2.
• You can vote on items as much as you like. Exact details of how the voting works will be available when the voting period begins, but in short you'll be shown two random entries and vote on which one you like better.
• The voting period closes on January 15, 2013, at 2 PM Pacific time. That gives you plenty of time to look at several items each day and contribute many votes overall.
• If you did submit a wondrous item for Round 1, you should be thinking about archetype designs for Round 2. If you start planning now, that's four extra weeks of design time for your archetype masterpiece! And be sure to read my advice about archetype design posted on the messageboards.
• The Round 2 rules will be revealed later this week—be sure to check the Paizo blog and the RPG Superstar page for the surprise twist!

Also, be sure to check out the Atomic Array's Special Edition segment, featuring RPG Superstar 2012, Mike Welham!

Sean K Reynolds
Designer and RPG Superstar Judge

Crystalhue Holiday and Pathfinder Online

Monday, December 17, 2012

Just in time for Christmas, we have a new holiday boon! Developer Adam Daigle was so excited when he detailed Evoking Day last month that I was able to rope... err... convince him to write a second holiday post for Pathfinder Society. This time, Adam took the original work regarding Crystalhue, written by Crystal Frasier in Wayfinder #2, and expanded on it. The holiday of Crystalhue is also mentioned on page 249 of Pathfinder Campaign Setting: The Inner Sea World Guide. You will find a special Pathfinder Society Chronicle sheet you can download and apply to a Pathfinder Society character during the date ranges noted on the sheet.

Illustration by Eva Widermann

During the day, in towns where the holiday of Crystalhue is celebrated, locals hang crystal prisms and glass baubles throughout town in order to spread light and scatter rainbows in the streets. As townsfolk prepare for the evening festivities, artisans and musicians ply their trades, hoping for a coin or two while they sell their crafts and play tunes for the people while they browse. Throughout the day, the locals exchange small gifts, typically handmade, as tokens of appreciation or as peace offerings to those they feel they wronged during the year.

To reflect artistic depictions of their patron goddess, women dye colored streaks in their hair. Young girls will commonly have half a dozen different colored locks, while older married women usually only have one or two. Men wear colorful patchwork coats they call melaros that they keep their whole lives, adding new patches or scraps of scavenged cloth every year.

As night falls, the community gathers every available lantern and candle, bringing them out onto porches or lining the streets with their communal light. The town square hosts a large feast around a bonfire complete with roasted meats, stewed vegetables, roasted root vegetables, and winter squashes—all seasoned with plenty of fragrant spices. Around these bonfires, the clergy of Shelyn perform marriage ceremonies, where the whole community gathers to witness and affirm the bonds of love. During the ceremonies, teenagers pursue their budding romances, giving trinkets and other symbols of their affection to the ones who caught their eye throughout the year.

One of the stranger traditions among the faithful of Shelyn is the Zonzon doll. A child chosen to be the “sibling” passes this strange little doll, made from scraps of leather and cloth and sewn with red thread, among neighbors. The townsfolk give it symbolic gifts and whisper apologies to those they’ve wronged during the year or share with the doll happy memories in order to represent Shelyn’s kindness and mercy to her now-lost brother Zon-Kuthon. The “sibling” child brings the doll to everyone in town during the festival, making sure everyone has had the chance to pay his or her dues and make peace. As the celebration winds down, the doll is cast into the wilderness or set afloat to drift down a river in the hope that it will find its way to the Midnight Lord and relate his sister’s kindness, mercy, and goodwill in the face of the dark place he now resides.

Also this past week, a Pathfinder Society boon was added to the $5 sponsorship level of the Pathfinder Online Kickstarter. The emerald elixir, stolen from a bizarre pool in the Emerald Spire dungeon, has now been made available for Pathfinders. When used at an official Pathfinder Society game table, drinking the elixir grants your hero the advanced simple template for the duration of the scenario. Alternately, the elixir can be spiked with experimental agents to trigger a beneficial permanent mutation randomly determined on a huge chart included on the certificate. If more than one player activates an emerald elixir at the same table, all drinkers can choose their preferred mutation from the list rather than roll randomly.

There will not be another Pathfinder Society blog post until January 7, 2013, so I want to take this time to wish all of you a happy holidays. I hope everyone has a great time visiting family, giving gifts, and hopefully enjoying some Pathfinder Society with the new holiday boon. We’ll see you in 2013!

Click here to download the Crystalhue 4712 Boon! — 117 KB (zip/PDF)—This Boon is no longer available as of 1/9/13.

Mike Brock
Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator

Dave Gross: Stat Up My Characters!

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Illustrations by Eric Belisle

We joke about gamers at conventions who want to tell you about their characters. Most of the time it's perfectly okay, but there's always that one guy who follows you into the bathroom talking about his +5 Holy Avenger. Dude. It's not all right.

As a long-time gamer, I sympathize with the desire to tell others about your paladin. Hell, in the Pathfinder Tales novels I'm basically telling you about my characters. Maybe it's time to turn the tables... with a twist.

When Prince of Wolves came out in 2010, James Sutter wrote a good article describing Radovan for Kobold Quarterly. I tease him that Charisma shouldn't be Radovan's dump stat, but I can't complain unless I stat him out myself.

But I won't. Or at least, I won't show those stats.

My secret is that with Hero Lab I have created character sheets for the important characters for all of my Pathfinder Tales novels. They're a big help when I deal with spell battles, but they also provide inspiration for action scenes. Can the game version of Radovan catch a knife thrown at him? I looked it up. Totally legit!

While I don't want to reveal any "official" stats to preserve the mystery of the characters, there's no reason you can't show us your version.

How would you stat up Radovan and Jeggare? How about Azra or Malena from Prince of Wolves? Burning Cloud Devil would be a challenge, as would Jade Tiger and all of the kami Arnisant meets in Master of Devils. Perhaps the most fun would be statting out Caladrel, Fimbulthicket, Kemeili, and Oparal from Queen of Thorns. And don't forget Ellasif and Declan from Winter Witch! I'm not sure Elaine or I ever did stats for them.

Post your character stats for any of my Pathfinder Tales characters in this blog's comments by January 2, 2013. With a little help from the Paizo editorial team, I'll choose three favorites to receive a signed copy of Queen of Thorns and a Radovan miniature.

What do you say? You've got my full attention. Tell me about my characters.

UPDATE: Additionally, each of the three winners will receive a free copy of Hero Lab from Lone Wolf Development. If the winner already owns Hero Lab, you’ll be able to select up to $20 worth of add-on packages for Hero Lab. The contest has also been extended to January 2, 2013.

Dave Gross
Pathfinder Tales Author

Superstar Lineup for the Emerald Spire Announced

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Dear Friends of Paizo,

First off, I want to thank you for your support of Paizo through this, our 10th anniversary year. It has been a year of reflection, a year of celebration, and a year of exciting new projects! I am blessed to have an incredible team here at Paizo that I enjoy working with on a daily basis. I am equally blessed with such a super group of fellow gaming enthusiasts that I can call my friends and customers. As Conan would say, life is good!

As many of you know, we have a Kickstarter going that will help our sister company, Goblinworks, make the Pathfinder Online MMO. This game has me excited because it will be the first time that anyone will be able to visually immerse themselves into the world of Golarion and to see what it would be like to actually live in this campaign world that we have only seen through the words of our incredible authors, the pictures of our amazing artists, and the imaginations of our own brains. I can tell you that when I actually was able to take Merisiel and run her through the wilderness outside of Thornkeep in the River Kingdoms the other day, I was trembling with excitement! Pathfinder Online is the type of game that I can really get excited about because it doesn't just lead you through a scripted Pathfinder experience, it allows YOU to shape the experience just like you do in our real world. It reminds me so much of my 30 years of playing tabletop RPGs—I get to decide what happens in my campaigns. That, to me, is very exciting!

The Pathfinder Online Kickstarter has been up for two weeks and I'm pleased to announce that yesterday we reached the $300,000 sub-goal: 30% off the way towards our final goal! Statistics have shown Kickstarters that reach the 30% mark have a 90% chance of success. It means that early supporters came in and the project is on a good track to go all the way. However, we still need a ton of support if we are going to make our goal and see Pathfinder Online become a reality. That means we need your help! Of course, we don't intend to just ask for your help without giving you a little something in return. We've added some tasty morsels to the Kickstarter by way of new reward tiers, some cool add-on products, and some additional value for the already announced tiers.

The biggest announcement this past week was for the Emerald Spire Superdungeon, a Pathfinder RPG product that could become the largest official Pathfinder dungeon ever created! We have enlisted a massive number of superstar RPG designers to each pen their own unique dungeon level in the Emerald Spire. As the Kickstarter pledges grow, so does the dungeon! This superdungeon will be available in both print and PDF, and there are numerous options to support us that will get you this cool collaboration of RPG legends!

I'm super excited to announce today the all-star lineup for the first 12 levels of the Emerald Spire Superdungeon. They are:

Rich Baker (author of the Birthright campaign setting for D&D)
Wolfgang Baur (CEO of Open Design, and legendary TSR designer)
F. Wesley Schneider (Paizo Editor-In-Chief and creator of Ustalav)
James Sutter (Paizo Fiction Editor and creator of Kaer Maga)
Lisa Stevens (CEO of Paizo, and co-founder of White Wolf and Wizards of the Coast)
Keith Baker (Creator of the Eberron campaign setting for D&D)
Ed Greenwood (Creator of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for D&D)
Erik Mona (Publisher and co-creator of the Pathfinder Campaign Setting)
Mark Rein-Hagen (Co-founder of White Wolf Publishing, author of Ars Magica, Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Wraith: The Oblivion, and Changeling: The Dreaming)
Jason Bulmahn (Lead designer of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and co-creator of the Pathfinder Campaign Setting)
Frank Mentzer (Founder of the RPGA, co-author of The Temple of Elemental Evil, author of D&D boxed sets)
James Jacobs (Creative Director and creator of the Pathfinder Adventure Path and Varisia)

These folks have been my heroes, my co-workers, and my friends in the industry. They have created the products that have defined my 25 years in this industry and I am extremely proud to have them working with me to create the most amazing superdungeon ever! The very cool thing is that this baby can grow bigger if enough people back this Kickstarter. We have another dozen or so amazing authors waiting in the wings should we need to call on their services to add additional levels. How low do you want the dungeon to go? Back this Kickstarter and tell us!

In addition, our friends at WizKids have worked with us to create some prepainted plastic minis for this Kickstarter campaign! The Bloodbriar Goblin and the Shadowfire Elemental have already been unlocked, and we're on our way to unlocking the Lava Lurker. These minis have been added to the reward package for everyone at the Crowdforger Pioneer level and higher. There are more minis waiting to be unlocked as we head towards our funding goal, giving backers a minimum of nine cool new minis if this Kickstarter campaign is funded!

For our Pathfinder Society friends out there, we have added a new reward level that will get you a very cool boon that you can use in Pathfinder Society play! Erik, Mike and Mark have pulled out all the stops in making this the coolest Pathfinder Society boon I have ever seen! Check out the Kickstarter page to learn more!

Now is a great time to help us spread the word about this Kickstarter. The more people hear about us, the more momentum we gather, and the bigger rewards get for Kickstarter backers and Pathfinder fans! Here's how you can help:

1. Pledge to support the Kickstarter! Even if you don't play computer games, there are plenty of awesome rewards to add to your tabletop Pathfinder game.
2. Share the Kickstarter link with your buddies on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.
3. Check the Pathfinder Online Kickstarter page every day to watch the newest videos and learn about the latest reward reveals!

In closing, thanks again for making Paizo your gaming company of choice. If it weren't for you and your patronage, Paizo wouldn't be heading into year eleven. It truly means the world to me and my staff. Have a wonderful holiday season—I look forward to sharing so many new adventures in 2013!

Lisa Stevens
CEO

Thieves Vinegar

by Kevin Andrew Murphy

Chapter Two: The Hall of Lies

Newby analyzed the contents of Norret's flask, pronouncing it ninety-nine point nine percent pure will-o'-wisp essence, with the impurities mostly consisting of honeysuckle and grape. Norret nodded, and the three old men fell to talking amongst themselves.

"Wizards would buy it for ink," Sage pointed out.

"Wizards don't need this degree of purity," Newby countered.

"Would be useful for underpainting secret messages," said Hessim. "Signatures and such."

Newby snorted. "Think of the holy glow of Iomedae's sword or Sarenrae's rays."

"Bit heretical, considering the origin," said Sage.

"Then the ghastly pallor of Urgathoa."

"Or the flames in Asmodeus's eyes," Hessim enthused.

"Point," admitted Sage. "Wonderful for unholy icons. We are agreed then, gentlemen?"

"Aye," said his fellow shopkeepers.

The old men were nothing if not scrupulous. They kitted Norret out with an elaborate case of oil paints and brushes, including a traveling easel, a sketch pad, and a small canvas, while I was given a similar set of watercolors. They also gave us a map of Korvosa and advice on the best bridge to take to cross the narrows en route to the mainland and the Acadamae atop Citadel Crest.

It was grand. It was imposing. It was also open only to students, faculty, and tradesmen. Frightening hellspawn guards menaced those who didn't belong.

That said, Norret and I were Galtan, and we were used to avoiding the Gray Gardeners. Hellspawn gate guards, no matter how ridiculously twisted their horns, simply did not rate. We walked past.

A plague also raged, and we'd noted any number of Korvosans who'd masked themselves like hastily deputized Gray Gardeners, neckerchiefs pulled up over their faces to keep disease-bearing spirits from flying down their throats. Ours were Vudrani silks which had belonged to Rhodel.

Perhaps the most shocking thing were the imps that perched blatanly on the shoulders of students and professors, or lounged on the lintel of the main gate. These stuck out their tongues and made evil gestures at the tiny dragons who rode on the shoulders of better-minded students and faculty. One older and elegant wizard had a cloud of multicolored gemstones orbiting her head, serving as the hoard for the rust red drakeling perched atop the jeweled comb holding up her long red hair.

We had floating pomander oranges.

The Acadamae's discipline of its familiars leaves something to be desired.

We followed her into the Acadamae's grounds. Before us lay the grandest and newest building I'd ever seen in my life.

Suddenly an imp swooped down. "Trespassers!" it shrieked. "You've no legitimate business! You're our lawful prey!"

Norret displayed Dr. Orontius's letter, including the seal at the bottom, a calligraphic O that resembled an owl's eye. "On the contrary, we're here to deliver a missive to one of your instructors, Zharmides the Godless."

The little fiend snatched the letter, fluttering higher into the air, then turned a backflip as it giggled with infernal mirth. "Didn't you know?" the creature cried. "He's dead! Not even of the plague! Choked on a fishbone!" The imp laughed as if this were the most hilarious joke in the world. "But without this letter, you've no legitimate purpose—or even with it! Ignorance of the law is no excuse!"

"Except you've no lawful right to that letter either."

"Possession is nine-tenths of the law!" the imp countered. "Care to try for the last tenth?"

It hovered above Norret, just out of arm's reach. While my brother is tall, he's not that tall. Norret jumped for it while the imp pulled it out of the way, still chortling.

Then I saw my brother get angry.

Norret angry looks a lot like Norret happy, except instead of the corners of his eyes going crinkly, his lips go white. He took off his glove, the fringed one with the ruby on the back, then reached into his pouch and took out the reefclaw pasty. He seasoned it with thieves vinegar and chewed it slowly, his teeth becoming longer and sharper, pointed like an eel's.

Then his arm shot up and his hand—well, I've seen my brother sprout claws like a wolf or a bear, and once even talons like an owl, but that was nothing compared to this. His hand changed, growing and shifting, becoming a giant crawfish pincer with the top half as big and sharp as one of the Final Blades of Galt.

The claw snapped like a guillotine. The imp's head flew one way, the body another. The letter drifted down.

Norret caught it, his hand once again its normal shape. He tucked the letter inside his jacket, put on his unicorn-skin glove, and picked up the imp's body by the tail. He stuck the stinger through the stopper of a corked vial and watched as unholy venom leaked down the sides.

"Guards! Guards!" shrieked the imps on gate.

Norret tossed the imp's body on the ground. It smoked, the little fiend dissolving into ectoplasm and ash as Norret turned to face the hellspawn guards.

"Is there a problem?" asked a lilting voice. The wizard with the rusty house drake on her comb stepped forward. "These gentlemen are with me." Hers was a beautiful smile, sweet as an icon of Shelyn. "They agreed to paint my picture before the Hall of Charms. Isn't that so, gentlemen?"

"Yes," I lied. Norret nodded.

The guard with the improbable horns snorted. "Visitors are supposed to sign in at the front gate."

"You are forgetting that the guest book was found to be a source of contagion." The wizard still smiled her sugary smile. "Please just put down that Arlunia Ehrmande, Lecturer in Charms, has two guests for the afternoon, and try to see that those in my retinue are not molested by stray imps." The house drake on her comb flicked its forked tongue for good measure.

"Of course." The horned hellspawn bowed.

Our rescuer gestured for us to follow.

We accompanied her past a rhododendron hedge and around to where a wide lawn opened onto smaller buildings. She gestured to the left to a graceful structure partially obscured by a copse of trees. All I could see above them was a marble frieze of frolicking satyrs and enticing nymphs. "The Hall of Charms is always lovely in any light, but..." she mused, tapping one finger to her painted lips, "perhaps, today, another might be more apropos...." She indicated the building directly behind her. "You're the artists. What do you think?"

What I thought was that I'd seen the building before—the House of Joy, the Calistrian temple from Isarn. The building's shape was slightly different, but otherwise it seemed a perfect copy. Then I realized that the banners of the former palace displayed the old king's crest, and instead of the usual bevy of Calistrian beauties, the balconies were thronged with pre-revolutionary coquettes, frivolous young noblewomen with impossibly high hairdos, fantastically jeweled gowns, and flirtatious glances strikingly like the sacred harlots.

I blushed and looked away.

"Behold," said the enchantress, "the Hall of Lies...."

All at once she changed, like a chalk painting dissolving in rain. The woman's rich flowing gown became mouse-gray robes, her long red tresses became mouse-brown hair, the cloud of jewels vanished, and her comb became a bunch of pencils stuck in a bun. Even the haughty little house drake became a crumple-eared orange tabby cat.

It had been an illusion, I realized. The Hall of Lies had to be one too, since I didn't think it likely that the Acadamae would just happen to have a building I recognized so well.

The woman gave a lop-sided grin. "I'm not Professor Ehrmande," she admitted, "but I couldn't leave a couple Galtan boys to deal with the hellspawn. My grandfather's from Galt, and you sound just like him." She appeared decades younger than the serene enchantress. "Besides, I saw that spell with the claw. It's wicked good, and I want it."

"It wasn't a spell," Norret admitted.

"Alchemy?" she guessed. "All I'll say is I'm from Daggermark, and it's not a spell yet. Give me the page from your formulary and I'll figure out what's missing." She grinned and put her hand out. "Nella. Nella Cailean. Not the one from the puppet show and no relation to the really famous one either. And not Nellaforia or Nellali, and for Cayden's sake not Nellatirencia. Just plain Nella or Nel, Journeyman Fibber. And this," she said indicating the snub-nosed cat still perched atop her head, its eyes round and bright as two coppers, "is Lady Marcatella, or Marcat for short. You two?"

"Norret Gantier," Norret said, "and this is my brother, Orlin."

"And you have a fabulous estate back in Galt that you'll inherit once the Revolution's over?" She paused, looking at our expressions. "Wait, you're really from Galt? Not just the kids of refugees we've got crawling all over the River Kingdoms?"

I didn't know what to say. Here she was admitting that she not only knew escaped nobles but that she might even be descended from one and had even given her cat a noble title. Then I remembered that I was in Korvosa, not Galt, and the Red Revolution was half a world away.

"We're from Dabril," Norret explained.

Nella paused, glancing at Norret's glove and the ruby on the back. She chuckled. "You read Pintgarthe's Lost Jewels too, eh? Points for making it look believable. You can't imagine the sort of gaudy crap impers try to pass off when they take 'Frauds & Forgeries.' The Hero's Tankard made of solid gold chased with pearls? As if!" She gave us each a hard look. "But what's your scam? Don't try to fib a fibber."

Norret reached into his jacket. "We're just here to deliver a letter."

She looked at the letter and laughed. "You're after Zharmides' lost books too?"

"Lost books?" I was confused. I'd thought we were after a snuffbox.

"What, you really don't know? The imp told you straight: Zharmides is dead. Choked on a fishbone down at the Posh and Turtle. The professors have been accusing each other of stealing his books 'cause everyone wanted his spells. Speaking of which, you owe me one." She put out her hand.

Norret sighed and got out his formulary, his alchemical workbook. He pulled a blank page out of the back, took out his silver pencil, and began copying notes and scraps. It took a while, but at last he folded it and held it up out of Nella's reach. "A question first: Where's Zharmides' body now?"

Nella shrugged. "No great secret. The government's ordered all the dead taken to the plague pits in the Gray District and burned. The Acadamae's torched its dead in the Cube."

"And the ashes?"

She paused. "Sent to the Hall of Whispers for its columbarium."

"Columbarium?" I said.

She nodded, slightly so as to not dislodge her cat, which I realized had no tail. "Dome filled with cinerary urns: books for students, busts for instructors, full-on bronzes for headmasters, and a necromantic circle in middle so you can talk to their spirits, though it works a bit better if the urn has actual ashes in it."

I could already summon spirits–or at least one–without ashes, so I was less impressed than I might be. I heard a giggle, a bit too high-pitched and far too nasty to be Rhodel.

Nella raised her hand, adjusting her bun or her pencils or the cat who was sitting on them, but her pinkie was out at an odd angle and her cat was looking the same direction. I looked where both pointed. Norret did too, adjusting the lenses of his monocle.

Dr. Orontius once told me that three or more imps are called "an impudence." The impudence that was fluttering nearby scattered, spooked.

Norret looked back to Nella. "But Zharmides died outside the Acadamae."

"Right," she said, "and no one's wanting to search the plague carts to see if they've burned his body yet. The conjurers are pissed 'cause, if he'd had an imp, they could summon it and ask for his soul, but Zharmides, just to be contrary, had a homunculus."

"Homunculus?" I repeated, confused.

"Homunculus?" Norret said the same word delightedly.

He and she exchanged looks, and she explained, "It's an artificial imp."

"It's made out of a mandrake root," Norret continued, "and that's not quite accurate."

"It's a foot-high manikin with fangs and bat wings." Nella waved flippantly. "About the only visible difference is that an imp has a poisoned tail, while your classic homunculus has poison teeth."

"So what did Zharmides look like?"

"The spell first?"

Norret handed her the folded paper.

She opened it and almost absentmindedly stepped over to the Hall of Lies and tapped one of the statues flanking the door—that of a cavorting nymphette with precariously tall hair.

The statue's illusion flickered, feminine trading for masculine, youth for age, and hard marble for living flesh, now appearing as a stooped, thin-faced old wizard leaning on a gold-topped cane. The brocade of his waistcoat was woven over and over with stylized Zs, and the same sigil was engraved on the wax seal hanging as fob from his watch chain. I didn't see a snuffbox, but I noted a telltale bulge beneath his pocket square.

Norret took a vial from his bandolier and sipped it, flipped to a blank page in his formulary, took his silver pencil in hand, and began to sketch.

Coming Next Week: Bringing out the dead in Chapter Three of "Thieves Vinegar."

Kevin Andrew Murphy is the author of numerous stories, poems, and novels, as well as a writer for Wild Cards, George R. R. Martin's shared-world anthology line. His previous Pathfinder Tales stories include "The Secret of the Rose and Glove" and "The Perfumer's Apprentice" (also starring Norret and Orlin), and "The Fifth River Freedom," the fourth chapter of Prodigal Sons in the Kingmaker Pathfinder's Journal. For more information, visit his website.

Illustration by Andrew Olson

RPG Superstar 2013 Deadline Reminder

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Have you submitted a wondrous item for RPG Superstar 2013 yet? The deadline to submit your item is one week away! We have hundreds of submissions so far, but there's plenty of room for more—and yours might be exactly what the voters are looking for! Check out my RPG Superstar advice thread for some tips about your item!

The deadline for entries is December 18 at 2 PM Pacific time, and voting begins on December 20!

And remember, this year everyone gets to vote on the wondrous items!

Sean K Reynolds
Designer and RPG Superstar Judge

Sanctioning Adventure Paths for Pathfinder Society

Monday, December 10, 2012

Adventure Paths are the staple item here at Paizo. Since the inception of Pathfinder Society Organized Play, some people have wanted to play the Adventure Paths and receive credit for their Pathfinder Society characters. This is one of the few bullet-list items I have been trying to figure out since I arrived 15 months ago. The release of the Shattered Star Adventure Path and its close ties to the Pathfinder Society made it even more imperative that we find a way to include Adventure Paths in sanctioned Organized Play. We feel it's the right thing to do, both from a business perspective and as a way of making even more material available for event organizers and players who've gone through what we already produced and are chomping at the bit for more.

Over the past few months, we have dedicated a large percentage of our weekly Pathfinder Society meetings to make sure we have the best formula for as seamless a fit as possible in sanctioning Adventure Paths. We could not find an easy solution to allow play through an entire Adventure Path, or to easily port a character in and out of a specific volume of an Adventure Path. With the feedback of our Venture-Officers, we think we have a system that can appeal to the widest audience.

The solution we've landed on is treating one section of a Pathfinder Adventure Path volume like a module. It would generally be played over one to three sessions, and grant 3 XP, 4 PP, and a level-dependent amount of gp. An example you will find on the first Chronicle sheet is from the first installment of Rise of the Runelords, Burnt Offerings. When you play through areas C1 through E10 of Thistletop, your GM may assign you the Chronicle sheet for Burnt Offerings.

If possible, all players must use an existing Pathfinder Society character (without modification) within 1 level of the starting level of the sanctioned content from a Pathfinder Adventure Path. In the example used above for Burnt Offerings, you would use a 3rd-, 4th-, or 5th-level character.

For Adventure Path content below 9th level, if you do not have a character in the correct level range, you may use a Pathfinder Society pregenerated character or the Iconics found in the NPC Codex. If you play a 1st-level pregenerated character, you may apply the credit from that character to a newly created character of your very own, with the gp gained reduced to 1,398 gp (or 699 gp for slow advancement track characters). If you play a non-1st-level pregenerated character, you may apply the credit to your character as soon as she reaches the level of the pregenerated character played. Equipment listed on the pregenerated character sheet may only be sold to clear conditions, such as death, during the play of the module and any remaining wealth does not carry over at the end of the module.

Alternatively, if you are participating in a Pathfinder Adventure Path with an ongoing home group undertaking the entire campaign, you may receive credit for playing the sanctioned portions of the adventure as if you had played a pregenerated character. In this case, GMs running the Adventure Path are not bound to the rules of the Pathfinder Society Organized Play campaign when running the campaign or the sanctioned portion of the adventure. Pathfinder Society characters and characters from an ongoing Adventure Path campaign may not play in the same adventure.

If a character dies and is brought back to life, the GM must determine the rewards for that character. The minimum possible reward is 0 gp, 1 XP, and 1 PP on the medium advancement track or 0 gp, 1/2 XP, and 1/2 PP on the slow advancement track. If a character participates in more than two-thirds of the sanctioned content of an Adventure Path, she should receive the full rewards. GMs and active players are encouraged to hasten the return of any characters waiting to be raised from the dead.

Players who do not complete each game session earn 1/3 fewer gp, 1 fewer XP, and 1 fewer Prestige Point for each session missed. This also applies to players who join later sessions; they receive 1/3 fewer gp, 1 fewer XP, and 1 fewer Prestige Point for each session missed. In both cases, players earn a minimum of 1/3 gp, 1 XP, and 1 Prestige Point.

As always, each player may receive credit for each sanctioned Adventure Path volume once as a player and once as a GM, in either order. Players must accept Chronicle sheets for their characters the first time they play any sanctioned content. A player may replay a sanctioned Adventure Path at the GM’s discretion, but the player may not receive more than one Chronicle sheet per adventure. The only exception is Tier 1–2 sanctioned Adventure Path content. A player may only play a Tier 1–2 sanctioned Adventure Path for credit once with a 2nd-level character, but may use additional 1st-level characters to replay the same content for credit.

Since sanctioned Adventure Paths can be multi-session events, a Pathfinder Society character may not be used in other Pathfinder Society events until the character receives a Chronicle sheet for the Adventure Path volume. GMs are advised to work with players who miss the final session of the module or AP in order for those players to receive their Chronicle sheets.

The data entry system has already been updated to include all 10 of the current sanctioned Adventure Path volumes. Data is entered into our reporting system in the same manner as sanctioned modules. You receive credit toward GM stars the same as sanctioned modules.

The Guide to Pathfinder Society Organized Play, Version 4.3, scheduled for release next month, will update Chapter 6 with all info about sanctioned Adventure Paths and how they work within Pathfinder Society.

Initially, we are only sanctioning Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition and Shattered Star Adventure Paths. If those are well received, we will consider sanctioning other Adventure Paths in the future. You can find the rules for running these in Pathfinder Society Organized Play and the Chronicle sheets on their respective product pages.

We are excited with the solution that this not only expands normal Pathfinder Society play options, but also increases play opportunities past 12th level. We hope that this will also allow players who enjoy our Adventure Paths, but have not yet experienced Pathfinder Society, to give our organized play a try.

We understand there are a lot of very strong opinions among the player base about whether we should sanction Adventure Paths and how they should be implemented. We value your opinions and look forward to reading your thoughts about the exciting new play options we have introduced today. With your input, we can make Pathfinder Society better for all.

Mike Brock
Pathfinder Society Campaign Coordinator

Pathfinder Online and the Emerald Spire

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Our sister company Goblinworks is busy developing Pathfinder Online, a sandbox-style MMORPG game based on the Pathfinder world. In celebration of them raising $200k in the first week of their Kickstarter initiative, and to thank our fans for their continued support, Paizo is thrilled to announce today new reward tiers for the Pathfinder Online fundraiser. These tiers add awesome new content to the Pathfinder world, we're sure you'll agree!

The biggest news, literally and figuratively, is the launch of the Emerald Spire Superdungeon, what will become the largest official Pathfinder RPG dungeon ever published. The Emerald Spire Superdungeon includes 32 pages of source material detailing the area around Fort Inevitable, one of the starter towns in the Pathfinder Online game. It will also add at least four, 8-page dungeon levels, designed by Pathfinder superstars Richard L. Baker, F. Wesley Schneider, Wolfgang Baur and James L. Sutter. The Superdungeon will be accompanied by the Emerald Spire Dungeons Flip-Mat Multi-Pack, a set of Pathfinder Flip-Mats presenting each dungeon level in tabletop miniatures scale.

As the Kickstarter funding grows, so does the Superdungeon. When the $250k sub-goal is met, I will come out of game design semi-retirement to add an original dungeon level to the book. As each $100k sub-goal is met thereafter, new levels by superstar designers will be added. By the time the Kickstarter reaches its $1 million funding goal, the Emerald Spire Superdungeon will encompass 12 dungeon levels in 128 pages, accompanied by 6 double-sided Flip-Mats in the Emerald Spire Dungeons Flip-Mat Multi-Pack. But it won't stop there! As additional stretch goals are met, the Emerald Spire will become even larger, and the number of Flip-Mats will grow.

Also, a new RPG Print Pack has been added to the Kickstarter reward tier. Backers at any pledge level can get the RPG Print Pack for an additional $100 (plus $15 shipping outside of the U.S.). The RPG Print Pack includes a hardcover print edition of the Emerald Spire Superdungeon, which will feature an exclusive Kickstarter cover by Wayne Reynolds; a print edition of the Emerald Spire Dungeons Flip-Mat Multi-Pack; a print edition of the Pathfinder Tales novel The Crusader Road by Richard L. Baker, and an Emerald Spire Campaign Cards game accessory.

New WizKids Pathfinder Battles Miniatures will be added to the Pathfinder Online Kickstarter as rewards for all of the Crowdforger backer levels, which start at $100. The miniatures will all be drawn from the Emerald Spire Superdungeon, starting with the Bloodbriar Goblin Raider. A second miniature, the Shadowfire Elemental, will be unlocked when the Kickstarter reaches $300K, with additional miniatures revealed for each $100K raised. This means that starting at $250,000, a new reward will be offered for every $50K reached, alternating between new dungeon levels for the Emerald Spire Superdungeon and new Pathfinder Battles prepainted plastic miniatures!

With the success of this Kickstarter, Pathfinder Online is targeted for a mid-2014 Beta. As stretch goals are reached beyond the base funding level, this target date will move up as more resources are brought to bear on getting Pathfinder Online finished.

The Pathfinder Online Kickstarter Campaign is in progress and concludes at 2:00 GMT on January 14, 2013. We look forward to your being involved in the development of Pathfinder Online – the voice of the fans will be at the core of what we do, and we thank you for your support.

Lisa Stevens
CEO, Paizo Publishing, LLC
COO, Goblinworks, Inc.

Thieves Vinegar

by Kevin Andrew Murphy

Chapter One: The Old Quay

"Observe, Orlin." Norret scooped a vial of purple cabbage water from the leaves I was blanching for the afternoon's meal. "Note how the introduction of even a weak acid transmutes the deepest amethyst to brilliant fuchsia...." He added a drop of vinegar and swirled it.

The dark purple did indeed change to bright pink, but I'd already seen this reaction when he'd ruined half my store of violet syrup, oblivious to the facts that sugar was dear in Isarn and violets troublesome to pick.

High on the kitchen wall, one of the servant's bells jangled—the one with the wire running to the Primrose Suite, occupied by Dr. Orontius, a kindly old wizard and one of our best boarders.

A whiff of ectoplasm manifested—an example of ethereal, the seventh scent, as Norret had taught me—mixed with the faint odor of roses.

Some people, when they returned from Pharasma's Boneyard, could see its denizens. Others heard ghostly voices. Me? I was raised in Dabril, famous for its perfumes and gloves, so I only smelled the dead and sometimes felt their touch.

The violet syrup levitated. It emptied itself into a jug of water, dying it the same color, then changed this to pink as a cut lemon squeezed itself over it.

"You see?" Norret beamed. "Even Rhodel can work a litmus test!"

My ghostly spirit guide also knew how to make pink lemonade. "Go stall." I handed him the jug. "I'll bring lunch up as soon as I can."

As Norret left, words appeared on the kitchen slate, written in a woman's hand: Careful what you wish for.

"I know." I had hoped that, after our last adventure, my brother would stop treating me like a child. I had not expected that he, a grown man, absolved of this responsibility, would start acting like a child himself. But it was the case.

Dr. Orontius is nice enough—but a wizard is always plotting something.

It was also the case that the Revolutionary Council, rulers of Galt, had appointed Norret and me proprietors of the Eglantine House, home to some of the nation's finest scholars and magical researchers. They paid rent but expected meals. The kitchen garden provided fruits and vegetables, a few hens provided eggs, and an enchanted horn spoon provided bland unicorn bone porridge. I had become good at hiding it in other dishes. This afternoon's luncheon was cabbage rolls stuffed with "horsemeat."

What would have really helped were salt and spices.

Fortunately, Dr. Orontius had his own, or at least he could wave his fingers in the air, mumble some ancient syllables, and make a sprinkling of salt materialize over his food, followed by pepper. This he did as soon as I arrived with the tray, then sampled a bite from a silver fork. "Ah, yes, now it is perfect."

Norret adjusted the complicated series of jeweler's loupes and lead crystal lenses attached to the monocle he'd taken to wearing in place of his old eyepatch. For reasons only my brother could understand—sympathy, antipathy, planetary resonance—lead both helped divination and blocked it. This included the sense I'd picked up from some unicorn horn and a drop of philosopher's mercury, which let me detect poisons. Norret, after an alarming and thankfully temporary experiment with eyedrops that let him look through walls, had switched his optical inquiries to lens grinding and tinted glass. He'd been trying to peep through the veil into Pharasma's realm so we could see Rhodel. He still hadn't discovered the right combination of lenses to see the spirit world, but had managed the arcane spectrum.

"Is that phenomenon accomplished by means of conjuration or spontaneous generation?" he asked Orontius.

"An astute metaphysical question," said Dr. Orontius, "but a true wizard never reveals his secrets." His old blue eyes twinkled, the same color as his robes and pointed hat. "At least not without receiving another secret in trade. Perhaps that formula for 'thieves vinegar' you mentioned?"

"Not in exchange for such a trifle," said Norret. "An alchemist has his secrets as well."

"Just so," Dr. Orontius agreed, turning to me. "Your brother claims to have a formula for a fabulous antiplague, a sovereign preventative for all manner of ills. As Desna would have it, a plague currently ravages Korvosa. Zharmides, an old classmate from my Acadamae days, has recently perished therein. I desire a keepsake to remember him by, a little ivory snuffbox of which he was fond."

"Can you describe it?" Norret asked him.

"Why describe when one can simply show?" Dr. Orontius muttered arcane phrases and made mystical passes with both hands, opening one to reveal a tiny ivory chest resting on his palm. "This is merely a memory, so look but do not touch." The wizard's memory sharpened, scrimshawed lions and lilies appearing on the sides, little clasps and fittings in matching gold. It floated in the air, tumbling like a bubble, revealing a gilded sigil engraved on the bottom, looking like a stylized Z.

My brother took out his formulary and a silver pencil. The talent Norret lacks for cooking he makes up for with drawing and scientific illustration. Soon he had a passable silverpoint architectural diagram of the snuffbox.

"I expect it should be among the effects to be interred with his body." The wizard gestured with his fork and the vision of the snuffbox vanished, quickly followed by his last bite of cabbage roll. "Whether that will be in Korvosa or with his family in Alkenstar, I cannot say. But I'm certain there should be time for formal viewing at the Acadamae itself." He produced another snuffbox, this one of paueliel burl, the sacred "first trees" of the elves. Norret had taught me how to identify paueliel along with a dozen other woods with interesting alchemical properties. A matching traveler's trunk sat against one wall, swirled with whorls like owl eyes, and I swear, I had once seen it blink at me.

Muco, an actual owl and Dr. Orontius's familiar, perched atop a bust of Nethys at one end of the mantel. He swiveled his head around backward and blinked at me for real.

Dr. Orontius merely opened the smaller box, a whorl on the lid forming yet another eye with the iris wide as an O, and took a pinch of snuff in each nostril. The snuffbox disappeared back up his sleeve, replaced with a handkerchief. "I shall give you a letter for Zharmides." He blew his nose decisively. "While he of course will not be able to read it, being dead, it should at least gain you admittance to the funeral."

Where my brother would pick a dead wizard's pocket. Unless Dr. Orontius's "friend" were already interred, in which case Norret would think nothing of burgling the dead.

After all, he'd already dug up my grave. Not that I was complaining.

"He's not going alone," I stated plainly.

"Oh, surely—" said Dr. Orontius.

I cut him off. "Surely something can go wrong."

Norret only smiled with his eyes, but the one without the monocle was almost dancing with amusement. "Orlin is growing up."

"Quite," sniffed Dr. Orontius. "But if this 'thieves vinegar' is as efficacious as purported, there should be no risk to yourselves."

I had already died once of a fever, and while I had been brought back to life, I had no desire to repeat the experience. That said, it was not my brother's alchemy I was worried about.

"As Desna would also have it, tomorrow is an execution day." Dr. Orontius stood, straightening his robes and his beard. "Your boarders will be procuring viands elsewhere, and since you two have no other duties, shall we away now?"

I paused. "Wait. Isn't Korvosa rather far away? Outside of Galt?"

"In Varisia," Dr. Orontius supplied helpfully, "but really, it's no further away than that picture." He gestured to a wall crowded with old paintings. He'd shown me his collection many times, telling tales of his travels in the days before the Revolution: The Grand Opera House of Egorian, capital of devil-haunted Cheliax; or The Warlock's Walk in Nex, parade ground for its arcane arclords.

His finger indicated a smoke-yellowed painting up in one corner. A small brass plaque attached to the frame identified it as The Old Quay In Korvosa. "Are you familiar with a metaphysical process known as 'teleportation'?"

∗∗∗

I was not familiar with teleportation before Dr. Orontius cast his spell. Afterwards? I never wished to experience it again. Unfortunately, if we ever wanted to see our beloved Galt, we would rejoin him on the morrow at this spot when he would transport us back to Isarn.

I was also wondering if we'd traveled in time as well as space, for the sun hung lower in the east than it had in Isarn, but before I could ask, Dr. Orontius pronounced some ritual phrase and vanished with an inrush of air and an audible pop.

Norret and I were left on the quay, a very old dock, even older than the one in Dr. Orontius's antique painting. As I looked down at it, I realized we were standing at the same spot where the painting had been made.

"An excellent illustration of sympathetic magic," Norret remarked.

He wasn't smiling, but the corners of his eyes crinkled. He knew the pun he'd made, but wasn't going to admit it.

"But which branch? Homeopathic or contagious?"

"Homeopathic," I decided. "The Law of Similarity governs a wizard using a painting to go where it shows."

"But wouldn't it also be contagious?" My brother waved a gloved hand. "Surely it was painted from this exact vista."

The boards of the quay were spotted with pigment. A short distance away were two easels with artists behind them. No pun intended, we'd teleported to the most picturesque spot in Korvosa.

"Both then. It falls under the Law of Contact too."

The Law of Contact, or Contagion, stated that things that had once been in contact remained in contact. That meant that anything that touched evil could become evil, so if you put on a ring that had been to the Worldwound, for example, you could be possessed by a demon. If you touched something that had been touched by a plague victim? You could catch the plague.

It was alarming to think about. Before, I had thought that sickness was carried by tiny pixies so small as to be invisible, who flew over the river from Kyonin on mosquitoes and shot people with poison darts. At least that's what the doctor told my mother. While I'm sure she put out a bowl of milk and honey to make them take my fever away, that obviously didn't work.

Norret's solution, rather than milk and honey to bribe capricious fey, was vinegar to drive them off. Thieves vinegar was perfumed with a bouquet of magical herbs–sage, mint, tansy, thyme, rosemary, lavender, wormwood, and rue–but it took an alchemist to know how to decoct them so what you got was an antiplague instead of salad dressing. Besides driving away evil pixies, thieves vinegar was said to ward off fever spirits, purge foul humours, and repel the flies that were the eyes of Urgathoa, at least if you believed the nursery rhyme:

I met a pale lady in a tattered spattered gown.

Her hair was black. Her face was white. Her dress was red and brown.

She said the flies were all her eyes and she saw near and far.

I drove her off with salad and a splash of vinegar!

That was a lot to expect from salad dressing.

That said, I had faith in my brother. He had faith in Citizen Cedrine who'd taught him the formula. She in turn had had faith in the graverobbers who'd used the perfumed vinegar to safely plunder plague pits and battlefields before they were sent to the guillotine for their crimes.

We'd washed with it, gargled with it, and for good measure carried hollowed-out pomander oranges studded with cloves, wreathed in frilly ribbons, and filled with sponges soaked with thieves vinegar. "Carried" is probably not the right word. They were floating, and not just because Rhodel was playing with them or because I'd forgot and reached for something with my soul's hand instead of my regular hand like I sometimes did. They were floating because Norret's only sponge came from a deceased will-o'-wisp, which he'd prepared specially so that it would retain its ability to float. It glowed, too, or at least would come nightfall.

So there we were, standing on the oldest quay in Korvosa with pomander oranges circling our heads.

Strange as it may sound, we were not the strangest people there. Two men walked down the quay wearing perfectly ordinary tricorne hats, but below them they had the faces of storks. Occasionally they stopped at a shop, looked in, and marked an X on the door with chalk. At first I was thinking they had stork men in Korvosa like I'd heard lived in Osirion, but then I realized that they were wearing masks.

"Plague doctors," Norret explained. "Those are doctors' masks."

"Wouldn't storks make more sense for midwives?"

"If they wore them for fashion, yes," explained Norret, "but the beaks hold herbs that work like our pomanders. Powdermaster Davin once helped us rig up similar masks for the battlefield. But he'd been to Korvosa before the Revolution and said it's illegal to wear a doctor's mask if you're not a doctor. Besides, we don't want to see patients. We just need to find Zharmides the Godless—or his body. He is, or at least was, a professor at the Acadamae."

"Where's the Acadamae?"

It was a reasonable question, and I was completely skipping the fact that I'd missed the honorific and "Zharmides the Godless" didn't sound like anyone you wanted to deal with, even if he was dead.

Especially if he was dead. I didn't know what the gods did with atheists, but it couldn't be pleasant. And I'm saying this as someone who met a couple of them.

Gods, I mean. Not atheists. Or, if I hadn't met them, at least I dreamed about Shelyn and Pharasma talking about me when I was dying, so it sort of counts.

"I think it's on the top of a hill." Norret glanced around. Two hills were visible in the city, one nearer, one farther. "Let me ask."

He went over to one of the artists while I stood there feeling somewhere between stupid and nervous. Apart from that time when I died, I'd never been outside of Galt, and while Korvosa wasn't as grand as Isarn, it was still far grander than Dabril. And there was a plague, so I assumed many folk were staying in.

"Reefclaw pasty! Hot 'n tasty!"

Even plague couldn't stop barkers. A young woman wearing a patchwork scarf waved to me. Her booth's sign read Meatclaw's Feast! It showed some horrible monster with the front half of a lobster and the back half of an eel, a giant wooden claw grasping a doll in the shape of a terrified fisherman.

Behind the young woman was an older one tending a cauldron of boiling oil. She used a wire mesh scoop to fish out balls of fried meat that looked like the salmon croquettes. One of them floated in the air, took a second to dip itself in what looked like cameline sauce, and popped itself in my open mouth.

I didn't know whether to thank Rhodel or be annoyed at her, so I just ate it. The sauce did taste like cameline, with cinnamon and nutmeg, but with mint in place of the usual ginger. The pasties tasted like crayfish-and-lamprey tarts.

"For eight silver shields, I'll owe you three more pasties and another spoon of thileu bark sauce." I glanced at the menu slate. It seemed spice was as dear in Korvosa as it was in Isarn, but meat was cheaper, even if it was monster meat.

I took out a gold minted by one of Galt's previous Revolutionary Councils and tossed it to her. The young woman scrutinized it and shrugged. She handed me a paper cone with three more pasties, a waxed paper cup of dipping sauce, and a couple of the local silvers which did indeed have shields on them.

I went back over to Norret, who was talking with one of the artists. "And they still make Newby Violet? Excellent!" He noted the reefclaw pasties and the dipping sauce. He took one, sampling both. "Thileu bark? Some interesting alchemical properties there. And... reefclaw?" He glanced over at the sign. "That could come in useful."

He took a second pasty and munched it. Then he confiscated the last pasty and the dipping sauce, placing the pasty in a pouch and the sauce in a stoppered vial. "Intriguing stuff, thileu bark. Only the Varisians know the trick of harvesting it." He chewed, considering. "Said to be one of the few spices potent enough to be tasted by the dead."

"Did you find the Acadamae?"

"Oh, yes, it's on that hill over there." He pointed to the farther one. "But I also found out where we could buy a map."

My brother had that dreamy look he sometimes gets. He led us up a couple streets and around a corner. There he stopped and stared with an expression like he'd seen Shelyn combing out her rainbow-streaked hair.

I saw a sagging old shop with a quilt of little diamond-paned windows displaying pots and jars, easels and brushes, and a signboard that looked like an artist's palette sized for a giant. The multicolored splotches spelled out Hessim, Newby, & Sage Paint Manufactory.

"Powdermaster Davin told me about this place."

I followed my brother inside. The shop reeked of turpentine and linseed oil. And poison. My unicorn senses were almost overwhelmed: arsenic in the familiar Isarn green, quicksilver in the Tian red, and white lead in the flake white. That was everywhere, in gallon jars and penny pots and covering all the pre-painted canvases.

They also, indeed, had maps, whimsical illustrated ones with points of interest drawn to a larger scale. But the pigments and poisons were everything an alchemist could dream of, which explained my brother's glazed expression. "I want your deluxe set. The one with everything—including the special pigments..."

Three old men stood behind the counter. When I say "old," I mean you could picture them patting liches on the head and calling them "sonny." When I say "men," I'm meaning men shorter than me, like tall no-nonsense gnomes. On the wall behind the counter hung three masterful portraits labeled with helpful brass plaques: Hessim, Newby, and Sage.

Sage spoke first: "You couldn't afford it."

Hessim spoke second: "Who told you to ask?"

Newby simply took off his thick spectacles, polished them with a velvet pocket square, and named a figure that would have made Abadar check his vault.

Norret did not drop his monocle. He reached into his pack and pulled out a beautiful cut crystal flask that had formerly belonged to Dabril's duchess and had until recently held honeysuckle absolute. Now it was glowing with an eerie light. "Perhaps we could work out a trade."

Coming Next Week: Adventures at the Acadamae with Norret and Orlin in Chapter Two of "Thieves Vinegar."

Kevin Andrew Murphy is the author of numerous stories, poems, and novels, as well as a writer for Wild Cards, George R. R. Martin's shared-world anthology line. His previous Pathfinder Tales stories include "The Secret of the Rose and Glove" and "The Perfumer's Apprentice" (also starring Norret and Orlin), and "The Fifth River Freedom," the fourth chapter of Prodigal Sons in the Kingmaker Pathfinder's Journal. For more information, visit his website.

Illustration by Carmen Cianelli

Are you ready to be a Superstar?

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

It's time for RPG Superstar 2013! Every year, Paizo holds an annual open-call RPG design competition to give the best and brightest aspiring game designers a chance to show the world their talent. This year's winner will receive a contract to write a Pathfinder Module to be published by Paizo.

Previous winning modules include Christine Schneider's Clash of the Kingslayers, Neil Spicer's Realm of the Fellnight Queen, Matthew Goodall's Cult of the Ebon Destroyers, Sam Zeitlin's The Midnight Mirror, and Mike Welham's upcoming Doom Comes to Dustpawn. We can't wait to find an exciting new designer to join their ranks as this year's champion!

Even if you don't win the grand prize, RPG Superstar offers a number of different routes to getting your name on a Paizo product. Runners-up will have their work critiqued by industry leaders, and the three final-round runners-up will earn a contract to write a Pathfinder Society Scenario, a downloadable adventure sanctioned for play in Paizo's worldwide Pathfinder Society mega-campaign. Staff and audience favorite entries from RPG Superstar's earlier rounds may show up in Paizo publications as well.

Getting noticed in RPG Superstar might be the start of a long-term professional relationship with Paizo as one of our regular freelancers. Developer Rob McCreary got his start with Paizo as a finalist in the first RPG Superstar. Even though he didn't win the final challenge, his creativity and talent earned him a staff position as one of the creative leads behind our flagship Pathfinder Adventure Path line.

This year's competition begins today with an open call to design an original wondrous item. For the first time in RPG Superstar history, initial entries will be judged by Pathfinder fans worldwide. Tell us about your magical treasure in 300 words or less by December 18, 2012, and you might just have started your RPG design career! The top 32 will be picked by our guest judges and staff, as well as last year's RPG Superstar finalists, Steve Miller, Mike Welham, Tom Phillips, and James Olchak.

Even if you're not interested in competing, you can participate by voting. Stay tuned for an update on how to help us choose our first-round finalists. See paizo.com/rpgsuperstar for more details, a complete RPG Superstar calendar, and rules and instructions for submitting Round 1 entries.

So loosen up your creative muscles and start crafting a wondrous item, and get ready to be the next RPG Superstar!

Monkeying Around

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Late last week, we posted up a few quick FAQ issues to resolve some problems involving the monk. There has been a lot of discussion on the monk on the boards, and while it has taken us a while to come up with some solutions, we have made a few simple changes to address these concerns. I wanted to take this blog post to review these changes and to announce a few more.

Flurry of Blows: We have decided to reverse a previous ruling (that came from this very blog) that stated you needed to use two weapons when using flurry of blows (or a combination of weapon attacks and unarmed strikes). You can now make all of your attacks with just one weapon, or substitute any number of these attacks with an unarmed strike. Of course, if you have a pair of weapons and want to keep using both of them, that still works as well.

Ki Pool: Monks typically have problems bypassing DR with their unarmed strikes, forcing them to rely on weapons to deal with many forms of DR. We have decided to add a new ability to the Ki Pool monk class feature. At 7th level, a monk's unarmed strikes count as cold iron and silver for the purposes of overcoming damage reduction, so long as he has at least 1 point remaining in his ki pool.

Amulet of Mighty Fists: On Friday, we posted up a FAQ that stated that the enhancement bonus from an amulet of mighty fists does allow natural attacks and unarmed strikes to bypass damage reduction if the enhancement bonus is at least +3 (as with other weapons, see page 562 of the Core Rulebook). In addition, we have decided to adjust the price of the amulet of mighty fists. The new prices are as follows: 4,000 gp (+1), 16,000 gp (+2), 36,000 gp (+3), 64,000 gp (+4), 100,000 gp (+5). Accordingly, the costs to create these amulets are also reduced to the following: 2,000 gp (+1), 8,000 gp (+2), 18,000 gp (+3), 32,000 gp (+4), 50,000 gp (+5). This makes this item priced a bit more competitively for monks and creatures that rely on natural attacks. I should note that this change will be reflected in future printings of the Core Rulebook, Ultimate Equipment, and the NPC Codex.

Well, that about wraps up our current thoughts on the monk. Thanks to all the folks on the boards that provided us with feedback on this class.

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer

The Path Before You

Monday, December 3, 2012

As we enter the dark winter of Pathfinder Society's Year of the Risen Rune, campaign HQ is already thinking ahead to the warming months of spring that still seem so distant. Just last week, I assigned scenarios for April, and we're in the process of outlining and approving the May scenarios to be commissioned in the coming weeks. Since the season's endgame is quickly being decided, I thought it might be a good time to give folks a little preview of where the season is set to go from here, what challenges Pathfinders are bound to face, and what changes look likely based on our reporting data.

What follows includes spoilers for the remainder of the season, so if you don't like knowing anything until your PC busts down the door, the rest of this blog might not be for you. Fair warning and all that.

First, we're now two scenarios into the core Year of the Risen Rune metaplot, and PCs who've been through either The Cultist's Kiss or Feast of Sigils already know that the stage is set for the season to end with a confrontation with a waking runelord, and that's exactly what's going to happen. Over the next few months, the Pathfinder Society will race with the cult of Lissala to uncover the components needed to bring a runelord back from his millennial slumber, and members of all factions are going to need to work together to prevent this terrible evil from returning to the world.

Later this month, a prominent faction head is going to need the entire society's help, and characters from 1st to 9th levels will be able to assist in tracking the missing NPC down and ultimately deciding if he or she is rescued from certain death or written out of the campaign. We'll be looking very closely at the early reporting data from Pathfinder Society Scenario #4–13: Fortress of the Nail as a result, and the sooner you play that scenario, the more likely your actions will be to directly affect the campaign world.

Along similar lines, judging by reported data since Gen Con, it looks like two factions are in serious jeopardy of being written out of the campaign. We've known for some time that several factions were struggling, but looking at play results over the last few months means that some major changes may be coming. We've only got another month or two before any faction-eliminating scenarios would need to be written, so there's not much longer for folks to turn things around for their ailing factions. I recommend playing often and doing your best to accomplish both your primary and secondary missions with characters of your favorite factions in the next two months. Because after we change course to reflect a faction's failures or successes, we won't be able to go back and change things.

Sometime next month, look for another letter from each of the faction heads to report on their respective factions' successes and failures thus far in the season, and to get an idea of whether or not your favorite faction might be in desperate need of help. If you didn't receive the last faction goal email over the summer, make sure to set your privacy settings to accept non-transactional emails from Paizo so you don't miss the next one.

With the holidays coming up, it's likely many people will be traveling to see family or staying home to enjoy some much needed time off from work. In either case, there's a Pathfinder Society game happening close to wherever you'll be, so make sure to check the Pathfinder Society events page to find a game between fruitcakes and egg nog. And hope Santa gives you lots of natural 20s when you're playing.

Mark Moreland
Developer

P.S. Some folks on the messageboards requested we show off some NPC headshot art here so they can make handouts with them and share them under the Community Use Policy. That's what the art is from/for. Merry Christmas!