Summon Monster X

Friday, May 15, 2015

We're getting closer and closer to the June release of Dungeons Deep, the latest, greatest set of prepainted plastic Pathfinder Battles miniatures from our friends at WizKids! By my count, we've revealed nearly the entire set so far, but I've been holding off on two figures in particular, waiting for the right time to show them off. Lots of folks have been asking if Dungeons Deep will have any iconic characters, now that we're also releasing those characters in the form of the spectacularly detailed Iconic Heroes Base Sets. The answer, my friends, is a resounding YES, and this set's iconic hero rounds out the ranks of the iconic characters we featured in our second class-centered RPG release, the Pathfinder RPG Advanced Player's Guide.

I speak, of course of Balazar the summoner and his beloved "pet," the otherworldly eidolon Padrig!

Let's take a closer look at Balazar, Gnome Summoner.

Balazar's sculpt captures him mid-spell, or perhaps directing the actions of his eidolon from afar. While the sculpt is similar to Balazar's appearance in the just-released Iconic Heroes Set 3, here the colors are somewhat brighter, and if I'm being honest I think I like this version of Balazar just a little bit more than the Iconic Heroes version, which is a bit darker. Balazar is, as I mentioned, the final iconic character of the original 17 to appear as a prepainted miniature in one of the random Pathfinder Battles sets. While the stand-alone Iconic Heroes boxes will delve further into the ranks of iconic heroes from the Pathfinder RPG Advanced Class Guide (and possibly beyond), Balazar is also the last iconic character to show up in the regular Pathfinder Battles line, at least for the next set, which contains none.

So let's take a moment to celebrate our tour through the iconic characters of our first two major hardcover rulebook releases. We knew we'd get to you eventually, little guy! Balazar, Gnome Summoner is a Small, rare figure.

Balazar is just a wee gnome without his best buddy Padrig, who in Dungeons Deep is called simply "Eidolon." The Eidolon represents a class feature with lots of variability, so it's probably fitting that Padrig is a weird snake/chicken hybrid. He'll see plenty of table use for folks playing the Balazar pregenerated character in the Pathfinder Society Roleplaying Guild organized play program, but I'm also hoping he gets use as a generic eidolon figure, or just as a weird monster used to throw off players who think they have every Bestiary memorized.

The sculpt here is a bit meatier than the Padrig figure in Iconic Heroes Set 3. Check out the back view to see Padrig's snake body fading away into clear plastic, taking a cue from his original Wayne Reynolds illustration. The figure twists and turns with some real dynamism, and it's growing on me even more as I sit and look at it now. Yes, he's a weirdo, but he's a fun weirdo. The Eidolon is a rare, Medium figure.

I leave you this week with a look at Balazar and his Eidolon as they face off against the vicious Gargantuan Red Dragon Case Incentive figure from the Dungeons Deep set.

Don't forget to order our most recent Iconic Heroes boxed sets: Iconic Heroes Set 1, Iconic Heroes Set 2, and Iconic Heroes Set 3, all of which are shipping now to paizo.com customers.

Better yet, set up a Pathfinder Battles Ongoing Case Subscription to unlock a whopping 30% discount on Iconic Heroes box purchases (the discount for new subscribers goes into effect only after your first case ships next month). Existing subscribers should also consider ordering the Iconic Heroes sets soon, as they've proven to be very popular and they will not last forever!

There will be no Pathfinder Battles preview blog next week, as we'll all be rolling dice and hanging out with fellow gamers at PaizoCon 2015! I'm going to try to have the entire Dungeons Deep set on display in the Paizo store at the convention, so swing by there to see these awesome figures in person.

I'd also like to remind all PaizoCon attendees that I host an annual Miniatures Trading Afterparty in the hotel bar following the formal close of the show. I'll have a bunch of Pathfinder Battles figures for trade, as well as remnants from my own personal miniatures collection that I'm looking to unload. We've been doing this event for something like 6 years now, and it's always a highlight of the show. Bring any minis (painted preferred, but there's a market in unpainted figures too) you don't want and trade them with other gamers for figures you do. It's awesome, and I'll see you there!

Until then, I remain,

Erik Mona
Publisher

Time to Break Your Chains!

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Over a year ago, I went to talk to Erik about a book idea I had. The pitch was simple: "Let us do a book filled with whatever crazy ideas we have floating around in our heads". He said "no". I said, "Wait though, allow me to explain, our crazy ideas might make the game better." He said "tell me more", and Pathfinder Unchained was born.

This book is just about to be released and it is time for us to give you a good idea of the crazy ideas you will find inside. Pathfinder Unchained is a book full of rules tweaks and alternate systems you can use to mod your game, changing the way it plays. While we suspect that everyone will find their own favorite rules subsystem, just about everyone take a long look through Chapter 1, detailing alternate versions of the barbarian, monk, rogue, and summoner. So to kick off our previews, I've asked designer Mark Seifter to give you some of the juiciest tidbits about the Unchained variant classes!

Barbarian: From a game-balance perspective, the original barbarian serves her role admirably, but her mechanics are math-intensive, forcing you to recalculate numerous values once she enters rage and keep track of a bevy of once per rage abilities. Worst of all, she's the most likely character of all to die in a fight due to the way that ending rage lowers her current hit points. The unchained barbarian keeps the adrenaline-pumping fun of her former self but significantly simplifies the gameplay by adjusting the final mechanics instead of the stats themselves. For example, she gains temporary hit points instead of raising and later decreasing her current and maximum health (woo, no more dying at the end of rage!). Finally, she gains stronger versions of some of the mechanically weakest rage powers like raging climber (now you get an actual Climb speed instead of a small bonus!).

Illustration by Michael J. Penn

Monk: The original monk has many disparate abilities. While these abilities may be useful, they don't always synergize, and they are extremely inflexible. The unchained monk loosens up, gaining ki powers that allow you to customize your monk to fit your vision, whether it be a kung fu genius or wuxia mystic (my favorites are the ones like ki visions that let you gain divination powers that affect the narrative out of combat!). The unchained monk also has a full base attack bonus, an all-new flurry of blows, and some martial arts style strikes that help him reach his true potential (my favorite is flying kick, which lets you perform a leaping kick out to a distance equal to your extra monk movement speed once per flurry—mobile combatant for the win!).

Rogue: The original rogue has plenty of skill points and a damage increase in the form of sneak attack, but she needed a way to rule her own niche, especially with all the other classes that have things like big skill bonuses and accuracy boosts. The unchained rogue has a powerful debilitation ability that dramatically alters her ability to hit or dodge her foe, rogue's edge, which allows her to do unique things with her favorite skills (figure out surface thoughts with Sense Motive, Bluff so well you bypass truth-telling magic, use Disable Device reactively to protect yourself from a triggered trap, and much more!), and a significant boost to some of her rogue talents (For instance, minor magic? Yeah, you get that cantrip at-will). She also gets Weapon Finesse as a bonus feat and the ability to add her Dexterity to weapon damage!

Summoner: The original summoner has plenty of innovative features, but he also lacks focus and theme. As Jason was fond of describing it "You just have this amorphous blob with ten tentacles and two butts." The unchained summoner gains an eidolon that fits among existing outsiders, gaining additional abilities but also focus and theme (and if you want ten tentacles and two butts, we've still got that—go protean all the way my friend!). Some of these outsiders gain some pretty juicy abilities, like the angel's protective aura (that double strength magic circle against evil/lesser globe combo) or constant true seeing. Additionally, he possesses the spell list originally intended for the summoner.

So there you have it. We are confident that some of these classes will find a home at your game table, even if the Eidolon no longer has two butts. Tune in next week when we move on to look at some of the exciting new options in the Skills and Feats chapter!

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer

Friday Publisher Preview: Second Look at Iconic Heroes Set #3

Friday, October 31, 2014

The happiest of Halloweens to all of you out there in Previewland! We're a little under three weeks from the November 19 release of The Lost Coast, the newest 45-figure Pathfinder Battles set. We've recently simplified our Pathfinder Battles Case Subscription, so if you want to make sure you don't miss a single figure setting up a subscription in the next week or so before we start shipping them is your best bet. I brought home a case of my own this week, and I'm really happy with how the set turned out. The giant Shemhazian Demon Case Incentive figure is fantastic, and the set includes lots of other favorites like Lamashtu cultists, Lamashtu herself, and the stupidest (and I mean that in a GREAT way) Hill Giant Chieftain ever created in prepainted plastic. I think you guys are really going to enjoy this one.

But we're not here today to talk about The Lost Coast! Instead, let's cast our minds forward to March 2015 to take a look at the second half of figures included in Iconic Heroes Set #3. Last week's preview revealed the first three iconic heroes in the set, Alhazra the oracle, Damiel the alchemist, and Alain the cavalier.

This week, we've got three more figures from the set.

Let's start off this week's preview with Imrijka, Half-Orc Inquisitor! Imrijka has proven to be one of the most popular iconic characters introduced in the Advanced Player's Guide. Outside of the iconics from the Core Rulebook and the amazingly popular witch, I tend to notice community-produced images of Imrijka more than almost any of our other iconics. As a lot of these images are of a decidedly adult nature, I assume we somehow tapped into the world's need for a decent-looking orc. (How's THAT for a Halloween shudder?) Whatever the reason, she's here to stay, and her new miniature looks fantastic.

And here's Balazar, Gnome Summoner. Balazar is a fun little guy who always has a trick up his sleeve. I wrote Balazar's Meet the Iconics backstory, and I've had a soft spot for him ever since. Our design team is currently at work revising Balazar's class, the summoner, for spring's Pathfinder Unchained hardcover, so expect to see a bit more of him in the near future.

Balazar is just a weird little gnome without his best buddy, the eidolon Padrig. Padrig can change his shape according to Balazar's will, and the two have been inseparable ever since they met many decades ago. As a representative of a creature type with no particular permanent shape, Padrig also works great for just about any weird monster you might want to throw at your players. Note the clear effect at his base. Cool!

All six figures in Iconic Heroes Set #3 come with a unique card for use with the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game that will be available ONLY in these special sets.

And that's it for this week. Enjoy the spooky holiday, and we'll see you back next week for a look at something REALLY SCARY!

Until then,

Erik Mona
Publisher

Meet the Iconics: Balazar

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

To join in all the gift giving going on today, here's a belated present for the season. Happy holidays from all of us here at Paizo Publishing!

Illustration by Wayne Reynolds

The final decade of the Age of Enthronement brought hope and innovation to the people of the Inner Sea region. In the north, Chelish explorers from Korvosa founded the city of Magnimar. In the east, Taldor and Qadira reached an uneasy peace after centuries of antagonism and open warfare. In the treacherous Mana Wastes of the south, refugees fleeing persecution in Nex settled the Duchy of Alkenstar as a beacon of light and progress in a sea of magic-warped madness. And not far away, in Nex's capital city of Quantium, the Arclords adopted an orphaned gnome child named Balazar into their most prestigious school of magical instruction.

Diligent students of the scribbles and writings of the long-lost archmage who founded that nation, the Arclords deciphered codes and texts from the margins of newly discovered spellbooks and concluded that "children of the First World" would play an important role in the magical administration of the departed wizard's kingdom. In the years before the death of Aroden, prophecy was a much more valuable currency in the lands of the Inner Sea, and in 4601 the tradition-obsessed Arclords scoured the gnome communities infesting their beloved cities for young gnomes to press into service. To prevent their great works from falling victim to what they considered a chaotic and untrustworthy race of childlike anarchists, the wizards culled only the youngest (and thus in their minds least corrupt) gnome children from their parents, imprisoning or destroying families with the temerity to go against the marginalia of the wizard who had founded the nation and declared the city open to creatures of all races so long ago. To the Arclords, any gnome resistance was a revolt against the ideals of the nation itself, akin to treason.

By 4606, the human god Aroden was dead, the power of prophecy was broken, and the Arclords' eugenics experiment was veering toward abject failure. As the gnome orphan brood developed into maturity in the decades that followed, they brought chaos and catastrophe to Quantium's magical academies. And at the center of that chaos stood Balazar: an impulsive youth with a temper to equal the bright red ferocity of his prodigious mustache, a burning match on a bed of tinder.

In the early years of his instruction, Balazar revealed almost no magical acumen whatsoever, preferring to spend his days conducting merry pranks on his fellow students and instructors instead of absorbing himself in the meticulous study of the Arclords' curriculum. When one such prank resulted in the transmutation of an instructor's tower into a living being of elemental stone (thanks in part to a mysterious glowing rock pilfered from the school's vaults), Balazar and three gnome associates found themselves expelled from the academy, exiled from Quantium, and sent on the first wagon train to Ecanus, the sprawling southern city whose world-famous fleshforges churned out a legion of horrors to bolster Nex's armies and terrorize its squalid countryside.

The Ecanus assignment was intended exclusively as punishment, but the city's masters welcomed the gnomes with open arms, eager that their unconventional attitudes, boundless creativity, and unpredictable obsessions might aid them in conquering one of the most enduring mysteries of the monumental fleshforges. For deep within the dungeons below the military complex, in a room designed by the Archmage Nex himself, lay an extraplanar rift known as the Void Chasm, a shaft of sheer sides and cloying, multicolored mists that had driven insane all who had previously gazed within it.

One by one, Balazar's gnome associates gazed within the abyss, and one by one they lost their tenuous grip on reality. Balazar watched in horror as the color drained from their hair and skin, as if the whole of their life from birth to bleaching transpired within the span of a few moments. When the emotional strain grew too great and the gnomes cried out in anguish, the pitiless fleshforge instructors pushed them into the trench, where their howls soon faded beneath the swirling mists. If the gnomes could not discover the purpose of the Void Chasm, the administrators reasoned, perhaps a sacrifice to the unknown powers below would do the trick.

As he stood on the precipice of the Void, Balazar wondered if perhaps he should have studied more diligently in the relative comfort of Quantium's academies. Reluctantly, he cast his gaze into the miasma and felt the weird energies of the Chasm worming their way into his mind. Worse, he heard whispering voices in the mists, calling out to him and begging him to step over the edge. At first he thought the voices to be those of his lost fellow gnomes, and called back to them one by one even as the color drained from his hair and he felt his mind slipping away. But the voices were not those of his friends. They belonged to… something else.

It took all of Balazar's limited concentration to sift the many voices from each other. Some were angry, demanding to be left alone. Others beckoned with honeyed words of sweet oblivion. But one voice among the tumult spoke softly and plainly. "I will help you," it said in reassuring tones. "Give me form and allow me to leave this prison, and you and I will become as one."

With the hands of the fleshforge administrators on his shoulders, about to give the final push that would send him into nothingness, Balazar tried to imagine what the voice would look like. He dreamed of a creature with a vast serpentine body, with grasping talons and horrifying scales. And, perhaps because he had not eaten that day and was growing hungry, he imagined the voice speaking through the beak of a monstrous chicken. And then, just as he felt the muscles of his captors tense for the final push, the creature he had imagined emerged from the Void Chasm fully formed and fully real, screaming a hideous avian cry and weaving through the air with serpentine grace. Its claws tore at the necks of the administrators, its hideous beak making a mess of their unbelieving eyes. And all along, in reassuring tones only he could hear, it spoke to him. "Do not be afraid, little one," it said. "We were meant to be together."

Somehow, Balazar and the avian entity that called itself Padrig managed to win their way free of the fleshforges, of Ecanus, and even of Nex. As he fled up the eastern coast of Garund on a succession of merchant and smuggler vessels, Balazar and Padrig grew closer and closer to one another. Padrig explained that he was a bodiless being known as an eidolon, and that only Balazar could give him structure and form due to the affinity of their minds and souls. As the gnome made his way from Nex to Katapesh to Absalom, Balazar grew more and more adept at shifting Padrig's form to add more legs, terrible wings, or other features fitting the dangers and situations at hand. When things got too dangerous to be seen with a magical creature or when discretion was more important than protection, Balazar dismissed Padrig to some extraplanar hidey-hole, only to call him once again to his side when needed.

Although a great deal of the young Balazar's mischievous spirit remains, the horror of the Void Chasm remains with him to this day. Other gnomes often confuse his stark white hair for a symptom of the insidious bleaching that threatens all gnomekind, but through his constant and relentless travels Balazar remains as engaged and full of life as any of his healthy gnome brethren. When other gnomes inquire about his "condition" with the best of intentions, Balazar sometimes flies into an impatient fit of grumpiness, chastising his would-be helpers and instructing them to mind their own business.

Privacy is very, very important to Balazar, for the Nexian wizards he betrayed have not forgotten his singular mastery of the Void Chasm. Agents of the Arclords of Nex dog his travels at every stop, pushing him further and further away with each season. Balazar knows that each new stop—however temporary—will provide him with ample opportunity to learn new things and meet new people, to master the magical craft that always eluded him in Nex, and to do honor to the friends and colleagues he left behind. Despite occasional moments of maudlin reflection on all he has lost, Balazar takes comfort in his enduring friendship with the eidolon he recued from oblivion so long ago. As long as he travels with Padrig, he knows he will never be alone.

Erik Mona
Publisher

Illustration by Matt Dixon. Widescreen version here.

Happy Holidays!

December 24, 2010

None of us are in the office today, we're hither and yon, fording rivers and traveling through woods, celebrating the holiday weekend with family and friends. However, we hope you enjoy this week's wallpaper and that you have a wonderful holiday, eat as much great food as you can, and have the chance to decorate your home with the finest crystals available.

From all of us, to all of you, may you have a joyous crystalhue!

Hyrum.
Marketing and Organized Play Manager

Webmaster's Note: Due to popular demand, we are also providing a widescreen version of last Friday's wallpaper. Thanks, Crystal!

Advanced Player's Guide Playtest, Round 2!

Monday, November 30, 2009

Illustration by Wayne Reynolds

Illustration by Wayne Reynolds

The playtest of the Pathfinder RPG Advanced Player's Guide continues today with the launch of two more classes slated to appear in the book, due out in August. Round 2 focuses on the summoner and the witch. The summoner is an arcane caster that forms a close bond with a powerful outsider, known as an eidolon. The eidolon works a lot like an animal companion, but its form and abilities are decided by the summoner and they can change as the summoner goes up in level. The witch is a class that utilizes a wide variety of spells from both the arcane and divine spell lists. She draws her power from a mysterious force, which she communes with through her familiar. To top it off, she has a wide variety of hex powers to draw on, that both help her allies and hinder foes. This is your chance to take a look at these classes before they hit shelves in August. You can download the free PDF containing both of these classes here.

Two weeks ago, we released the cavalier and the oracle, and the playtest for those classes is well underway. In two weeks, we will release the final two classes set to appear in the book. While we are focusing on the classes as they release, the playtest itself will remain open until the end of January 2010.

Just like the Core Rulebook playtest last year, there are a number of forums waiting for your feedback and comments. The first is a general forum, for discussing larger issues and announcements. Following this is a pair of forums for discussing each round of the playtest. Discussion on the summoner and the witch should go in the round 2 forum.

Feedback on the first round has been immensely helpful, but I want to stress the usefulness of actual playtest feedback. Observations and general concerns are useful, but we are getting the most information from players who have actually given the classes a try. So take the summoner and the witch out for a spin and let us know what you think.

See you on the boards.

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer