Planes: Anything but Plain

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Having finished hacking away at the random encounter tables for the GameMastery Guide some time ago, I was recently set to work doing the same kind of thing for the Bestiary II. This time, however, instead of providing GMs with random encounters based on a plane's alignment, I got to make a separate table for each individual plane in the Great Beyond, Golarion's cosmos.

This is pretty exciting, because not only do these new tables utilize all the new monsters in the Bestiary II, but they also provide GMs with a plethora of inspiration, whether your PCs be traveling through the ever-shifting realm of the Maelstrom or ascending the soaring Great Spire in the Boneyard.

As if having stores of creatures to fill entire planes with isn't sweet enough, the GameMastery Guide includes an entire section dedicated to the planes, detailing the specific traits and characteristics of each plane, as well as the dangers that may await adventurers. As an example for what kind of cool details you can find in the GMG, below is art for Ymeri, the Queen of the Inferno.

Illustration by Christopher Burdett

At any rate, I've been staring at these books and their tables and creatures and stuff for weeks now, and I'm still excited about them; that means all y'all on the outside have no idea what kind of awesomeness you're in for.

Patrick Renie
Editorial Intern

Snagged from the Vault: Great Beyond, A Guide to the Multiverse

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Occasionally the Vault contains wondrous oddities, such as this map of the Eternal City of Axis, rendered beautifully by Rob Lazzaretti. This map, and more information about Axis and the other planes of the Outer Sphere, can be found in Pathfinder Chronicles: The Great Beyond, A Guide to the Multiverse, due out in May. Of course, nothing but perfect symmetry should be expected from the axiomites and their Godmind.

Vadid and Nahk
Preview Purloiners

The Eternal City of Axis exists among the planes of the Outer Sphere as the personification of universal law, a shining example of perfect order and harmony rising out of the churning Maelstrom. Within the plane's golden barrier walls, the streets are perfectly ordered and clean, the buildings appear as paragons of their respective architectural styles from virtually every culture within the multiverse, and the natives strive to live in orchestrated harmony. Of course, some would label the plane's perfection hollow, or its beauty verging on sterility, but given the eternal city's violent history and perhaps precarious present standing, its gods and outsiders alike dismiss such criticism outright.

Snagged from the Vault: The Great Beyond, A Guide to the Multiverse

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

From the depths of the vault we bring you another glimpse into The Great Beyond, illustrated by Sarah Stone...

Individual keketars range from 7 to 40 feet long, though they constantly shift and change like the unformed reality of the Maelstrom itself, altering color and serpentine banding patterns, shrinking or elongating, and undergoing even more radical physical changes. However, a keketar possesses two static features: first, whatever configuration its body takes, its eyes are always a piercing shade of violet; and second, a whirling ring of ever-changing symbols floats above and around its head like a shapeshifting crown. The cloud's symbols coil, snarl, and intermingle with one another, gradually merging and mutating without apparent pattern. Each keketar is marked by unique stylistic elements within the symbols and the general orientation and appearance of the crown—useful for distinguishing between different individuals. They can hide or manifest this crown at will, but they usually leave it visible.

Vadid and Nahk
Preview Purloiners

Snagged from the Vault: The Great Beyond

Friday, March 13, 2009

After yesterday's fateful misadventure, we have decided against heavily drinking Qadiran firewine before plumbing the depths of the Vault in the future. Today, dear readers, we promise to fetch only the finest art from the Golem's boundless treasury. Presented here are the axiomites and astradaemons from Pathfinder Chronicles: The Great Beyond, illustrated by Sarah Stone. Our deepest apologies for the errors of our last theft.

Vadid and Nahk
Preview Purloiners

The lords, caretakers, and architects of the eternal city of Axis, the axiomites possess a wide variety of outward forms, oddly unlike the uniformity displayed by their fellow natives, the hive-dwelling formians. A random cross-section of axiomite society contains those who resemble flawless, perfect humanoids of all descriptions—typically humans, elves, tieflings, dwarves, halflings, giants, and even gnomes—but these outward shapes belie their true forms, which can be seen briefly whenever the axiomites move or perform any complex actions. During such moments, their bodies partly dissolve into glowing clouds of golden, crystalline dust. The clouds move and contort on their own accord, temporarily congealing into twisting lines of mathematic symbols and complex tangles of equations. Each axiomite is actually an immortal construct of living, intelligent mathematics approximating a humanoid shape.

Astradaemons appear as ghostly, faintly phosphorescent, rail-thin humanoids with exaggeratedly long limbs. The fiends also have a seemingly random number of translucent tentacles trailing from their backs, shoulders, and upper arms, which wave and weave through the air. Their bizarre forms possess heads that are skeletal, elongated, and vaguely piscine, reptilian, or canine, always bearing hungry rictus grins. Wicked, curved claws sprout from their hands and feet, and each creature’s tail moves in rhythm with its tentacles, typically hanging toward the ground and almost doubling its length. As the perpetually ravenous servitors of Abbadon’s archdaemons, the astradaemons’ touch is corruptive and damaging to the spiritual material of souls. Their touch and especially their bite can cause horrific damage, akin to that of a wraith, to anything they attack. Most feared, however, is their ability to utterly consume the souls of those killed in their proximity, feeding off of their essence or dragging it back to their fiendish overlords.

The Great Beyond

Friday, February 13, 2009

In The Great Beyond, A Guide to the Multiverse, we get an in-depth tour of what lies beyond the borders of life and death, of reality and entropy, and of good and evil in Golarion. Here, Wayne Reynolds's incredible cover shows us not only a view of the Maelstrom (the chaotic neutral outer plane) but also one of its indigenous menaces—a protean. A CR 17 keketar protean, to be precise. Here's hoping poor Seltyiel's ready to handle some quickened confusions, a lawful weapon, and a good fortitude save to resist all those transmutations when the monster invariably claws him up. And for Desna's sake, Seltyiel... don't try to teleport when that keketar's that close to you!

James Jacobs
Pathfinder Editor-in-Chief