Clockworks and the End of the Emerald Spire, with Rich Baker and James Jacobs

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Cartography by Rob Lazzaretti

All good things must come to an end, and this week we look at the end (or at least, the lowest level) of the Emerald Spire. Of course, the end of a superdungeon is something a lot of players never get to see (as Erik Mona discussed a bit in his teaser last week), so we also thought we might expand this sneak peek to include two maps from the adventure.

When discussing the fact that every dungeon level had to fit on a Flip-Mat, Erik briefly mentioned that this requirement drove our authors to find creative ways to get the most out of the space available. One good example of this is The Clockwork Maze, which has sections likely to initially confuse the players and that are certain to force players to work harder than a typcial ten foot wide corridor. We don’t want to give away the whole secret of the level, but a glance at the map is a pretty big hint why the level has "clockwork" in its title.

Other levels use the available space on a Flip-Map in a more traditional way, but include multiple environments, hazards, and unusual geometry to increase the variety available in the dungeon experience. The final level of the dungeon, The Emeral Root, is a good example of this kind of creative map.

Of course even a great map isn’t very useful if you don’t have enounters to fill it with. To learn a little more about these levels and how they came to be, we we spoke to the CEO and Publisher of Sasquatch Game Studio LLC, Richard Baker, and our own Creative Director, James Jacobs.

How do you define a "Superdungeon"? What is your favorite dungeon or superdungeon experience in your personal gaming history?

Rich To me, a superdungeon is any adventure that you could reasonably base a whole campaign around. It will provide months and months of play, characters will level up a good 8 or 10 times in the course of the game, and the players are up against an epic threat or fighting their way through a truly amazing setting. I suppose I might further refine that by saying that a super-dungeon does that all in the context of a single sprawling underground maze (you can certainly have super-adventures that do the same thing but across multiple locales). So, it's a particular flavor of super-adventure, I guess.
My personal favorites were Undermountain—really the gold standard of superdungeons, even if a lot of the map was left for the DM to populate—and more recently City of the Spider-Queen, which is probably more of a superadventure. When I was developing that adventure, we had James Wyatt (the adventure author) run it for us with a great group of players, and we had a blast.

James I define a Superdungeon as a dungeon that you can run an entire campaign in. My favorite superdungeon is Greyhawk’s Maure Castle, which was featured several times in Dungeon magazine back in the day. On Golarion, though, my favorite superdungeon is Hollow Mountain, and I hope to some day get to personally design and develop that site into a significant adventure location. At which point I can see it supplanting Maure Castle as my favorite. Unless I do the same for the Crimson Citadel first, that is.

Illustration by Jorge Fares

What is your level of the Emerald Spire Superdungeon called? What theme, if any, does the level have?

Rich My level of Emerald Spire is the Clockwork Maze. This is the lair of the first major villain in the Spire, the Numerian wizard Klarkosh. As you might expect, it has a strong clockwork theme—the entire dungeon configuration can be altered by using control levers in different spots. In fact, the players will have to do just a little bit of puzzle-solving to figure out how to change the dungeon geometry to navigate through the level. The monsters are mostly constructs of different kinds, since Klarkosh was previously described as a master of making constructs.
I also wrote the description of Fort Inevitable that begins the adventure, and did most of the coordination and direction for the whole project. I got to see each author's contribution as they came up with it!

James My level of the Emerald Spire is the final one—the "Emerald Root." It’s theme is hard to divulge without revealing a lot of spoilers, since it contains the source and reason and history of the Emerald Spire itself, but it goes beyond that and reveals some key bits of information about the Darklands—particularly the vaults of Orv. In fact, the opportunity to explore some of the mysteries of these vaults is the primary reason I pounced on designing the lowest level of Emerald Spire in the first place.

What where the inspirations you drew on for your Emerald Spire level, and what are you hoping players get out of it?

Rich My primary inspiration was really just delivering on what had already been said about the Spire. In the Thornkeep sourcebook we mentioned a few key facts about the Spire, so I took it upon myself to make sure the Emerald Spire superdungeon delivered on those teasers. For the villain, I admit I was thinking of Tharok, the half-robot leader of the Fatal Five, the arch-enemies of the Legion of Superheroes. Klarkosh is kind of a magical version of Tharok.

James There’s a fair amount of Lovecraft inspiration in my level of Emerald Spire, both in the monster mix and in the story beyond what’s going on in that level, but that also ties in to some of the deep continuity of the history of Orv and the Darklands themselves. And by "Lovecraft" in this case, I’m not talking about Cthulhu and tentacle monsters, but about the idea that humanity was not the first to rise to power on this ball of dirt (Earth) or that ball of dirt (Golarion) hurtling blindly through the uncaring gulfs of space.

We really appreciate our Creative Director and the Chief Sasquatch (Editorial Note, Rich told me to call him this) taking time out of their busy schedules to share some of the Emerald Spire with us!

Owen K.C. Stephens
Developer

Secrets of the Azlanti, With Erik Mona

Monday, June 30, 2014

Illustration by Abrar Ajmal

Wrangling 16 authors to write 16 levels of a massive superdungeon is no small feat, but after getting the physical copy of The Emerald Spire Superdungeon in our hands we can say that it was totally worth it.

There is enough high adventure and dungeon delving between these covers to keep a group of players entertained for a long time. Although this massive module can take a group of heroes from their meager beginnings as 1st-level adventurers all the way to the high end of 13th level, game masters can run one-night adventures with individual levels. Alternately, a GM could take four or five levels of the dungeon and cobble together a mini-campaign hitting on just a few of the levels that most interest them and their group.

Our own publisher, Erik Mona, designed Level 14, and his dungeon would make a great ending for one of these compacted campaigns. This level also serves as one of the most interconnected levels of the whole superdungeon. But don’t just listen to me—let’s let Erik speak for himself and share some of his experiences designing Level 14: The Throne of Azlant.

How do you define a "Superdungeon"? What is your favorite dungeon or superdungeon experience in your personal gaming history?

A superdungeon is a multi-level collection of mini dungeons that combine to form a locale suitable for an entire campaign's worth of exploration. The best superdungeons allow for repeated forays in and out of the dungeon, and the majority of a character's growth and development (both in terms of story and game statistics) can occur without too much deviation from exploration of the singular, epic location—if that's what the players want.

Cartography by Rob Lazzaretti

I've run several campaigns based around the classic Temple of Elemental Evil dungeon (how cool is it that the co-author of that adventure is one of my co-authors on this project?), with general success. The opening levels of that dungeon—particularly the moathouse section—are among my favorite dungeon levels in all of gaming. I had the opportunity to playtest Monte Cook's Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil with the author himself back in the early days of third edition, and I really loved the way Monte updated the adventure I'd run so many times before, so my affection for the adventure transcends three editions (I have not yet managed to run it in Pathfinder, alas). Each time I've run the classic version it's been completely different. One group decided to knock over the village of Hommlet's jewelry store and ended up outlaws. Another got completely wiped out on the third level of the dungeon. No group I've ever run through the temple has ever made it all the way through. Sure, a few of them died, but mostly people just ended up losing interest, or the campaign went on long enough that the real world intruded to make it impossible to game together. That's the problem with superdungeons—it's all too easy for them to get boring, or for them to become so ambitious that it's nearly impossible to play all the way through and experience all of the story the dungeon has to offer.

One of my favorite things about the Emerald Spire project is that the Flip-Mats are like a challenge to play every level. They also contained the authors somewhat, forcing us through the brutality of limited space and a tight word count to focus on the important stuff and not design anything too sprawling. The Emerald Spire, unlike many superdungeons, is designed to be completable. Alternatively, it works as a collection of 16 dungeons that can be used more or less independently, making this a very easy adventure to cannibalize.

What is your level of the Emerald Spire Superdungeon called? What theme, if any, does the level have?

My Emerald Spire dungeon is called the Throne of Azlant. It's the seat of the dungeon's Big Bad, the lich Nhur-Athemon. A lot of the foreshadowing in the dungeon, particularly on the handful of levels directly above mine, points to this ultimate nemesis, so my level pays off elements that the adventure has been building toward all along. Nhur-Athemon was "destroyed" by the Knights of the Ioun Star in the dying days of the Azlanti Empire, his unmortal corpse bound forever to his subterranean lair by mythic magic curses. Naturally, the player characters investigate and discover what an undead wizard tyrant gets up to when he has 10,000 years confined to quarters. Old Nhur-Athemon was exiled from Azlant after a failed attempt to claim the imperial throne, so you can be sure that whatever the lich's plan, it certainly doesn't lack for ambition.

My busy work schedule doesn't allow me to write as much as I'd like to, so over the last couple years I've tried to make my few small projects count by tying a lot of minor elements of subplot together throughout various sources. The Knights of the Ioun Star, Nhur-Athemon's ancient Azlanti enemies, also appeared in a short section I wrote for Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Occult Mysteries. My Emerald Spire dungeon also connects (thematically and literally) to the dungeon level I wrote for the Thornkeep dungeon, the Sanctum of a Lost Age. That adventure dealt with Nhur-Athemon's apprentices, who have influence upon the Throne of Azlant as well. All of this material ties into my home campaign, Kings of Absalom, which involves a lot of ancient Azlanti secrets. I'll be running that campaign next weekend at PaizoCon, and I hope one day to write it up for publication. This adventure is a taste, and a peek at the grand picture.

Illustration by Abrar Ajmal

What where the inspirations you drew on for your Emerald Spire level, and what are you hoping players get out of it?

My inspiration for this adventure comes more from my in-game play experience than from something I'm trying to emulate from fiction or the movies or whatever. I've run (and written) a lot of dungeon crawls in my time, and this one plays off of a few lessons I've learned along the way. There's one of my patented "oh, this fight is more difficult than I anticipated" encounters right near the beginning of the adventure, but beyond that I've done my best to avoid some of the pitfalls a big dungeon brings on both sides of the screen.

The Throne of Azlant is non-linear—there are multiple routes to the final chamber that leads deeper into the Emerald Spire dungeons (for the Spire's "Big Bad" is not the "Biggest Bad" on offer).

The dungeon level is more than just hack-and-slash. I included a few roleplaying encounters amongst all the carnage, a sure-fire way to get across more of the dungeon's backstory and to engage the interest of players who enjoy more than just rolling dice.

The adventure contains interesting elements of world lore and continuity. Though I don't explore the full history of Old Azlant or a major mystery like the origin of the god Aroden (you'll have to find a way to play Kings of Absalom for that!), it does reveal interesting new tidbits about the empire that fans of the Pathfinder world will likely appreciate.

It also contains the meanest trick I have ever played on a player character, a bind so nasty that I continue to giggle just thinking about it. I don't want to give away the secret on the blog post, but folks who read the adventure should find it pretty easy to understand what I'm talking about. Every time I've run the dungeon it's been utterly delightful to see whether the players fall into this trap and create a real conundrum for themselves. It's a glorious thing, if you are the type of GM who appreciates seeing his players squirm when they realize they've made a bad decision.

I'll be running one more shot at the Throne of Azlant at PaizoCon next week, which will make it the 13th time I've run the adventure. I started before last year's PaizoCon, and managed to run the Throne of Azlant about a half-dozen times at various conventions and events before I had to turn in my final manuscript. Unsurprisingly, repeated play produced lots of changes to improve the adventure, and I honestly believe it got better with each play-through. I've now run the Throne of Azlant more than any other Pathfinder adventure, which has earned it a special place in my heart. Each running has resulted in different conclusions and different routes through the dungeon, and it never seems to get old.

Thanks to Erik for taking the time out of his schedule to share some of his insights on this monumental project. Keep your eyes on this blog next week for more exciting reveals.

Adam Daigle
Developer

Chaos and Drowning in the Emerald Spire, with Sean K Reynolds and James L. Sutter

Saturday, June 21, 2014

The Emerald Spire Superdungeon is the largest Pathfinder Module ever, which means there's a lot to keep track of for GMs and players braving its perils. Adventurers can end up on a number of different quests, talk to various recurring allies and foes, and acquire a trove of odd relics and treasures. Players without good notes might end up a bit lost somewhere between The Automaton Forge and The Pleasure Garden.

For groups that find visual aids helpful, many of these elements can be managed with the help of Pathfinder Campaign Cards: The Emerald Spire Superdungeon. This set of 53 full-color campaign cards tracks 18 quests on which the PCs may find themselves, reveals the faces of 19 major NPCs, and unveils 16 mysterious items found in the depths of the Emerald Spire.

And what will PCs encounter over 16 levels of dungeoneering? For another sneak peek, this week we talk to some of the designers of the Emerald Spire Superdungeon. We talked to Sean K Reynolds (prolific game designer and developer, founder of Sean K Reynolds Games, and designer of level 5) and James L. Sutter (Managing Editor at Paizo and designer of level 15) about how they approached creating their dungeon levels, what they think a "superdungeon" is, and what inspired them when crafting their portion of the Emerald Spire.

Illustration by Firat Solhan

How do you define a "Superdungeon"?

Sean

I define it as "a dungeon that gets its powers from exposure to Earth's yellow sun," as opposed to "Spider-Dungeon," which got its powers from a radioactive spider; "Wonder-Dungeon," which got its powers as blessings from various Hellenic deities; "Invisible Dungeon," which got its powers from cosmic rays; or "Ant-Dungeon," which has a technological helmet that can communicate with bugs.

James

I think a superdungeon is an old-school dungeon romp that just keeps going—room upon room of traps, monsters, and loot! While I was always more of an urban adventures kid when it came to actual gameplay, I can still recall the way those old-school Gary Gygax dungeon maps captured my imagination. What was in those little gridded boxes, floating in the sea of black ink? It could be anything! There was a sense of possibility that pulled me in at a really visceral level (the same way I can remember how my first Magic cards smelled, or the feeling of my first BattleTech set). Whether I had a game or not, I spent countless summer hours with graph paper, drawing connected rooms without any idea what could be in them. (Even today, I still sometimes like drawing a rough draft of a dungeon map first, then letting that inspire its encounters.)

What is your favorite dungeon or superdungeon experience in your personal gaming history?

Sean
Hands down, when Monte Cook ran Labyrinth of Madness for a bunch of TSR people as an all-nighter at his house in Lake Geneva, WI. It was brutal, but we played high-level characters who alternately romped through the challenges and got our butts kicked, and it was great fun.

James
I never owned any superdungeons as a child, but of the ones I've encountered in the years since, I think my favorite is Maure Castle. I was unfamiliar with it until I started working at Paizo, and once I started editing for it, I was fascinated by all the clues and secrets—who was the mysterious "Y"? It had never occurred to me that a superdungeon could have overarching mysteries running through all of the levels. So when it came time to write Emerald Spire, I was excited to have tie-ins between my level and other folks' (most notably Wes Schneider's).

What is your level of the Emerald Spire Superdungeon called? What theme, if any, does the level have?

Sean
It was called "The Water Level" in my turnover, because nobody told me we were supposed to come up with names for our levels. Hopefully they changed the name in development into something cooler, like "The Hydro Level." _{(Developer Note: We actually went with the MUCH more evocative "The Drowned Level")}

James
Mine is called "Order and Chaos." I'm not going to lie—going into the project, my goal was to be as self-indulgent as possible. Ever since Death's Heretic—and really since I wrote the bit of protean speech that shows up in the Chapter 6 opener of the GameMastery Guide—I've felt a particular bond with proteans and inevitables. They're just so delightfully alien! So in my level, I wanted to give people the chance to encounter both of them, in an environment that's almost as weird as the creatures themselves: partially mechanical and partially warped by chaos. And of course, since I find social encounters as interesting as combat (or more so), you have the opportunity to form an alliance with either side, though neither really have your best interests at heart...

Illustration by Damien Mammoliti

What inspirations did you draw on for your Emerald Spire level, and what are you hoping players get out of it?

Sean
In the concept meeting for the book we realized we wanted a water level for characters at about level 4 or so. Much of the level is partially submerged or completely underwater, and navigating the water and the lack of air are common challenges. As a scientist by training, I tried to create a reasonable ecology in the level, with microportals to the Plane of Water keeping most of it fresh and providing suitable food for the inhabitants, and also setting up active currents in what otherwise would be still, stagnant dungeon water. I also like to mess with darkness in dungeons (as mentioned in intern Hank Woon's blogs about my Bastards of Erebus playtest game), and using murky water (filled with silt and gross stuff) accomplishes the same thing as darkness. I'm hoping players will be challenged and annoyed by the water level, but will figure out ways for their characters to routinely overcome those obstacles—basically, to make the dungeon a learning experience for them.

James
Really, that chapter opener from the GameMastery Guide is probably the single biggest inspiration for my level—I've always wanted to play through that particular scene, and despite the fact that this is a dungeon level, I hope that I've come close to capturing its feel. More than anything, though, I just want players to have fun, which for me always means seeing new (and weird!) creatures and landscapes. So in my level, every room is different, there are bizarre magical effects, and you rarely fight the same critter twice.

Oh, and there are robots. Because robots.

We hope your appetite is whetted by this glimpse of the visions you may find in the lower reaches of The Emerald Spire! Next week we'll look at a few more Emerald Spire tie-in products GMs are sure to find useful, and maybe even preview some of the superdungeon maps!

Owen K.C. Stephens
Developer, Pathfinder Modules

Bonus Blog: Happy Free RPG Day!

Free RPG Day is going on right now! Be sure to head out to your participating local game store and pick up this year’s Pathfinder offerings: Ranzak the Pirate Goblin—a new character for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game—and Pathfinder Module: Risen from the Sands, a complete adventure previewing four new classes from the upcoming Pathfinder RPG Advanced Class Guide. You can get the full story on both of our Free RPG Day products right here. Also, be sure to download your Risen from the Sands pregenerated characters so you can start playing as soon as you hit the game store. Hope you have a blast with all your Free RPG Day adventures!

Behind the Emerald Spire, with Lisa Stevens and Wolfgang Baur

Friday, May 30, 2014

The Emerald Spire Superdungeon is the largest Pathfinder Modules product ever produced, a record that's unlikely to be taken from it anytime soon. With its release in just a few short weeks, we want to make sure it gets the attention and celebration it deserves. At 160 pages, with 16 levels (by 16 different authors), eight brand-new monsters, enough material to take players from 1st to 13th level and several major mysteries, there's a LOT of Emerald Spire features to highlight!

We won't be able to cover all the superdungeon's twists and turns (and wouldn't want to spoil the fun or players looking forward to discovering the superdungeon's mysteries for themselves), but over the next few weeks these blog posts will tease a few of the Emerald Spire's secrets, preview some of its amazing art, and giving a few of its authors a chance to talk about superdungeons, inspiration, and what they cooked up for the biggest Pathfinder Module ever.

This week we asked some leading questions of designers Lisa Stevens (who wrote the 1st level and just happens to be Paizo's CEO) and Wolfgang Baur (who wrote the 11th level and is CEO of Open Design and a legendary TSR designer).

How do you define a "Superdungeon"? What is your favorite dungeon or superdungeon experience in your personal gaming history?

Lisa
I define a Superdungeon as one whose exploration basically takes up an entire campaign. Or at least the vast majority of the campaign. I don't buy into all this parsing of superdungeon vs. megadungeon. They are all the same in my book.

My favorite superdungeon is Temple of Elemental Evil for 1st edition AD&D.

Wolfgang
I would say it is any dungeon big enough that you never really need anything else; that is, you can start at 1st level and run an entire campaign in it. I think that Undermountain is probably my favorite for the maps, but there's an argument to be made that the Underdark is a superdungeon. You can, after all, run a campaign entirely underground and never bother surface dwellers, and I have to say I've loved the Underdark since I first encountered it in Gygax's D series with Trampier art. And I haven't stopped loving superdungeons. I'm playing in one now, an old-school thing called the Barrowmaze. Good fun, fairly deadly, rules-light.

Illustration by Ben Wootten

What is your level of the Emerald Spire Superdungeon called? What theme, if any, does the level have?

Lisa
I nabbed the first level, which is called The Tower Ruins. I wanted to play around with goblins, so I used my super CEO powers to make sure I could. :)

The Tower Ruins are the part of the dungeon that rests above ground. When I was designing it, I wanted to make a level that would be fairly easy to be implemented in Pathfinder Online, which I have also been focusing a lot on lately. My hope is that we can at least have my tower ruins inserted into Pathfinder Online sooner rather than later because the various enemies are mostly already built for the online game. Then, as we have time, we can open up lower levels a level at a time.

My theme was basically, what would goblins do if they found this cool ruined tower level? What insanity would they cook up?

Wolfgang
My level is The Tomb of Yarrix, and it has a very clear theme: it is all about the entomb of some eldritch horrors from beyond space and time, and the non-standard geometry required to make sure that things *stay* entombed. That always seems to be the problem, frankly, and tomb-designers have a lot to answer for if adventurers ever want to call them out on it.

This level does warp space and warps time, at least a little, for some oddball encounter effects. The Tomb of Yarrix holds some bizarre new creatures and energies, one of which is revealed in a slightly roundabout way in the Deep Magic tome of spells. And the tomb's treasures are similarly antique and obscure. There's a mix of weird with strange, and this sort of theme made it easy to work with a few of the more out-there monsters from the Bestiaries.

All in all, it's sanity-blasting fun and a squishy change of pace from your average tomb.

What where the inspirations you drew on for your Emerald Spire level, and what are you hoping players get out of it?

Lisa
Believe it or not, my inspiration for my level came from the classic D&D module, Dragon Mountain. In that adventure, kobolds were put into an environment where they have the advantage against the bigger and better equipped PCs, allowing the little buggers to really strike fear into a party. I wanted to try to do that with goblins. My level has a little twist that gives the resident goblins a pretty decided advantage against most adventurers. I wanted players to have to really think a bit outside the box, and use brains rather than brawn to overcome those pesky goblins.

I also put little glimpses into goblin psychology into my level. Little bits of treasure to make you scratch your head because they're odd, but there's a story behind everything. I'm hoping that GMs are able to bring those little stories to light in order to flesh out these goblins as more than hp pincushions.

Illustration by Ben Wootten

Wolfgang
The Tomb of Yarrix borrows its tone from Clark Ashton Smith and his inevitably doomed evil high priests, and it's loaded with the ancient and the macabre. There are cultists, ancient evils from beyond the mortal realm, and a cult that has fallen out of history, but whose adherents still seek to bring just one more extradimensional monstrosity out of hiding. There's music that Must Not Be Sung.

The Tomb happens to fit almost perfectly into the Wasted West of the Midgard Campaign Setting, which was one of its other inspirations, largely because that region is all about imprisoning ancient Walkers and dimensional tricks. It's where a lot of the clockwork and time magic of Deep Magic comes from.

One of the encounters in Tomb of Yarrix also goes back to C. A. Smith's ability to make things horrific without necessarily being deadly. There's a set of nests... well, I won't spoil that encounter, but let me just say that if this level of Emerald Spire doesn't get at least one "ewwwww" out of your players, I'll be very surprised.

Many thanks to Lisa Stevens and Wolfgang Baur for giving us a peak at goblins with a twist, and encounters that bend space and time! There's much more Emerald Spire to talk about, but the rest will have to wait until next week's post, when at the least we'll take a look at the superdungeon's "fire level," and maybe a few more snippets as well.

Owen K.C. Stephens
Developer, Pathfinder Modules