Homebrew Special: Some Cubes to Die For

Thursday, September 13, 2018

In this installment of Homebrew Special, we're graced by Darren Rigby, who might be the best calligrapher and font creator I've ever met. It doesn't surprise me that in his gaming life, his meticulous and creative spirit shines through. In the spirit of his home country's Canada geese, take a gander.—Mike

I brought the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game to a puzzle convention that Mike, Chad, Tanis, and Gaby were attending. I timidly showed them one of the upgrades I've made for the game, and they said I ought to write something for the homebrew blog. The thing is, they didn't see just how crazy obsessive I've become about improving my game experience.

First, the thing I showed off was pretty simple. I got some craft store wooden cubes, colored them with markers (Name a brand of markers. Yes, that one.) and labelled them with card types. We use these cubes during play to track what's left in each location. Since the number of each card type in a location is usually no secret, we place the appropriate number of cubes by each location deck. We separate banes and boons so we can see at a glance how bad a location is. Every time we remove a card from the deck, the corresponding cube goes with it.

This all seems perfectly sane. So far.

Some compromises had to be made on color. The brand of markers doesn't have a whole lot of choices for grey, so armors are darkened to black, and items are green. There are light blues, but if you use them on wood, they come out green again, so blessings become beige. I have a lot of cubes, but if we ever run out of one type, then the purple Extra cubes come into play, and if there are particular cards to track, they're made silver Special cubes.

Until we know which location has the villain, all those unknown bad guys round to henchman red. If the villain escapes, incoming cards are accompanied by those dark red/beige checkered cubes until we know whether they're a blessing or the villain.

This is all pretty normal—after all, the electronic Pathfinder Adventures game does the same thing. The idea of using cubes to track things, though, seemed like a good one, and could be used to solve another problem. On a check that has a number of blessings and powers and effects modifying the result, it can be hard to remember them all. The answer? Moar cubes!

The good, the bad, and the pretty numbers.

Blue buff cubes add to the result, and red debuff cubes are evidence of the check getting harder. The "- hexagon" red cube subtracts one from the check for every die used.

These work great, but having a little pile of cubes next to a location can be difficult to work with, especially if you move the locations around to be closer to the player whose character is exploring them. Guess I better make LEGO trays to hold everything!

What else are you going to do with your cubes?

There's a rack on the back to hold the location card, token cards for any characters at that location, and if the check to close involves facing a henchman, we can keep it there as well. The cubes happen to be the same size as a 2x2 brick, so creating slots for them was easy, and there's a brick keeping the location deck tipped up to assist in drawing a card.

From there I started looking at solutions for keeping my character's hand and dice contained, since there's only so much table space to go around. That's why I made a rack for my cards, and a dice holder.

Sliding farther down from 'healthy interest' to 'back away slowly'.

The rack is a baseplate sandwich, with my character deck on the lower right, discards on the upper right, buried cards on the left, and a bonus space on the lower left in case my cards ever need to do some weird thing Lone Shark thinks of. Displayed cards can stand up at the back. In that first photo you can see the character card I made so you can check things off. And the dice holder… holds dice. (By type!)

The one thing that I've made that I'm the most proud of is this rack for organizing cards that we've dealt with during play so I can quickly reset the box after the session.

Note the red and gold design on the front.

The same color changes that affected the cubes go into the rack. Location cards go into the brown slot in the back for end-of-scenario clean-up, and the white slot is for any Basics or Elites that are about to leave the game.

Finally, the one thing I have to support the game that I treasure the most isn't for playing but for storage, and it was created by my husband.

Isn't a roll like this the way everyone carries their tools?

Each type of die gets its own pocket, and so do the buff and debuff cubes. The flap at the top folds down over the openings to the pockets, and the tie holds everything inside. It puts the finishing touch on packing all this gear together into a couple of neat containers so it can all be carried or put away with a minimum of fuss.

I'm still looking for ways to improve or add to what I have. I hope some of this inspires you to trick out your game.

Darren Rigby

Homebrew Special: Emerald Legacy

Friday, July 20, 2018

Francesco "Doppelschwert" Silvestri tackles the latest Homebrew Special challenge with his new Pathfinder Adventure Card Gamecampaign: Emerald Legacy. He totally had me at "Sharkomancer."—Mike

Now that Ultimate Combat and Ultimate Equipment are out, so Hayato and Reiko are available as playable characters, I'm finally ready to proudly present my latest longtime project: Emerald Legacy, a new homebrew Adventure Path for Skull & Shackles!

Before we get into specifics, let's start with a short rundown of the setting. In the prologue, you start in Absalom and are hired as mercenaries by the Tian noble Hiro Yamashi to join his expedition to the Shackles, where his brother Masao has fled after stealing a family heirloom. In order to get the heirloom back, you'll chase Masao and his henchmen through several exotic locations, discovering his plans along the way. Once you find out what he's up to, will you be able to stop him in time? I certainly hope so!

When I started this project, I first looked back on all the experience I gathered while working on my first homebrew AP Revenge of the Wicked. While I'm very happy with how RotW turned out, I have to admit that setting up the box is rather complicated, so I wanted to improve on this aspect in Emerald Legacy. At the same time, I wanted to change a lot of things to give the set my own spin and try out some new ideas.

The one thing from RotW I was absolutely sure that I wanted to keep was the great appearance of the cards made by Ludwig Orsingher, and so I asked him to help me out with this project again. Luckily, he agreed, and he made both the awesome logo as well as the great realizations of all the custom cards for Emerald Legacy, a contribution for which I want to express my deep gratitude.

With that said, let's have a look at what Emerald Legacy has in store for you!

Your ship is your upgradeable base of operations.

I like it when RPGs give you the option to have your own upgradeable base—a place for your heroes to return to between adventures. In the RPG version of Skull & Shackles, you can earn your own island; it's also a central mechanic in the popular Kingmaker AP. For Emerald Legacy, I decided early on that I wanted a base to be important both in the narrative as well as mechanically. My solution for this was to make the Shirofune, an upgradeable ship that grows alongside you during the course of the AP. (You might think that the concept of a floating fortress is a fantasy trope, but warships like these were actually used in Japan during the 16th and 17th century.)

Note: The artwork on the Shirofune card above was done by myself, and is not covered by the Paizo Community Use Policy.

My idea was to set up the Shirofune much like a character. Instead of skills, though, there are ship facilities, which produce cards from an upgrade box you can customize yourself with 3 class decks, another AP, or Skull & Shackles itself. This allows you to give the set a distinct flavor by adding your favorite expansions. (The Monk Class Deck and the Ultimate Combat and Ultimate Equipment decks make excellent candidates for a Tian theme.) From a narrative point of view, your choice of upgrade box corresponds to the people that were hired to work on the ship.

And instead of a cards list, there's a list of cargo that you get to add as plunder to your ship at the beginning of each scenario! These cards can be used as an income for boons, as payment for the cards from the upgrade box, or to use the ship card's power (discussed below).

You'll never walk alone.

For once, no one expects you to save the world all by yourself.

While your party plays an essential role in the story of Emerald Legacy, you're not the only ones working toward your goal of stopping Hiro's brother Masao. Important NPCs will regularly help you out as cohorts, and when everything else fails, you can resort to calling the Order of the Raging Wave to help you out! This seafaring monk order has travelled with Hiro from Tian Xia to support him on his quest, and their leader Umiko Sensei acts as your mentor during the journey.

In exchange for a little donation in the form of a plunder card, they will temporarily replace your role card, gladly taking care of your problems for you. This role card is the third step of turning your ship into a character by having its crew earn power feats. Over the course of the AP, you can have them learn all kinds of useful tricks to cover the weaknesses of your party. You could very well play through Emerald Legacy with 1d4 in Wisdom without the need to despair at the first sight of the infamous Siren Caller!

You have rivals, and there are sidequests connected to them.

Instead of pirates vs. ninjas, it will be you vs. pirates AND ninjas!

For this AP, I thought it would be cool to fight against a rivaling party with opposing goals. While you are fighting on Hiro's side, his brother Masao has a band of loyal followers that you will meet several times throughout your journey. To keep them fresh and relevant, I made them veterans and introduced villain feats, which grant them additional powers over time. Since you get to choose those powers, you can start with the least disruptive powers for your party, but you will eventually be forced to make what I hope to be hard choices. Additionally, each villain has a theme that will influence the rules of the scenario they appear in. For example, there is usually a scenario rule related to examining cards when Kaze is around. By encountering these villains several times, it was possible to flesh them out more, and I didn't need to make a huge number of custom cards you would use just once.

In Emerald Legacy, sidequests are the only way to earn loot cards, and they have minor and major consequences for later parts of the AP and the ending of the story! I've introduced 2 sidequests for each villain, giving you even more opportunities to interact with them.

You'll get into all kind of crazy situations.

Note: The artwork on the Shrine of Sealing card above was done by myself, and is not covered by the Paizo Community Use Policy.

I'll openly admit that when I make my homebrew adventure paths, I often try to incorporate my favorite mechanics from the official material, which you can consider as my love letter to the game. In particular, Mummy's Mask had a big influence on many of Emerald Legacy's cards and scenarios.

Illustration by Ben Wootten.

However, I also try to come up with new mechanics and ways to make the game feel different from what you are used to. Emerald Legacy contains a new type of scenario that I like to think of as "Showdown Scenarios." These all use the Shrine of Sealing, a location where characters are not allowed to start. No matter what you do, the villains will eventually all end up in the Shrine of Sealing, and you need to close all other locations before you can win. Assuming you win the fight against a villain, it's actually better not to temporarily close any locations in these scenarios, which has a major impact on how you can approach them.

Here's a short list of my favorite 5 features from other Emerald Legacy scenarios, in no particular order:

• There is a self-proclaimed "sharkomancer" that lets you roll on a shark table.
• You can reunite a dinosaur with its lost baby (or keep it for yourself—I'm not judging).
• There is an anti-magic zone that your casters won't like very much.
• You can encounter a tribe of grindylows living inside of Hirgenzosk.
• Depending on how you play, you may or may not encounter the guy to the right.

If you want to try out Emerald Legacy, you can find the free PDF and further information in this thread. I'm still updating the PDF as well, so any feedback is welcome!

I hope you enjoy the AP and can use it to scratch your Tian Xia itch until the day we can have an official card game version of Jade Regent :) Until next time!

Francesco Silvestri (Doppelschwert)
Homebrew Scenario Designer & Sword Enthusiast

Homebrew Special: The Deck of Many Dividers

Friday, June 29, 2018

Today's Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Homebrew Special blog is by Richard Noble (Brother Tyler), about a homebrew of a different kind. Richard wanted to organize his PACG cards, so he came up with some dividers and other tidbits to facilitate storage and gameplay. They're pretty boss, sez me. —Mike

As our gaming group's facilitator, it falls to me to control the game box, drawing cards and returning them to the box during our PACG sessions. It's like being the banker in a popular real estate game, but without the benefit of being able to skim money from the top.

Has something like the following ever happened to you?

With the town guard searching for Pillbug Podiker, Valeros offers to stand post at the city gate. Recalling a large chest in which the guardsmen kept confiscated contraband, he hopes to find some useful weapon. Finding the chest durably locked, he turns to his crowbar...

Simon: I rolled a 14, opening the chest. And I got a 1 on the d4 roll, so I get 1 weapon from the box.

Richard (reaches into the box and pulls out a weapon, handing the card facedown to Simon): Here you go!

Valeros quickly opens the lid of the chest and guffaws in delight, withdrawing a large glaive from within.

Simon: Alright! A Shock Glaive +1! Waitaminute, why is there a "1" in the top right corner? Isn't this a "B" scenario?

Richard: Dangit!

Or how about this?

Meanwhile, in one of the village houses that Pillbug Podiker was known to have visited before his disappearance, Merisiel is searching for clues. Hidden in the corner beneath a pile of blankets she finds a battered chest. "No problem," she says confidently as she pulls a set of slender tools from inside her jerkin.

Christina: I recharged the Masterwork Tools to automatically defeat the barrier, and I rolled a 1 for the number of items I get.

Richard (reaches into the box and pulls out a card, handing it facedown to Christina): Here you go!

Cautiously, Merisiel lifts the lid of the chest to reveal its contents, jumping back in surprise when a large beast suddenly forces its way out, growling in fury. As she reaches for her knives, she wonders how the chest's owner got the Saber-Toothed Tiger into the small chest.

Christina: (Looking archly at her husband): I said I get an item, not an ally.

Richard: Great googly moogly!

Now I won't say that neither of these types of incidents has ever happened to me, and I can't say that they haven't. Besides, my wife tells me that it happens to everyone. To keep things like this from happening again, and to satisfy my abnormal compulsion for organization, I developed some dividers to keep everything neat and tidy. I decided early on that I wanted to make the dividers sufficient to support whatever sort of organizational method different players might like, with color coding and text of sufficient size and font type to be legible at arm's length.

The dividers that started it all

Something else to consider was long-term storage. While the stock box comes with a plastic vacuum tray that can fit all of the cards, things get a little dicey when you sleeve the cards. Personally, I sleeve all of my PACG cards. I wanted to make sure that the cards last, even when my wife is eating potato chips during a game. I used the PACG organizer available from The Broken Token, removing all of the cards for the AP from their boxes. I needed to ensure there were dividers for all of the different card types as well as for all of the different deck indicators. This makes adding cards (say, a 5th player joins us for a game) or removing them (say, when we finish an Adventure Path) a snap.

The dividers in the stock vacuum tray (left) and in The Broken Token's PACG Organizer (right)

The basic dividers are tall enough so that the labels can be seen over the top of the cards when they are unsleeved, but they're short enough to fit in the base set box with the rules on top and the lid all the way down. If your cards are sleeved and the dividers are cut to the shortest height, much of the label is obscured by the sleeve, but the color bar is still visible. Some players might not use the base set box, and those that have a storage solution that allows for more height can cut the cards to different heights so that they can be seen above the cards even when they are sleeved. There are even different cut lines so that some dividers can be taller than others—perhaps you want the main WEAPON divider to be visible above the other weapon dividers (e.g., WEAPON—B, WEAPON—1, etc.).

A sleeved card (left) and an unsleeved card (right) next to a divider

The file for each Adventure Path also includes special dividers peculiar to that AP. The Skull & Shackles dividers include dividers for the ships and the fleet card; Wrath of the Righteous has dividers for cohorts, mythic paths, and the redemption card; and Mummy's Mask has dividers for scourges, traders, and the bazaar and defensive stance cards.

The special cards for each of the Adventure Paths

Dividers for the organized play "Season of…" cards are also included, using the color black. Also, there are "blank" dividers that allow you to further customize. These use a light gray so you can write your own text.

Two of the "Season of…" cards next to a blank divider cut to a taller height

There are also some optional cards to facilitate different types of storage methods. Most of the card types have an IN USE divider. There are three options for removing cards from play, depending on what floats your boat: When you decide that you're tired of seeing the Mace come up during Fortress of the Stone Giants, you might simply put it behind the WEAPON—B divider. Or maybe you'd prefer to put it behind the WEAPON—BASIC divider. And when you finally banish that pesky Goblin Pyro during Spires of Xin-Shalast, you might decide to put it behind the MONSTER—REMOVED divider.

It's like the Whopper® of card organization: you can have it your way.

I use the full-size dividers. I print them on card stock, laminate them, and cut them to size. Lamination isn't absolutely necessary, but they're pretty durable this way, and any snack residue wipes away easily.

At some point it occurred to me that some people might already have dividers and just need labels. Some game supply companies sell dividers; and some players might use materials such as plasticard or cardstock cut down to size. To support these and other options, I added pages that only have the labels. Players can then cut out the ones they want and affix them to their dividers using tape or glue.

These labels have been affixed with tape to thick plasticard cut to size

Another thing I did was create dividers and labels for the class/character/add-on decks. There is a basic set of dividers applicable to all class/character/add-on decks (boons), and a set of dividers specific to each class/character/add-on deck (cohorts, if included in that deck, and each of the characters). Most of the dividers are exactly the same as for the APs, with the addition of two different types of dividers for the overall deck and small labels for your storage solution. Two of the deck dividers have the name of the deck and images of all of the characters in that deck. The other two deck dividers simply have the deck name and logo. Any/all of these can be used however you want, depending on your storage solution.

The boxes for my class/character/add-on decks from different angles

I use plain boxes for long-term storage. These generally don't have the majority of card dividers in them because I don't want to print up that many dividers. I have a special deck holder for when I use a class/character/add-on deck in organized play, and this holder has the dividers for all of the cards.

Cards for characters include the logo and/or name of the base set or class/character/add-on deck to which they belong. This way you can see at a glance that it's Kyra from the Cleric Class Deck romping around in the Worldwound and not Kyra from Wrath of the Righteous.

Dividers for all three versions of the iconic cleric, Kyra

Another part of my divider files is standees. When my group first started playing the game, we found that the tokens were sometimes difficult to see, pick up, and move, so we often proxied the tokens with dice (which didn't work well). Also, those tokens take up space, and we often played where space was at a premium. I decided that some sort of substitute was necessary. I would have preferred to use miniatures, but some of the characters don't have miniatures and I didn't want to have to either look for miniatures that were "close enough" or explain to players, some of whom can be quite persnickety, that the red-bearded dwarf miniature represents Agna or some such. Most of the characters have images that are part of the Community Use Package, making paper standees relatively easy. I made the standees in two sizes, though my group uses the smaller ones. These can be printed, cut out, and assembled to make triangular standees that are easier to see, pick up, and move. I also laminate the standees to avoid that annoying snack residue. We found that the standees needed some weighted bases to keep them from tipping over, so I found suitably sized art tiles at a local craft store and glued each standee to a tile, then cut small squares of drawer liner (available by the roll at local DIY stores) and glued them to the bottoms to protect the table surface. For those characters that don't have images, I have six blank standees, each on a different colored base. The standees can be stored easily in tackle box inserts.

Standees for the Rise of the Runelords characters, with a blank (left); my standee and dice storage (right)

Every time Paizo and Lone Shark bring us a new adventure path or class/character/add-on deck, I upload a corresponding set of dividers/standees to BoardGameGeek and provide a link to the files here on paizo.com. It will be interesting to see how next year's new core set and Curse of the Crimson Throne AP change things up. I'm always looking for ways to improve the dividers/standees. Hopefully, some of you have found these useful in some way!

Richard Noble (Brother Tyler)

Adventure Card Game Homebrew, Tower of Doom

Thursday, March 29, 2018

Today's PACG Homebrew Special blog is by Todd Alexander (Wilbur_Whatley), about a homebrew of a different kind. Todd wanted a new surface on which he could play our game and... well, he made something everyone in our office now wants. Take a look.

I've been a fan of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game for a few years now. My entire family played Rise of the Runelords, my wife and I played through Wrath of the Righteous, and I've played everything I could solo. All those decks and cards and layouts were getting hard to manage on the dining room table, and after fighting the cat for room on the table—again—it occurred to me it would be great to have my cards up off the table.

I had been surfing for Pathfinder images for a different project when I came across some photos of people making really cool custom boards for their favorite CCGs, and from there, the ideas began to flow. By the next night, I had come up with an exacting blueprint encompassing some of the ideas I'd been having fun with. (Warning: I can't draw a stick figure!)

The next weekend I found myself escorting the family to the local crafts store. I spotted some foam board for school presentations and remembered those homemade die-rolling towers I'd seen online. From there I walked around trying to imagine how everything in the store might work as part of a diorama. I picked up a couple sheets of moss and some pillars intended for a wedding cake. When I got home, I borrowed the lazy Susan from the kitchen, which made things easier to reach and work on. That also made it a circle, which really drove a lot of the implementation of things. A lot of what followed was more out of necessity than design. That also meant it evolved as I put it together, which was fun to watch.

It changed even more after we used it a few times. My attempt at water turned out to be not just a mess but also sticky and oily. Lesson learned: stick with modelling tools and supplies! I ended up covering the whole base in moss, which has turned out be a lot easier to use. It also made things look more like a miniature place that could be real, rather than just a rotating board.

That brought me to the next step in my Tower of Doom: greeblies. I had heard that term on an Adam Savage vlog and it clicked. Greeblies are tiny little details that movie effects artists add to props and models to make them more complex and multi-layered. They often take them from old model kits they keep around for this purpose. Well, I'm a geek—I have plenty of little things around the house that I could use, like a gargoyle kitchen magnet that is now a fallen piece of rubble. That was next to the Kyra figure I had from playing Mummy's Mask. Nearby was a Cthulhu miniature I picked up at Comic-Con.

Speaking of Cthulhu, I used a website to translate H.P. Lovecraft's famous quote “That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even death may die” into J.R.R. Tolkien's dwarf runes, and copied that onto the base. (Told you I was a geek.) I was bothered by the plainness of the board—those petrified stone pillars were begging for some extra moss effect... and there's always room for magic runes. The diorama nature of the board and the miniature props give it a multilayered look that I love to look at when we play.

The top section is for rolling dice and holding the blessings deck. It would need to support a fair amount of weight, so I used the four wedding cake columns from my craft store run. I glued the column bases to a center stand I made to give the tower a little extra height. I attached a thin lazy Susan to the column tops, so the top section swivels independent of the main base, which is on the lazy Susan I took from the kitchen. Having access to every part of the die roll tower while fighting goblins is pretty handy! I added short foam board walls around the top so the dice wouldn't roll off. I lined a piece of cardboard with shelf paper, giving it the look of a stone floor. Toothpicks became wooden beams sticking out of the stone walls. As we've played, I've made a few changes, adding a little moss here and a Supernatural pin there. I haven't had to make any big fixes—I suggest a lot of Gorilla Glue if you try something like this.

It has added a lot of atmosphere as we spin it to play a scenario. While my family and I made this, I'd like to thank Mike Selinker and everyone at Paizo for giving us the inspiration. I'm off to make a new Adventure Path to play on this nifty board...

Todd Alexander

Homebrew Special: The Call of the Gods

Thursday, January 18, 2018

For our latest entry in the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game homebrew series, we turn to Ron Lundeen, who's made a habit of crafting entire homebrew PACG Adventure Paths for free, posted on Ron's website. You should play them all, says us. (By the way, Paizo recently hired Ron as an RPG developer. Congratulations, Ron!)

I wanted to talk a bit about my latest variant Adventure Path for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, God Callers of Sarkoris. Let me open with a confession: I absolutely adore the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, but I didn't much care for the Wrath of the Righteous set. Although it introduced a lot of interesting new mechanics, including cohorts, the mythic rules didn't scale in a way that I liked; overall, the set didn't resonate with me. This was a shame because, in playing through the game, I was frequently delighted to see items that I'd created for the RPG make their way into card form (such as Barding of Pleated Light and Pauper's Thighbone).

I wrote the book on that book, is what I'm saying.

I'd created an entire variant adventure path for the Rise of the Runelords set, called Shield of Rannick, as well as a variant adventure path for Skull and Shackles, called Bloodlust Corsairs. My variant adventure paths don't require new cards; they just let you use the cards you already own in new ways. I initially said I wasn't going to design a variant adventure path for Wrath of the Righteous, but my inner game designer just wouldn't let it go. It kept nagging at me with questions and insisting on answers.

Why didn't I like Wrath of the Righteous? Well, I didn't like the mythic components (mythic charges and mythic paths). Could the mythic aspects be jettisoned? Far fewer than half of the cards use those mechanics... but the basic blessings do, as well as many villains, barriers, and late-game armors. So I explored the idea of replacing them with something else, and eventually decided to use some neat Skull and Shackles cards to fill in those holes.

Or appear to fill in those holes.

Now I realized I was actually going to design something, so I set to work. For my previous variant Adventure Paths, I'd set out all the villains, henchmen, and locations and thought, "What new story do these cards want to tell?" That's pretty hard to do when you know the RPG adventure background (that Fort Rannick is a ranger fort overrun with ogres, for example), and I normally have to work hard to separate my RPG knowledge from what is plainly written (and illustrated) on the cards in front of me. But that wasn't so hard this time, because I'd never actually played the RPG version of Wrath of the Righteous. It should therefore have been easy to mix them around. Still, I kept coming back to the same story: the heroes go into the Worldwound and kill a bunch of demons. I thought that story had already been told quite well, and I needed something new.

I've done a lot of writing for the RPG and I knew quite a bit about the lore of the area around the Worldwound: it was once a barbarian nation called Sarkoris. To me, Sarkoris had a lot of the feel of the old Conan stories, with barbarian kings and witches and decadent cities and the triumph of brawn over beasts. Plus, its summoners called pieces of gods to their sides—that was really neat. It hit me that I didn't want to set my variant in the Worldwound; I wanted to set it before the Worldwound, in the time of Sarkoris.

It further struck me that I'd need some mechanic to "power up" the characters if I took mythic paths away, or even the ordinary monsters and barriers would be too tough. Rather than a straight numerical increase, I wanted to give some flexibility to all the characters; this took the form of additional "supercharged" power feats. I also wanted to offer some variety, so I gave players a choice of bonus power feats. A sudden idea simultaneously solved the power problem and gave my variant adventure path its name: I'd let all the characters tap into the deific powers of Sarkorian god callers. The cohort rules already showed how summoners worked (thanks, Balazar!), so I assigned everyone a cohort that gave them powers to "level up" over time. Everyone would be god callers of Sarkoris! The specific abilities were revised and refined several times, thanks to a lot of good feedback on the forums here.

Share the love, god caller Alase.

Let me jump on a legal tangent to say that my variant adventure paths are free; they have to be, because I produce them under Paizo's Community Use Policy. That policy forbids charging for products, but it opens up tons of fantastic art for use. The Community Use Policy doesn't let you use Paizo's storylines (I couldn't reproduce the plot of one of their RPG adventure paths, for example) or most of Paizo's maps.

But I really wanted a map to show all the neat locations in fallen Sarkoris; this map would also show how the characters travel across the land in their adventures. Fortunately, I know a talented cartographer named Marco Morte, and he put a map together for me at a reasonable rate. To sketch out that map—and, in fact, the whole plot of God Callers of Sarkoris—I relied on information about the Worldwound. (I later learned that Paizo had already produced a map of Sarkoris, tucked into Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Lost Kingdoms, and my map wasn't too far off the "official" one.) You can see Marco's map prominently displayed in God Callers of Sarkoris, available from welbybumpus.com, but here it is for your enjoyment.

Note: The map image above is not available for use under the Paizo Community Use Policy.

Give God Callers of Sarkoris a try; I've changed a few other things, like how servitor demons work, how recurring villains become nemeses, and so forth. It all playtested quite well, and I'd love to hear what you think!

Ron Lundeen
Developer

Homebrew Special: The Little Dragons That Could

Thursday, November 16, 2017

We continue our Pathfinder Adventure Card Game homebrew series with a look at True Dragons of Absalom by David Jacobson (Theryon Stormrune) and newly crowned Pathfinder Society ACG Online Play venture-captain Tyler Beck (Cartmanbeck).

At PaizoCon 2016, with help of ACG organized play coordinator Tanis O'Connor, we debuted a series of adventures based on the incredibly popular We Be Goblins modules that Paizo has been releasing as part of Free RPG Day over the last few years. We had enjoyed playing the RPG versions of the scenarios so much, and had fallen in love with the tempestuous goblin characters detailed in the modules, so it was natural to try to convert them. We even convinced Tanis to create a special boon for the event (one coveted by many an ACG player since then). Then, before Gen Con 2016, we were honored to be asked to help adapt these into the official Pathfinder Adventure Card Guild Season of the Goblins!

We were thrilled by how well received our goblins content had been, so we decided to set to work on another set of adventures for PaizoCon 2017. There were more We Be Goblins modules we could use for inspiration, but one of our good friends, Elizabeth Corrigan (Eliandra Giltessan), has some sort of personal distaste for goblins—crazy, right??—so she asked us to consider kobolds instead. Coincidentally, one of our all-time favorite Pathfinder Society scenarios features kobolds: Thurston Hillman's (in)famous True Dragons of Absalom! Anytime Paizo provides pregen characters like the ones in that scenario, they beg to be adapted.

True Dragons of Absalom brings players into the slightly crazed mindset of Absalom's sewer-dwelling kobold tribe, the Sewer Dragons. These kobolds are given a field commission by Venture-Captain Drandle Dreng himself to serve the Pathfinder Society in tracking down the perpetrators of a plot involving the Sewer Dragons' turf and a shadowy group calling themselves the Onyx Alliance. Just as exciting as the story, however, is the chance to run through an organized play scenario as a kobold, a race not normally legal for Pathfinder Society Roleplaying Guild play… and the pregenerated kobolds that come with that scenario do not disappoint.

Engashez represents the most diplomatic of kobolds… a Dragon Yapper bard who, rather than buffing her allies, annoys her enemies into submission with her high-pitched screeching and drumming.

So, we set about adapting the pregens for our game. Everyone who's familiar with Pathfinder kobolds knows that if there's one thing that kobolds are renowned for, it's their traps. They LOVE setting traps. We obviously had to translate this deadly proclivity into character powers, so we came up with a brand-new mechanic for trap-setting.

Traps aren't just for rogues and rangers! Varanog's magic traps will make cinders out of the most resilient adventurers …I mean monsters!

The nice thing about the trap-setting mechanic is that it gives you the chance to get cards out of your hand while setting up for combat checks later on. You could even set a trap or two at your current location, then move away and let one of your less combat-oriented allies jump over and obliterate a monster.

Once we adapted all six characters, we had to decide on the rest of the storyline. We wanted to have more than a single ACG adventure, so we dove into the Pathfinder Modules archive and found the perfect solution: We would also adapt Crown of the Kobold King and Revenge of the Kobold King. This would give us inspiration for tons of excellent characters for our special adventure path, including Jeva the werewolf-child; the deadly forge-spurned; and Merlokrep, the kobold king himself.

As a bit of a tangent, a lot of the scenarios we were putting together were set in the sewers of Absalom. Did you ever realize how difficult it is to design an entire adventure based in a sewer system? We had to pull locations from several different base sets, as well as create a couple of new sewer locations which were reused throughout the entire Adventure Path. We playtested and modified these until we were satisfied, and it was a bit tougher than we'd imagined.

We designed a bunch of dragon-themed boons, and even commissioned art for a bunch of them by the gifted and talented Keera McNeill; check out more of her work at Vivid As Life Illustrations)! I shudder to think how many playful faerie dragons had to die for my favorite new armor…

Note: The images on the cards above are not covered by the Paizo Community Use Policy, as Paizo does not own the copyrights to them.

We'd like to take a moment at this point to recognize that these cards ended up looking really nice, and we don't want to take all of the credit for that. Besides our awesome artist, we also had help from the one and only Andrew Warner (Hawkmoon269), who created a really excellent card creator database that we used to generate the majority of these new cards.

You'll notice a new Hat trait on that jester's cap. That's because adventure deck 2 of our We Are Dragons homebrew series includes a pleasant surprise for those who have played through True Dragons of Absalom:

Hats is a simple otyugh with simple tastes, and is by far our favorite otyugh of all time.

Hats likes hats. When Hats loses one of his hats, he gets mad. He has only a single role, the Master Collector, which helps him collect even more hats. I think you can see the pattern emerging here. When we sat down to play True Dragons at PaizoCon 2017, one of the first things a player asked was "Is Hats in this?” so we knew we'd made a good choice including him as an unlockable character.

Speaking of PaizoCon, Mike Selinker himself showed up and sat down to play with us, and really enjoyed the characters and scenarios. He also pointed out mistakes and suggested improvements in the scenarios and cards with such precision and care that it would have been impossible not to know that he does this for a living.

We've really enjoyed designing and running these special adventures for PaizoCon, and we're going to continue doing it. For PaizoCon 2018, we've got a very piratey, gobliny campaign planned; if you're planning to attend, we can't wait to see you there!

Tyler Beck and David Jacobson

Homebrew Special: Revenge of the Wicked

Thursday, September 21, 2017

We're starting a new monthly-ish Pathfinder Adventure Card Game series on the blog. Homebrew Special will feature the finest in Pathfinder Adventure Card Game homebrew creations (often made using the DriveThru Card Creator), written by the homebrewers themselves. If you have a homebrew creation that you'd like to spotlight, let us know!

My name is Francesco Silvestri; on the forums, you may know me as Doppelschwert. Before I tell you a bit about a recent PACG homebrew project of mine, I'll tell you a little bit about my gaming interests. When I'm playing a roleplaying game, there are two narrative elements that I really enjoy:

The first element is a setting where the stakes are high. It's a bit clichéd to be the chosen one all the time, I give you that, but while everyone can save a kitten or two from a tree or slay some rats in a cellar, few heroes are able to pull off such astonishing feats that you might call them mythic. As such, I immediately fell in love with the Wrath of the Righteous set when I got it last summer.

The second element is the inclusion of antiheroes. Don't get me wrong: I like to play as Hero McRighteousface just as much as the next guy, but there is a special itch that I can only scratch when the bad guys are doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. In PACG, folks like Wrathack and Darago immediately come to mind as fitting this role nicely.

Epic adversaries—check. Pragmatic protagonists—check.

So I wanted to make a homebrew PACG Adventure Path that combines these things, with a focus on the bad guys being able to live up to their morally grey standards. I proudly present the variant AP for Wrath of the Righteous that I've been working on: Revenge of the Wicked, or RotW for short, is my personal antithesis to WotR (see what I did there?).

You start RotW as a bunch of shady characters of your choosing, and it doesn't take long for you to meet the wrong people at the (seemingly) right time. One thing leads to another, and before you know it, you've signed up with the Templars of the Ivory Labyrinth and are eager to become demoniacs—cultists of demon lords with the goal of turning themselves partially into demons, just like their RPG counterparts from Lords of Chaos. Of course, you'll eventually achieve this goal—the end justifies the means, after all, and who's going to stop you?—but more on that later.

This 33-scenario tale chronicles your rise to power that takes you all over the Worldwound, the Abyss, and even into the Darklands! Along the way, there are plenty of opportunities to live up to your bad reputation. And while the forces of good will eventually try to stop you from doing exactly that, there are some familiar faces to help you out as well.

I won't tell you any more of the story, so you can go into it unspoiled. But who knows: you might just end up doing the right thing in the end!

Your mount might have something to do with your cover being blown...

Let's talk a bit about what RotW has to offer in terms of game mechanics. As you can see, there are custom cards—25 in total. Most are villains, henchmen, and support cards, but there are also some boons to replace thematically unfitting cards, as well as new barriers to replace some of the more infamous barriers of WotR.

Thanks to Ludwig Orsingher, better known as user LudwigO on the paizo forums, I'll be able to replace the current RotW cards with the awesome preview pictures you can see on this blog for my next update, and I am really grateful for all the work he put into making RotW a much prettier experience for everyone.

While optional, you are also encouraged to shuffle the upcoming Hell's Vengeance Character Deck 1 and Deck 2 into the box. Not only will that enrich the atmosphere dramatically, but it will also give you access to some pretty rad evil characters to play. You'll hardly find a better place to let them loose on whoever dares to get in their way!

You might be wondering what I've done with all the support cards from WotR: mythic paths, cohorts, servitor demons, and the redemption table. In RotW, almost all of those cards are either unused or replaced with new variants. Since you play a bunch of cultists, you don't get a mythic power source or a redemption table; instead, you become demoniacs and receive access to the patron table, which memorializes the demon lords you've served well in the past!

Who needs redemption when you can summon a bunch of servants to do the dirty work for you?

Remember that annoying Blackfire Cultist that always summoned those pesky servitor demons to get in your way in WotR? I have good news for you: she won't be around this time... and you get to summon those demons yourselves instead, thanks to the conjuration mechanic. Basically, it works like Summon Monster, but you get to choose a monster from the Conjuration table according to your number of mythic charges (while servants that have the Undead trait get an additional 1d6).

While you lose access to the constant bonus to skills and those shiny d20s from the original mythic paths, you can instead spend mythic charges to help with any skill, and you can utilize Corrupted cards to use and generate those charges. As a result, the AP feels quite different from WotR. There might just be even more mythic paths to unlock further into the AP (just don't tell the demon lords I told you that).

Finally, the servitor demons are demons no more—righteous heroes have arrived to thwart your plans instead, and they offer some interesting abilities that interact with the new mythic path.

While you try to serve your demonic masters, the forces of good won't stand idly by.

If you want to try out Revenge of the Wicked, you can find the PDF and further information on the forums. I'm happy to update the PDF based on players' feedback, so let me know what you think!

I hope you enjoy Revenge of the Wicked and have as much fun playing it as I had making it!

Francesco Silvestri
(Doppelschwert)
Homebrew PACG Scenario Designer & Sword Enthusiast

Get Ready to be Goblified

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

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

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

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

Wait, not those proxies.

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

Even got Gaby "goblified"!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homebrew Scenario Design with Jen "Iammars" McTeague

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Greetings, Pathfinders! This is the second in a recurring series of blog posts written by you. Today Jen McTeague shares with you his conversion of a cool story trope to a Wrath of the Righteous homebrew scenario. But before we get to the delicious design in this week's blog, we wanted to let you know that in addition to all the card types already available for creation, you can now create six more card types with DriveThruCards' Community Card Creator. Create your own Locations, Scenarios, Adventures, Adventure Paths, Blessings and Cohorts! Also, for this week only, all custom cards are just 25 cents! Create your own card or browse from hundreds of cards the community has already made. Head over and check it out, then come back to learn what's new in the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game."

Hello, everyone! My name is Jen "Iammars" McTeague, and I like tinkering with board games. It's very rare that I get heavily invested into a board game and don't end up tinkering with it. You may have seen some of my work with Mansions of Madness (seen here and here, which led to a consulting gig with FFG on its Call of the Wild expansion. Since I've recently become addicted to the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, I've been looking at it with an eye toward writing material and tinkering with it.

Everyone has a favorite monster or two—it's hard to play this game (or any RPG) for too long before you settle on the monster or two that you really like fighting. And for me, there's one monster that stands out above the rest. It's pictured just below these words. Why don't you go and click on it and bask in its great glory?

Aw... Look at the cute fire-breathing pig!

BAM! Shadow Demon! Bet you didn't see that one coming! And that's the beauty of a shadow demon. You don't know he's there at first, but then suddenly people start disappearing, outsiders know all of your battle plans, and friends start turning on each other. Once it's obvious that the havoc is coming from inside the house, the scenario becomes a witch hunt as you interrogate your allies, trying to get them to screw up. Those who aren't as friendly with you may take your questioning as a challenge and come to blows. In the end, you find the "traitor" only to have a black smoky form come out as its flesh puppet falls unconscious, cackling at all the chaos it has caused.

If you're only familiar with PACG Shadow Demons, you may be wondering where this is coming from, since card-game shadow demons can't actually do this. Well, that's the thing. In the PACG, they're vanilla incorporeal servitor demons that do a bit of damage if you're in an Abyssal location, while in the Pathfinder RPG, they're super cool. I think these guys deserve to have their time in the sun—let's put them center stage in their own scenario!

Maybe "time in the sun" wasn't the best choice of words...

Now that I've gotten my impassioned rant in defense of shadow demons out of the way, let's determine what we want the scenario to do, stripping it down to the important points:

• Chaos is being caused inside friendly lines
• We interrogate various allies to figure out who is causing the problem
• Once we find the possessed soldier, exorcise and defeat the shadow demon.

That first point can be modeled by choosing locations that are mostly friendly, but have a decent number of monsters. The final point can partially be covered by making the Shadow Demon a villain, but we need it to not show up until we've beaten its host. To solve the middle point, we'd really like a henchman that can defeated by either Diplomacy or Combat, and we'd really like one of the henchmen to spawn our Shadow Demon at some point.

Looking at those points, we can start to lock down some parameters about the scenario. The Shadow Demon needs a Combat 20 to defeat, which puts it on the higher end of the Adventure Deck 2 villains, which means that this likely wants to be an AD2 scenario. (It's certainly much closer to AD2 than AD3, and the only part of the demon's powers that make the check harder is requiring the Magic trait. That's not trivial in AD2, but it's not hard either.) At this point in the game's power curve, the only henchman that has both a Diplomacy and a Combat check to defeat is the Corrupted Soldier. Since there's only one of him in the box, we'll have to use a proxy, much like the Adventure Card Guild scenarios. It's ugly, but it'll do. [Tanis: Welcome to my world.]

It's like a shell game, but if you lose, hundreds of people die.

Spawning the Shadow Demon is going to have to be part of the scenario mechanics, since there's no other place to put it. What we want is a way to randomly pick which one of the Corrupted Soldiers in the scenario is actually a Shadow Demon. Whatever method we devise must not fail to produce a Shadow Demon if all the Corrupted Soldiers are encountered and defeated, which means we'd prefer a random event that was dependent on previous events (such drawing cards from a pile without replacement) as opposed to an independent event (such as a die roll). Stack of cards it is then!

If we place one Corrupted Soldier in each location, we need a stack of cards with 1 Shadow Demon and (# of locations - 1) other cards. When we defeat a Corrupted Soldier, we flip a card from the stack. If it's a Shadow Demon, then we shuffle it into the deck of the Corrupted Soldier we just defeated. If it's not, then maybe we banish the card to the box and we can attempt to close the location as usual. While I was brainstorming and writing the scenario, the extra cards were blessings. As I wrote up the scenario for initial playtesting, they became allies that you automatically acquired for a couple of reasons. First, having a second deck that mostly consisted of blessings next to the scenario card sounded confusing. The second reason was thematic. Shadow Demons are all about confusing you as to who your allies are. Gaining an ally when you defeat a Corrupted Soldier reinforces the idea that you are eliminating the ally as a suspect for the demonic possession. This does mean that it's possible that your crusader ally was a Wolf all along, but that's funny and I stopped worrying about being 100% thematic every time a bell fell on me in the Forest during Rise of the Runelords.

I assure you, it made a sound.

At this point, we have the meat of the scenario written down and we're just filling in details. Locations are the biggest detail we haven't filled in yet. We want locations that have positive or neutral benefits for the characters, but still have monsters in their deck lists, and we want locations from Adventure Deck 2 or lower. That leads us to Cathedral of St. Clydwell, Citadel, Dark Forest, Laboratory, Watchtower, Defender's Heart, Tower of Estrod, Celestial Beacon, and Paradise Hill. Of these, Defender's Heart and Citadel both play on the allies theme we've got going on and will definitely see use in the scenario, whereas Cathedral of St. Clydwell and Paradise Hill will definitely not see play, given how powerfully friendly they are. Most location picking is more art than science, guided by the idea that this is your base that's being assaulted.

Finally, our reward. As an optional scenario for an Adventure Path, we can't have this give out a feat, as that would throw power levels in later scenarios out of whack. (Well, not by much in Wrath, but still.) Since we're borrowing a trick from the Adventure Card Guild in scenario setup, we're going to do it again in the scenario reward. The scenario has given you an ally for all but 1 of the Corrupted Soldiers you defeated, which is already pretty strong. We could give another ally for completion, but that's boring. Instead, let's grant a cohort for use in a later scenario. [Tanis: In published designs, we avoid asking you to remember something for a later scenario; we call this "the memory issue."] Luckily we have the world's first and foremost expert on shadow demons available to us: Sir Ilivan!

Confused? Play Adventure 2!

Well, that's the basic design done. Now comes writing everything up so that other people can read it. I try to word things as best I can before playtesting to give myself an extra editing pass. I went through multiple iterations to make it clearer, and I had to change the proxy card when I realized that I would need 8 Corrupted Soldiers but only had 7 Cultists of Baphomet.

No scenario is complete without playtesting. One thing that my playtesting showed was that when you put that many ally-heavy locations in the scenario, the locations get closed really quickly—perhaps a little quicker than I'd like. I don't really have any room on the scenario card to adjust anything, so I needed to swap a few locations. The Cemetery replaced the Laboratory, and the Gray Garrison replaced the Watchtower. Fortunately, the core of the scenario worked fine. Which leaves us with this:

[Vic: Even after tightening up the text, the art box on this card is a little bit smaller than we like in a printed product. It's hard to make scenarios that fit in the allowed space!]

Well, that about wraps up this article. I hope you enjoyed a look at one person's methods of adapting a RPG situation to the PACG, and a glimpse at how rough a Shadow Demon can actually be.

Fortunately Shadow Demons can't possess books, so this book is obviously safe to click on.

Jen "Iammars" McTeague
Homebrew Scenario Designer

Arranging Notes into a Song

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Greetings, Pathfinders! This is the first in a recurring series of blog posts written by you. We're kicking things off with homebrew scenario creator extraordinaire Ron Lundeen. After reading this, I learned that Ron and I design scenarios in a similar way, so I can vouch for this excellent advice.

Hey, all! I'm Ron Lundeen, freelance author and avid Pathfinder Adventure Card Game fan. I'm here to give you a rundown on homebrew scenario design. I've released over 80 scenarios, including the very first fan-made scenario for the game and two full homebrew Adventure Paths: Shield of Rannick, which allows you to reuse all your Rise of the Runelords cards in a whole new way, and Bloodlust Corsairs, which does the same for Skull & Shackles. You can pick up these Adventure Paths and more for free at welbybumpus.com. Now that the "establishing my bona fides" and "hawking my work" bullet points are out of the way, let's talk scenario design. I'll break this down in four steps. Along the way, let's design a new scenario!

1. Fit the Story to the Cards, Not the Cards to the Story

First, find a few cards you'd like to use together in interesting ways. This is the most exciting part of scenario design for me, and I usually do it with the cards right in front of me. You might have an awesome scenario idea about a haughty nobleman protected by an army of obstinate bureaucrats, but without cards to fit those ideas, you won't get very far (which is where the card creator at DriveThru Cards could become your friend, but we're concentrating on scenarios you can make with cards that you already own.) So start with the cards, then build a simple story.

Our Scenario: Let's use Wrath of the Righteous. The loot card Fiendsplitter from Adventure Deck 3 is a powerful weapon devoted to Torag, righteous god of the dwarves, and the villain Staunton Vhane from Adventure Deck 2 is an evil dwarf. Perhaps those two can go together: Vhane has stirred up some group to attack dwarves who follow Torag. An evil dwarf seems like just the kind of guy to lurk in a remote Canyon or Cavern, preying upon pilgrims at a Celestial Beacon. We'll plan on using those locations. Plus, this set has Blessings of Torag—perhaps we can use those somehow. We now have the nucleus of our scenario!

"Axes and dwarves" feels a little stereotypical, but we have to start somewhere.

2. Consider Where the Cards Are (or Could Be)

Certain cards are going to be required for your scenario—villains, henchmen, and locations, most likely. Those are pretty freely available for you to mix and match across adventure decks, or even across entire adventures. You don't want henchmen that are wildly more powerful than the villain (or vice versa), because the adventure will feel uneven. Building a scenario around cards other than villains, henchmen, and locations is a lot of fun, but must be done carefully. If your scenario requires other cards, consider whether they might already be in someone's deck; if so, don't use them, or set your scenario earlier than the cards would "appear" in your game.

Our Scenario: For Vhane's henchmen, let's use Deraknis. Vhane hasn't been paired with those before. I'd really like to use Blessings of Torag somehow—maybe shuffling all four of them into the Celestial Beacon to represent the pilgrims there—but those are base box blessings and therefore could be in players' decks already. So it's best not to have any special rule with those. Fiendsplitter is granted as loot in the third adventure, so we should set our scenario prior to adventure 3. Let's call it adventure 2 (which is also in line with our villains and henchmen). We'll banish Fiendsplitter at the end of the scenario; let's say the pilgrims of Torag loan it to the characters to put down Vhane.

Do they seem a little easy? We'll fix that.

3. The Scenario Designer Giveth and the Scenario Designer Taketh Away

Most scenarios have a factor that makes things easier and another that makes them harder. If you notice that a scenario has one fewer location than normal, you can bet it's going to have a rule making the scenario pretty tough (like needing to close all locations to win.) If the scenario has only one or two locations regardless of the number of players, you'd better strap in. For both easier and harder scenario rules, steal like crazy from anywhere in the game: villain powers, support card effects, and even character powers all provide good ideas for scenario-wide rules. Plus, the tricky part of including a rule—wording it clearly—has already been done for you.

Most scenarios mix locations that are beneficial and locations that are harmful. Mix those up as the number of players increases—you don't want to have only beneficial locations for smaller groups with the harmful locations showing up only for larger groups. But more importantly, choose locations that fit the theme of the story you're telling. If doing that makes the whole scenario feel a bit too easy or too hard, skew the scenario rules to compensate.

If your scenario is a one-off game that you intend as a detour from a published Adventure Path, the reward should be light: a single card draw is sensible. If you're designing an entire adventure—or even an entire Adventure Path—provide rewards at the same frequency as those provided by the published adventures.

Our Scenario: Let's have a scenario rule to make Fiendsplitter a bit better; we want to let multiple characters get a lot of use out of it. Some characters—like Alain and Radillo—can put useful cards on top of their decks, so let's create a power like that for Fiendsplitter. To ramp up the difficulty, and to keep the Torag theme, let's use a rule I swiped from the Kraken ship card from Skull & Shackles: against the villain or henchmen, characters must replace each die they roll that's larger than their Strength die with their Strength die. For locations, we already have the beneficial Celestial Beacon and the harmful Canyon and Cavern; let's include a few more locations appropriate for a pilgrim's trail through an isolated mountainous region. This is a one-off scenario where we anticipate being rewarded by holy pilgrims, so a non-Basic blessing is a reasonable reward.

That's right: I just stole from a pirate ship.

4. Shake It Until You Break It

Once you have your scenario sketched out, test it a few times with groups of different characters and different sizes. The more you deviate from the standard scenario model, the more you should test it. Pay particular attention to where you've changed how an existing rule works, so you can see whether that makes other rules function oddly or whether the change disproportionately affects some characters more than others. If you find something like that, change it or build an exception around it. Or you can just pretend that's what you intended all along!

Our Scenario: Playtesting reveals that our scenario doesn't work for large groups—there aren't enough Derakni cards in the set to populate all the locations. We need to add one more henchman. I first thought about a Grimslake, but that seemed too tough in testing, so let's use Chorussina instead. After testing with a bunch of different characters, I found that the rule about limiting some checks to your Strength die doesn't really bother Crowe, but that's okay: Torag loves Crowe. The rule also particularly handicaps low-Strength characters like Seoni and Enora, so we'll make sure that characters who spend mythic charges to swap in d20s don't have their d20s knocked down to their Strength die. Low-Strength characters can then plan to reserve mythic charges for this circumstance.

Vhane's bringing this gal to the party.

Now we've got our final scenario, The Pilgrim's Axe. Give it a try and let me know what you think in the Homebrew and House Rules section of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game forums. Better yet, post a scenario of your own!

Cheers!

Ron Lundeen
Contributing Author

If you've got an idea for an Adventure Card Game homebrew blog you want to write, send me your pitches at pacg@paizo.com!

Tanis O'Connor
Adventure Card Game Designer

Choose Your Own Adventure—How to Make Cards for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Before I get into this week's blog, let me tell you the best thing that happened to me at a fantastic PAX East. Through designer Chad Brown, Pathfinder Adventure Card Game fan Jim Wnorowski contacted me at the con about helping with his wedding proposal to his girlfriend, Sarah. As I came out of my Tabletop Deathmatch panel, Jim flagged me down. He "introduced himself," and then introduced me to Sarah, a self-proclaimed fan of my games. Jim then asked me if I had any promo cards.

"Oh, yeah," I said, "I wasn't going to give those out till my 100 Games You Absolutely Must Know How to Play panel on Sunday, but I think I've got one in my bag." And then I proceeded to fish around in my shoulder bag for at least a minute, unzipping every pocket and shuffling around every piece of paper, while Jim sweated out the delay.

"Oh, here's one!" I said after the agonizing wait, and gave them a card that Jim had created. This one was something special. He got down on one knee as she looked it over.

Jim gives Sarah a card, then begins his move step.
Photos by Eric Neustadter.

I would be lying if I said Sarah said yes immediately. In fact, her brain locked up, discombobulated from all that was going on. But after a paralyzing few seconds, her mind re-engaged and she leapt into Jim's arms and said yes. And that is the best thing that happened to me at PAX East.

I bring up this story both because it's awesome and because Jim created his card on the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Community Card Creator, a spiffy new tool from DriveThruCards that allows you to make your own cards for the game. I've seen lots of fans experimenting with it, so I thought I'd revisit some guidelines I use for making cards of similar power level and compatibility to the ones in the game. Note that not all the features of the card creator are live yet, so some of this won't work on the site today. But eventually, it all will, and you'll have this as a resource. I hope you find this useful as you make cards that work with ours!

Brainstorming

Start with a concept, such as "an underwater fortress," "a divine alchemist," or "a vampire monk." You can come up with something on your own, or take some inspiration from Paizo books, real-world concepts, or other universes. Just make sure it's something where you can say "I thought of something new, and here it is."

Then, for most types of cards, think of what adventure deck number that concept matches. If you imagine your concept as something only really powerful characters can deal with, then maybe a 5 or 6 is appropriate. If it's something that anyone can handle, use B or 1. This decision will affect several aspects of your cards.

Depending on what type of card you're creating, some additional guidelines might be useful.

Banes

Monsters and barriers should scale in difficulty against the ones in the box. For noncombat checks, a good baseline difficulty is 6 to 10 plus twice the adventure deck number. However, if you're aiming solely for a skill that isn't one of the big six (Strength, Dexterity, etc.), keep in mind that most characters will be rolling a d4. So keep the numbers low in that case, unless you really want only those who have the skill to succeed.

For combat checks, consider a difficulty of around 8 to 10 plus 2.5 or 3 times the adventure deck number. You can start adding monsters and barriers with multiple checks after adventure 3 or so. The powers should be reasonably simple through adventure 3, and then start getting more bizarre. If the powers usually reduce the character's ability to fight, such as by dealing damage before you act or by requiring multiple checks, you might want to reduce the difficulty by 2 to 5.

Henchmen should be tougher than the average monster you can imagine in your scenario, so increase the difficulties from the previous paragraph by an amount roughly equal to the adventure deck number. If you expect to want to use the henchman in multiple adventures, consider giving it the Veteran trait and a power that uses the adventure deck number. The henchman should always say it gives a chance to close the location, unless it doesn't.

Villains can have difficulties of as much as 10 higher than your average bane. They should always have something special about encountering them. When a villain shows up, everyone at the table should be invested in the outcome. Villain powers that scale with the number of characters present, the number of locations, or the number of open locations help reinforce this.

Boons

Boons should have checks to acquire in the neighborhood of 4 to 8 plus twice the adventure deck number. Watch out for boons that can only be acquired by skills that not all characters have. If a boon has a recharge check, aim for a difficulty 2 higher than the check to acquire.

Loot should be pretty darn awesome.

Characters, Roles, and Tokens

Characters should be tightly balanced against the ones in the box. Each character should start with 15 cards on her Card List. Add up the dice in your character's skills; if it's more than 42, you're probably aiming too high. The character should have no more than 1d12 in any skill. She should have 15 skill feat checkboxes, 10 card feat checkboxes, and 4 power feat checkboxes on her character card; no skill or card type should have more than 4 checkboxes.

Roles should have 12 power feat checkboxes each, including the 4 from the powers on the characters they advance. Save your craziest powers for the roles.

Tokens should tell intriguing backstories that make you want to play the characters again and again.

Story Cards

Adventure Paths list a set of at least 3 adventures. They should specify what happens to cards in the box as the adventure progresses. You can add adventure path powers that typically refer to things that happen between games.

Adventures need a set of scenarios, usually 3 or more. We recommend that you specify an play order, or it can be hard to keep track of which ones have been completed. Pick a reward that is on the level of "a card feat" or "a skill feat." As with adventure paths, if adventures have powers, they should not be of the kind that you must remember to consult frequently, because players will forget about them.

Scenarios generally need at least one villain and some henchmen that are appropriate for the power level of your characters. Powers can be simple or complex; think of something that sets your scenario apart from others and implement it. Your location list should have eight locations, unless you're doing something wacky. A standard scenario will have two more locations than you have players. Be careful when setting rewards; you don't want to give out too much for success. Make sure to put any lasting benefits in the Rewards section. You want people to be able to replay your scenario multiple times without skewing the rest of the campaign.

Locations and Support Cards

Locations should have fairly simple powers in each section. Watch the difficulty on noncombat checks to close locations, as these do not scale well. If you want a power that continues after closing, put it on the back as well.

Ships should have noncombat checks to defeat in the 6 to 12 range, and similar Craft checks to repair. Most have powers that make them harder to fight in the Encountering section, and they'll usually have a power in the Commanding section that allows you to discard cards from the blessings deck to trigger effects. You're looking for simple, frequently usable powers here, as you'll refer to them a lot during play.

As these new types of cards start to roll out for the Card Creator, experiment with them and see what you come up with. And if you decide to make an Engagement Ring card, be aware that it might take me just a little while to find it in my bag.

And again, congratulations, Sarah and Jim!

Mike Selinker
Adventure Card Game Designer

Community Card Creator and Errata Decks

Tuesday, February 25, 2015

Paizo and DriveThruCards have been cooking up a couple of delicacies for the Adventure Card Game connoisseur. Steve Wieck of DriveThruCards has details below!

Card Creator

Paizo and DriveThruCards are delighted to announce their partnership and today's release of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Community Card Creator. That's quite a mouthful isn't it? Even making it an acronym, PACGCCC, isn't much better. Let's call it the Card Creator.

So what is the Card Creator? It's a web application at DriveThruCards that lets you create, print, and share your own cards ideas for PACG. You can check it out here!

The Card Creator allows you to:

• Create your own cards
• Purchase your created cards in print for $0.50/card.
• Keep your card private.
• List your card publicly on DriveThruCards, allowing other PACG fans to see your card, comment on it, and purchase it.

Using the creator is easy. Just choose your card type, and then upload some card art.

We've worked with Fiery Dragon Productions and Fat Goblin Games to make an array of stock art available to you as a micro-license for $0.40. You can also upload your own art or public domain art. Then create your card text and attributes before finalizing the card.

We've gone to Herculean effort to match the card backs as closely as possible to the Skull & Shackles cards, so that cards you create and print can be shuffled in seamlessly with your existing cards. To avoid any confusion, though, all community created cards are clearly indicated as such. The traditional expansion icon in the upper left corner of the card is replaced with a Community Created Card logo.

This clearly differentiates the official cards designed by Mike Selinker and the card game team from the unofficial cards designed by the community. Speaking of Mike Selinker, now might be a great time to review Mike's post that offers a guidelines on creating PACG cards.

Then, please come and give the card creator a try or check out the cards the community is already creating with this new tool!

Errata Decks

Today we're also releasing errata decks on DriveThruCards for any PACG fan who wants to play with fully corrected Rise of the Runelords cards. There are a few different errata decks, and you'll want to check the printing of your cards to know which errata deck is for you. The first Runelords printing was manufactured in China and the second was done in the USA. The card backs produced by each printer vary a bit in color, so to have errata cards most closely match your existing cards, you should get the errata decks customized for your printing. Not sure if you have a first printing or second printing? Check the fine print on the back of your box. The first printing will read, "Printed in China" and the second will say, "Printed in the USA."

Naturally, there are more errata cards for the first printing, as many cards were corrected in the second printing. The first printing errata cards are available in three separate decks or as one bundle of all the cards. The second printing errata cards come all in one deck.

• First Printing Bundle, Base Set–Adventure Deck 6
• First Printing Base Set Box (RotR), Adventure Deck 1, Add-On Deck
• First Printing Adventure Decks 2–6
• First Printing Blessings of the Gods only
• Second Printing Bundle, Base Set–Adventure Deck 6

Tanis would like to add that the Adventure Card Guild cards created exclusively for the Season of the Shackles will soon be uploaded to the Card Creator, so you can play your way through that story without proxies.

We hope you enjoy using the Card Creator and updating your Rise of the Runelords collection with the Errata Decks!

Steve Wieck
DriveThruCards