PaizoCon Begins in... Less Than 24 Hours!

Thursday, May 25, 2017

As I scramble to get my games ready for PaizoCon, I realized that I hadn't yet prepared a blog for Adventurer's Guide for today. I suspect I'll be talking quite a bit about the book in seminars and to folks for the next few days, but in the meantime, let me just show off a few more pieces of art that I particularly like... I'll have one more post next week with a bit more to say about how to integrate Adventurer's Guide into your game if all goes according to plan as well. In the meantime... enjoy the pictures!

Illustrations by Geraud Soulie, Willian Liu, and Alexandre Chaudret

James Jacobs
Creative Director

Adventurer's Guide: Behind the Scenes

Thursday, May 11, 2017

We've been pretty vocal (I hope!) about one of the big changes to the rulebook line with the introduction of significant amounts of world content from Golarion in the upcoming Adventurer's Guide. In fact, we've been relaxing the "world-neutral" element of the rulebook line for some time, as far back as Occult Adventures where we abandoned the generic names for planes like the Boneyard and just used the Golarion/Great Beyond names in there. By lifting this self-imposed restriction, we're not fundamentally changing the type of content we're putting in rulebooks, but it does allow us to make our own rulebooks work even better with our own campaign setting.

Golarion is, after all, the setting used most overall by Pathfinder players. Gamemasters who run Pathfinder games set in other settings already had to decide how to incorporate flavor into their campaigns, changing names as needed, so whether or not they're changing the name of something called a "Red Mantis" or "Crimson Killer" or a "Scarlet Slayer" or whatever, by using the Golarion name we're making it more elegant and obvious how it fits into the vast majority of everything else Paizo publishes. But in order to standardize things for those who wish to reference names that remain our product identity, the Rules index for Adventurer's Guide lists alternate names as appropriate. So, if you want to use the Aldori swordlords in your game, you can either make a name up that fits your setting, use the "Aldori swordlord" in your setting, or go with our suggested "world neutral" name. So for example, the "Aldori defender" archetype becomes the "sword duelist defender", the "Aldori dueling sword" is merely the "dueling sword", and so on.

But there's another element in Adventurer's Guide that does something a little different, and this should specifically appeal to and intrigue fans of Golarion. When we were deciding what organizations to include in this book, there were a few that were no-brainers—Hellknights, Red Mantis, and the Pathfinder Society to name a few. We also knew we wanted to explore some of the concepts we've come up with more recently, like the Rivethun. But there was another category that was a bit trickier—organizations that we debuted and explored in our Adventure Paths. In many ways, these groups have become some of the most well-known organizations, because they've been the focus of entire campaigns. I'm talking about groups like the Council of Thieves, the Silver Ravens, the Cyphermages, and the Lantern Bearers—groups that were created for an Adventure Path first.

Perhaps the most famous of all these groups are the Gray Maidens—and in this case, they were absolutely created for an Adventure Path. Until the events of Curse of the Crimson Throne occur, there are no Gray Maidens at all in Golarion. But of all the groups in the setting, the look of the Gray Maiden has hit more eyes than ANY other group… because we put the iconic image of a Gray Maiden (created by the ever-talented Eva Widermann) on the back of the Core Rulebook itself.

So how can we present information about an organization that might well not even exist yet?

The answer was to make the assumption that the content of the Adventurer's Guide exists in a world after the events of those campaigns have played out. This allowed us to not only include groups like this in the book, but to explore how the events of their campaigns changed and shaped them. In the case of the Lantern Bearers in particular, this change is incredibly significant. In the Second Darkness Adventure Path, the Lantern Bearers were a puppet group manipulated by a shadowy conspiracy. In Adventurer's Guide, the assumption is that the Lantern Bearers have come out from that shadow and are well on the way to recovering and redeeming themselves. They still seek to stem the evil of demon worship and threats from the Darklands, but do so in a way more aimed at redeeming lost sisters and brothers and saving them from themselves rather than via shadowy stealth ops or conspiracy tactics. This results in a far more interesting group with less cliche and more growth to build upon.

We've made every attempt to avoid spoiling adventure paths from which these groups came from, of course, with the goal of having this content serve almost like a movie trailer; you won't learn everything there is to know about the plot of the Council of Thieves Adventure Path by reading the Council of Thieves chapter in Adventurer's Guide, but if we've done our job right, you'll be intrigued and perhaps want to play or run Council of Thieves as a result. The bulk of the new rules options for these groups are all brand new, so if you're a GM you can use the prestige classes and archetypes and items and spells and options in Adventurer's Guide to enhance an Adventure Path as you run it, perhaps even by giving out options to PCs as rewards for progressing through the story. You can also use them to bolster elements in an ongoing campaign, of course.

And that's it for this week! We've got a few more Adventurer's Guide previews coming in the weeks to come, so if there's an element of the book that folks are particularly eager in seeing a preview of, let me know in the comments below. In closing, I think I'm gonna show off the illustrations we've got in the book for three of the prestige classes inspired by groups that had their genesis in an Adventure Path—the Westcrown Devil, the Sanguine Angel, and the Argent Dramaturge!

James Jacobs
Creative Director

Organizations of the Adventurer's Guide

Thursday, May 4, 2017

So I just finished the final Bestiary 6 preview blog last week, so you know what that means! Yup… time to start doing preview blogs for the next hardcover down the line—the Adventurer's Guide!

As opposed to the hardcovers before (Bestiary 6) and after (Book of the Damned), the Adventurer's Guide is very much a product for players. The central idea of this book is to focus on several of the more famous (or infamous) organizations active in the Inner Sea region of Golarion. This book is not intended to present these organizations as things your characters can join (we've covered that topic before in numerous ways, after all) but instead to use these groups as themes for the presentation of new archetypes, prestige classes, magic items, spells, feats, and other player options for your characters to take. In effect, these groups serve as your characters' adventuring guides, in that once you become affiliated with them, they can guide your character into new specializations, talents, and powers.

We'll have more to say about the new options in the book later, of course. For now, though, I wanted to take the opportunity to reveal the full list of organizations that are featured in this volume. Some of them are long-standing groups in the setting we've done a lot with before, while others are relatively new. Many of them had their genesis in various Adventure Paths as well, and you can use the additional information in Adventurer's Guide either to bolster their associated Adventure Path in your game or to expand the organization's role beyond that Adventure Path. This does mean that Adventurer's Guide blurs the line between the traditionally "world-neutral" hardcover rulebooks and the setting books—but that's intentional, since this allows us to draw upon over a decade of lore and inspiration to give additional weight to all these new options for the game. And of course, if you're a GM, these options work just as well for you in building memorable new NPCs for your game as well!

In any event, the organizations covered in Adventurer's Guide are...

• Al-Zabriti (Deep-Desert Traditionalists)
• Aldori Swordlords (Masters of the Clash of Blades)
• Aspis Consortium (Profiteering Syndicate)
• Bellflower Network (Eradicators of Halfling Slavery)
• Council of Thieves (Rulers of a Criminal Underworld)
• Cyphermages (Inheritors of Ancient Arcane Traditions)
• Eagle Knights (Vanguard of Liberty)
• Gray Maidens (Remnants of a Tyrant's Reign)
• Hellknights (Merciless Enforcers of the Law)
• Houses of Perfection (Trio of Elite Mystical Monasteries inspired by the Elements)
• Lantern Bearers (A Light Against the Coming Darkness)
• Magaambya (Inheritors of an Ancient Academy of Arcane Learning)
• Mammoth Lords (Beast-Riding Barbarian Tribes)
• Pathfinder Society (Adventuring Scholars of Historical Lore)
• Red Mantis (Notorious Cult of Deadly Assassins)
• Rivethun (Animists Harnessing Personal Struggles for Spiritual Growth)
• Silver Ravens (Rebels Against an Oppressive Regime)
• Storm Kindlers (Storm-Seeking Devotees of Gozreh)

Each organization opens with an evocative half-page illustration to set the mood. I've only got room to show off three for now, though!

Rivethun Introduction
Illustration by William O'Brien

Red Mantis Introduction
Illustration by Willian Liu

Magaambya Introduction
Illustration by Florian Stitz

James Jacobs
Creative Director

It's Dangerous to Go Alone!

Friday, April 21, 2017

On the heels this month's sixth Bestiary volume comes the Pathfinder RPG Adventurer's Guide! Being an adventurer comes with it's own set of perilous challenges, but with the help of allies, a well-supplied pack, and an alliance with one of Golarion's powerful organizations, your character can go far. Until we begin exploring the finer details of the Adventurer's Guide on the blog over the next few weeks, take a look at the just-revealed final cover, featuring prolific characters from the Pathfinder campaign setting.

Chris Lambertz
Community & Digital Content Director