Pathfinder Legends Unearths the Treasures of the Dead

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Last spring, four heroes arrived in the sleepy coastal town of Sandpoint, were attacked by goblins, and embarked on a journey to stop the awakening of a legendary runelord in the first Pathfinder Legends series, Rise of the Runelords. Since this first audio adventure adaptation of Paizo's Pathfinder Adventure Paths, the interest and feedback from fans of the series have been fantastic. But what's coming next?

Today, we're happy to announce that starting this September Ezren, Harsk, Merisiel, and Valeros will be trekking to the pyramid-laden realm of Osirion in Mummy's Mask: The Half-Dead City, the first of six new Pathfinder Legends releases. This new series will follow the story of the Mummy's Mask Adventure Path, beginning in the city of Wati, where our heroes unearth a plot that could lead to the resurrection fo the ancient and feared Sky Pharaoh Hakotep. Will these iconic characters be able to succeed and defend the city, or will they be unable to stop the rule of this undead mummy from Osirion's distant past?

Illustration by Chris Seaman

Not familiar with Big Finish or Pathfinder Legends? Big Finish produces hundreds of audio titles based on popular titles like Doctor Who, Dark Shadows, Stargate, Highlander, and more. For Rise of the Runelords we worked closely with their team to determine the cast of characters, fine tuning the Adventure Path story to this new format, and pairing voices with the vivid characters featured. James Jacobs detailed this process last year on the Paizo blog.

With Mummy's Mask the Pathfinder Legends format is changing up! Each release is now double the length (running at about 2 hours) and will be provided as both a double CD set and digital download. Each Mummy's Mask episode will be released monthly as well.

Don't want to miss any of the action in Mummy's Mask? Starting today, Paizo is now offering the Pathfinder Legends ongoing subscription! By subscribing to Pathfinder Legends, you'll get:

• 20% off of the list price of each double CD set
• A free digital download version of each double CD set

The first installment in this subscription, Mummy's Mask: The Half-Dead City, will begin to ship with September's new releases. If you want to get all six episodes of the next Pathfinder Legends audio adventure as they release, sign up now!

Chris Lambertz
Community & Digital Content Director

A Sound of Goblins

Thursday, March 27, 2014

When I was writing "Burnt Offerings," I was focused mostly on the daunting task of setting up an adventure that would not only present goblins as monsters you love to hate, but also to launch an entire new product line. I was focused on how to make the adventure simultaneously introduce the world to a new world while at the same time feeling old-school enough that it felt nostalgic and familiar and comfortable. I wanted readers of the first Adventure Path installment to enjoy the innovations, but to feel more than ever that this was the same game they've enjoyed playing for years.

I think it's fair to say that I never really stopped to think what the characters sounded like, or how a 50 page adventure could translate into an hour long audio drama.

When we sealed the deal with Big Finish to produce Rise of the Runelords as a full cast audio adventure, though, those were among the many questions we had to answer. We worked closely with Big Finish from the start on both determining what iconics should be featured in the story and what parts of the adventure needed to be represented in the hour-long running time for each installment.

Choosing the characters, in retrospect, was relatively easy. The important NPCs would be determined by what parts of the adventure we chose to adapt, so it came down to the PCs as the main choices we had to make early on—we knew we wanted four adventurers, since that's the basic assumption we make for the game... but which four? In the end, we knew that just as the visuals of all our iconics are so distinctive, we needed the voices to be distinctive as well. The first-time listener needed to be able to tell the four heroes apart just by listening to their voices. Furthermore, we wanted to choose the four iconic heroes from those who were actually featured on the covers of Rise of the Runelords. Harsk and Ezren made a lot of sense, because their voices—an old man's and a gruff dwarf's—were so distinctive. Valeros was an obvious choice since he was the first iconic we'd illustrated he's as close as we have to a "main character" among all the iconics. And that was it for the initial party—but we needed one more. I pushed hard for Merisiel, and not only because she's my favorite iconic—she's also an elf AND a female character, two elements that were missing from the current lineup.

Ezren	Download the sample! (147 KB MP3/zip)
Harsk	Download the sample! (143 KB MP3/zip)
Merisiel	Download the sample! (123 KB MP3/zip)
Valeros	Download the sample! (143 KB MP3/zip)

That DOES leave the heroes without a dedicated healer in the group... but fortunately, when you get to control all aspects of the story and don't have to worry about dice and chance throwing curve balls at you, you can write the story so that the lack of a healer isn't an issue.

And that brings us to the second part of the question—how do you condense an adventure that can provide for hours and hours of game play over the course of several days of gaming sessions into a single hour?

And it's here that Big Finish's writers stepped up big time. For each installment, the authors write out a brief outline of what elements they want to focus on, and then we at Paizo would go over the outlines and approve some elements and make suggestions for others. Deciding what parts of the adventure are important to cover and what parts are not made for some tough choices—the reduction of Nualia's henchmen in number or the entire catacombs of wrath would have been great to hear, but the storyline works without them as well. Once we approve the outline, then the next step is for us to approve the full script—we'd go through page by page, giving feedback from "Harsk is spitting too much" to "Ameiko wouldn't say that," and much more... and once that stage was done, the task of actually recording the dialogue came next.

Ameiko Kaijitsu	Download the sample! (86 KB MP3/zip)
Nualia	Download the sample! (135 KB MP3/zip)

The final step—approving the final recording—was the most fun though. It's pretty cool to sit in your office at work, listening to goblins run amok!

Goblin	Download the sample! (180 KB MP3/zip)

James Jacobs
Creative Director