Our journey through the iconics continues with our third Core Set Quick-Start character, Seoni!

She’d rather you actually got with the plan, but at least get out of fireball radius.

Seoni’s art has historically been a bit flashy, but I really like her new serious and driven aesthetic in Pathfinder Second Edition.

Find some allies and monsters, and Seoni will show them who’s boss.

Rise of the Runelords Seoni could enjoy the fun of spellcasting without worrying about recharge checks, and also had a backup power for when she was caught without an Attack spell in hand. This made her a great starting character, which is handy since I remember her being very popular for new groups picking characters before understanding the mechanics.

With everything important based on Charisma, you’d get to enjoy the excellent d12 most turns, and picking skill feats was a breeze. Card selection and card feats could require more thought, though. After blithely ignoring weapons and armor, Seoni loaded up on 5 blessings, 4 allies, and 3 each of spells and items. This let her explore very well, but meant that you might quickly run into some difficult choices about what spells to keep around. If you didn’t take many Attack spells, you’d likely soon find out that her character power was a great backup option, but a little anemic for important combats.

As much Sorcerer-ing as Runelords, now with more Class (Deck).

Sorcerer Class Deck Seoni adds Knowledge to her skill list, playing up a bit more of the detail-oriented and planner side of her background. She also swaps her Attack power from Fire to Force. This makes her less good at killing some monsters like Trolls, but a whole lot better at fighting a number of Fire-immune monsters like Devils. She also trades out her automatic spell recharging power for a bonus to acquire Magic boons. If you’re used to playing other casters already, or you play in a large group, that’s probably a decent trade.

A slightly more Wizardy Sorcerer.

Wrath of the Righteous Seoni went off in a different direction from the previous two versions. She only recharges Attack spells (and items), and doesn’t have the power to do an Attack spell whenever she wants. In trade, she has an extremely nifty power to draw Arcane or Magic cards directly from her discard pile and occasionally draws extra cards on acquires. She’ll want to make sure to stock up on some good Attack spells; thankfully, Wrath of the Righteous has a whole bunch of awesome ones, and she has 2 more spells in her deck. She’s also swapped Diplomacy for Perception and can add armor to her deck. Probably a decent call for ventures into the Worldwound.

New style, same raw power.

Of all the Core Set characters, Seoni follows most in the footprints of her previous incarnations. Her Runelords powers just make her the perfect choice for introducing new players to spellcasting. That said, we can’t help but switch things up. Her Attack power is more reliable, especially at high level, and a single power feat makes it a lot cheaper to use. Another power feat lets her shuffle spells into her deck on recovery: a nice option once you know which cards you want to force higher in your deck.

Seoni is a bit more diverse in her skills than Runelords, starting with Knowledge and able to pick up Perception in a role. Her art has always had a staff and dagger, so she’s the first Seoni to start with a weapon. Thankfully, both the Dagger (assist a local combat) and Quarterstaff (evade an Obstacle or Trap) are pretty solid for her in Core and she can always convert them into an Arcane Attack.

That “freely” makes Deflect an essential tool in the Sorcerer’s box.

Spells are her bread and butter, and she doesn’t need too many Attack spells because of her power. This lets her take protective, utility, and assisting spells if she wants, or choose a greater variety of Attack options. With a single power feat, she can also pick up some solid Arcane items like the Wand of Enervation.

Giant Form makes a mockery of the words “Immune to Attack.”

Seoni can safely load up on the highest level difficult-to-recharge spells she can get her hands onto. Giant Form and Scrying are fun and effective options that Ezren and Kyra might have real difficulty consistently recharging. They also convert well with Seoni’s Attack power.

Pharasma: goddess of birth, death, fate, prophecy, rebirth, fighting undead, and making Seoni awesome at casting spells.

In character, Seoni has always been devoted to Pharasma, even leading us to adjust the Pharasman blessings in Rise of the Runelords to make them a better fit for Seoni. In Core, both Pharasma’s Knowing and Lady of Mysteries lean into the undead-fighting aspect of the Lady of Graves while also being useful for Seoni, allowing her to cycle her deck around to have the right cards in hand before pressing onward.

I also believe we can reach the morning light.

Seoni’s Celestial Runecaster role builds on the concept that she draws her sorcerer power from a celestial origin. This role builds on her Attack power, both in effectiveness and in adding the ability to deal Divine damage (useful for bypassing resistance or immunity). She gains bonuses when blessed and at thematically Sacred locations. She gains occasional (end of turn) flight, and resistance to damage like a celestial creature. All solid, effective options.

Her Dreamweaver role embraces her Varisian background and devotion to Pharasma to learn to see and pull the strings of fate. She becomes somewhat of a deckmaster, with powers to cycle her deck and ensure she can get her favorite cards back into hand. She can gain the Perception skill and assist her party against barriers. It benefits from a little more thought and planning, and occasionally your friends will screw up your plans. And that’s sometimes what being Seoni is about.

That’s our new Seoni! She’s still a straight-forward badass d12 chucker of energy magic and Diplomatic ways, but she’s got some new cool options to add complexity as she gains levels.

Keith Richmond
Adventure Card Game Designer

Keith and Shannon have been talking about the new character designs in the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Core Set, so I thought I would do some blogs about the characters from the Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path. In particular, today I’m going to consider Varian Jeggare, everyone’s favorite faithful Chelaxian Wizard dedicated to Asmodeus.

Book, blade, and bon vivant? Checks out.

Those of you who are familiar with Varian, whether from the Pathfinder Society, the Pathfinder Tales Character Deck, Keith’s previous blog post about that deck, or from any of Dave Gross’s novels featuring Varian, will recognize that I might have, ahem, stretched the truth a bit in that last paragraph. If that sounds interesting to you, I can enthusiastically recommend any of those sources for more detail. For now, I’m going to dig a bit deeper into the design of Varian as a PACG character.

When the time came for us to put together a set of characters for Curse, we knew that we’d want to play up the connection between the characters and the city of Korvosa itself, so Varian went on the list early. In addition to being a cool and familiar character that hadn’t yet appeared in an Adventure Path, he’s a graduate of the Acadamae in Korvosa and he’s a noble with interesting connections to Cheliax, Asmodeus, and Desna. The early drafts of his character wanted to establish him as a wizard (mostly… more on that later), a bit of a fencer, and a well-connected man-about-town.

Dashing, debonair, and potentially dangerous? Checks out.

Varian’s hardly a hulking, brutish sort (if that’s your thing, check his cohort Radovan), so we didn’t want him to rely on Strength, but we still wanted him to be capable in Melee. We were planning on pushing him toward Finesse-style weapons, so we counted on being able to give him a skill to help. This ended up as Acrobatics: Dexterity and Sword proficiency, which helps keep him true to Dave Gross’s original concept without too much card-text overhead. This approach also made him a good potential fit for—avoiding spoilers here—an option that comes up during the AP. As a “gentleman of means and connections,” we gave him a power that adds a bonus to efforts (his or others) wherever he could reasonably call on civilized aid. This melded nicely with the new traits we’d added to locations. So Varian can call for help in Urban locations, where his name, rank, manners, money, and/or general confidence can be put to use. Naturally enough, this makes Varian want to spend his time in those locations.

Since Varian is a wizard, he has a strong Arcane skill, but with his particular take on wizardry, we wanted him to feel distinct from Ezren or Darago during play. Since the Core Set was moving away from “if you have the Arcane skill” toward proficiency as the method to determine whether or not spells were used as if prepared from a book or as one-shot scrolls, we could simply give him proficiency with Arcane to keep the spells after using them. To create the “riffle scrolls” effect (see Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Inner Sea Magic for more details) that allows Varian to avoid the debilitating nausea that besets him when casting spells, we gave him an unusual power: Unlike Seoni who automatically succeeds at recharging Arcane spells, or Ezren who is very likely to succeed, Varian automatically fails. This gets those boons into his discard pile where his next character power lets him pull them to the bottom of his deck.

Finally, we come to Varian’s fourth character power, one that requires a feat. This power lets him draw some cards and then recharge the same number of cards, so he stays at the same number of cards in hand, but he gets to choose which he keeps and which he stores away for later. All by itself, this filtering power is useful on both ends: it can help you get a key card that’s hiding in your deck, and it can also let you save cards that are good but not yet needed, or not safe sitting in your hand. This power is a bit more mechanical than some others; to me, it generally represents Varian’s resourcefulness, and it also combines with his riffle scrolls power to help him manage which spells he wants now versus which spells he wants later. This gets us to the not-so-secret direction that I wanted for Varian: deck control. It would take too long to explain, so I’ll try to sum up. You see, it’s all Paizo’s fault. To be more specific: it’s PaizoCon’s fault.

Late in the wee hours one PaizoCon night, Keith and I were watching and playing an early Core playtest. Who did which has been lost to sleeplessness, but what’s important here is that someone was playing an Arcane caster, and they were playing it by counting their deck.

Since the early days of PACG, we’ve seen people dedicate a lot of attention to managing their deck. While most Divine casters tend to heal themselves to victory—hi, Paul!—other early characters like Valeros and Sajan also get in on the recharging game, especially when combined with a little judicious deck thinning.

Deck thinning, for those who don’t already know, is the process of specifically (and, hopefully, carefully) removing cards from your deck so that it’s more likely to produce the cards you really want. Valeros can thin his deck to his favorite weapons (or those most appropriate to the current scenario) and then make repeated use of his power to recharge them. If Sajan can get rid of his items and allies, then his deck is focused down to a big pile o’ blessings, which he can recharge for big hits. The downside of this approach is the danger. In addition to the utility of the specific cards you give up, you also have to sacrifice your “hit point buffer” to get there. For example, when Rise the Runelords Sajan’s deck is thinned down to his 10 blessings, he’s very strong at combat checks, but if he’s forced to discard 4 of them to damage, suddenly those boons he “got out of the way” would be very helpful to have around.

Even people who don’t push things quite so far can derive fun and benefit from managing what cards they recharge and when. This sort of deck manipulation is especially common among characters like Ezren and Seoni who cast a lot of spells, and usually get to recharge them. What I saw that night/morning at PaizoCon was someone who wasn’t just thinning their deck; they were working to set it up, ordering and recharging cards to the bottom to try to plan their future draws, setting themselves up to be ready for the future, for other people’s turns and their own. While this sort of play isn’t for everyone, both that player and the rest of the table seemed to be enjoying themselves. I always enjoy watching people really get into the game, whether it be the story, characters, theme, mechanics, or anything else. With Varian, I was trying to build a character for this sort of player. For the person who shuffles their deck, draws their starting hand, and then proceeds to exert order over the chaos of the game, choosing what to recharge, when, and in what order. For the person that knows when they want to be healed, and especially when they don’t want to be healed, because they know when the card they want is coming up, and they don’t want you messing with their order. I’ll say it again: it’s not for everyone, but in the right hands, it’s a beautiful thing.

Sarcastic, stealthy, and sometimes savage? Checks out.

As Varian well knows, it’s always good to have friends. Also: companions, suitors, contacts, servants, agents, employees, and factotums. In this case, Varian has his personal “bodyguard” Radovan Virholt, and he’s quite lucky to do so. Radovan will stick around Varian to protect him from harm, and while he’s around, the two of them can be quite effective at solving “problems,” including problems you might not expect to be solved by a gentleman fencer. When Radovan does have to temporarily deal with a dangerous situation, Varian’s ability to draw and recharge will help get Radovan back by Varian’s side.

The school clubs are both better and worse than you’d expect.

When Varian gains a role card, one option is to lean into his studies as an Acadamae Graduate. This lets him get even more benefit “around town” from his contacts that are interested in the Arcane arts. He can also filter cards to the top or bottom of his deck for even more control. Finally, his time at the Acadamae lets him call on his studies of magic and the Harrow, both to get out of unusual situations (using Arcane instead of another skill), and also to dig deep for a crucial spell in a moment of need.

“Pick your poison” isn’t always meant so literally.

Varian’s other option in Curse of the Crimson Throne leans into his political, diplomatic, and noble connections, as well as his fencing studies *cough* spoilers avoided *cough*. Always one to make friends and (try to) influence people, Varian can now make even greater use of his allies, both their inherent abilities and for “favors.” He can also get flashy with his rapier (or, I suppose, other, less gentlemanly weapons) to good effect. One of the powers represents some lessons that we think he might have picked up from his friend Radovan (I’ll bet you can guess which one!), or perhaps just the influence of his officious dedication to his official religion. Finally, neither last (on his role card) nor least (for my not-so-secret intentions), his “resourcefulness” ability can be extended to a large degree, especially late in the Adventure Path. Put another way, even if “deckmaster” isn’t your thing, I’ll bet you can find ways to enjoy drawing essentially a second full hand at the start of each turn, then putting a fistful of cards back for later, and in the order you think you might want them.

For those of you who might be looking to try out Varian for the first time, we’ve put together a set of deck suggestions for Varian using cards from the Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path.

• Weapon: Scimitar
• Spells: Acid Burst, False Life, Infernal Healing, 2 others
• Item: Spellbook, 2 others
• Ally: Acadamae Student, 2 others
• Blessing: any 3

That’s it for now; I hope you enjoyed this look behind the curtain at Varian. If you’d like more or less of this sort of thing, please do let us know in the comments. Thanks!

Chad Brown
Adventure Card Game Lead Developer

In the first installment of our behind-the-scenes look at the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game’s Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path, we covered Adventure 1: Edge of Anarchy. By the end of that chapter, you learned that Korvosa is a strange city full of criminals (both big- and small-time) and devils (mostly small… for now), and that many of those are respected citizens. Now it’s time for things to get grim: a plague descends on the city. Let’s walk through Adventure 2: Seven Days to the Grave. Bring out your dead!

Throughout this adventure, I encourage you to use the Harrows wildcard Harrow of Shields for additional flavor and challenge. If you’re on the fence about this extra challenge, consider using the Base suggestion from the previous Adventure Time blog, or only apply Harrow of Shields when you have at least 3 cards in your discards (ensuring that heal effects will always provide some value).

Time to really appreciate the Fortitude skill.

Let’s talk a little bit about the scourge Plagued. Nobody wants to be plagued. And as soon as someone is, nobody wants to hang out with them. Or suddenly everyone is plagued. It won’t kill your character quickly, but you’ll want to remove the scourge as soon as possible. The best ways to do so are to play your harrow, which lets you remove a scourge this adventure, or to go to the Base. Otherwise, you might want to stock up on boons like Antiplague, Balmberry, Remove Disease, Plague Mask, or Soothing Word.

Just a vat of diseased liquid with a disease daemon pickling in it. Like you do.

Every scenario in Seven Days to the Grave has its splash of plague to toss around. As long as you’re careful around wererats and plague zombies, though, you’ll mostly be okay. (The final scenario has a bit more than a splash, though. More like a deluge, or a particularly unhealthy bath. More about that later, though.)

This isn’t the kind of ship that brings good things to town.

Before playing scenario 2A: Rats and the Sinking Ship, please observe its FAQ.

When disease suddenly breaks out in Korvosa, there’s a rush to find out how. And there’s an even more intense rush to blame just about anyone and take advantage of the chaos for personal benefit. (Sometimes Korvosa is a little too realistic.) In scenario 2A, the finger-pointing has settled on a gang of wererats. After spending some time exploring the back alleys and sewers of Old Town, you determine they have nothing to do with it, but their dictator Girrigz does have plans to take advantage of the chaos. Once you deal with him, the wererats are happy to be helpful members of society and point you toward a sunken ship that might’ve brought the disease to town. It’s guarded by a sea hag druid and her (lone) shark, but not for long!

To increase the difficulty of this scenario, I’d suggest the Perils wildcards Desperate and Impoverished to evoke the sudden exhaustion of supplies and closing up of the town. The Onslaughts wildcard Wearisome is also solid, given how much swimming and sewer spelunking the characters need to do.

Nobody told me it was a Bring Your Own Zombie party!

In scenario 2B: The Life of the Party, you continue your search for clues started in the previous scenario, stumbling into the “undead everywhere” part of the adventure. In addition to some opportunistic vampire spawn, the highlight of the scenario is a nod to “The Masque of the Red Death.” Worried about plague, some nobles have cheerfully shut themselves up in a manor house with a bunch of supplies, intending to have a long party while waiting out the trouble. That lasts right up until Jolistina Susperio, apprentice to the town’s favorite necromancer-slash-serial-killer Rolth Lamm (you raided his lair for body parts back in scenario 1C: The Dead Warrens), crashes the party... and turns everyone into zombies. Then she restarts the party, complete with costumed zombie dancing! Sanity is not one of Jolistina’s strengths.

The Onslaughts wildcard Monstrous works well with the scenario’s closing rules as well as the selection of level 2 monsters in Curse. For Legendary mode, I’d suggest the Perils wildcard Deadly to amplify those Plague Zombies, or the Perils wildcard Unhallowed to suit the rampant necromancy. [Editor note: “Suit.” I see what you did there.]

This looks not at all suspicious.

In the RPG, right up until this point, it can be pretty unclear if the Queen is doing anything wrong. In fact, in one of my groups, one player loved the Queen so much she wanted to become a Gray Maiden. Thankfully, the party found out that’d be a bad idea before she got too far. The cover of the hardcover edition does make it a little more likely for the players to suspect her from the start, though.

These Queen’s Physicians also seem not at all suspicious.

Still, in scenario 2C: The Queen’s Hospitality, you have plenty of reason to want to sneak and talk your way past as many of the Gray Maidens and Queen’s Physicians as you can. (Along those lines, my wife’s character had a long-lost sister she’d been trying to track down that I’d made into a Gray Maiden, figuring it would lead to a great reveal. I underestimated the ability of players to foil any plan, though: Through a combination of well-planned and lucky acrobatics, stealth, and timing, she managed to miss interacting with her sister by literal inches. Oops.)

If you have the right skills, this scenario isn’t all that difficult, so when adding wildcards, you may want to consider how much Diplomacy, Perception, and/or Stealth the group has. If you have those skills, I’d encourage the Perils wildcard Hostile to provide a little more danger and suspense. The Perils wildcard Confusing and Onslaughts wildcard Hazardous also feel appropriate for wading through the deception and betrayal. If your group is rarely pressed for time, I’d add an additional location (adding Storehouse to the list for 6 characters).

Lady Andaisin, the head cultist of Urgathoa, would like you to have a civil discussion with her scythe.

After you make it past all of the false trails laid by the Queen’s minions, in scenario 2D: The Cult of Urgathoa, you discover a fully-fledged temple to the goddess of the undead under the city. There you also discover a vampire scholar who helped craft the blood veil plague and is studying why some portion of the populace seems to be immune to it. And those previously mentioned vats where cultists are currently brewing a thousand gallons of “viscous, phlegm-like fluid of concentrated blood veil.” After you deal with the villain in charge of the temple (twice!), you’ll save the city from the plague!

All pretense of civility is out once an Aspect of Urgathoa shows up.

If your group is good at cornering villains, adding the location Blood Pool is a solid option. The Perils wildcards Hostile and Unhallowed and the Onslaughts wildcard Withering are all good fits thematically and mechanically. Because of the risk of plague and this scenario’s villain powers, managing your discards and buried cards adds suspense and a fear of death that will make winning this chapter feel like a well-earned triumph.

That’s Seven Days to the Grave. I promise you won’t need to make nearly as many Constitution Fortitude checks ever again. Probably. [Editor note: No promises!]

Keith Richmond
Adventure Card Game Designer

Though I’ve seen all four of the quick-start characters in action, Lini’s the one that I’ve been playing through the Core Set adventures, and so this strategizing has all been firsthand. I’ve discovered that she’s a more nuanced character than she was in the original Pathfinder Adventure Card Game sets: better balanced, and so requiring more thoughtful play. Which is all for the best: the classic Lini made everything a bit too easy.

So here are my thoughts on playing Lini, the second of the Quick-Start characters from the Core Set—and here’s some discussion on what “invoking the Animal trait” really means. You’ve very likely got it wrong: we did for our first few games, before I sat down to write this.

Once again, you can see Keith Richmond’s article on Lini for more on how the character has evolved.

Shannon Appelcline
Game Historian

Core Set Lini

Best Skill: Wisdom (d10)

Character Type: Warrior, Healer, Divine

Skills. Lini only has three “subskills”—Divine, Perception, and Survival—but they’re all under her d10 skill, Wisdom. Of those skills, Perception and Survival are the rarest, being featured on only three Core Set characters each. Harsk has both of them (along with Fortitude and Ranged), making them a somewhat poor pairing for an adventuring party, due to the overlap.

Weaknesses. Lini’s biggest weakness is her d4 Strength. Given that she also lacks Melee and Ranged skills, and starts with just one weapon card, she could end up rolling a horrible d4 in combat… if not for her “wild shape” ability: the power that lets her recharge or bury a card to use Survival + 1d4 instead. So this weakness isn’t nearly as problematic as it is for other d4 Strength characters, such as Lem.

Cards. Besides having just a single Weapon, Lini is also short on items (1) and blessings (2). The latter means that she’ll have to find other ways to explore multiple times—a critical ability for all characters. Allies (5) are her best option: she should make sure to collect allies that permit exploration... provided that they have the Animal trait.

Allies. Lini should collect Animals!! (For more, see below.)

Blessings. Nethys’s blessings are probably the best for Lini, as they can bless her Wisdom (and so Divine, Perception, and Survival). Alternatively, Erastil will bless just her Survival.

Spells. Because Lini has both a Divine proficiency and plenty of ability to do damage via means other than spells (namely, her wild shape power), she should stock up on healing spells; this will make her one of the strongest healers in a party, overshadowed only by someone like Kyra, who has a healing-oriented power feat. Take special note of Aspect of the Monkey, the only Animal spell in the Core Set.

Weapons. Lini needs to watch for Dexterity weapons that do not require proficiency. Her starting Dagger actually isn’t bad, since it can be recharged for 2d4. Crossbows are another good choice.

The Power of Animals

Lini’s best powers center around the use of Animal allies, which serve a variety of purposes. That is why you want to fill her ally slots with Animals (which is how her default deck is laid out) and advance to the max of 7 ally cards as quickly as possible.

Take +1d4 to Animal Invocations as Your First Power Feat. Of Lini’s three basic powers, the best is obviously the +1d4 to local checks that invoke the Animal trait. This can be used whenever she activates her wild shape power, whenever she acquires an Animal, whenever she fights an Animal, whenever she plays an Animal to determine the skill she’s using, and whenever her friends at the same location do these same things. It’s very versatile, and it’s a cooperative power. (In contrast, her least useful power is the one that lets her discard instead of bury when using wild shape with a non-Animal card. That’s a desperate last resort, so no need to make it cheaper.)

Clarification: What Invokes the Animal Trait? The “invoke” rule is one of the most confusing in the PACG. Page 9 of the Core Set rules tersely defines it by saying: “A check invokes a trait if it has or is against a card that has that trait. A card invokes a trait if it has that trait. A bane also invokes a trait if it deals only damage of the type that matches that trait.”

This means that the skill you’re using invokes its traits, as do any it references (e.g., Wisdom and Survival are invoked if Lini uses her “Survival: Wisdom +3” skill) and the card you’re facing invokes all of its traits (e.g., Acid and Animal when you’re trying to acquire a Giant Slug, and Poison and Animal when you’re fighting a Giant Toad). Then there’s the special case of a bane adding an exclusive damage type as a trait. And that’s it.

Well, that’s mostly it. Two more special cases appear on page 11 of the Core Set rules: you always add your character’s trait (e.g., Lini always adds Gnome and Druid), and you add the traits of a card you play if and only if it’s a “For your … check” card, like most weapons and Attack spells, which essentially replaces your skill with a card (e.g., when Lini plays a Deathbane Light Crossbow for a combat check, she would invoke Bow, Ranged, Piercing, and Magic).

There’s one last situation when traits are invoked: if a card, power, or scenario rule specifically says to add traits as part of its special effect text (e.g., Lini’s wild shape ability explicitly invokes the Animal trait).

Here’s a chart of all the traits that are actually invoked during a check:

Player Invokes	Challenge Invokes
Character Traits	Oppositional Card Traits
Skills Used or Referenced	Exclusive Damage Type
“For Your … Check” Card Traits	Special Effect Traits
Effect

Note what’s not included here: you don’t invoke the traits of cards played into a check other than a “For your … check” card or the oppositional card. So, if someone plays a support spell like Aid or even Venom Blast in a support role, it doesn’t invoke its traits; if someone plays a blessing, it doesn’t invoke its traits; and most tragically, if Lini plays a support Animal, it doesn’t invoke the Animal trait (or anything else).

Use Wild Shape. Lini’s best combat ability is her wild shape, which allows her to bury a card or recharge an Animal ally to fight at Survival + 1d4 + the card’s level. This has a starting value of 1d10 + 3 + 1d4 + card level, for a range of 5–17 + card level and an average of 11 + card level. Compare that to her starting Dagger at Dexterity + 1d4 (+1d4 if recharged), which is 1d8 + 1d4 (+1d4). That totals 2–12 (3–16 if recharged) or an average of 7 (9.5 if recharged).

Not only is the wild shape better, but it’s easier to pump up, with the +1d4 power feat immediately improving its range to 6–21 + card level and its average to 13.5 + card level. Keep an eye out for anything that could improve your Wisdom or Survival, making wild shaping even better (and note that you can always add in your Hide Armor to give yourself another +3 to combat by double-adding your Survival modifier).

Obviously, you always want to recharge Animals, not bury cards, to invoke wild shape. Recharging helps to cycle your deck, while burying cards thins it and makes you more vulnerable. (Here’s another reason to recharge Animals: you can happily declare “I turn into a giant slug” as you play the appropriate card.)

Collect the Right Animals. Consider carefully if you want Lini to be a combat monster or more versatile; this should largely depend on the composition of the rest of your party. If you want Lini to be one of your main fighters, collect Animals like Droogami and Riding Allosaurus, which can add to her combat stats. If you want Lini to be more versatile, then instead go for Animals that add to other skills, like the Raccoon that adds to Dexterity or Disable. In the latter case, you’ll still be recharging the Animals to wild shape, but during the narrow window that they’re in your hand, you might be able to use them for something else instead. (But don’t hold onto an Animal for a specific non-combat check unless you know it’s in your near future, such as a check to close your location. Else, you’ll just be clogging your hand when you could be cycling it.) Whichever the case: collect Animal allies exclusively and improve them as quickly as you can. Lini should never have non-Animal allies, not even seductive Loot allies.

The Lini Roles

Overall, the Wild Whisperer seems like the role that builds better on Lini’s innate abilities, but World Walker is a nice alternative if healing or movement are missing from your party.

Wild Whisperer. This role improves Lini’s already great power of Animals, allowing her to bring both her wild shape and her Animal invoke bonus up from +1d4 to +1d6 and also allowing her to heal Animal cards (albeit at the cost of something else). That makes it a good choice if you’ve been able to build out Lini’s Animal allies well. The ability to turn Strength into a d10 offsets Lini’s main deficit, which is good if it’s been causing you problems (and the fact that you recharge a card to do so makes this power even better, because that can again help you cycle cards that were clogging your hand). Finally, the power feats that add Acrobatics and Fortitude skills are nice if they’ve been lacking in your party. (That’s more likely for Acrobatics, as it appears on only three Core Set characters.)

World Walker. This role is much more defensive, giving Lini elemental defenses and the ability to remove scourges. If your party is light on healing for either damage or scourges, this might be a good choice. Meanwhile, the ability to move at the end of a turn is nice if your party is missing Amiri—see the upcoming fourth article in this series for why that’s great!

From 2016 to 2018, I wrote a series of articles about the strategy of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game—strategies that remain largely viable with the release of the updated game system in Core Set and Curse of the Crimson Throne. I always wanted to write some class strategy guides to go with those general strategy articles, but I couldn’t figure out who to write about. The Rise of the Runelords characters? The Class Deck characters? Every variant of each character?

Fortunately, the Core Set gives everyone the opportunity to get in from the ground floor again—including me, because I can now write class strategy guides from the beginning. This article, on the strategy of playing the monk Sajan, is the first of four covering the characters used in Core’s Quick-Start scenario.

For more on Sajan, you may wish to read Keith Richmond’s article detailing how Sajan was revised and updated for the new Core Set.

Shannon Appelcline
Game Historian

Core Set Sajan

Best Skill: Strength, Dexterity, or Wisdom (d8)
Character Type: Warrior, Melee, possibly Ranged

Skills. Sajan has the smallest skill range of any Core Set character. He has no d4s, no d10s, and no d12s: half of his skills are d6s and half are d8s. That small range isn’t even made up for by his subskills: though he has four of them (Acrobatics, Fortitude, Melee, and Perception), he’s only +1 or +2 in each. In the end, his only real standout skill is Acrobatics, his highest at 1d8+2, and which one of his powers allows him to easily buff with blessings. Despite the lack of high skills, Sajan’s lack of low skills means that he can be your go-to guy for any task that your party is relatively unskilled at: though a d6 isn’t great, it’s better than a d4! Sajan overlaps two skills with Harsk (Fortitude and Perception), so they may not be the best choice to combine in a party.

Weaknesses. Sajan’s weakness is writ large in this description: he’s great at nothing. His best skill, Acrobatics, has a range of 3–10 (averaging 6.5). Compare that to a less combat-focused d12 character like Seoni, who has a range of 3–14 (averaging 8.5) in both Arcane and Diplomacy.

So how does Sajan overcome this deficit? By blessing everything.

Cards. Sajan’s best card type is unsurprisingly blessings (7, which he can and should quickly pump up to 8, 9, and 10). This unfortunately means that he doesn’t get fun and evocative allies or spells, but it plays to Sajan’s greatest advantage: the power of blessings. Because Sajan won’t usually be using blessings for exploration, he’ll need to depend on his allies (3) for that and may alternatively decide to increase the count of that card type. Sajan’s biggest card weakness is probably his lack of armors (0), a problem that can be resolved some by his damage-reduction power feat (and even more by his Exiled Padaprajna role).

Allies. Sajan’s allies must allow him to explore! Secondarily, they should be rechargeable to improve his best skills. As an example: the Archer, Mouse, and Raccoon are good choices because they allow exploration and can be recharged to improve Dexterity.

Blessings. Sajan should be very picky about which blessings he takes. Cards that allow him to freely bless his own skills don’t do much for him, given his innate ability to freely bless his combat or Acrobatics. Thus, he needs to look more carefully for blessings that will benefit his best skills in other ways, such as Erastil’s “Old Deadeye”, which allows him to bless his Dexterity twice. Alternatively, Sajan can try and use his blessings to become less selfish, a problem created by his second power. In particularly, he might look for blessings that can be recharged when played on other members of the party: the humble Orison is thus a pretty good blessing for Sajan, as are the Asmodeus blessings and some level 3 blessings.

Weapons. Sajan’s weapon skills will likely fall behind his unarmed combat (his first power) over time. That means that his weapons should be fallbacks that he uses if he can’t afford to recharge a card for his first power. That means that he needs weapons that are pretty good without having to discard them: swords (which reload) are a good Core Set choice. Of course, if Sajan can get higher-level weapons that use Acrobatics as their skill, that’s the best. The Quarterstaff of Vaulting and the Lucky Starknife and probably Sajan’s favored options in the Core Set.

The Power of Blessings

Sajan’s biggest advantage is certainly his paired powers that allow him to recharge his own blessings and to freely use some blessings on combat or Acrobatics checks.

Bless Extensively. Because Sajan recharges all blessings that he uses on his own checks, he should use them quite freely. Most characters will save their blessings for the most important rolls against banes, but Sajan can (and should) expend them for things like attempting difficult acquisitions. In fact, he should empty his hand of blessings just about every turn: they’ll come back.

Beware of Blessing Explores. Sajan’s blessings recharge power only works when he plays them on his checks, not when he uses them to explore. Thus, he should be very wary of using blessings in that way: it takes blessings out of his deck, ultimately making Sajan less powerful. Instead, depend on allies for extra explores.

Be Selfish. Similarly, Sajan should be pretty reluctant to use his blessings on other players, because those also don’t return to his deck. Of course, PACG is a cooperative game, so he might occasionally have to help his fellows anyway—which is why he should look for blessings that can recharge in that circumstance. The other option for offsetting Sajan’s selfishness is using his blessings on himself… to get cool stuff for his friends.

Create a Blessing Machine. Feel free to discard Sajan’s weapons, items, and allies for their special effects. If he ends up with a deck of all blessings, then he can play through them each and every turn. (This doesn’t necessarily result in “Maximum Game Fun,” but it does result in “Maximum Sajan Efficiency;” balance the two as appropriate for your own enjoyment and that of your group.) Do be aware, however, that Sajan will be riding a thin line when he does this. A starting Sajan with a hand size of five will have a draw deck of only two if he empties his deck to just his seven blessings, and that means that death might lie too near. Increasing the number of blessings in Sajan’s deck and/or choosing a few additional cards to cycle, to bring his minimum deck size up to 10, will make him less vulnerable and is suggested.

An old, degenerate strategy involved starting all the characters at the same place as Sajan, then having the other characters each give Sajan a blessing. This isn’t particularly recommended. It’s less effective than it was in the previous PACG releases because Sajan is limited to using a maximum of three blessings at a time, and it dramatically decreases the Maximum Game Fun not just for Sajan, but for everyone.

The Power of Kung Fu

Sajan can be a notable combatant even without using a weapon.

Fight Unarmed. With his unarmed combat power, Sajan can recharge any card to fight at Acrobatics + 1d6 + the card’s level, which has a starting value of 1d8+2+1d6 + card level (with a range of 4–16 + card level and an average of 10 + card level). That’s not bad for a cheap combat, and is entirely comparable with Sajan’s basic weapon combats: his Dogslicer does 1d8+2+1d6, but can be boosted to 1d8+2+2d6 with a discard, and his Starknife does 1d8+2+1d4 and can be boosted to 1d8+2+2d4 with a recharge. Of course, unarmed combat’s card level will improve with time, and as soon as Sajan takes a power feat to change his unarmed combat’s +1d6 to +1d10, he’s definitely notched unarmed combat above his weaponry.

Can Sajan Use His First Power When Fighting with Weapons? No. The power begins “For your combat check,” so it determines the skill you are using for that check, just as weapons do. You can only use one power that determines the skill you are using for a check, so it’s either Sajan’s first power or a weapon. (If you want to use Acrobatics with a weapon, use something like Dogslicer or Starknife, but you still won’t get that extra 1d6 (or 1d10) + card level.)

Bless Extensively in Combat Too. Whether he uses weapons or not, Sajan’s better than the numbers above suggest because he can play up to two blessings on his combat or Acrobatics checks, increasing either by 2–16 (average 9). Though an unarmed combat of 4–16 + card level (average 10 + card level) isn’t bad, a combat of 6–32 + card level (average 19 + card level) that doesn’t permanently use any resources, is spectacular.

Take the Extra Free Blessing Power Feat. Sajan can get even better at combat! The best way to do that is to check the power feat that allows him to use a second blessing freely. This increases his ability to pump his combat by another 1–8, turning his spectacular combat skill into one that’s largely unbounded. You’re now up to 7–40 + card level for a low-level character if you temporarily expend three blessings! (The other option is to change Sajan’s combat ability from +1d6 to +1d10; it’s nice to be able to do that without temporarily expending a card, but it’s only an average increase of +2 to the roll, as opposed to +4.5. Mind you, it’s still a good second choice, and maybe sooner if you’re having problems with monsters that require Magic skills to be killed.)

Become the Villain Killer. By now, you’re playing Sajan like a combat machine. That should make him a prime choice for taking out your villains, henchmen, or other difficult monsters. Send him over when a location deck is getting low, and make sure he has a handful of blessings.

The Sajan Roles

Though there are a variety of differences between Sajan’s two roles, the Exiled Padaprajna is generally better if you want to play Sajan as a weapons fighter and the Iroran Dedicant if you want to play him as an unarmed fighter. The latter plays more naturally to Sajan’s strengths.

Exiled Padaprajna. This is the “weapons master” role for Sajan. It gives him better Melee and/or Ranged skills along with proficiencies. It’s not strictly necessary, but you might choose it if there’s no melee or ranged weapon fighter in your party, and thus those cards would otherwise go to waste. This role also makes Sajan a bit more cooperative (since other players can bless him without cost and he can offer them damage reduction); and more protected (since he can avoid losing his cards to damage). Thus, you might also choose this role if complementary opportunities for cooperation are being wasted or if Sajan is getting hurt too much.

Iroran Dedicant. This is the “martial artist” role for Sajan. It can make him considerably better at unarmed combat by adding an extra +1d4, by allowing rerolls of 1s or even 2s, and by adding bonuses if multiple dice come up the same (something that becomes more likely as Sajan adds more blessing dice). If you improve Sajan’s combat with the four basic dice changes, he now rolls a base of 1d8+2+1d10 + card level + 1d4 and rerolls 1s and 2s. That alone makes his basic combat range 11–24 + card level (an average of 17.5 + card level), which is quite high, and doesn’t even count his ability to add 1–3 blessings. Mind you, this role doesn’t make Sajan any more cooperative and doesn’t make his gameplay any more varied.

When working on Adventure Time: Edge of Anarchy, I really wanted to talk about some of the things that didn’t make it into the Curse of the Crimson Throne box. Every set, we design more cards than end up making it out into the wild. Some cards just get lost to that voracious devourer of cards called Card Count, which only lets some preordained multiple of 110 survive. Some characters never made it into a Class Deck because we liked how the deck (including its selection of cards) looked with the other characters more. This series of blogs plans to shed some light on some of these lost elements. Enjoy at your own risk!

Want to trade your priceless artifact for my priceless artifact?

A big mechanic that we tested at some tables throughout the Core and Curse playtesting process was the “Market”. At the end of each scenario, you were given the option to trade for a readily available boon (one that was either level 0, or at least 2 levels lower than you).

When rebuilding, each character may banish 1 boon; any that do may search the vault for a boon with a maximum level of the most recently played scenario’s # minus 2 (minimum 0).

It was cut for a few reasons:

• It would add complexity and time to the end of scenarios, as traders did in Mummy’s Mask.
• There was concern around removing some of the loot chase, both in terms of reduced difficulty and also reduced excitement.
• We just didn’t have space in the storybook for more mechanics.

We considered trying to sneak it in as a simpler mechanic that would piggyback off rebuilding to have a similar effect:

When rebuilding, each character may banish any number of boons.
OR
When rebuilding, each character may banish 1 boon.

As long as you were able to banish enough boons that you had to refill your deck to make it legal, you could replace them with cards that were a maximum level of the most recently played scenario’s # minus 2 (minimum 0). Unfortunately, it was less flavorful and still had the same complexity and timing flaws. It was also less obvious how you use it (especially to newer players). This is a good example of the sort of things that cause us to cut material even after it has been developed and tested. While the mechanic was dearly beloved by several of our (very experienced) playtesters, it added an extra layer of confusion for the newer players. It’s always a balancing act to keep the game interesting and challenging, but not overwhelming.

Now that we’ve talked about why we didn’t include it in the box, let’s talk about why you might want to play around with it at home.

Even single use, it’s nice to have healing options.

The main goal of the market concept was to empower characters to take and, especially, feel comfortable using consumables like Elixir of Healing by providing a reasonable way to replace them. It’s extremely common for characters in the RPG to carry around a supply of healing potions and scrolls, so we like the idea of a character hanging onto an Elixir of Healing or a scroll of Soothing Word, secure in the knowledge they can get it back.

One of these things doesn’t belong with the others...

A secondary goal of the market was a way to address a rare conundrum that can occur. If, for whatever reason, your character had to banish a boon you liked, you have to rebuild your deck with whatever card you happen to have on hand. Only if there are no spare cards of that type can you go searching the box for a reasonable replacement. I’ve seen a few different complaints about this, and I’ve also suffered it myself. I was soloing Rise of the Runelords with Merisiel when I had to banish my Thieves Tools, probably to close a location. Merisiel really liked those Thieves Tools, so I was eager to get them back, but I drew a random item from the box (for either closing a location or defeating a Cache barrier) and got a Token of Remembrance. It turns out that since Merisiel has no spells, that particular item doesn’t help her except as a hit point. “No big deal,” I thought, “I’m sure I’ll quickly either banish it or find another item I want more.” Sadly, I was stuck with it for 3 whole scenarios. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t a big deal since I just kept using it to feed my backstab power, but it felt wrong!

Does Ezren keep failing to acquire ‘your’ Greataxe? Well, we’ve got an offer for you!

A tertiary goal, and one that led to the greatest mechanical argument against including the market concept, is that sometimes you just fail to find a boon you really want. Perhaps you really want a particular level 1 weapon or blessing, but you’re level 3 and you’ve never had a chance to acquire it (perhaps because Lini or Quinn keeps finding it and failing to get it for you). It’d be nice to be able to just banish a boon you like less and replace it with the one you’ve been hunting for multiple levels. That said, one of the most exciting things for many players is the loot chase: seeing that dream boon that perfectly complements your character, waiting to luck into it, throwing the kitchen sink at acquiring it, and victoriously adding it to your deck. If you can too easily just get lower level boons, that takes away a fair chunk of the ‘thrill of the chase’ for some people.

So many shiny boons, so little deck space.

An extra benefit for the market appeared later: you can give up boons until you think you’re likely to need them. Know that you’re heading into a few scenarios full of undead? Go buy a Deathbane weapon. See that there’s an upcoming scenario full of arrows and fire? A Covering Shield might be just what you need. This is particularly nice now that Loot boons are in the vault. The Loot weapon Wyrmsmite from The Dragon’s Demand is great against dragons, which might be great to use against a couple of vicious dragons late in Curse of the Crimson Throne.

I encourage you to try it out and see if it’s good for your group. If you think “at the end of a scenario” is too often, you could make going to the market require winning the scenario, or only occur at the end of an adventure. Another interesting option would be to make a trip to the market a reward for having spent a hero point on something other than a feat during a scenario, or for being rewarded a hero point and not immediately spending it on a feat.

Some locations lend themselves more to a market trip than others.

Another option for Curse specifically is to make the market a special feature available at the end of any scenario that included the Base. If that sounds too frequent for your group, you could require that characters “put in an order” by only allowing characters that explored the Base during the scenario to go the market. Just be careful of this option if your group has someone who hogs the Base and demolishes it before anyone else can even think of going to it.

If you want to go a bit crazy, you could even give access to the market as a reward for closing certain locations. Just have people keep locations they close handy, then at the end you might let whoever closed the Shop trade for anything, Academy a spell, Arsenal a weapon, Cathedral a blessing, Tavern an ally, etc. This is more complex than we’re likely to publish outside of a blog, but it could add an exciting benefit for some groups.

If you get a chance to play around with the Market, let us know. We love feedback. Maybe it will appear in some future product.

We’d also love to know if this kind of blog content is of interest. It’ll take time and effort to put lost boons into a usable form, and a lot of work to develop and test the lost characters from class decks, but it may be worth it if enough people would like to see them.

Keith Richmond
Adventure Card Game Designer

Hi, Droogami! I see you brought lunch.

In the first Core Design blog, we had a good chat about Sajan. This time we’ll look at another of the four Quick-Start characters, Lini.

Arguably, the best strongest character in Rise of the Runelords.

Paul Peterson, a great guy and amazing designer, once wrote all about how Rise of the Runelords Lini was the best character ever. A secret I did not reveal when I wrote my best character blog is that I agreed with him, but it would have been a lot less interesting if we both wrote a blog about Lini. The next dirty little secret [note: not really a secret] is that Paul and I could both be called power gamers.

I once handed a high-level Rise of the Runelords Lini to a friend to play for a session and she asked what her character was good at, to which I replied, “everything.” She could recharge animals to explore, reveal animals for 1d4+4 to all checks, and carry some of the best spells in the game like Augury and Cure. Hard to beat.

Sometimes you just want to swim with the fishes. And talk to them. And have them help you seize pirate ships. All that.

Skull & Shackles Lini gives up her bonus to every check in the world for even more amazing mastery of all Animal allies. She’s also better at using her version of the RPG’s wild shape ability to use a d12 for her Strength or Dexterity. With the right support, she can be an exploration machine, and she’s got two of the most important skills for Skull & Shackles: Fortitude and Survival.

Oddly, the Lini with the most animals is also the only one pictured without Droogami.

Druid Class Deck Lini explored a pretty different direction from the previous two Linis. No longer attempting to emulate wild shape, she went all in on wielding her animals as her weapons. Her skills got a bit of a bump, making her pretty reliable at recharging spells and combat. If you go with her Pack Lord role and fill her deck with animals, you really do feel that “Everything is cool when you’re part of a team.”

Lini’s new portrait really lets you see the details in her hair and face.

One of the first changes I made to Core Set Lini was to replace her Knowledge skill with Perception. It fit better for how I’ve seen every druid in the RPG, as well as the ways we tend to use Perception and Knowledge in the ACG. I knew that I wanted to give her a power like Class Deck Lini, because in play it feels so much more like you are actually using your menagerie of friends. I also knew that I wanted to stop worrying about armor and weapon proficiency with her.

Animals help with all kinds of checks. A fair number involve mauling your enemies, but not all!

Lini benefited a lot from Core’s focus on local teamwork. Her allies in Core and Curse are far more likely to be able to benefit her friends, and her power lets her cycle them more quickly back to her hand. She can also add a d4 to every Animal check at her location, helping everyone gather animal friends and defeat Animal banes, and also helping Lini’s own combat checks.

Droogami is a great reason to be Lini. Aspect of the Monkey just makes me smile every time I see it.

She also gets to start with a level 1 card, the only named ally in Core: Droogami. Droogami helps out some of Lini’s favorite kinds of checks. She also gets to recharge or shuffle Droogami back into her deck for mobile explores, so you’re likely to want to keep Droogami forever. Convenient, since Droogami is an important part of her backstory and artwork.

Because she doesn’t need to worry too much about Attack spells or weapons, Lini can focus on utility spells like Aspect of the Monkey. In addition to bearing a truly excellent piece of artwork by Vicky Yarova, it’s a solid bonus for Lini to display for the entire turn, and her extra die for Animal checks applies to its recharge check (as well as any other Animal spells you might pull from Ultimate Wilderness and/or the Hunter Class deck).

Her art’s got armor and a weapon, so Core Lini does too. You can learn to love them, though.

I wanted to stick with a more balanced spread of boons than RotR Lini had, at least in part because I knew we were going to make weapons and armors better cards for her. Now she can display armor and take a sling or knife to assist with combat checks, or a quarterstaff or bolas to avoid some banes. Hide Armor really shines in Lini’s hands as a great proactive choice, adding a big bonus to her check. It won’t absorb a sudden big hit as well as Chain Mail, but if instead you need to turn into a bear and tear an enemy apart, it’s got (or at least is on) your back.

I assume all Lini roles from now on need to start with double W’s. Suggestions welcome!

As a Wild Whisperer, Lini focuses on her Animal companions, improving all Animal checks at her location, especially her combat checks using them. She also has a few powers (themed around using wild shape) to improve her physical skills or gain Acrobatics and Fortitude.

Her World Walker role instead focuses on her surroundings, adding to all checks at Wild locations (a common location trait in Core and Curse) and moving more easily. Along with her wider travels, she also becomes resistant to poison and elemental damage (useful for survival in some of the more extreme corners of Golarion and beyond) and learns to use herbalism to remove scourges from her party.

That’s our new Lini! She’s self-reliant and versatile and feels like a great druid in play.

Keith Richmond
Adventure Card Game Designer

Keith, again, here to kick off another new series of blogs. Each blog in this series will attempt to do a behind-the-scenes look at an adventure in an adventure path. We’ll start with Edge of Anarchy, the first Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure, but there are plenty more Adventure Paths after that. Each blog will include anecdotes from design and suggested options for changing the difficulty of scenarios or spicing up replay. I invite you to “Play It Your Way” my way. It’s fun! (Warning: Many of these suggestions increase the complexity and/or difficulty of the game, so are most appropriate for experienced players!)

Harrow of Keys really spices up Edge of Anarchy.

In Curse of the Crimson Throne, each adventure is associated with a specific Harrow suit, so consider adding the Harrows wildcard that corresponds to the Harrow suit for that adventure. For Edge of Anarchy, that’s the Harrow of Keys. If you don’t want to just increase the difficulty by adding a wildcard, you could make the game a little easier by starting each scenario with a free exploration of the Base and making the Base not close if it’s out of supporters. That’s an easy way to make the supporters a lot more accessible to the whole group, which might be more fun for some groups.

Fagin from Oliver Twist meets Captain Hook.

The Adventure Path's introductory scenario is 1★: Haunted Fortunes. It’s adapted from (and shares its name with) the first part of the first chapter of the RPG Adventure Path. I think it’s my favorite introduction to an RPG Adventure Path: Each character is invited to think of some reason to hate a despicable criminal, Gaedren Lamm, then gets to rescue a bunch of orphans on the way to bringing justice to him. Drawn together by this mutual hatred and a mysterious fortune-telling, you instantly create a party and dive right into play. When I ran it for my wife, her character had two reasons to hate Lamm: he’d kidnapped her and her twin sister, and he’d fed my wife’s character to his alligator. (Don’t worry: she got better. Sort of. She also eventually found her sister. Sort of.)

For extra fun and profit!

For this scenario I’d additionally consider any of the Perils wildcard Wearisome, the Onslaughts wildcard Impoverished, or the Perils wildcard Hostile (in roughly increasing order of difficulty). Wearisome isn’t too painful at this level, but it does keep people’s turns from getting too long. Impoverished lets you start with a better hand, at the cost of losing some cards and being closer to death; not ideal, but also not too bad in your first scenario. Hostile makes a lot more checks a lot more dangerous, so is a good pick for those seeking a real challenge. Villain scenarios can also often use an extra location to increase difficulty for experienced groups, so I’d add the next location on the list; if you’re a group of 6, I’d add Abandoned Shacks.

So loyal he still wears his uniform while committing his treason.

The next scenario is 1A: A City Gone Mad. The villain here, Verik Vancaskerkin, doesn’t actually know about the dastardly deeds of the thugs working for him, so if you manage to find the Evidence or talk him into surrendering, you get a bonus ally and blessing for your trouble. Which is great. Apparently it’s news to Verik that people calling themselves “The Cow Hammer Boys” and operating out of a shop called “All The World’s Meat” at the address “22 Stirge Street” were up to no good, where “no good” is selling people meat. No, not selling people meat—selling people meat. Cannibalism. (I’m not sure how that term works if you’re an elf eating a dwarf, though.) When I ran the RPG and the PCs reported what they found to Verik, I assumed the proper reaction to “Sir, the men have been moonlighting as assassins who turn people into ribeyes. Also, how was dinner last night?” would be shocked bewilderment followed by vomiting.

I’d recommend the Perils wildcard Deadly here. I also like adding a location (Alley for 6 characters). After that, I’d use any of Wearisome, Impoverished, or Hostile, especially if you didn’t use them in Haunted Fortunes.

We grow big spiders in these parts.

Before playing 1B: The Ambassador’s Secret, please observe its FAQ.

The next scenario is an example of the ‘Solve the Mystery’ style scenario, where you get free examinations that let you move cards around between locations while you try to deal with Trigger barriers. I made the first test scenario of this type for Season of the Righteous 3, based on a concept I’d intended for this very path. I got to experiment with the format a bunch more in other seasons, especially Season of the Plundered Tombs. This scenario also led to my favorite testing anecdote ever: After the monster Giant Fly was shuffled randomly into the location Spider Nest, the tester commented “Either a bad idea for the fly, or it's off to get revenge for its kind,” to which another tester asked “Well, how big are the spiders?” I supplied the above picture, and got a prompt response of “Bad idea then.”

The Perils wildcard Ablaze, dealing Poison damage instead of Fire, is a very thematic (albeit painful) option for this scenario. To increase the difficulty, consider shortening the first scenario power to just “At the end of your turn, you may examine the top card of your location,” or changing the final phrase to “then put that card on top of a random location.” Requiring an additional Evidence (by removing the “or equal to” from the second scenario power) is also a solid option.

Scenario 1C: The Dead Warrens can easily be the toughest scenario in the adventure. This is true for thematic reasons and also because it was originally the final scenario of the adventure. For story and pacing reasons, we wanted to keep the chase after Trinia and the execution together.

The Perils wildcard Confusing is a perfectly thematic choice for this Derro-filled scenario. I also like the Onslaughts wildcard Monstrous, but I’d require that all of the monsters have the Undead trait (you’ll need to find them before building locations). If you’re playing on Legendary and haven’t increased # to 2, this scenario could really use it since level 2 has a bunch of Undead.

Chase rules can get a little wacky in both the RPG and ACG.

Scenario 1D: Kingkiller is one of several ways we’ve run “chase” scenarios. In the RPG, you often make choices about which way to go, such as “leaping between rooftops” or “balancing on the plank that leads across” that let you use different skills and mix up the difficulty of options. The location Rooftop’s power to choose between two barriers whenever you encounter a barrier is entirely inspired by this mechanic. This scenario can be pretty quick and easy, which might feel nice for anyone who had a tough time with the previous scenario.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for more of a nail-biter, I’d encourage at least one of two modifications to this scenario to increase difficulty: First, remove the scenario’s automatic closing from defeating the Fugitive. This means that you’ll have to defeat a barrier to close each Rooftop location, and if you fail, closing will require either emptying it or shuffling the Fugitive back into it. It really changes up the feel of the chase. Second, when the Fugitive is defeated and is shuffled into another location, I’d instead shuffle the Fugitive and a new barrier into a stack, then shuffle each into a random location (different locations if possible).

That’s more than enough for this blog. I can probably do Adventure 2 more succinctly, right?

Keith Richmond
Adventure Card Game Designer

Keith here to kick off the first in a long series of blogs discussing the new versions of the iconic characters that we did in Core. When designing these characters, we did things in roughly this order:

1. Delve into the character’s current backstory.
2. Evaluate the character’s capabilities in the RPG.
3. Examine the character’s new art.
4. Examine every old version of the character to cherry-pick the best parts (using designer definitions of best).
5. Focus on powers and capabilities that would feel good in any and every adventure we make from here on out.
6. Make sure the final result feels different enough in play from the previous versions that veterans aren’t bored.

Some things changed with Pathfinder’s new edition, like Valeros using a shield, Harsk dual-wielding axes, Fumbus... existing. Little things like that.

Swanky temple sword you got there, Sajan.

To start this blog series, I wanted to do one of the four characters we put in the Core Set Quick-Start scenario. So, let’s talk about Sajan.

For when you really need to play all the blessings on your check.

Hawkmoon, an invaluable contributor on of our forums, once wrote all about how Rise of the Runelords Sajan was the best character ever. One of my goals for the new Sajan was making sure he felt different, but still passed “the Hawkmoon test.” Thankfully, Hawkmoon was excited for the changes and liked the new Sajan.

I think CD Sajan stole all of RotR Sajan’s weapons.

With Monk Class Deck Sajan, we switched away from the multiple blessings and punching to focus on his use of slashing weapons, particularly that temple sword he’s often holding. This version was dubbed Stabby Sajan. We also bumped Sajan to a starting hand size of 5, which is a huge quality of life improvement for a class that’s supposed to feel agile.

I’ve played a number of monks in the RPG, and one aspect that I felt we could focus more on is how versatile and well-rounded monks are in the RPGs. Or, at least, try to be. They are great at all saves, have a fair number of useful skills, and really like having a good Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, and Wisdom. Monks are pretty much the example class for Multiple Ability Dependence, where you need more abilities than you can afford to increase. Core tries to emphasize the monk’s versatility in a few ways by giving Sajan a more human monk-like array of “okay but not great” stats, and by letting you be “pretty good” (though not great) at more things by recharging your blessings on any check and having more skills.

Punch, kick, slash, stab. Sajan’s no one-trick pony. Four tricks, maybe.

Core Sajan keeps a couple weapons in his deck, because he’s got a sword and dagger prominent in his artwork. Thankfully, Core includes some more weapons that use Acrobatics, and knives in Core can be used to help others.

Sajan doesn’t need to worship a deity to make good use of their blessings.

Another benefit that Sajan derives from Core that isn’t obvious at face value is that Core has so many more diverse blessings. As a character who likely blesses every turn, with blessings as his primary card type, this lets you really customize Sajan’s deck in an interesting way. Want to be ready to avenge? Pack a Calistria’s Sting. Want extra dice against monsters, and you’re okay fighting the occasional summon? Grandmother Nightmare has your back. Nothing to worry about there.

Challenge: have Sajan play all 54 Harrows at least once in one adventure path.

Curse’s Harrow blessings open up an entire world of character capabilities for Sajan. Cycling The Big Sky lets you deal with scourges. The Sickness is a good blessing to save for slightly riskier rolls, when you need to make checks a little easier.

Wonder how often Sajan’s roles are mispronounced?

Both roles offer a reroll option, since you’re probably rolling a bunch of dice at most things, but you don’t necessarily have a great bonus. Padaprajnas master all aspects of warfare, so that role offers better skill and proficiency with weapons alongside improved teamwork feats. Iroran Dedicant focuses more on perfection of self, improving his unarmed fighting skills and giving him ways to turn any roll into success. Iroran Dedicant also offers a unique ability (not for everyone) to shift around your skill and card feats as you play, letting you adapt to different adventures and correct past choices you might regret.

And that’s our new Sajan. In testing, we found him more flexible and interesting to play and advance. Hopefully, you’re enjoying him too!

Keith Richmond
Adventure Card Game Designer

At PaizoCon last May, Paizo launched a new Core Set for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. At the same time, the organized play team updated the Pathfinder Adventure Card Guild into the Pathfinder Adventure Card Society. Three months out, we asked one of our active volunteers to give their impressions of current Society. Without further ado, I’m turning the blog over to our guest author, Jonathan Ng.

Hi, I’m Jonathan and I’m one of the Venture Lieutenants for the Seattle region.  We play weekly at the Mox Boarding House in Bellevue, which is one of the local staple game stores in the region.  We are currently running through the previous Season, Season of Tapestry’s Tides.

We have about 8-9 or so players a week, and often this presents to us a logistical dilemma - how do we balance out our party?  The RPG side of the Pathfinder Society can often have this type of dilemma, but we often need to go through a much longer period of time with the same characters and parties - this could be fatal in higher level scenarios!

Some days, we balance out our party perfectly, with a Strength character at each table, a Dexterity character, some healing, some Arcane… and then some time ago, we had a scenario where we decided to seat people according to when they arrived.  We ended up with a party of Athnul, Hayato, Lirianne, and Seltyiel, and a party of Alahazra, 2 Linis, and Radillo. Guess where most of the high level weapons ended up? The poor weapon users keep telling us to share, and yet this has happened not once, but twice.  Worse yet, this scenario just happens to punish non-magic users. Luckily, the martial table managed to make it through.

One of the things I like the most about the Pathfinder Card Society scenarios is that the developers often use Society scenarios to test out interesting concepts.  The concept of the Defensive Stance in Mummy’s Mask and the siege scenario was actually previewed in Season of the Runelords.  When I first played that scenario, everything about it seemed new and different - I think I played way too many “defeat and corner the villain” scenarios at that point.  Tapestry’s Tides also has a scenario like this:

Instead of having locations, the scenario in question required you to fight on ships, then beat the actual ship to close the location.  Luckily you didn’t actually need to close all 9 locations to win - that would have been a nightmare!

With all the cards we bring every week to host a game, the box runners often have to find creative storage solutions.  One of the box runners brings a set in a card bandoleer. I bring something that looks somewhat like a rounded-off suitcase.  And one of the box runners has an actual, honest-to-goodness Pathfinder Adventure Chest:

I’m very glad for the people in my region who are interested enough in the game to play through these Seasons.  It has been great playing together with them and I hope to do this for a long time.

Come back next week for our monthly Stars, Spotlights, and Convention Blog – which includes an update on Pathfinder (second edition) Society!

Until then – Explore, Report, Cooperate!

Tonya Woldridge
Organized Play Manager

A month ago, an unruly quartet of goblin heroes was unleashed on an unsuspecting populace. Yes, I said heroes. It turns out some goblins have learned the error of their ways—or, perhaps at least learned what many adventurers learn: you can steal and murder as much as you want, as long as it’s against “the bad guys.”

We managed to fit 4 new characters in the Free RPG Day We Be Heroes? storybook, but we just didn’t have enough space for role cards (also, you couldn’t use them in that storybook anyway). Thankfully, there’s this crazy thing called the internet and I hear you can post things to it. Let’s get crazy with it.

Speaking of crazy, I give you goblin markers!

Disclaimer: Half of the following roles use a new mechanic called goblin markers. A goblin does something it should probably be doing already and is rewarded with a marker that lets it do something else it wants to do. I’m sure nothing can go wrong here.

Crimsi is making a trebuchet. Will she load it with fire, rocks, or other goblins?

Let’s start with our favorite Goblin ranger, Crimsi. She’s really into inventing things, as long as “things” can fling destruction and fire about. She’ll cheerfully scout for you, but she’s easily distracted by bits of junk and fire.

Arson Archer Crimsi would like you to know that she likes burning, crossbows, fire, catapults, and any other words for fire and siege weapons she hasn’t learned yet. It’s a fairly straightforward role that wants you to care about Bow and Fire cards. She can also launch goblins (including herself) to other locations with hardly any chance of serious injury.

Kitbasher Crimsi likes gathering those new goblin markers together so she can bash things together, whether the result is helping, hurting, or both. Mostly both. She’s good at flinging things into fights her friends are probably in, or flinging her friends at fights, and is great at Crafting new things that will probably hurt someone.

Whether you’re into head injuries or giant bunnies, Grenek’s got you covered.

Grenek is not as tough as Amiri and has less control over his rage, as befits a goblin barbarian. He also has a habit of biting every monster he gets near.

Amnesiac Grenek focuses on his head injury that sent him randomly wandering the world. He’s good at forgetting his cards to rage, wandering in the way of attacks meant for his friends, and even forgetting his scourges so well they don’t bother him anymore.

Rabbitpuncher Grenek is used to adventuring in the lands of giants where bunnies grow bigger than goblins. He gets to have fun with goblin markers, potentially gaining a massive bonus to his hand size and checks, hopping about everywhere, and getting even better at biting.

No, “pizazz” means alluring and charming. I don’t have any pizza!

Pizazz is good at helping his friends, like any bard. The wrinkle he runs into is that he has a genuinely fantastic singing voice... that sends goblins running away in pain. They really like when he plays his “fancy” penny whistle, though.

Battlecrooner Pizazz leans into using his mellifluous voice, despite any panic it may cause nearby goblins. As a result, he makes lots of non-goblin allies that turn out to be pretty darn useful, whether he’s getting to use them more often or they’re appreciating his instrumentless crooning.

Whistleblower Pizazz goes another way, embracing his goblin heritage (and markers) to whistle up bonuses and spook any upcoming monsters into fighting his goblin friends. He’s maybe a little bitter that said friends don’t appreciate his true talent, so from time to time he might steal some of their markers. (The fools won’t miss them anyway.)

Mitzi is still the prettiest wolf. Yes, she is!

Siathorn and her fearless wolf Mitzi are still keeping the other goblins in line with Mitzi’s threatening facelicks. She’s not quite as good at druiding as Lini, but Mitzi more than makes up for that!

Siathorn is probably going to be mercilessly hugging both trees and wolves, regardless of which role you pick.

Treemugger Siathorn easily gathers goblin markers by just playing with everyone’s animals. She then helps everyone at Wild locations and against bunches of natural banes. She’ll also make sure to heal her friends! They might need it after she steals a few of their Animal allies away from them.

Wolfmother Siathorn focuses her efforts on Mitzi, as well she should. Under her care, Mitzi becomes a very effective fighting “wolf” and Siathorn figures out how to make sure she keeps her deck full of all those fun Animal cards that Mitzi likes.

So, how do you get these neat roles? We’ve updated our Character Sheet package to include sheets for all four of these goblins, including their roles. And in the near future, they’ll also be available as a print-on-demand card set from our friends at DriveThru Cards. (After they go live, we’ll mention it in a future blog.)

Keith Richmond
Adventure Card Game Designer

In the latest PACG Homebrew Special, our Online Venture-Captain Tyler Beck returns with a new Adventure Path for kobolds! Because more kobolds is good kobolds. —Mike

Hello again, everyone! It's your mostly-fearless-except-for-fear-of-falling-from-heights Venture Captain for online Pathfinder Adventure Card Society, Tyler!

I had a blast at PaizoCon, and we got LOADS of new information from Paizo on the release of the Core Set and the Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path (both available now), on the new Year of Rotting Ruins that begins at Gen Con, and on the fact that the Core and Curse scenarios in the storybooks that come in the box are sanctioned for PACS play! I also want to give a quick plug for the current online PACS play-by-post convention, Cards Against Gnomanity II. Though the event has already begun, we'd love to have you join us for future games, so if you just tell us in the recruitment thread that you're interested, we can help you find a game—even if you've never played PACS through play-by-post!

Mostly, though, I want to talk to you a bit about something that I spent several months working on leading up to PaizoCon, and then spent most of my actual time at PaizoCon running: this year's homebrew special, entitled "I Want My Mummy!"

This set of three adventures was designed to run during three afternoon sessions at PaizoCon. We decided this year to do Tier 1, Tier 3, and Tier 5 so that people got a broader taste of the characters. The story is based on some of the most popular PFS scenarios from WAAAY back in season 5: the Destiny of the Sands trilogy. This means that your kobold characters (new versions of the infamous kobolds from True Dragons of Absalom) get to interact with everyone's favorite creepy dude in a hot tub, Grandmaster Torch. He'll send your kobolds on a grand adventure to… do a bunch of seemingly mundane tasks for him, as is tradition.

Grandmaster Torch, the guy everyone loves to hate. One of his requested tasks is to harass the owner of a legitimate cabaret hall and her elemental buddies.

That's okay though; you're well aware that Torch doesn't always have the interests of the Pathfinder Society at heart, and you will get the chance to disrupt his plans several times. Along the way, you'll also be able to use the fun trap-setting mechanic that we introduced back in our first kobold-themed homebrew special, "We Are Dragons". There are several ways to set traps, one of which is represented by the kobold Alchemist, Athrax:

The kobold Alchemist, Athrax. There's no "n" in there… read it again, I promise you it's true.

As you can see from his character and role cards, Athrax uses the trap-setting mechanic to keep from banishing his Alchemical items. He also has a few spells, but he just straight-up banishes those, so it's best to keep things like Cure and Find Traps in those slots, which can be useful one-shots. Athrax also has a useful way of ignoring Triggers, by setting traps and then examining locations. Sometimes it's more than worth a buried card to ignore a Trigger.

In brief, trapsetting works like this: When you set a trap with a card, you display that card next to your location (we played them facedown at PaizoCon because we had different-colored sleeves for each character, which helps determine who set the trap initially). When a monster is encountered at a trapped location, the trap is sprung, and you get to add 1d6 to all checks against that monster for the encounter.

After Adventure 1, we skip ahead to Adventure 3, where you're in hot pursuit of two Aspis agents who have gotten hold of one of the fabled Sage Gems, mythical gems that hold the power of the Jeweled Sages inside them. Several of the scenarios in this adventure allow you to gain Chase Points for finishing quickly, culminating in a scenario where you're literally chasing the Aspis agents along a set of locations, trying to move quickly to the place where another Sage Gem is likely to be found. Once you arrive, you find many dangers, the worst of which is the deadly Sage of Plagues, who has one of the most diabolical powers I've ever written. When you defeat him, he explodes in necromantic energy, shattering the Ruby Sage Gem… but even shards of such a powerful relic have the ability to grant incredible abilities to those wielding them.

The Sage of Plagues makes you so poisoned that you can barely hold onto any of the items you've been carrying. At least you gain some extraordinary abilities out of the deal, right?

Finally, in Adventure 5, you've got a chance to really make use of your new mythic abilities, going up against some truly terrifying mythic foes. You even have the chance to fight the diamond sage, Tahonikepsu herself, whose powers as a time dragon are nothing to sneeze at. Check out her character card below, and keep in mind this scenario power that is in effect when you encounter her: "At the beginning of your turn, expend a mythic charge or uncheck a skill or power feat from your character or role card; If you can do neither, bury 1d4 cards from your hand and 1d4 cards from your discard pile."

The Diamond Sage Tahonikepsu, a mythic time dragon sorcerer who does NOT play around.

This time, I'm not JUST going to tell you all about these fun scenarios… I'm going to make them available to everyone! See the Dropbox link below to download the character sheets, custom cards, and adventure text for the I Want My Mummy adventure path. It could be a great set of scenarios to run in between regular adventures of the Mummy's Mask AP, or you could just run it on its own… just remember to level your characters up appropriately in between the adventures!

LINK WITH ART: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/dwvhoe3xdinjt3a/AAB7643f_nBGsp3CAo0gatvla?dl=0

I'm working on an even more ambitious project for next year's PaizoCon, so stay tuned. Thanks for reading!

Tyler "Cartmanbeck" Beck
Venture Captain, PACS Online Play

Hi everyone!

Last month, after countless hours combing thorough feedback and iterating improvements to design, Lone Shark released a revision to the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: the Core Set. I’ve played every base set of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, so I can say that their hard work has paid off. The Core Set is still fundamentally the same game, but the play is smoother, more dynamic, and more exciting.

The Core Set's release was also a perfect opportunity for the Organized Play team to improve the rules of Pathfinder Adventure Card Society. I talked about three of the big updates in the New Rules, New Opportunities PACS blog. The blog said that we would soon have a FAQ that described how to handle updates that weren't already called out in the Core Set Rulebook. This FAQ is now available, through the link Core Conversion Guide at the bottom of paizo.com/pacg. I'd also like to highlight something I said in the comments after that blog. We recognize that people who are deep into an ongoing campaign may not want to update the rules immediately. To that end, ongoing games may continue to use the Mummy's Mask rulebook until the official start of Season 6 at GenCon (August 1st).

In Pathfinder Society and Starfinder Society, we've established a tradition of releasing sanctioning documents for non-Society adventures like modules and adventure paths. These documents allow players and GMs to receive credit for their organized play characters in adventures that weren't originally designed with organized play in mind. We'd never had anything like that for the card game, and that seemed like a missed opportunity. We're happy to say that you can now play the Dragon's Demand Adventure Path from the Core Set, The Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path, and the free RPG day adventure We Be Heroes? with your Adventure Card Society characters. Each product's paizo.com page now includes a pdf describing how to play for PACS credit.

We also tried a bit of an experiment in Dragon's Demand. The last scenario is a choose-your-own builder, which provides 6 different rules structures that you can use to build the scenario. This scenario, Wandering Way, is replayable any number of times, and the rules in the sanctioning document allow you to play it at any tier. So if you're looking for a scenario that any character can play, a way to help a character who has missed a few sessions catch up, or a chance to flex your own creativity in the Pathfinder Adventure Card Society, check it out! The addition of this scenario to the sanctioned content is a big change, and we welcome your feedback on how it's being received and used in your area.

Linda Zayas-Palmer
Developer

Hello everyone! It's your friendly cyber-neighborhood Venture Captain Tyler again, bringing you a quick discussion about the options that we have as players in the Pathfinder Adventure Card Society. (Note the new branding!). First I'll talk about the stunning number of characters you can choose from, and then I'll talk about the mindboggling amount of content there is to play through.

We have a LOT of character options now. So many that I found it a daunting task when I started typing all of them out. So, instead, I decided to do something a bit more fun… I made a graph! (Yes, I'm a huge nerd, we all are, deal with it!)

Click on the image for a larger, more readable version!

There are a total of 32 class decks and 162 characters you can play in PACS! (I'm counting Aric and the Red Raven as one playable character even though they have 2 character cards.) In the graph, I've listed the characters in the format "Name (Deck or Box)" in order to distinguish where they came from. I've also listed some specific scenarios, adventures, or other means of unlocking certain decks for certain characters. Altogether, the decks, characters, and means of unlocks make up the nodes of the graph.

The edges of the graph represent the way in which a character is available for any given deck. Most of these are yellow arrows with the word "Free" on the label. This means that you can use this character with the associated deck without any additional requirement. Obviously, you can use, the monk Rooboo with the the Monk Class Deck she came in. But the PACS Guide also says you can swap any character with any other character of the same class. For example, the Pathfinder Tales deck includes the wizard Varian, so you can replace him with any of the other 9 PACG wizards: Varian from Curse of the Crimson Throne; Darago, Ezren, Melindra, or Radillo from the Wizard Class Deck; Nyctessa from Hell's Vengeance 2; or Ezren from RotR, Mummy's Mask, or the Core Set. (The Tales deck also gives you free access to 9 rogues and 8 sorcerers—that's 27 "Free" characters to choose from!)

The new We Be Heroes? Free RPG Day adventure includes 4 new goblin characters: Crimsi the ranger, Grenek the barbarian, Pizazz the bard, and Siathorn the druid. The rule I described above means they can be played with the Class Deck corresponding to their respective classes, but thanks to a table on page 8 of the most recent PACS Guide, they can also be played with the Goblins Fight! Character Deck (Crimsi and Grenek) or Goblins Burn! Character Deck (Pizazz and Siathorn). Looking at the graph, you'll notice another connection for Crimsi: the Hunter Class Deck. This is thanks to a beautifully written adventure reward from Season of Factions' Favor Adventure 4: "Each player unlocks the ability to play all characters that have the Ranger trait using the Hunter Class Deck." This is one of several character unlocks that are achieved through completing specific sets of scenarios, with the best example of these being my buddy Mavaro from Mummy's Mask, who can be played with a total of FIVE different decks, four of them through adventure completion unlocks. These unlocks are represented on the graph by maroon or orange nodes with names in the format "S4A4" for Season 4 Adventure 4, or "S5-5E" for Season 5 Scenario 5E.

There are four new characters in the Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure path, three of whom don't have a matching Class Deck. But fear not! Page 9 of the PACS Guide gives us decks for these characters, with Kess the Brawler using the Barbarian Class Deck, Quinn the Investigator using the Ultimate Equipment Add-on Deck, and Hakon the Skald using the Warpriest Class Deck. (Crimson Throne's other character, Varian the Wizard, starts off with three deck options—Wizard, Tales, and Hell's Vengeance 2—so he's versatile from day one.) And don't forget that you can add an Ultimate Add-On Deck to a Class Deck or Character Deck, or add a Class Deck or Character Deck to an Ultimate Add-On Deck (as described on page 8 of the PACS Guide), giving you loads of choices for your card upgrades!

There's one more character on the graph that I'd like to specifically point out: Arueshalae from the Wrath of the Righteous base set. Arueshalae—or Aruey, as I like to call her (please don't tell her that)—was unlocked way back in season 1 for a few lucky convention-goers who were able to pick up a specific convention boon. It allowed them to use her with the Rogue Class Deck—but only in Season of the Righteous. Now, however, there is a new way to unlock our succubus friend, and play her in any scenario!

My friend Aruey, always willing to help out her friends... and smite some serious demon butt.

The Season of the Righteous Adventure 3 PDF was updated recently: the reward for that adventure now unlocks Arueshalae with the Hell's Vengeance 2 deck. This reward is retroactive, so if you have completed all 4 scenarios of Season of the Righteous Adventure 3: Lexicon of Paradox, you have already earned the following reward:

Each player unlocks the ability to play Arueshalae from the Wrath of the Righteous Demon's Heresy Adventure Deck using the Hell's Vengeance 2 Character Deck. When Arueshalae is Tier 3 or higher, you may add the loot cards Spherewalker Staff, Starbow, and Swallowtail Bracers to your Class Deck box.

A huge number of players just gained a new character to play... and she's quite the character, with a cohort and several Owner boons coming along with her. I recommend adding the Ultimate Combat Add-On Deck when playing with her, for maximum arrow-based destruction!

I know a lot of our players out there are concerned with compatibility of the old class decks with the new Core and Curse cards. The folks at Lone Shark and Paizo have heard you, and they've been hard at work on some creative solutions. Make sure you check out the Conversion Guide, especially the Characters and Roles section.

Also, Vic recently made a post that gives us an option for trying out some new cards in our class decks, letting you swap any class deck card for any Core or Curse card that has the same name! You'll need to own copies of these cards, and you'll need to come up with innovative ways to make sure your cards don't end up mixed up with those of the box that you're using to play (I recommend a small sliver of colored Post-It Note stuck to your cards). Or, you can play online with us over in the Flaxseed On Deck play-by-post lodge, where your cards will never get mixed up because they're digital!

Who wouldn't want to try out these cards with one of their favorite characters?

With so many character options, you'd think that we would run out of adventures to play them in. But you'd be wrong! Here are the currently available adventures for PACS play:

• Season 0: Season of the Shackles (Uses S&S; 6 adventures with 1 bonus scenario; Tiers 1–6)
• Season 1: Season of the Righteous (Uses WotR; 6 adventures with 2 bonus scenarios; Tiers 1–6)
• Season 2: Season of the Runelords (Uses RotR; 6 adventures; Tiers 1–6)
• Adventure #8-00—The Cosmic Captive (Uses RotR; 1 adventure; Tiers 2 and 5)
• Season 2B: We Be Goblins (Uses RotR; 2 adventures; Tier 1–2)
• Season 3: Season of Plundered Tombs (Uses MM; 6 adventures with 1 bonus scenario; Tiers 1–6)
• Season 4: Season of Factions' Favor (Uses MM; 6 adventures with 3 bonus scenarios; Tiers 1–6)
• Adventure #9-00—Assault on Absalom (Uses MM; 1 adventure; Tiers 2 and 5)
• Season 5: Season of Tapestry's Tides (Uses S&S; 6 adventures with 1 bonus scenario; Tiers 1–6)
• Adventure #10-00—The Hao Jin Cataclysm (Uses S&S; 1 adventure; Tiers 2 and 5)
• Season 5B: Season of the Kobolds (Uses Core and optionally Curse; 1 adventure; Tier 1)

That's around double the content that has been released in regular Adventure Path form! The last of these, released just this month, is a four-scenario adventure written by David Jacobson and myself, outlined and developed by Linda Zayas-Palmer, with rules text from Keith Richmond. Working on this was a blast, particularly since it let us draw inspiration from David's and my fan-made Adventure Card Game adventures that we've run at PaizoCon the past several years, including our own take on Season of the Kobolds.

Up next is Year 6: Year of Rotting Ruin (Uses Core and Curse; 6 adventures, Tiers 1–6)—the first adventure drops at Gen Con on August 1!

And it doesn't even stop there! The Dragon's Demand, Curse of the Crimson Throne, and We Be Heroes? have also been sanctioned for PACS play. Each product page below includes a link to a sanctioning document that details the changes that need to be made for PACS play:

• Core Set: The Dragon's Demand (Core and optionally any AP; 3 adventures; Tiers 1–3–but with unlimited replay at Tiers 1–6 for the random scenario, effectively giving you an endless supply of fresh PACS scenarios!)
• Curse of the Crimson Throne (6 adventures with 1 bonus scenario; Tiers 1-6)
• We Be Heroes? (1 adventure, Tier 1)

In addition, Linda announced at PaizoCon that we will soon be seeing some standalone PACS adventures that can be played at several different tiers, so stay tuned for more news on that front. There are so many new options for play, my head is spinning!

That's it for me today. I'm sure you can tell that I'm excited about all of the new content and character options that we have available to us now and moving forward, and I'm sure the comments section of this blog will quickly include a rousing debate over the best ways to play some of the characters shown in the graph. (I'll likely start off the comments by expanding my previous list of best secondary decks to add to any given character.) Thanks for reading, and I look forward to playing with as many of you as I can!

Tyler "Cartmanbeck" Beck
Venture Captain, PACS Online Play

If you’ve picked up the brand new Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Core Set and the Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path, you may have noticed we reached an important milestone: For the first time, every iconic hero developed by Paizo has now appeared in PACG. How we got here was quite a journey.

The Class of 2013: Ezren, Kyra, Merisiel, Sajan, Seoni, Seelah, Amiri, Harsk, Lem, Lini, Valeros

We started, of course, with the "Core Eleven," the iconics representing the classes from the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook. In August 2013, the wizard Ezren, the cleric Kyra, the ranger Harsk, the bard Lem, the rogue Merisiel, the sorcerer Seoni, and the fighter Valeros became the centerpiece of the Rise of the Runelords Base Set, and are without a doubt the most played characters in PACG history. For those who wanted a slightly more complex set of characters, the barbarian Amiri, the druid Lini, the monk Sajan, and the paladin Seelah were featured in the Rise of the Runelords Character Add-On Deck.

The Class of 2014: Alahazra, Damiel, Feiya, Jirelle, Lirianne, Oloch, and Seltyiel

As satisfying and… well, iconic as those characters were, we were hot to introduce a bunch more. While we spooled out alternate options for those 11 classes in our first waves of class decks, we introduced a handful of less traditional iconics in August 2014. The Skull & Shackles Base Set gave us the oracle Alahazra, the swashbuckler Jirelle, the gunslinger Lirianne, and the magus Seltyiel, while the Skull & Shackles Character Add-On Deck was home to the alchemist Damiel (more on him later), the witch Feiya, and the warpriest Oloch.

We’d now introduced roughly half the known Iconics, and people started clamoring for the rest. There was a particularly loud drumbeat for the investigator Quinn, whom people presumed would make his debut in our next set. This did not occur.

The Class of 2015: Adowyn, Alain, Balazar, Crowe, Enora, Imrijka, and Shardra

May 2015 launched the Wrath of the Righteous Base Set, where the cavalier Alain, the summoner Balazar, the arcanist Enora, and the inquisitor Imrijka arrived. Those first two mandated a whole new card type, the cohort, to account for their respective warhorse Donahan and chicken-snake eidolon Padrig. The Wrath of the Righteous Character Add-On Deck gave spots to the hunter Adowyn, the bloodrager Crowe, and the shaman Shardra, with Adowyn and Shardra accompanied by the wolf cohort Leryn and the stone spirit cohort Kolo. Quinn, an urban character, would have to wait until we were done sacking the Abyss.

We were nearing the goal line, except the RPG folks were moving the goalposts. Suddenly, there were about to be a lot more iconics.

The Class of 2016: Estra, Mavaro, Yoon, and Zadim

For the next set, we had a choice to make: complete the existing iconics or branch out with a few more story-based characters. The design team was split: yeah, we wanted to wrap up the iconics in a dainty bow, but there were just too many other cool characters we wanted to make. In October 2016, the Mummy’s Mask Base Set featured the slayer Zadim and the first two of our mental-focused iconics, the spiritualist Estra and the kineticist Yoon, along with Estra’s ghost ally Honaire. Another of those, the occultist Mavaro, appeared in the Mummy’s Mask Character Add-On Deck.

But that’s only four new iconics. We slowed our roll a bit, saving room for new non-iconics in our core boxes for the first time: the rogue Simoun (whom we made up), the magus Ahmotep (ditto), the druid Channa Ti (from Elaine Cunningham’s stories), and the cleric Drelm (from Howard Andrew Jones’s stories). This made for a richer story than if we’d dropped Quinn into the middle of the undead-filled desert. We would later follow that inclusion of non-iconic characters from Pathfinder fiction by introducing James Sutter’s Salim in the Inquisitor Class Deck and Dave Gross’s Alase in the Summoner Class Deck. We also added the trio of Dave’s wizard Varian and bodyguard Radovan (both previously seen as a cohorts in Season of the Righteous) and Chris A. Jackson’s lunar naga astrologer Celeste in the Pathfinder Tales Character Deck.

At this point, we needed to make some calls. We didn’t have the next base set on the horizon yet, but we wanted to keep bringing out characters. So the practice of only debuting iconics in Adventure Paths needed to be reconsidered. The other obvious place was the class decks, but were we really going to want to write a class deck solely for mesmerists? We needed a new approach.

The Class of 2017: Emil, Lazzaro, Linxia, Nyctessa, Urgraz, and Zelhara

In October and November 2017, we debuted the first character decks united around an Adventure Path. The Hell’s Vengeance Adventure Path features six evil characters—the so-called "evil iconics," even though they’re not technically iconics—and we wanted our players to get to play the baddies too. Hell’s Vengeance 1 Character Deck featured the cleric Lazzaro, the hellknight Linxia, and the antipaladin Urgraz, while Hell’s Vengeance 2 contained the assassin Emil, the necromancer Nyctessa, and the torturer Zelhara. I admit that when I designed the first iteration of this game, I did not expect a torturer character. But hey, it takes all kinds.

The Class of 2018: Aric, Erasmus, Hayato, Meligaster, the Red Raven, Reiko, Rivani, and Zova

In the same design cycle, we did it again, this time with all of the iconics from Occult Adventures. In addition to Estra, January 2018’s Occult Adventures 1 Character Deck starred the mesmerist Meligaster (Lem’s bro!) and the psychic Rivani. The next month, Occult Adventures 2 had the return of Mavaro and Yoon, plus the debut of the medium Erasmus. This approach allowed us to make the occult boons that all of them could use, including all the psychic spells.

And now we were down to stragglers. At this point there were only six iconics left, and no clear plan to deal with them. For example, were we ever going to make the Jade Regent Adventure Path? I mean, maybe? But not soon. So what to do with the samurai and the ninja? A Jade Regent Character Deck? Sounded cool, but I had another idea.

Based on complaints I heard at PaizoCon and elsewhere that the first seven class decks had essentially been lapped by the creations we made afterward, I proposed to Paizo a new line of decks designed to supplement the class deck line. Using the four “Ultimate” RPG books as inspiration, we would make four “Ultimate Decks,” each with a bunch of experimental boons and one character each. That character would be one that we probably never would make a class deck for. For example, with the Wizard Class Deck and the Sorcerer Class Deck already in existence, did we really need a deck with three arcanists in it? One would do. So Enora reappeared in April 2018’s Ultimate Magic Add-On Deck.

But now we had a chance to get three more iconics out: the samurai Hayato in March 2018’s Ultimate Combat Add-On Deck, the ninja Reiko in June 2018’s Ultimate Equipment Add-On Deck, and—in one of the most bizarre things we’ve ever done—the dual-character vigilante Aric/the Red Raven in May 2018’s Ultimate Intrigue Add-On Deck. Which would— Hold on. As we were plotting these out, Erik and Vic let slip that a new book called Ultimate Wilderness was on the way, and it would feature a new shifter class with a not-yet-named iconic. After some quick schedule rejiggering, Zova appeared in the Ultimate Wilderness Add-On Deck in July 2018.

All right, just three to go! I had lobbied that our new versatile base set contain all the Core Eleven iconics done from scratch. My co-designers told me this would be challenging—actually, I think the word they used was “impossible.” No single box before could ever hold 11 characters, but I was sure we could do it. Eleven was tight, but we could just make it.

The Class of 2019: Fumbus, Hakon, Kess, and Quinn

But the folks in RPG R&D had one more surprise first. With the long-awaited Second Edition Pathfinder Core Rulebook underway, they wanted to introduce a goblin iconic. Totally cool by me, I said, and then they said they wanted it to be an alchemist. “But, but… we already have an iconic alchemist,” I said. They would shed no tears for poor Damiel, and neither did I when I saw the crazily goggled nutball they were planning to make. “What’s his name?” I asked. “Oh, he’s still in testing,” they said. “We won’t know that for months.” I don’t draw many lines with Paizo, but this time I had no choice. “Our game comes out three months before yours does,” I said. “So if you don’t name this goblin quickly, he’s gonna be named ‘Gobbo McBoomy.’” Bingo-bongo, the iconic goblin alchemist Fumbus was born. Alongside the other members of the newly expanded “Core Twelve,” Fumbus appeared in May 2019’s Core Set.

Core’s companion Adventure Path, Curse of the Crimson Throne, finally gave us the urban setting we’d been longing for, and we could bring in the last three iconics. Along with a new version of Varian (with Radovan as a cohort), Curse debuted the skald Hakon, the brawler Kess, and, at long last, the investigator Quinn. Iconic collection 100% complete.

That’s 41 iconic characters (since Aric and the Red Raven have separate character cards) plus 6 “evil iconics”, amid—get this—163 total characters and 329 roles. (Why not 326, you ask? At the risk of spoilers, I leave that question for the trivia-minded among you.) It’s been a great journey with a whole lot of great characters. We hope you’ve enjoyed playing each and every one.

Mike Selinker
Adventure Card Game Lead Designer

We're proud to announce that Paizo has partnered with Dized to bring you the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game rules to your Android and iOS devices! Whether you're setting up your first game, looking for a quick rules clarification, or curious about strategies, you'll find it all in this FREE app! Dized includes all the rules from the recently released Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Core Set and is the perfect resource as you play The Dragon's Demand and Curse of the Crimson Throne.

Download for Android Download for iOS

Greetings from Columbus, Ohio! This is a brief blog to let you know what the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game doings are at Origins Game Fair (in Columbus) and on Free RPG Day (at participating retailers worldwide) this weekend.

At Origins, there's PACG play in the Franklin Rooms pretty much all the time. If you're here and you haven't seen the new Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Core Set and Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path, now's your chance to dive in. Plus, you'll be able to play all 4 scenarios of The Fangwood Thieves, the new Season of the Kobolds adventure for Pathfinder Adventure Card Society. (If you've never played PACS before, this is a great place to start!) It's a rollicking good time.

I'll be here throughout the weekend, mostly doing my annual nightly broadcast from the Big Bar on 2 with my co-hosts Paul Peterson and Gaby Weidling (remember them?). If you like lots of guests and assorted silliness, tune into the Lone Shark Games Twitch channel each night. Last night's broadcast should already be up!

And then on Saturday, it's Free RPG Day! As I mentioned in a previous blog, we took this opportunity to write a whole new goblin adventure using the Core Set! We Be Heroes? is a weird, wild adventure of good-guy gobbos dealing with paladins, undead, and strange chickens. It includes 4 new goblin characters, though you can play it with any of the 159 (!) other PACG characters we've released over the years. You'll like it. Pick it up at any participating store or try it at Origins. If you can't get to one of those locations, though, don't worry—starting July 1, you'll be able to download the FREE PDF or buy a print copy from paizo.com.

We're also pleased to announce that We Be Heroes? is officially sanctioned for Pathfinder Adventure Card Society play. Just download this sanctioning document (218 KB zip/PDF), which describes the adjustments you need to make the adventure PACS-legal. (We will soon be issuing similar sanctioning documents for The Dragon's Demand and Curse of the Crimson Throne.)

Since We Be Heroes? is for starting characters, it didn't make sense to include roles for our new goblin heroes in that adventure. But we will be releasing them online so you can take them all the way through any Adventure Path—if you can keep them alive, that is. We're doing something very new for these: One of the two roles you can choose for each goblin uses a concept called goblin markers. Here's how they work: Each goblin picks a pattern of marker that's theirs. When various circumstances occur (such as Crimsi examining a barrier or Siathorn stealing an Animal ally from another character), they get to mark their character with one of their goblin markers. Feats allow them to count and spend the markers for all manner of craziness, such as the Kitbasher Crimsi letting a friend examine the top card of a few location decks then move to one of them. (Crimsi's friend will probably take only a small amount of damage in the process; I wouldn't worry about it too much if I were Crimsi.) There are only 7 of each marker in the box, so no goblin can have more than 7—unless you're playing Pizazz, who has a feat that lets him swipe a marker from another goblin to heal himself.

It's going to be a fun weekend! Hope to see you at Origins and Free RPG Day!

Mike Selinker
Adventure Card Game Lead Designer

Hello! My name is Chad, and I'm here to talk to you about converting to the Church of... wait, wrong spiel. This is about converting existing PACG materials to the new rules and conventions of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Core Set and beyond. The Core Set rulebook includes some guidelines for conversion already, on page 26.

Here, I'll talk about the rhyme and reason for conversion guidelines, and also discuss some new, more specific changes from the new Conversion Guide we just released today. (There's a link to it at the bottom of this blog, but we'd love it if you finish this blog introducing it before you click!) I'm going to touch on several high-level topics in no particular order; let's get started!

With the release of the Core Set, we were given a chance to streamline the game a bit and clean up both card and rules text, to remove murky or confusing corner cases. As you probably know, we knew right from the start that we wanted to maintain compatibility with all the previously published Adventure Paths and Class Decks, but we were ok with making some high-level changes, just so long as we could easily explain to everyone how things should be updated—ideally without resorting to a gigantic list of individual card changes.

Recovery

The first of these changes I want to talk about here is recovery. When we launched the PACG with Rise of the Runelords in 2013, there were a few areas of the game that could get a little more complicated than we'd hoped. (Who would have thought that adapting a tabletop roleplaying game with thousands of pages of rules and an active human moderator to a card game could lead to complexity?) To help navigate these waters, we eventually shared our guiding principles.

Unfortunately, there was one pretty common situation where it seemed like the principles didn't entirely agree. It had to do with playing cards during an encounter when the card played wanted some extra steps for resolution. This includes nearly all spells, as well as a smattering of effects across other parts of the game. The issue is basically "What do I do with these cards that are ‘in flight'? Do I stop what I'm doing and resolve them, or hold them in abeyance while I finish the task? In the meantime, are these cards in my hand, in my discards, or something else?" The vast majority of the time, things work out exactly the same either way, but when things get really tight (usually because your deck is low and the bane is especially mean), suddenly you can find situations where you really care precisely where those cards are at specific points in time.

Our answer to this issue is recovery. When cards that need these extra steps are played, now they go into a special, designated place (so you're no longer wondering where they are), and then they're processed at the end of the current turn. This last part also helps with overall game flow, because the next player rarely needs to wait to start their turn while others are doing recovery. As a nice side effect, it lets us clarify and simplify the wording on spells:

More room for art, more functionality, and clearer wording. Win!

Using the former approach, we would tell you to discard the spell, which to most people means "put it in your discards." Then, after playing it, you'd check to see if something happened to make it go somewhere else. Internally, I called this the "banish-discard-or-maybe-recharge" effect, and when that mouthful is the shorthand, you know you don't actually have a winner. That said, when people were learning the game, they'd often go through the process of seeing spells, and then saying "My character isn't a spellcaster, so I don't care about these cards at all...", and then follow that with "wait a minute, I can use these spells as one-shot effects. They're like scrolls!" (In game design, when you can help new players ignore a chunk of the game while learning and later come to understand that it can help them after all, it's nearly always a good thing.)

Since we'd been playing with these concepts for many moons, it was clear to us what to do, and thankfully, it was also clear to most of you, most of the time. But... What happens if there's a bane that buries cards from your discards, or counts the cards in your hand? What about a location effect that takes cards that would be banished and instead shuffles them into the location? What about a scenario power that forbids you from recharging cards? As we (and you!) made more and more interesting, varied, special powers, the answer "it works out the same either way" started being untrue more and more often. Eventually, we resolved these questions in an explicit way, but that also required a pretty deep understanding of the game, and practically speaking, usually required one to review the FAQ/errata with a hawk-sharp eye.

Starting with Core and Curse of the Crimson Throne, spells just tell you how to play them as if they were scrolls, a usage available to everyone. The rules tell you "Hey, after you wring the juicy goodness from that card, just toss it into your ‘clean it up at the end of the turn' pile, and go on about your business."

Once we'd implemented this for spells, we also pushed it through to alchemical goodies, which have more prominence from now on thanks to Fumbus, the new iconic Goblin Alchemist. We think this approach is cleaner (that is, fewer murky rules corners) and often results in shorter, clearer wording, so we're also going to use it on other things with similar functionality.

Repetition: the Key to Comedy... and to Bad Gameplay

That gets me to the other big impetus for recovery, something near and dear to my heart as a game designer: avoiding repetitive play. This part is good medicine for making the game healthier in general, and like other medications, it's sometimes a bit bitter, so prepare yourself. There are several ways to express this principle. The one we talk about during PACG development is a statement Mike stole from designer Jonathan Tweet: "Never pay the player to do what you don't want them to do."

I'm talking about repetitive play—i.e., a situation where game design allows a player to be effective just doing the same thing over and over again. In a game with character- and deck-building elements like PACG, I'm talking specifically about playing the same card repeatedly.

In the short term, this can seem great. You get to use your cool, powerful effect every time, and you're mostly flying through the scenario. Over time, though, it's usually bad for the game. You start to view every challenge as a spike to hit with your sledgehammer. You mostly stop caring about new cards that you see, because they're not your sledgehammer (rarely, you find a better sledgehammer, but that's not enough for a bunch of reasons). You stop making decisions because the answer is always "sledgehammer." Sometimes, your sledgehammer takes you all the way to ultimate success, and sometimes it crashes down around you because you run into a sledgehammer-proof wall, but neither outcome is much fun. In general, the job of the game designer is to create challenges for the players to overcome and opportunities for their choices to matter. The sledgehammer is bad for both, so we try to make sure we don't make them. In other words, we try not to create situations where the players get a payoff for always using the same singular tool.

This comes up in the concept of recovery (no, I didn't forget). To make this a bit more concrete, let's talk about spells and spellcasters (if you've played a PACG alchemist, you should recognize everything I'm about to say). There are character builds that let you play a spell and then get it back. If you get it back "pretty soon," that's usually ok; you invest in a few different options, and you choose whichever one gives you the most fun and the best chance of overall success at any one point. Awesome. If you get it back "right away," that's less ok. If you get it back "immediately," that quite frequently leads to repetitive play. No bueno.

I'm sure that some of you have seen this before in PACG, the Pathfinder RPG, or other games. At first, it seems neat and exciting, but most of the time it becomes boring quickly. Sometimes it leads to an arms race, or a table agreement to soft-ban certain combos, or an update that rebalances relative options. For our cooperative game with physical cards, we spend most of our preventative effort avoiding the problem up-front, and occasionally errata things later (I'm looking at you, RotR Restoration spell!). In this case, recovery provides us with a useful general tool to avoid "playing the same spell/potion in every encounter." By moving the opportunity to get the card back to the end of the round, we avoid a whole swath of bad-gameplay options.

This impacts some pre-Core characters, in that there were ways to build them such that they could potentially play the same spell over and over again within a turn. In general, that ability is removed by the Core rules, which does sometimes hurt the raw effectiveness of those characters. Most of those characters are still playable, and we believe they'll be more fun in the world with recovery. Witches and alchemists need some extra help, though.

For witches, recovery interacted badly with temporarily taking their familiars out of play. We were able to use proficiencies and markers to solve the concern. Alchemists are a bit more complicated, as they each have specific wording that resists the creation of general guidelines. During testing, people had little trouble "doing the right thing"—it was just the particular wording that got tricky. While we were adjusting these powers, we noticed that sometimes the former wording had impacts beyond what was appropriate—the powers were turning out too broad, getting things that didn't fit or feel right for the characters. Since we needed to add specific wording for each character anyway, we took the opportunity to clean up some of these concerns. Bottom line, these adjusted alchemist characters aren't always exact mechanical equivalents to their former selves, but we feel that they're a better fit for the character concepts, and the changes result in better gameplay. If we happened to shut down your favorite alchemist "combo" exploit (*cough* Hi, Liz! *cough*), I'm sorry, and you're welcome.

It's possible that we'll need to make further small adjustments to other characters to account for recovery, but we feel that most are fine. With that in mind, if you find another character that you feel is severely impacted, please bring it to our attention, and we'll take a look. Thanks in advance!

Proficiency

The next big change I want to talk about is an expansion of the concept of proficiency. Proficiencies have been with us since the beginning, where we had just three: Light Armors, Heavy Armors, and Weapons. We picked this set to model the proficiencies of Pathfinder, but with the upcoming changes to proficiencies in the new edition of the RPG, we decided to broaden the concept. Moving forward, there are more proficiencies in the game, and they have an expanded role. Characters can be proficient with card types and with traits. This lets us make characters that are proficient with Alchemical things (including Alchemical items and armors, but not ALL items or armors). Or Arcane things (including spells and wands), or spells (getting both Arcane and Divine spells, but not wands or staves).

Better if you know how to take full advantage.

On the other end of this change is an expansion of what it means to be proficient. We still can add special effects to cards for proficient wielders, and you're sure to see that going forward. We've also generalized a concept from existing spellcasters and Alchemists that proficiency is what lets you keep a card that would otherwise be banished, like a spell or a potion. This expansion of the concept of proficiency is a better match for the new Pathfinder RPG, and it's incredibly flavorful. For example, bards can have proficiency in Instrument (we approximated this before, but it's cleaner now). Varian can have proficiency in Sword, Drunken Master Sajan can have proficiency in Liquid, and Yoon can be proficient with Fire. The Conversion Guide adds new proficiencies to two dozen characters.

Light Armors

One of the changes to proficiencies we made was to consolidate armor proficiency down from Light and Heavy Armors into just Armor. At the same time, we rebalanced armor boons so that they're more useful for all characters, with extra perks kicking in for characters that are proficient. In a sense, you can imagine that there are now two levels of proficiency with armor rather than three. We think this will result in a better balance for this not-exactly-beloved card type, and in testing, the new approach to armor and proficiency was almost universally liked, so we're optimistic that you'll like it also.

This change created one of the most significant conversion issues for pre-Core characters: what to do about characters with armor power feats. In general, our approach for conversion is to make a few general changes, because nobody loves huge lists of card changes—at least, I don't. We looked at several options, and here's where we came down:

Characters and roles that have a feat for Light Armor proficiency should be given an additional hand size feat instead.

This is probably the fuzziest change we've introduced via conversion, and it might result in a few odd character builds. We settled on this approach because it gives us a general adaptation, and it's a generally useful feat. The change to gaining role cards one adventure earlier means that characters have fewer power feats that they're "forced" to take on their character cards, so if you really dislike hand size feats, you should just take a power feat on your role card—something that you probably wanted anyway.

Closed Locations

Another big rules change has to do with closed locations. In Core and Curse, locations lost their back "closed" state and gained a rule that cleans them up as you go, pushing characters to move and encouraging interaction in the game in general. In the Core Set rulebook's Transition Guide, we tell you to just ignore effects involving interaction with closed locations. This solution proved to be controversial, I think for a few reasons. We're introducing a different way to handle these that I think will help address some of the concerns, and I'll try to talk about some of the others after. The idea is simple: use the pre-Core rules with pre-Core locations and use the new rules with new locations. More precisely:

When you would put a location card back into the vault, flip it over. If it does not have a Pathfinder Adventure Card Game logo on the back, it stays in play and local characters do not automatically move. Closed locations are automatically guarded.

This change supersedes the page 26 rule for these locations, and we think it will prove to be less disruptive for older Adventure Paths, especially those from organized play. (If you play a homebrew scenario with a mix of old and new locations, we recommend banishing the new locations and flipping the old locations.)

One common bit of feedback that we've heard about the new rule for closed locations is that established players don't understand why we changed it. In other words, "it's not broke; why did you fix it?" This is a pretty broad question, so my response will also be broad, but I hope it will help nonetheless. My answer is threefold:

1. It was slightly broken.
2. Rarely, it was confusingly broken.
3. It makes a lot of small things a little simpler and a little better.

For the first point, it mostly comes down to "You could learn to accept it, but it was often confusing to people learning the game." The second point has to do with a small set of tricky corner cases. Behind the curtain, we use bug-tracking software to deal with issues, errata, etc., and I've been told that the change to banish closed locations immediately closed a shocking number of them. While it may not be obvious, this is good for everyone simply because it lets people spend more time focusing on things more likely to create more fun. The third issue is sometimes part of the other two, and sometimes all its own concern—moving forward, being able to say just "location" rather than "open location" seems like a small change, but when wording around it gets complicated, it still helps. (The move from "temporarily closed" to "guarded" is another such improvement.)

In addition to more straightforward wording, the change has the effect of grouping people together more as the game moves toward conclusion. While older scenarios made use of the former approach, this new approach gives us better tools for managing the tension in the game, creating more dramatic effects, some of which comes from increased challenge. At the same time, it increases the impact of player choices during the game—the decisions about which locations to close and when become more important.

...And the Rest

While most of the changes in the Conversion Guide relate directly to recovery, proficiency, and closed locations, there are a few things related to smaller changes, like the one character who cares about cards that don't have adventure deck numbers, and the one monster that cares about the Basic and Elite trait. There really aren't many of those, though.

Now go ahead and check out the Conversion Guide! It's entirely possible (read: likely) that there are obscure corner cases that we haven't yet found; when we (or you) find them, we'll update the guide, and maybe even write another blog post on the topic. For now, we're all very excited to have you all get a chance to play with the Core Set and Curse of the Crimson Throne. Thanks!

Chad Brown
Adventure Card Game Lead Developer

Lemme tell you why Curse of the Crimson Throne is my favorite Pathfinder Adventure Card Game set yet. It's totally self-indulgent. You've been warned.

Back in 2007, I was helping Vic and Lisa launch the board game line that included Kill Doctor Lucky, Stonehenge, and (my personal favorite) Yetisburg. I got to be around Jason Bulmahn, James Jacobs, James Sutter, Wes Schneider, and the rest of the original Pathfinder RPG design team. One day, Wes came to me with a query.

"Mike, do you know how to design a tarot deck?" Wes said.

In fact, I had waited years for someone to ask me that question. In those days, I owned over a dozen tarot decks, and I had long wanted to make a divination deck that could stand up next to Ravenloft's tarokka, Discworld's caroc, and Everway. I'd just never had the chance.

Wes told me that the new RPG Adventure Path they were planning, Curse of the Crimson Throne, would feature a storyteller deck, but nobody in the company knew what to call it or how it could work. Or even how many cards it had.

"Fifty-four," I said. "The nine alignments times the six abilities. Done."

"Uh," said Wes. "Yeah, you're designing our tarot deck."

So we began work on what I dubbed "The Harrow Deck."

The original Harrow packaging, designed by James Davis with art by Kyle Hunter.

Now, this wasn't one of these everyone-in-the-world-figure-out-this-thing projects. It was too niche of a design for that. Instead, Wes, the Jameses, artist Kyle Stanley Hunter, and I just holed up and riffed for a couple of hours.

"What if there was a giant, but he was juggling?" Wes would say.

"Juggling an elephant?" Kyle would reply.

"And a unicorn," Sutter would answer. "Not juggling a unicorn. A different card with a unicorn."

"But with a pear on the end of her horn, and she can't get it off," I'd say.

"I have an odd idea for The Marriage," Jacobs would say, and we'd keep going till it was done.

I'm sure we were sober when we thought of these.

I had the mechanics worked out from the get-go, tasking Kyle with envisioning six symbols we could float over the art in nine different alignment positions. But, we needed more heft to this thing. We brought in my design partner Teeuwynn Woodruff to create a divination mechanic and to write dozens of fascinating interpretations of the nutball ideas we had come up with. Jason brought over an idea for a gambling game called Towers based on my card alignment array. Mike McArtor (we miss ya, bud) took on the editing and James Davis the graphics.

It was one of the very few projects where nothing ever went backward. Everything anyone said made it in. Because nothing—nothing at all—was too weird for the Harrow deck. You can read more about the creation of that deck in this ridiculous 2008 blog of mine, and I encourage you to do so.

In 2013, two card sets of mine came out. The first was the Deluxe edition of the Harrow deck.

The Deluxe Harrow Deck.

In this re-envisioned product, the cards became tarot-sized and the overlay suit icons got replaced by alignment dots around the edges, freeing up Kyle's art even more. It still functioned the same, with the same names and imagery, but it sure looked a bit different.

"How you gonna do neutral?" I asked. They figured it out.

Also in 2013, we had just finished core design on the first Pathfinder Adventure Card Game set, Rise of the Runelords. Already, a buzz was building about what we were concocting. Soon, we'd need to know what the second PACG set would be.

"It's Curse of the Crimson Throne," I said as a final pronouncement. "Because I want to make a totally new timer mechanic based on the Harrow deck."

The finality of that pronouncement lasted about 20 seconds. "Whoa there, hoss," my collaborators said. "We just spent a year making your dumb thing work, and you want to start it over? Nope, and also nope."

OK, so Skull & Shackles. Fine. But, the third set for sure...

I brought on Keith Richmond, as recounted in this blog of his, because for sure we were doing Curse real soon now. Except we didn't. Wrath of the Righteous would be our plane-spanning epic tale, so Keith cut his teeth on that. Then Mummy's Mask led us into the sands, and Keith helped make that a reality. Also multiple seasons of organized play. Keith was working on a lot of these game projects for us, but not the thing I actually brought him on to make.

After Mummy's Mask, we needed to recalibrate. In 2018, with many thousands of PACG cards out there, we wanted to cure some of the lingering roughness in the game and give it a real cleanup. Finally, I said, "Now. We're doing Curse now. I'm getting my Harrow set."

Vic and Lisa agreed. So we started in on Curse. I cannot tell you how liberating it felt to crack open a Harrow deck and reimagine it a decade later. All of Kyle's mind-bending art, all of those odd concepts that Wes and the Jameses and I kicked around, all the ethereal meanings that Teeuwynn ascribed to every card—all of that was about to become real. Cards now had to function. They had to mean one thing, not everything.

New design by Sonja Morris, and a darn pretty one, says me.

Liz took the first pass on the Harrow blessings. She looked at every weird idea that made it onto those cards and wrote whatever madness popped into her head. Keith and Chad reworked her cool concepts. Aviva figured out how everything should be said. I went through and made everything fit that original Harrow vision.

Fifty-four new blessings, all themed to suits, was the largest amount of blessings we'd ever designed at once. Not only did they all need different play powers, but they also needed different "when this is the hour" powers, and they all had to be different from the ones in the Core Set. Most importantly, they needed to match whatever stories our original Harrow deck put in your head.

After quite a bit of work, we had a new Harrow deck for a whole new audience.

Except... we didn't have a harrowing, per se. We had a few spells called various versions of Harrowing, and we had allies called Harrowers, and we even had items called Harrow Decks.

Plus lots more Harrow cards.

But, we didn't have any divination.

Keith figured that out. Well, he figured a version of it out, but it was too big and complicated. Through many iterations, we finally got down to something nice and simple. Each adventure, you'd gain a Harrow blessing of the adventure's suit, which would affect your checks of the related skill. Your harrow would follow you throughout the adventure, loading itself into your hand at the start of each scenario. Sometimes you'd be thrilled by what blessing governed your play; sometimes you'd be less thrilled. But, it was yours for the adventure, like it or not.

Now and then, some of the Harrow blessings were in players' decks, making the harrowing less fun. The "impossible rule" covered this situation, and we made a rule that if we ran out of blessings of the appropriate suit, we'd use ones of other Harrow suits. A simple enough hack, but we wanted another approach.

So we tried something else. We cracked one of my old Harrow decks to play the divination similarly to the way Teeuwynn imagined it years earlier. Then we used the rules in the storybook applying to whatever card each character got (assuming it was available). You sure don't need a real Harrow deck for that purpose, but if you can get your hands on one, you'll feel more deeply immersed in the adventure.

Along with the whole team, Keith finally got Curse of the Crimson Throne done like he wanted, and as a "reward," I made him be the president of my company. Me, I got my Harrow set. That time a dozen years ago, when we made a crazy deck of cards that a generation of Pathfinders interpreted in every possible way, was now part of my most adventurous project for Paizo ever.

Sometimes Fate is a cruel mistress. But, sometimes, if you just give her a chance, she smiles on you.

Mike Selinker
Adventure Card Game Lead Designer

As copies of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Core Set start to arrive in subscribers' homes, Liz is here with the latest Core Principles blog. We also have a long-awaited treat for you: the new PDF of the Core rulebook! Check the link below and you'll get it! —Mike

Download the Core Set Rulebook — 3.0 MB zip/PDF

Hi! I'm Liz Spain, the designer at Lone Shark Games best known for not so much pushing the envelope for what we do in the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, but ripping that envelope open and refolding it into a stylish hat. If you liked the added wackiness of products like Mummy's Mask and the Alchemist Class Deck that tread weird territory, that was probably my fault.

One of my favorite things about designing for PACG is getting to see it played in the wilds of game stores and conventions. It's fun people-watching, but I also get to hear about how you want to play the game. Some folks asked that the game play in less than an hour, while others spend all day engaging an epic campaign. Families play PACG in a laid-back manner with kids, and dedicated competitive card players crave the brutality of an experience that can seem unwinnable except by perfectly harmonized strategy. We got asked a lot to make the story of the adventure more relevant and descriptive, and others asked for scenarios that can be played repeatedly. So, of course, we set out to do all those things at the same time.

We cut ties with the idea that every PACG story needed to be an epic. Treating the Core Set as a toolkit for grafting on adventures of every size really unleashes our ability to make things interesting. If you're looking for the sultry burn of a long intrigue adventure, Curse of the Crimson Throne is a 26-course meal with all the bells and whistles, going from adventure 1 ("B" is gone forever) to adventure 7. (You read that right.) For the impatient (and perhaps a little unhinged) among us, the upcoming We Be Heroes packs a goblin-sized adventure into two scenarios of wackadoo fun. You can even use the tools of the Core Set to craft roguelike scenarios, with six random scenario types in Core and two more in Curse.

But especially important is that the Core Set itself is a satisfying survey of things that PACG scenarios can do. We aimed to provide an Adventure Path of a size we'd never made before: a three-adventure campaign you could blast through in a weekend marathon if you wanted. At Lone Shark, we called this a "mini-Path," but really, "Adventure Path" is the official term for a connected set of any number of adventures greater than 1.

We cannot guarantee there's a dragon in The Dragon's Demand.

We found the perfect adventure that could strike the middle ground between one-shot and epic in a little green book by Mike Shel called The Dragon's Demand. In it, a wizard obsessed with a zoning issue dies, and dealing with his legacy goes... awry.

Check out the danger entry and henchman list for how strange things get.

You wanted more story? Have an illustrated 2-page spread of story for every scenario, including denouement if you succeed. Fans of the PACG Organized Play might recognize this kind of scenario layout. The extra room really lets us designers stretch our imaginations, finding new way to pull the levers of how PACG functions. Also, we compartmentalized the setup instructions and the rules you need during a scenario, so you can find the important stuff for the moment at a glance.

But what makes The Dragon's Demand the perfect story for the Core Set (which we expect you'll play a lot) is that it packs a lot of different beats into a compact narrative: Begin with the classic ride into town as a brief intro scenario to quickly teach how the game works, then explore a trapped magical estate, delve into ancient tombs, negotiate with sinister minions, rescue stolen townsfolk, and maybe even face a dragon at the end. The variety of situations in The Dragon's Demand allows us to parade a variety of our favorite scenario mechanics.

The PACG Core Set and the elements of this Adventure Path are designed as a toolkit. While remaining true to the story notes of The Dragon's Demand, we tried to capture elements you'd expect to build an engaging tale in the tabletop RPG.

Lots of utility here.

The barriers and story banes in particular stray further than ever from direct mortal dangers and include the sorts of things that might stymie hero investigators hunting a mystery. Globally useful concepts like a witness to a disaster or a person needing rescuing are introduced here and then used whenever the story dictates.

Good for all your reptilian needs.

But we haven't neglected to pack the box full of monsters. With the concept of story banes, a challenging Kobold Champion villain for heroes fresh off the hay wagon can become a masterful manipulator's loyal lieutenant in later chapters. Underappreciated stars of The Dragon's Demand story (they do die a lot in the tale), the clever little dragonlings lay all kinds of traps for our heroes. Though goblins get much love, kobolds are so hot right now with a sleek updated look. (And check out the homebrew AP "We Be Kobolds" by Tyler Beck and David Jacobson, which inspired us to look deeper into the scaly rotters.) And when it comes to changing up flavor for future stories, variability on the similarly scaly Drake and Dragon throw new flavor onto reusing story banes for new tales.

I'm not ashamed to admit: I want you to get hooked on the new PACG. Whether you're playing your first scenario ever or playing your favorite scenario of Core for the umpteenth time, our hope (and hopefully clever design) is that you'll find something new to explore.

Liz Spain
Adventure Card Game Designer

Hi. I'm Aviva, and I'm new here. Sort of. I was an intern at Paizo in 2012, so when I began working with Lone Shark in 2016, Pathfinder wasn't totally new to me. I've never really considered writing a PACG blog before, but now that I've contributed for a while, I have some important things to say. So I've poured a glass of cheap rosé, illuminated a 3-wick vanilla butter–scented candle, and hit play on an acoustic Spotify playlist, all to create my perfectly chill atmosphere. But you know what's not chill? The inefficiency in OG PACG.

Maybe you think the earlier products have gotten better with age, but I think new players may not have quite the experienced palette you do. This isn't making the game sweeter. (I have looked ahead, and yes, the wine puns are just going to keep coming. —Mike) The adjustments we're making to the flow of your adventure mean you'll be engaged in all the turns and will probably have more fun, which... like, why else would you play the game?

Yes, sometimes the game was too slow. Part of speeding up the new Core Set involved filling it with cards that are simpler, both mechanically and visually. This allows us to design crazier cards later without obstructing your flow more than otherwise.

Immolate from Mummy's Mask; Right: Immolate from Curse of the Crimson Throne.

Let's talk visuals first. The additional power on the Curse version of Immolate would make it an unreadable font size if templated with the previous card design; here, even with an extra power, there's still enough room for traits and the check to acquire without covering three different sides of art. (The updated wordings also help—you're welcome.) #efficiency.

A location from Rise of the Runelords (or should I say Rosé of the Runelords?); Right: one from the Core Set.

On The Leng Device, an entire character is blocked by the decklist. With the new card layout, you can see all of that skeleton in the Cell. And since there's no back, there's no flavor text. That's good because a location doesn't always have just one story. In Core, the Cell is used in Scenario 1B: The Blood Vow, in which an ally is held captive; and in Scenario 2C: Spirited Away, in which a villain lurks. So we've put the story where it belongs: in the storybook. Your stories will be much larger and contain more depth without us being so specific on these cards. #efficiency.

Let's move on to mechanics. One minor speedup comes from making checks to acquire mandatory, just as checks to defeat have always been. No more analyzing your decisions; just roll! If you want, you can take a result of 0 on any check and move on. However, you still play out the consequence of that 0.

Let's re-wine a prosec. Why is this faster, you ask? Making you do a thing every time there's a thing to do must be longer! But, my friends, you're forgetting about that time you spent 10 minutes trying to decide if a check was worth rolling for, and then another five minutes trying to figure out if the power prefixed by “if you did not succeed” would apply here. There is no more design around whether you perform the check or not, which saves you from having to work out the difference between “choosing not to make a check” and “failing a check.” Let me show you some examples that'll make you say chardon-YAY:

In Mummy's Mask, we wanted things to happen to you if you chose not to acquire or if you failed. If you simply decided to not make a check against an ally like Azaz Arafe and Zazu, what happens then? It doesn't make sense for you to come out better when you didn't try, rather than try and fail. So we added the rule “If you choose not to acquire it, it counts as failing to acquire it.” If you don't try, you still fail (just like real life, amirite?). Now, this is a global rule, which eliminates that extra step of you making a choice to make a check. Grandmother Nightmare's “hour power” cares for an entire turn, so you better give things your best shot! #efficiency

Another thing making the game faster: recovery. By having this step at the end of your turn, you don't need to interrupt your turn (i.e., the game flow) or whatever check you're making to see if you get to recharge the card and then have it matter for damage and bad stuff that might happen to your deck. Recovery happens at the end of each turn, so you can still recover your cards off-turn, but in many cases, the next player can get on with the start of their turn while you're cleaning up your own. #multitasking #efficiency

Setup of the game is also much quicker (yay, you can play sooner!). A big contributor to this is the use of proxies, making it so you don't have to search through a million duplicated henchmen to find the one you need. Mike talked about proxies in his blog Rethinking Complexity, Part 2, so I'm going to be #efficient and not re-explain here. (But I will mention something he didn't: You also use proxies in place of the old character token cards when you need to, like when your token card would get shuffled into a deck.)

Speaking of tokens (sort of), we now have markers. Mike showed you the scourge card design, but not the markers themselves. I will, so now you can imagine them together:

That pink marker could mark that I'm wounded, but then again, I like pink, so maybe I want this to mark my Brooch instead. The point is I GET TO PICK.

Look at all those When Closed powers that help all local people! Well, except Twisting Passages.

One of the larger visual changes will be noticeable as you start to accomplish your default goal of closing locations: locations are now removed when they're closed. Don't worry, though; everything happens for a riesling. This is going to speed up your game while increasing both tension and cooperation, thanks to the many "local" powers that exist. We know you need a chance to heal or buff yourself, and this is exactly what the closing powers on many locations will do for you—the nice ones anyway—before they're banished and you get to move (usually to a location of your choice)... and off-turn, if you weren't the active player. You will be fine. This also means the entire board is empty when you win! So, less cleanup too. #efficiency

Okay, time for me to wine this up.

Aviva Schecterson
Adventure Card Game Designer

Hey, it's Chad. In today's blog, designer and brand new Lone Shark Games president Keith Richmond takes a break from talking about Core Principles to wax nostalgic about his long journey shepherding Curse of the Crimson Throne. I'll comment along as needed.

Almost a decade ago, I ran the RPG version of Curse of the Crimson Throne for a group of players that included my friends Chad Brown and Tanis O'Connor. It's a fantastic adventure that starts you as a group of characters all wronged by a deranged dealer of drugs and kidnapper of kids, drawn together by a mysterious gypsy fortune teller to bring him to justice. From there, you become embroiled in saving the city of Korvosa—often from itself.

It has everything that makes for a great urban adventure full of morally ambiguous allies and enemies. You parkour over, under, and through the city to defeat criminal and political plots, a healthy mix of mundane greed and murder alongside mystical rituals of mass murder. As you investigate, you interact with such a fantastic cast of characters that you feel like the city becomes yours to protect, not just a backdrop for the dungeon of the day. When you finally end it by stabbing your magic sword into the heart of a centuries-old curse that's plagued the Crimson Throne, you feel a genuine sense of accomplishment at having changed the city's fate. It's the only adventure path I've GM'd multiple times, the anniversary hardcover is excellent, and I'd cheerfully encourage you to play it.

Back to the card game: about five years later, when I was looking for a new game project, Chad and Tanis lured me onto the PACG team. (After I'd introduced Keith to everyone, I casually mentioned to Mike that he'd GM'd Curse... three times.—Chad) Once I'd proven I could be helpful, one of my first big projects was to help architect the Curse of the Crimson Throne set. I still have spreadsheets from 2014 with some of the initial ideas. I'll admit that 5 years more experience designing, the help of the full team, and being able to leverage Core were tremendous improvements over those nascent ideas. Still, it is with great happiness and pride that I look forward to seeing this box, with our names on the front, make it into your hands. (What he said!—Chad)

Aged to perfection.

But more than enough about why I care about this product, and on to why you should!

Save the Base for emergencies or spend a couple turns hanging out with friends. We don't judge.

One of the defining features of the Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path is how it centers around Korvosa. Throughout several adventures, you work to save the city from crime, madness, plague, traitors, and ancient dark forces. At the same time, the city is there for you when you need a helping hand, perhaps to procure new equipment, gather information, or heal whatever injury, disease, or even death that has befallen you. (Even more helpful than going through your pockets looking for loose change.—Chad)

The very first scenario rewards you with your first supporter, Field Marshall Cressida Kroft (She's the best!—Chad), commander of Korvosa's guards. Impressed by your heroism, and sorely in need of help, she'll happily provide you all manner of armor and weapons. If you want her help obtaining spells, you'll need to check off that box on the card by spending a supporter feat on her. You'll receive a steady supply of supporter feats throughout your adventures, so the city of Korvosa levels up alongside you. Just like in the RPG, supporters in the ACG can change in and out, gain power, and even die. Each group will favor different supporters, and you may eventually need to make tough decisions about which supporters to obtain or save from calamity.

Any resemblance to Zorro or Batman is strictly coincidental.

Curse of the Crimson Throne also introduces you to Korvosa's Hero, Blackjack (Also the best!—Chad). Blackjack is a masked hero who has fought for Korvosa's poor for centuries. Fortunately for you, the current Blackjack is ready to give up his mantle to a worthy successor. Someone heroic. Someone adventurous. Someone who also fights to save the people of Korvosa. (Sound like anyone you know?—Chad)

This special role can be earned by any one character, adds to your existing character powers instead of replacing them like a normal role, and comes with several wonderful toys.

Varian is ready to become Blackjack to save Korvosa. Are you?

Harrows have a very different art style from traditional blessings. Also, apparently a Hag with an eyeball in her mouth. Ick.

Curse of the Crimson Throne makes extensive use of the Harrow, a Tarot-like deck of cards used to predict the future and play card games. Folks familiar with the Harrow Deck that Mike helped design several years back will not be surprised that a very similar deck has ended up in Curse, in the form of special Harrow blessings. There are 6 suits (Hammers, Keys, Shields, Books, Stars, and Crowns) representing different metaphysical concepts and also mapping to six familiar attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma). Each of those suits has 9 cards that correspond to the classic 9 alignments that describe the struggle between Good and Evil, Law and Chaos. Mechanically, this means that some Harrows are a lot kinder than others and they cover a wide variety of effects, both when played and when they show up as the hour (that is, are faceup on the hourglass discard pile). Also, following our design principle of more unique cards=good, you get 54 unique Harrow blessings in Curse of the Crimson Throne. More than enough to keep things interesting!

Every harrowing adventure has a Harrowing to start, so get to heroing.

Each adventure in Curse is themed to a particular Harrow suit. For instance, the first adventure is themed to the suit of Keys, and it cares a lot about chases, criminals, finding lost treasures, and other dexterous undertakings, so you get an automatic 1d4 on Dexterity non-combat checks. At the start of the adventure, each character will draw an appropriate Harrow and get to use it throughout the entire adventure, getting a special benefit each time they play it. And if you're seeking a little bit of extra challenge or just more Harrowing flavor, each suit has a wildcard you can add that evokes the right kind of flavor and actions.

My forum avatar has been the Harrow Rabbit Prince for years because of fond memories of Tanis's barbarian calling Chad's paladin "Bunnyman" for an entire campaign after he got it. (Yeah, she totally stopped after the campaign.—Chad) We even put out a promo card in Chad's honor.

Tanis would approve.

I'm in no way suggesting that you should use the Harrows as an excuse for silly nicknames, but I can confirm that it's hilarious.

Keith Richmond
Adventure Card Game Designer

With PaizoCon just around the corner, the current focus of the team involves pulling the edges together on all the moving pieces. As many of our convention catalogs went live last weekend, I wanted to take a moment and give some updates.

PaizoCon: The event lottery is complete, and I'm working with Customer Service to resolve any issues with scheduling. We will be reaching out via email as needed to discuss our resolution options. We also received a few GM cancellations so we will be reaching out to GMs that were on the waitlist for coverage. If your plans changed and you wish to GM some games, please visit organizedplayfoundation.org/paizoorganizedplay and complete the questionnaire for PaizoCon.

Origins: Tickets are on sale for all games, including the Saturday evening premiere of Starfinder Society #2-00: Fate of the Scoured God. This multi-table interactive event wraps up the storylines from the prior 22 months and gets ready to pivot to our Year of a Thousand Bites. We are selling tickets to this event by Tier range, to make GM allocation easier, so be sure to grab double check which one you add to your cart!

The Origins system has a few problems finding and displaying the events that run from 7 pm to midnight. The best way to find games is to look for the title of the scenario, such as "Daughters' Due" or "Herald's War." Then you can look through the schedule for the date/time you wish.

There are still tickets for many tables, including the PFS interactive finale running on Friday, Pathfinder Society #10-98: Siege of Gallowspire. We set these up for sale by Tier and by difficulty level—Soldier (slightly harder than usual) and Champion (hard mode). This year, I can pull ticket sale information, so we are using those numbers to adjust our table offerings. Unfortunately, ticket sales shifts may not resolve the schedule for everyone. If you can't get into a game you want, please come by on the day, and we will see what we can do on site. We desire to seat everyone that wants a game!

Gen Con: We submitted our schedule, and you should see them appear any day now! Tickets go on sale May 19 at gencon.com. Games for Gen Con run in 5-hour blocks from Thursday through Saturday 8:00 AM to 1:00 PM, 2:00 PM to 7:00 PM, 8:00 PM to 1:00 AM, and 2:00 AM to 7:00 AM. Sunday has one block starting at 9:00 AM. Each block includes a selection of Pathfinder Society, Starfinder Society, and Pathfinder Society (2nd edition) games. Pathfinder Adventure Card Society, Pathfinder Society Academy (to include Starfinder events) run in 2-hour blocks from 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM Thursday through Saturday and Sunday from 9:00 to 2:00 PM.

A few highlight events:

• Thursday, 8:00 PM—a large scale seating of Pathfinder Society (2nd edition) #1-00: Origin of the Open Road
• Friday, 8:00 PM—Starfinder Society #2-00: Fate of the Scoured God
• Saturday 8:00 PM—Pathfinder Society #10-98: Siege of Gallowspire

As with Origins, we are selling tickets to PFS #10-98 by Tier and difficulty level, so check your tickets carefully. Especially with #10-98, where only 7th level pregens are available.

For those of you not traveling to any of the conventions listed above, both Starfinder Society #2-00: Fate of the Scoured God and Pathfinder Society #10-98: Siege of Gallowspire are available after August 4 for conventions running 3-concurrent tables. At this time, Starfinder Society #1-99: Scoured Stars Invasion and Pathfinder Society #10-00: Hao Jin Cataclysm become available for purchase.

If you missed it this morning, developer Linda Zayas-Palmer wrote about our plans for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Society. Check it out here: PACS Blog. Otherwise, tune in next Wednesday for more decisions regarding the evolution of the Pathfinder Society.

Until next time—Explore, Report, Cooperate!

Tonya Woldridge
Organized Play Manager

The new Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Core Set is almost here! Paizo and the designers at Lone Shark built upon years of fan feedback and experience to improve the game. If you're curious about what the Core Set has to offer and the design principles that went into the revision, you're in luck. The designers have been publishing a series of great blogs on the topic: overall principles, adding more story, varying the challenge, reducing complexity, encouraging teamwork, rewarding heroism, and embracing chance.

Much like the card game itself, the card game branch of Organized Play is looking to build on feedback to make a better program, without throwing out the content that we had before. We renamed the Pathfinder Adventure Card Guild to the Pathfinder Adventure Card Society (PACS). This establishes our card game as the third branch of our organized play programs, with me as the dedicated developer. We will have year themes different from the Pathfinder Society, though there may still be crossover events from time to time, and are looking at what kind of special events we may be able to do besides the annual Open tournament.

In the PACS, there will be a lot of features that you are already used to. Players use class decks to play Adventures made up of several scenarios. As they play, characters upgrade their deck and gain Feats, which let them improve their skills, learn new powers, and add more cards to their deck. Every few scenarios, players can increase their character's Tier, allowing them to play more challenging scenarios.

The Fangwood Thieves

The Fangwood Thieves is the first PACS adventure to use the Core Set. The first two scenarios debut at PaizoCon, and the second two debut at Origins (June 11-15). This collection of 4 scenarios is designed as an introduction to the Core Set and is well-suited as a demo for the game usable anywhere, particularly game stores and conventions. It can also help new players catch up to other players who are playing an ongoing Adventure Path.

The plot's fairly straightforward, taking place in the Fangwood and involving a group of thieving kobolds. If you are steeped in Golarion lore, you may notice a few nods to existing canon, such as references to the aftermath of the Ironfang Invasion Adventure Path, but you don't need this knowledge to enjoy the adventure.

The Shape of Year 6

We're saving the name and symbol for Year 6 to be revealed at the PaizoCon Banquet, but I can talk about the season's overall structure. Over the years, we've received feedback that a season with a single large Adventure Path doesn't fit the schedules of everyone in the community. To help address this concern, we shortened the overarching Adventure Path story, including four scenarios per adventure instead of five or six. Not only does this fit more naturally with the new Hero Point model, but it also gives us more space in the season to experiment with other scenario and adventure formats.

Speaking of other formats. For Year 6, we'll be adding two new self-contained adventures. The first of these adventures will release in early 2020, and the second in the summer of 2020. These stand-alone adventures will be written for multiple Tiers to make them as versatile as possible. To differentiate what is part of the meta-plot and what is not, we are adopting a new title structure borrowed from the RPG adventure paths.

Rules Update

Even though Season 6 itself won't start until Gen Con, we'll be releasing an update to the Pathfinder Adventure Card Society Guide at PaizoCon 2019 (May 24-27), to coincide with the release of the Core Set. Here is a sneak peek of the three primary adjustments and one clarification appearing in the updated guide.

Using the Core Set Rules

Card Game Organized Play traditionally used the rulebook from the most recently released boxed set (with help from the boxed set that the adventure uses for card-specific rules). We'll be making this update again. Once the new guide releases, the revised rules from the Core Set will become the new default for Organized Play. As with previous rulebooks, the Core Set Rulebook will be available for free at paizo.com/pacg. With the new model of production, in which products like the Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path are presented as expansions on the Core Set rather than stand-alone games, the Core Set's rules will be the baseline rules for PACS for the foreseeable future.

So how should groups transition to the Core Set rules? The Core Set Rulebook includes a one-page transition guide that neatly summarizes the revision's changes and gives instructions for handling these changes when playing older sets. There are also a few specific cards that will be receiving changes. These changes will be available at paizo.com/pacg.

Hero Points and Tiering Up

In the Core Set, instead of gaining specific power, card, and skill feats, characters earn hero points. They can use these hero points to buy feats, reroll a die, or come back from the dead. Going forward, hero points will be the new standard for organized play. In PACS, a character can have several feats of each type equal to their Tier, but they can take these feats in whatever order they like. Hero Points also allow for more flexibility in how many scenarios a character can play before bumping up to the next Tier of play. A character could rush their advancement and increase their Tier after only 3 scenarios, or they could stick around for up to 6 scenarios to continue to improve their deck.

Challenge Modes

The Core Set includes options for making the game harder, introducing Heroic and Legendary difficulty. We are looking into how we can incorporate these difficulty levels into organized play and will have more information soon.

Replay

This isn't a change, but it's a clarification of an ambiguous rule. The rules about replay (namely, that characters that replay don't receive rewards) refer only to that specific character. In Pathfinder Adventure Card Society, playing a scenario with a different character does not count as “Replay.” This means that when you play a scenario again with a different character, that character earns the scenario's full rewards.

As always, we'll be keeping an eye out for community feedback, from rules changes to the new adventure model, so let us know what you think!

Linda Zayas-Palmer
Developer

To date in the Core Principles series, we've covered adding more story, varying the challenge, reducing complexity, encouraging teamwork, and rewarding heroism in the new Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Core Set. Now we're going to tackle another important design principle: injecting more drama into the game. One of our biggest tools to do that is embracing the vagaries of chance. The game comes with dice for a reason, and we wanted to change how we use them and give you even more ways to set yourself up for great payoff or greater disaster.

An early principle of Core design was establishing that uncertain outcomes are a lot more interesting than certain outcomes. We attempted to inject more chaos into the system in a few key ways. Core players have many ways to empower their characters and encounter exciting challenges, and there is almost always a chance that occasionally the dice will backstab them (or foot-stab them, in the case of the d4). We wanted more tools for managing chance, and fewer tools for removing it, extending the "lean into the fun" approach.

Now, that doesn't always mean increasing the number of dice. More dice isn't always more chance, because you can add certainty when you add more dice. One of the big lessons that we learned from the first several Adventure Paths is that, as characters grow over time, it's possible (in fact, pretty common) for players to choose feats and options that accumulate large bonuses to rolls. The more you can add a scaling bonus, like from a mythic path, marksman's bow, or cohort, the less the dice matter. Often, especially in large groups, players could find themselves attempting checks with a static bonus so high that they could not actually fail the roll. This was one of the reasons we removed the ability for all the characters to play blessings on a single check.

While there's a lot of fun to be had in coming together as a team to demolish a check, this is one of those cases where we as designers might be giving out "too much candy"—robbing those critical moments of tension and excitement. With this in mind, we've adjusted our design philosophy a bit, so that we're more often adding dice in areas where we might have previously added static +1s or +4s. We want Harsk, Lem, Seelah, and Valeros adding a d6 or d8 to your roll, not a d4+1 or d4+2. More variance leads to more suspense leads to more excitement leads to more fun.

Core avoids automatic success in most aspects of the game, especially against banes. Automatically succeeding on a combat check against the villain can be fun occasionally, but it's mostly bad for the game. Not needing to roll recovery checks for Seoni's spells? Sure, that's a pure quality of life improvement that sets Sorcerers apart from other casters like Ezren and Kyra.

If you like throwing dice, Sajan is a good pick.

Sajan loves throwing blessings on his checks, recharging any blessing he plays on himself. Or 2 or 3 blessings, if it's an Acrobatics check, combat check, or even an Acrobatics combat check. He also gets some interesting power feats for manipulating the dice he rolls, letting him really strive towards self-perfection. If he's not using a weapon, he can add a couple of extra dice. That said, Sajan also gets to add a card's level to his unarmed attacks. Many higher-level weapons grant static modifiers, and Sajan shouldn't fall behind there.

Harsk thinks Sajan should hold his beer.

When redesigning Harsk for Core, we really wanted to hew more closely to his RPG story. Harsk's origin story involves him getting revenge for his brother's death using crossbows and axes against Giants. So, bonus dice for axes and crossbows, and against Giants. And his Ranger assist power lets him assist anyone (including himself) anywhere for another die. That d4 becomes a d6 instead of becoming a d4+1, though.

Fewer ways to ignore the odds, more ways to control them.

The Frost Longspear shows why only some weapons grant static modifiers. Energy weapons, in general, are following the RPG's lead in adding extra dice, and also allowing you to choose to turn off that extra die when needed. For those of you worried that a focus on more dice instead of static bonuses will make the game too unpredictable for you (some of us try to avoid rolling important rolls if we don't have at least an 80% chance of success, and what do you mean you haven't calculated the odds?), there are plenty of ways to reroll in the system, like the new design for shields, or the previously mentioned hero points. And if you're unlucky enough to fail after rerolling (Hi, Gaby!), your friends might be able to avenge you.

Healing is also more "consistently random" (in game design, that's definitely a thing!). Time and time again, we've experienced regret due to targeted healing taking away the fun and uncertainty of what card is coming up (and also for sometimes breaking the game). Now, the new heal rule always heals random cards from your discards.

Okay, some story banes are just mean. Not all. But definitely some. Maybe most. Blame Chad.

Sometimes we want a story bane to cover variable options. Not all drakes breathe fire and not all elementals are immune to it. When we need them to be fixed for a scenario, we can declare that it is always a particular result.

Ruins are a very friendly place to encounter any of these 36 story banes. Honest.

Sometimes you need to encounter the danger, but there isn't just one and you don't know for sure what you're going to encounter. For example, a scenario might tell you the danger is a random Undead from the table. Maybe it's an Ancient Skeleton (yay!). Maybe it's a Vampire (boo!). And don't worry if you can't yet imagine fighting a Vampire. If the result you roll is higher than the adventure number, you just reroll.

That Story Bane Roster can also be used when you want to generate an entirely random story bane or story bane type for a random scenario. What's a random scenario, you probably ask? It's a new concept introduced in Core and expanded in Curse that lets you choose and/or randomly generate all of the requisite details for a scenario.

Something you hunt, not an open pit mine. They don't run very fast.

For example, Core's Random Scenario 4: Chase the Quarry steps you through a process wherein you select a location theme (Sacred, Underground, Urban, or Wild) then get a number of locations equal to twice the number of characters + 1 (and at least half of the locations have to have the trait for the theme you selected).

You then choose a story bane to be your quarry that you're chasing, a story bane to be your danger, and another stack of story banes equal to the number of characters + 1 to be not so friendly inhabitants of the locations you're chasing through.

Just select 3 wildcards to provide interesting scenario conditions and you're ready to start your chase.

Chase the Quarry is extra-random because as you're chasing your primary story bane from location to location, you are presented with a choice of two random locations to continue your pursuit. Your quarry is shuffled into the location chosen, as is another story bane that happens to be lurking in that location. Sometimes a little mix of surprise and choice is really excellent.

There are six random scenarios in Core and two more in Curse. We hope to introduce more over time. We haven't done out all the math to tell you exactly how many different scenarios you can create with these tools, but we feel comfortable stating that with the nearly limitless options available in these random scenarios, on top of the already healthy number of normal scenarios, you'll be able to play your hearts out with the Core Set and Curse of the Crimson Throne.

Keith Richmond
Adventure Card Game Designer

Keith here, to talk about something pretty darn shiny that we've added to the game. At the end of the day, we all like toys. And I'll admit that sometimes I've wanted to get them faster than the game has offered them. For instance, I love power feats, so waiting to win 10 scenarios in Wrath of the Righteous to get my first was frustrating.

No more.

We've been hinting for a while that we did something fun with the backs of all of those markers we added to the game. Time to spill the beans: The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Core Set introduces a new game mechanic and resource called hero points. They do a whole lot of fun things.

First, when you are rewarded with a hero point, you can immediately spend it to gain a card, power, or skill feat—your choice. Now, you can take those feats in whatever order is best for your character and your group. Just got a fantastic loot card? Maybe a card feat is in order. Botched a vital roll by 1 and it's bothering you? Skill feat. Or take one of those sweet power feats to spice things up a bit. This new reward system increases your ability to decide how your character develops, but it does have limitations to keep things from flying entirely out of control: the number of feats you can have of each type is limited to the # of the adventure you're playing. So while you're playing adventure 2, you can gain up to 2 skill feats, 2 power feats, and 2 card feats.

So what do you do with your hero points when you're not buying a feat? Use them to be heroic! Or at least luckier. During a scenario, you can spend a hero point to reroll all the dice on your check. Just missed on your check to defeat the villain, and failing it will mean you fail the scenario, or perhaps even die? Or maybe you've found that fantastic boon you've been chasing, and you botched the check to acquire. You'll be glad to have a spare hero point for a reroll.

You might also want to keep a hero point on hand for their most powerful use: If you die during a scenario, spend all your remaining hero points at the end, and you're no longer dead. This provides a reasonable compromise between those who feel death should never be permanent (always have at least one hero point on hand!) and those who think it should always be permanent (spend those hero points on rerolls, so you're not going down without a fight). Death still packs enough of a punch to add consequence to your choices, but not so much that a risky decision or moment of bad luck might derail your entire Adventure Path.

The number of hero points you collect varies by Adventure Path, giving each a different feel. The Dragon's Demand gives you just enough that dying too much will eat into feats, so play carefully. Curse of the Crimson Throne thinks you might need some of those rerolls, so it gives out a few more hero points.

Sometimes a reroll is handy. And sometimes failure is not an option.

Starting at PaizoCon, the freshly renamed Pathfinder Adventure Card Society replaces die bumps with hero points, and greatly simplifies its schedule for taking feats: every new scenario you complete gives you a hero point. This also helps cover for the occasionally missed scenario or mishap that might arise from playing with strangers at conventions.

Since we're talking a bit about feats, let's talk about roles. Remember when I said I get frustrated waiting for power feats? I also get impatient waiting for role cards. And I'm not alone. There are many discussions around which order to take power feats on a character before you get your role, because you generally have to take almost all of them, and you have to play for probably more than half your character's career before you open up more options with your role.

No more.

(Okay, so that seemed less dramatic the second time. Well, anyway‚ After extensive testing and gathering opinions, we've moved roles to show up a bit earlier. In Dragon's Demand, you gain your role as the reward for adventure 2, and Crimson Throne gives out roles after the first scenario of adventure 3. And the new Pathfinder Adventure Card Society reward structure will give you your role along with your third power feat. In all three cases, that means you'll select your third power feat from your shiny new role card.

Lini speaks softly, but Kyra carries a big flaming sword.

So, your level 3 Kyra Smiter can always have a weapon or Attack spell or be great at avenging. Your level 3 Lini Wild Whisperer can wild shape her way through all sorts of physical problems or ensure she can always heal her Animal allies.

With cards this great, never let them leave your side.

We've got a small mountain of blogs lined up for you to carry us through to release. I've got three open on my desktop now: one on how embracing randomness really opens up options; one on all of the awesome stuff in Curse like Harrows and Supporters; and a wrap-up of Season of Tapestry's Tide since the final chapter just got released this week! Jump on board, it's time to defeat a Voidlord. See you again soon!

Keith Richmond
Adventure Card Game Designer

Hello! My name is Chad Brown, and I'm here to talk with you all about the hows, whats, and whys of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, starting with the new Core Set, and continuing forward to the Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path and beyond. Today I'm going to talk about teamwork: when both the players and the characters work together as an effective and exciting adventuring party. Mike's talked about many changes for Core, including broad concepts of what we were (and were not) trying to accomplish. I'm going to dive in one level deeper and provide some more specifics about a couple of those things.

There are two major pillars of the revision, which I'll call "Story" and "Challenge." This probably isn't a surprise; the two main areas of feedback we've received since launching Rise of the Runelords are various forms of "we'd like more story" and "sometimes, the challenge level is off."

From the story side, we've adjusted the game to enhance and encourage teamwork, bringing it to a level you might see in an RPG session, adventure novel, comic, or movie. In particular, prior Adventure Paths gave groups a lot of freedom over when to split the party and when to group up. As a game mechanic, we built a balance around the advantages and disadvantages of each, and changed that balance over time, from scenario to scenario. As people played more and developed greater mastery over the game system, they came to realize that the advantages usually leaned more towards having the group spread out over multiple locations. This led to fine gameplay but didn't always match the story as much as we might have liked.

On a smaller scale, we'd frequently see new people learning the game ask how they could help each other, especially when their fellows tried something and failed. The answer (some form of "check your character and boon cards") generally created good gameplay, but often felt like a poor match for a heroic adventure story. Simply put, people felt like they were playing cool, fun characters, but they didn't always feel like they were playing those characters in an adventuring party.

To address this, we've made some adjustments to how we design cards and scenarios in Core. More character powers apply to local characters, and typical boons—including starting boons—provide more options for helping characters, especially local characters. A few examples:

Ezren shows off his knowledge of spellcasting whenever anyone finds a scroll or recharges a spell.

Further, we've adjusted how we make allies and weapons, increasing their teamwork aspects. Allies now usually offer some form of help to local characters, giving you more options for helping your party. Similarly, more weapons have options to help others in combat, both nearby and far away.

The sage believes the pen is mightier than the sword, but is silent on throwing axes.

Those of you who've played PACG with groups of differing size know that the challenges the game offers to solo and two-player groups are often different from those encountered by five- and six-player groups. In particular, very small groups tend to feel very little time pressure, but individual challenges can be very tough. On the other hand, large groups usually have at least one character that is well suited to any particular challenge, so the group can bring a lot of help to bear at important moments... but they need to accomplish a lot in few turns, especially if they get unlucky at the wrong moment. In practice, this could feel almost like two different games: one for very small groups and another for very large. Up to a point, this is what we expected and wanted; after all, a giant Pathfinder RPG party does and should feel different than a solo adventure. As we (including you!) have gained more experience with the game, we've come to the conclusion that this split is often larger than we (and you) wanted.

This gave rise to the biggest rules change since Rise of the Runelords first premiered. Because PACG is a cooperative game, people naturally want to work together. The rules have previously allowed each character to play up to one boon of each type on a given check or step—that is, when someone's doing a thing, each player is limited to playing at most one card of each type. (For example, to help Lini's combat check, Lem can play either his Force Missile spell or his Viper Strike spell, but not both at the same time.) This ability to help other people was and is key to the cooperative aspects of PACG. Starting with the Core Set, though, we've adjusted that rule so that now the party as a whole can play up to one boon of each type:

Each character may play any number of cards, but collectively, the party may play no more than one of each type of boon; powers that can be played freely do not count toward this limit.

I'm going to be blunt: many of our playtesters were nervous about this change. When you read it in a PDF draft or a playtest forum, it feels like the sort of change that could totally change the game, and there were some people who enjoyed the "massive overkill" situations that the old rule would often create. What we found during testing, though, was that it doesn't change the game as often or as much as you might think. The major impact it has is to cut down on the situations where a group could unload nearly their entire hands at a key moment. What we were seeing is that large groups could, with a little planning and effort, reliably drop this sort of massive card play on key checks, so much so that they were frequently removing the tension from these dramatic points. With this small adjustment to the rule, plus the ability to sidestep it when we want to with the freely exception (it's used by a LOT of cards), we were able to leave in the option for overkill while restoring much of the tension to those key dramatic moments.

In practical terms, these changes mean that the group will have to coordinate a bit more to make optimal use of their resources, and they also bring the typical experience of a small group much closer to that of a large group. There are still differences, and your group can use some newly provided tools to adjust the effective challenge level to match your desires, but the starting points are much closer together. We've mentioned before that Core adds several new ways to adjust both the difficulty and length of the game, both up and down: wildcards, adjustable size locations, more frequent use of scaling effects, and options for adjusting the size of the hourglass. You'll find that, in addition to helping everyone have more fun playing the game that they want to play, they also help you ensure that your characters are adventuring together as a team.

The other big thing we added to enhance teamwork is a new mechanic: avenge. When introducing the game to people, we would sometimes see players go up against a nasty bane of some sort, and then stumble due to bad luck, a bad matchup, or simply not being ready to tackle the challenge. When this happened, the unfortunate character's friends would invariably ask, "Is there anything I can do?" Core offers a new answer to that question: "You can try to avenge them."

Calistria, goddess of vengeance, approves of this new mechanic.

When a character fails to defeat a bane, another local character may attempt to avenge that encounter. The original character finishes their encounter, suffering the normal consequences of failure (including damage), but just before the bane in question would go away, the avenging character may bury a card to encounter the bane themselves. Sometimes you'll want Merisiel to get rid of that trap that chomped on Valeros before it shuffles back in, just so it doesn't chomp Val or Kyra later on. When smashing a villain, sometimes Amiri will manage to roll a lot of 1s and 2s on her handful of d12s (and not on the same die face!), and Seelah will need to step up to try to avoid a painful villain escape.

Each bane can only be avenged once (no stacking; this isn't a video-game monster vending machine!), and only by a local character, and by default the avenging character must bury a card in order to avenge. So it's something that you'll want to work out with your team. But when it works, it can be a beautiful thing indeed.

This may help you understand why we removed closed locations from the game, as Mike mentioned in the previous Core Principles column. This helps tilt the game back toward a middle ground between splitting up and staying together. Instead of hiding at a closed location when you get in trouble, you can instead rely on your friends to help protect you at an active location, using tricks like avenge, the new ally and weapon powers, and other changes you'll see as you play the game.

Before you go, we've got more to share!

Bonus Content: Making the Game

As Chad was working on this blog, I received this photo from our printer, Cartamundi, showing their "storyboard" for assembling the finished game. I thought I'd share it with you, giving me the opportunity to guide you on a tour of the Core Set.

Clockwise from top left:

• The rulebook. Now expanded to 32 pages, and laid out vertically rather than horizontally.
• Token sheets. There are 3 different sheets (they're overlapping in the photo), giving you a total of 12 pawns and 63 markers (7 each of 9 different designs).
• The storybook. Its 24 pages present the Dragon's Demand: 9 scripted scenarios plus the tools you need to generate a huge variety of customized and/or randomized scenarios.
• The Quick-Start Guide. Much like the one in Mummy's Mask, it leads up to 4 characters through a shortened version of the first scenario.
• The box lid.
• 4 packs of 110 cards, including the "Open Me First!" deck used for the Quick-Start scenario.
• Small components, clockwise from top right: foam blocks (4 per game), divider cards (24 per game), dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12; 1 each), and pawn stands (6 per game).
• The box bottom, packed with cards and small components.

You've probably noticed that there's no plastic tray. The tray was great for organizing a single Adventure Path that had a fixed number of each type of card, but it didn't work quite so well if you sleeved your cards, or if you wanted to add in a few class decks. And since the Core Set is intended to be the foundation for any number of Adventure Paths, there's going to be a lot less predictability in the card mix from here on out. So we've replaced the tray with a much more flexible solution, one capable of holding well over 2500 cards, and in a box about two-thirds the size of previous Adventure Path boxes. The 24 divider cards will keep your cards organized, and the foam blocks will keep them in place.

Vic Wertz
Adventure Card Game Project Lead

Thanks for reading! We're looking forward to seeing you all finally get your hands on both the Core Set and Curse of the Crimson Throne at PaizoCon 2019. See you there!

Chad Brown
Adventure Card Game Lead Developer

Over here at Pathfinder Adventure Card Game HQ, we're getting very excited. The new Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Core Set and the Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path are due for release in May. So we've got news about your PACG subscription!

Both of these sets are part of the main Pathfinder Adventure Card Game subscription. If you aren't already a subscriber, now's a great time to start. You currently have 3 choices for starting your subscription:

• If you choose to start your sub with the previous release—the Ultimate Wilderness Add-On Deck—you'll also score a free copy of last year's Free RPG Day promo character, Nok Nok.
• If you choose to start with the Core Set, you'll get both the Core Set and Curse of Crimson Throne.
• If you choose to start with Curse of the Crimson Throne, we won't send you the Core Set; this option is especially useful for non-US subscribers who want to get most of the subscription benefits without having to pay the unfortunately hefty international shipping fees for Core, which weighs in at a bit over 4 pounds.

And what are the benefits? Subscribers get 20% off the MSRP of their subscription products, plus subscribers occasionally get free promo cards.

What? "Embiggen" is totally in the OED. Look it up!

Yes, promo cards! There are six new promo cards for these products. Subscribers will get all six along with their subscription shipment of Curse of the Crimson Throne. They will also be available in these ways:

• Four of the six—the blessing The Real Rabbit Prince, the weapon The Tall Knife, the item The Unveiling, and the ally Asyra—are in a special Curse of the Crimson Throne promo pack we're sending out to retailers as part of a special launch kit in May. (If you're hoping to procure these from your favorite retailer, make sure they're ordering the launch kit from their distributor!)
• The armor Corpse Plate will be available at larger Pathfinder Society events in the next year, starting at PaizoCon on May 24.
• The spell Embiggen will appear in an upcoming issue of Game Trade magazine.

Free RPG Day is June 15, less than a month after we release Core and Curse. So we've got a special treat: goblins! OK, sure, we've done a goblin character every Free RPG Day for years. So what makes this year different?

We're not just releasing a character—we're releasing a storybook. We Be Heroes? is an 8-page storybook for the new Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Core Set. It's a PACG adaptation of the Pathfinder Module of the same name being released at the same time for use with the Pathfinder RPG. It features four new heroic goblin characters from the Crookedtoes tribe: the barbarian Grenek, the ranger Crimsi, the druid Siathorn, and the bard Pizazz.

They're not terribly good at being good, but they're working on it. Their opportunity comes when a group of paladins get in trouble, and our heroes need to get them out alive. Can they defeat the Blasted Chicken that squawks in their way? Only you can help them.

Oh, also, Siathorn has this wolf cohort.

Totally a wolf.

If you can't make it to a participating store for Free RPG Day, don't worry: starting July 1, you can get the PDF for free from paizo.com, or you can pay a mere $3 for the print edition.

So all that's very exciting! We hope you'll sign up for that subscription and get those promo cards, then keep an eye out for We Be Heroes? in June. It's all coming soon!

Mike Selinker
Lead Designer, Pathfinder Adventure Card Game

Last time, I showed you several of the new card frames and revised wordings in the upcoming Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Core Set. Let's keep that going!

Hey now.

Here's Amiri, our favorite barbarian. Hey—no more sideways character cards! In playtests, we enjoyed reading character and role cards like all the other cards. Paragraph widths your brain can handle. Pretty great.

We're using Wayne Reynolds' new iconic art for Amiri, which we revealed just this very week. We're proud that the Core Set is the first product that will include all 12 of Wayne's new iconic illustrations. (Yes, we said 12, not 11 like in Rise of the Runelords. There's a new Alchemist in town, and his name is Fumbus. More on him later on.)

The first part of Amiri's second power, "Closing your location does not prevent you from exploring," probably doesn't make a lot of sense to you just yet—we'll come back to that later in this blog.

Looking at the back of the card, you'll notice that the character's flavor text has moved here from the token card. That's because we no longer have token cards. Instead, you'll be getting pawns for each character, just like the ones in the Pathfinder Pawns line.

You may appreciate the clean phrasing of "Melee weapon." In previous sets, we would have to say "a weapon that has the Melee trait." Using traits as adjectives has value far beyond just making wordings more concise, though; we can now more easily use them as qualifiers throughout the game. For example, Amiri no longer has to be content favoring just any old weapon—she now favors Melee weapons specifically. And since favored cards aren't limited to types alone, "favored card type" has become simply favored card.

A change you could easily miss: characters don't have gender traits anymore. We've never actually used them anywhere in the game—not even that one time where we tried to make a Unicorn that cared—so we banished them to the ashbin. You can still figure out a character's gender from the pronouns in the flavor text (or not, as the case may be).

Enhance is the closest we got to naming a spell "Share Tattoo."

Spells and items got a very important overhaul. The most significant adjustment is how you recharge them after playing. One of the game's roughest edges—ok, it's a rusted razor blade—has been how and when you do that: these cards would go into a Schrödinger's cat-like abeyance zone while you finished whatever you were doing, then you could finally find out whether it was discarded, recharged, or banished. I've been wanting to fix this hiccup for years. So one day in the office, I quietly said, "I want to change what 'banish' means." Once everyone got done checking my forehead for signs of fever, I explained my new concept of recovery.

You will notice that Enhance gets banished when you're done using it; that's because all spells get banished now. But when you banish a recoverable boon for its power, you don't put it back in the vault—you put it into a recovery pile. At the end of each turn, anyone with a card in a recovery pile does whatever that "During Recovery" section says. Usually, this means applying your proficiencies and/or succeeding at a check to allow you to keep the card. If you aren't able to get your card back during recovery, then it goes to the vault. Recovery fixes a lot of the game's worst exploits, so we never have to worry about Restoration bollixing things up again.

And let's talk a bit more about proficiency. Previously, characters were proficient with card types, so when a card wanted to know if you were proficient with it, it would ask you by naming its card type. For example, a weapon might say "If proficient with weapons, you may add or subtract 3 from your result." But the first part of Enhance's recovery text just says "If proficient, discard this card." That's because there's now more than one way to be proficient with a card—in addition to being proficient with its type, you can be proficient with any of its traits. For Enhance, this means you're proficient with it if you're proficient with spells, or if you're proficient with Magic, Arcane, Divine, or even Veteran cards (not that any character is ever likely to be proficient with Veteran cards, but hey, you never know).

So if you're proficient with items, or with Alchemical or Liquid, you can try to recharge that Elixir of Energy Resistance. (Don't laugh about the Liquid proficiency, or Drunken Avenger Valeros will have words with you. Perhaps not entirely comprehensible ones, but words nonetheless.)

Also, check out that word freely on Enhance. That's an important word. There are new restrictions on how you play boons, most notably that the party can collectively play no more than one of each card type on each check. We'll talk about that in depth in a later blog, but the key is that sometimes we want you to be able to bypass those restrictions. So if you play a boon freely, you or someone else can play another of that type.

Sonja fit all that on one side of a location card. That’s A++ graphic design.

The first thing we need to explain here is "to close or to guard." We used to use the terms "permanently close" and "temporarily close" to mean closing a location either forever or just for the brief moment when the villain is trying to escape. But there were significant differences between those concepts, often requiring us to do some dancing to ensure that it was clear when we wanted something to affect just one of them. So "temporarily close" has become guard, as it is in Apocrypha, and "permanently close" is just close. No longer do you have to second-guess whether something that affects closing is supposed to affect temporarily closing too.

The next thing we need to explain is why we're not showing you the backs of those locations. Well, there is no back. When you close a location, you don't flip it over anymore—you banish it, then everybody there moves to a new location. There's no need for a "When Permanently Closed" power to appear on the other side of the card because there are never closed locations in play. This also means that the game cleans itself up as you go—when you win, there will typically be a lot fewer cards on the table, allowing you to get on with the next scenario that much faster.

This is also where Amiri's mysterious "Closing your location does not prevent you from exploring" power comes in. When other characters close their location, they move to a new one but are done exploring for that turn. Not Amiri—she can try to power through her new location like a raging barbarian should.

Let's talk about what it takes to close or to guard the Ruin: "Summon and defeat the danger." Every scenario lists a danger: one or more specific banes that a wide variety of effects can bring into play. This allows us to play up unique thematic elements in each scenario. Before, we didn't have a good way to throw lots of skeletons at you during a haunted castle scenario, but now we just define the danger as, say, an Ancient Skeleton, and it's restless dead till dawn.

The Graveyard has a new term: new. This just lets us bring in cards from the vault that—unlike summoned cards—stick around for more than one encounter.

And hey, all locations have traits now! Certain banes may be harder to defeat in an Urban location. Or you might be a power that serves you better at Wild locations, giving you a reason to gravitate toward them. That's a fun bit of storytelling.

Then there's the proxy card. We've been using proxies in Pathfinder Society scenarios for a long time now; bringing that concept to the Core Set means that we don't have to include six copies of a bunch of the henchmen. (Even the proxies themselves aren't truly duplicates—there are times when it's helpful to differentiate between them, so they each bear a unique designation, like our buddy A1 above.) This means we can give you more unique cards for your money. Proxies allow us to put 411 unique cards in the 440-card Core Set (and the duplicates are all level 0 and 1 blessings). It gets even better in the 550-card Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path, which includes 543 unique cards (the duplicates are all of a single level 0 blessing).

These are not the nicest cards we've ever created.

This trio shows some of the many ways we hurt you. When we hurt you in myriad ways, we want to use the same verb, because we often do it multiple ways at once. Enter suffer, a word you will learn to loathe. You can suffer damage and you can suffer scourges, an evolution of the concept from Mummy's Mask. We also named the place you bury your cards the bury pile, which might lead you to believe we did so because we used it a lot. Probably don't worry about it. For all that suffering, we also coined the verb heal to describe the act of shuffling a random card into your deck from your discards—and yup, we simplified that to one word too. That'll help when you use the single copy of Cure we put in the Core Set. (More unique cards is good, right?) And while we're shortening things, "reset your hand" became just reset.

We might hurt you before acting or after acting. We changed those from "before you act" and "after you act." This should make it more apparent that these terms describe a time that something happens regardless of who actually does it. Castothrane hits you for Fire damage and gives another character a Wraith to fight, so it's clear that "before acting" can affect more than just you.

When you try to defeat ol' Ghost Rider here, you might notice his immunities, resistances, and vulnerabilities. You can't hit him with Cold because he hand-waves that away. Hit him with Fire and you'll subtract 4 from your result, because he's resistant. Hit him with Bludgeoning and you'll add 4, because Skeletons fold up like deck chairs when bashed with rocks. Hit him with a Flaming Mace and both of those apply, so it all washes out.

Oh, maybe the most obvious change: Castothrane isn't a villain or a henchman. He's a story bane, which lets him be used as either a villain or a henchman. Or as a danger, even. This flexibility lets us use these important cards for various purposes, such as Mob of Undead summoning a random Undead story bane. This will come in especially handy when you see the random scenarios that you can generate yourself.

You might be wondering about that white circle on the scourge. That's just one place where markers come into play. The Core Set includes 63 of these little discs; 7 each of 9 different designs. When you suffer a scourge, you put a marker on that circle, and you take a corresponding marker yourself. While so marked, that scourge's powers apply to you. Scourges can also mark locations, and if you're at a location when it gets marked, or if you end your turn at a marked location, you suffer the corresponding scourge. Scourges are just one fun thing we do with markers; frankly, we haven't even begun to scratch the surface with the possibilities. And wait until we tell you what's on the backs of the markers... in another blog.

As I mentioned last time, we're aware that these changes affect some extant cards. The vast majority of cards just work, and the conversion guide in the rulebook has simple rules that cover many more. For example, characters that have the Arcane or Divine skill count as being proficient with the corresponding trait—easy. A single sentence tells you how to play old rechargeable boons with the new recovery rules. And another sentence tells you how to easily determine whether effects that apply to closing locations should also apply to guarding.

A few cards will need more specific attention, though. The conversion guide includes the general rule that you ignore any effects that involve interacting with closed locations, but that might not be good enough for a few cards; when Menhir Savant Lini wants to use her Planar Tuning Fork in the General Store, we'll help her out. And we might want to give some cards additional powers to increase their usefulness in the new set, like letting some cards that currently affect Curses and Haunts also affect scourges. Let us know what cards you think need an overhaul.

Basically, you're playing the same game as before, just with a new coat of paint. A much spiffier coat of paint, in my totally unbiased opinion. We hope you enjoy playing with the new rules as much as we do.

Mike Selinker
Lead Designer, Pathfinder Adventure Card Game

Last week, perhaps you heard a great exhaling from here in the Pacific Northwest: We shipped the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Core Set and the Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path to our printer Cartamundi for production.

I've said before that each set takes on the personality of one of my talented co-designers—Chad Brown for Rise of the Runelords, Gaby Weidling for Skull & Shackles, Tanis O'Connor for the Class Decks and Organized Play, Paul Peterson for Wrath of the Righteous, and Liz Spain for Mummy's Mask. Curse of the Crimson Throne is Keith Richmond's set. He came to Lone Shark in early 2015 specifically to work on that product. Four years later, he waved it out the door. I'm sure he'll tell you lots more about it soon.

However, after many months of design from the whole team, the Core Set ended up taking on my personality in a very different way. As part of our goals for these sets—which have already included adding more story and providing more variability—we wanted to subject the game to a withering assault of streamlining and clarification. The game needed to become less complex so you just get it out of the gate.

Developer/editor Aviva Schecterson and I form the editing core of Lone Shark. When we made the decision to remold—not reboot—the game around a new base set, Aviva and I pledged that we were going to clean up everything. All the rough edges, all the open bug-tracking issues, all the holes in the timing sequence, all the terms that didn't quite mean what we wanted them to mean. All of it was going to be exactly right. For one moment in time, before we found new things to complicate it, this 10,000-card game was going to be smooth.

I don't think Vic was quite ready for how far we were willing to go. Vic and I spent a solid six months in editing and polishing the two sets, renaming and rethinking concepts as we went. When we were done, we had a very different but wholly compatible set of cards—996 of them, to be exact—that continue the legacy of this deep and evolving game line.

There's one thing we knew we wouldn't change: the name of the game. The words "Pathfinder Adventure Card Game" are on the card back, and we want you to be able to mix and match generation 1 cards with generation 2 cards, so the card back can't change, nor can the name. (Also, can you tell we play a lot of Pokémon Go in the office?)

But the card fronts... man, just look what Sarah and Sonja made you.

I now wish we'd thought to give the Riding Allosaurus Wyrmsmite to chew on.

Here are a few Loot cards from the Core Set. First off, there's that Loot word. It's in a trait box in the lower right (things moved a bit, because sometimes things move a bit). And that means Loot is a trait, not a card type. It's got a check to acquire, which means that if you decide you don't want to keep it after you earn it, you can still find and acquire it later.

We also eliminated most of the "objects" in the game. No, I don't mean items like Caltrops and Compass. I mean the grammatical objects like "this card." Instead of saying "reveal this card," Wyrmsmite just says "reveal." You're holding it in your hand as you're reading it, so it's not going to be any other card. (When we need to differentiate between the card you're reading and another card, we do so explicitly, like in "Recharge this card and another card.") The display template also went through some radical changes to make it more intuitive and less of a dense wall of text.

Sometimes we changed a long phrase to a single word. The word reload is an Apocrypha term that's new to PACG, but it's a concept that has been in the game since the beginning: it just means "put on top of your deck." One word instead of six. But also, we needed that word. That's because we really wanted to use that concept. Here's how often the concept appeared in each of the Adventure Paths we've created to date:

• Rise of the Runelords: 7
• Skull & Shackles: 9
• Wrath of the Righteous: 15
• Mummy's Mask: 9
• Core/Curse of the Crimson Throne: 111

When you want to use a concept nearly three times as often as you've used it in all the Adventure Paths you've created so far, you need a new term for that. Enter "reload."

"At your location" and "at another location" went through a similar transition. We introduced local and distant to mean those things. All of a sudden, our vocabulary opened up. "A local character" was obviously better than "a character at your location," but also "a local check" was far better than "a check by a character at your location."

Rovagug gets TWO different blessings in Core. Pray he does not eat the rest.

The name "blessings deck" changed for a deeper gameplay reason. In Rise of the Runelords, the name made perfect sense because it only ever contained blessings. But in Skull & Shackles, we shuffled in the villain Brinebones. In Wrath of the Righteous, Khorramzadeh got the same treatment. In Mummy's Mask, all sorts of things—Sandstorms, Conflagrations, Forgotten Pharaoh Cultists, Sun Falcons, even scourges—ended up there. So we needed a name for that deck that didn't imply that everything in it was a blessing. We decided to focus on the deck's function as a timer, so we named it the hourglass. Once we had that, it became much easier to talk about the hour rather than "the top card of the blessings discard pile." And now nearly every blessing has a power that affects the turn while it's the hour.

Once we got rid of "blessings deck," the word deck itself got an overhaul. We simplified "location deck" to just location. (When we say "examine the top card of your location," we don't think you'll think of the card with the name of the location on it.) With those changes in place, that means the word "deck" now refers solely to character's decks.

The concept of the "adventure deck number" has also been rethought. It used to mean either of two very different things: "the scenario's adventure deck number" has been replaced with the symbol #, while the number in the upper right corner of a card is now the card's level. For example, the Veteran bane Traitor has a difficulty to defeat of 9+##, meaning 9 plus twice the number of the adventure you're playing. And his power increases the difficulty of his check by the level of the ally you discard. Tricky guy.

And now we can say things like "if the hour's level is 0, reload," which is so much better than "if the top card of the blessings discard pile has an adventure deck number of 0, put this card on top of your deck."

We've also borrowed some tricks from Pathfinder Society Adventure Card Guild and from Obsidian's Pathfinder Adventures app. We cull cards adventure-by-adventure, as we've been doing in PFS, and we do so by removing them from the vault, a Pathfinder Adventures term that describes the subset of cards in the box you're playing with right now.

And because we cull by level, we are able to make a sweeping change: removing the traits Basic and Elite. These have been on my hit list for a long time. New players would conflate Basic with "Base Set" too often for my taste, and Elite never pulled its own weight. Now when you build your starting deck, you do it with Level 0 cards. Easy.

We're aware these changes will alter a small number of past cards on more than a cosmetic level. Cards like Vestments of Authority and Named Bullet care about the Basic and Elite traits, and now need to care about something else. Adamantine weapons ignore powers that increase the difficulty of checks, but since the # concept moves the difficulty increase out of the powers box and into the check itself, those cards need a tweak to function properly. The rulebook includes brief conversion notes that cover a lot of these cases, such as explaining that level 0 is the new Basic. We are working on a short list of cards that need attention beyond that, and we'll happily accept your help ferreting out any more.

Speaking of new features in the rulebook, we've added a glossary that lists all of the important game terms (more than 100 of them, can you believe?) along with page references to tell you where to find the related rules. And when one of those game terms is introduced, we bold it—just like we've done in this blog post—to let you know it's a game term and to help you find it again later.

I've run out of pixels for this blog, but I've still got a lot more to show you on this subject. Next time I'll show you what we did with cards like characters, spells, items, banes, and locations. I think you'll like what you see.

Mike Selinker
Lead Designer, Pathfinder Adventure Card Game

P.S. Though the name of the game isn't changing, there is an important change to the front of the box: In addition to "A Game by Mike Selinker," each box now features the names of the designers of that set. For Core and Curse, it's me, Chad Brown, Aviva Schecterson, Liz Spain, and of course Keith Richmond. Credit well deserved, says me.