Illustration by Roberto Pitturru

Do Not Underestimate the Sneakiness!

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Working on Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Inner Sea Intrigue brought out our inner deviousness—this book has so many ways to inject a little craftiness into your Golarion games, especially for players and GMs who are using the recently released Ultimate Intrigue. Now that Inner Sea Intrigue is about to hit the streets, we thought we’d show you some of our favorite toys from the book!

Illustration by Konstantin Vavilov

Inner Sea Intrigue riffs seamlessly off of Ultimate Intrigue in that much of its content showcases these new rules as they affect and exist in Golarion. One of many examples is the specific archives presented. Using the research rules found on pages 148–153 of Ultimate Intrigue, the book presents four places of research that feature prominently in the setting. They are Forae Logos, located in the Wise Quarter in Absalom; the Jeggare Museum, located in Korvosa in Varisia; the Magaambya, located in Nantambu in the Mwangi Expanse; and the Quarterfaux Archives, located in Caliphas in Ustalav.

Illustration by Konstantin Vavilov

By making Research checks and reducing the archives’ knowledge points, players can discover many of the fascinating truths kept in these libraries. Many such discoveries are in-world details that pertain to the history of the archives’ locations, the magic that has thrived there, and other key elements. Some of the most difficult-to-unearth discoveries, though, are adventure seeds in and of themselves.

Take this gem, found in the depths of the Jeggare Museum, for example.

"A small island in Lake Skotha on the Storval Plateau is known as Chorak’s Tomb, and is rumored to be the home of an ancient weapon that belonged to a runelord rival of Karzoug. However, no one has been able to get close enough to verify this story, as all trespassers are driven away by bombardments of boulders and rune-covered ballista bolts."

As with other "Inner Sea" hardcover tie-ins we’ve done in the past (including Inner Sea Magic and Inner Sea Combat), we also had the opportunity to present dozens of new character options, from new talents for investigators, rogues, and vigilantes, to new archetypes and prestige classes directly tied to the intriguing elements of the Inner Sea region. The prestige classes included are the Lion Blade of Taldor (updated from its 3.5 iteration) and the enchanting courtesan (inspired by the character Vreva Jhafae in the Pathfinder Tales novel "Pirate’s Promise"), while the new archetypes include the Anaphexia thought-killer, the bonded investigator (who gets a familiar to aid him in his research), the Nexian spell-spy, the tinkerer (who learns to craft a clockwork familiar that she can adapt to an increasing number of situations as she levels up), and many more!

Whether you’re a GM running a campaign with intriguing elements, or a player whose PC prides herself on her sneaky, duplicitous ways, there’s no better supplement to an Inner Sea campaign than Inner Sea Intrigue!

Amanda Hamon Kunz and Mark Moreland
Developers

War of the Words

Thursday, March 24, 2016

As a GM, one of the things I love about the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game is that it allows you to play out any story you can imagine in the fantasy world within. But when those stories have fewer physical combats and more scheming, infiltration, persuasion, and other types of intrigue, the rules don't have your back as solidly as they do for combat, so a GM, like me, who ran lots of those plots had to do a lot of improvisation. In Ultimate Intrigue, we present both subsystems and advice for players and GMs alike to sink their teeth into an intrigue game and all sorts of fun challenges they might find therein.

Looks like Kess is about to put somebody... on ice!
Illustration by Nicholas Gregory

First up, we have two influence systems, one for gaining influence with particular characters at an event to pursue a goal, and another for gaining influence and power within an organization. Next, the Heists section shows you how to build and play a fun heist and get started with some "Ocean's Elven" style action. The leadership section shows how to modify leadership for a variety of types of leader or follower that break the standard assumptions and how to tie leadership into all the other subsystems, as well as presenting an enormous chart of potential monster cohorts from all five Bestiaries, with some adjusted cohort levels that reflect either disruptive abilities or relative lack of options in an intrigue game (for instance, stone giant is much lower now, but the hound archon with its at-will greater teleport is much higher). The nemesis subsystem helps with creating and managing of various nemeses of the PCs, including increasingly drastic options a nemesis might take once she has fixated on the PCs as a thorn in her side. Pursuit offers a long-term version of a chase where the whole group works together to overcome the challenges of the terrain and catch up to an NPC, escape an NPC, or beat an NPC in a race to a crucial site. The research subsystem helps in roleplaying the challenge of discovering hidden lore, based on the system from Mummy's Mask but adding a bunch of fun twists, like monsters or traps tied into the research progress. Spells of intrigue is an advice section on some of the most common spells in an intrigue game and how they fit into the world of intrigue without cracking it wide open (including their limitations, countermeasures, and so on). This section includes advice on adjudicating charms and compulsions, illusions and what counts as interacting, divinations, and more!

The social conflicts section is in some ways a centerpiece for the various subsystems, as it addresses directly how to put together a social conflict with various stakes and contenders like you might see in Game of Thrones (including an example social conflict where fey changelings are instigating a class war between the common folk and the nobility). Verbal duels are battles of wits and words where each duelist chooses various tactics to try to defeat their rival and impress the crowd. For instance, the allegory tactic is a good opening tactic, but telling a story isn't great in the middle of a fast-paced exchange, baiting tries to goad your opponent into responding with a penalty, mockery is great if your opponent is on the ropes with the crowd, and red herring lets you escape a tense situation by starting a whole new argument). Lastly, the skills in conflict section provides a variety of advice for the skills most often used against each other, like the social skills, Perception, and Stealth, filling out some of the skill descriptions from the Core Rulebook with more expansive rulings and advice. We've got advice in here for dealing with situations like:

• bluffing with a party
• true lies and implausible truths
• the aftermath of a bluff
• bluffing someone who has already been bluffed in a different way
• requests are not mind control
• roleplaying and social skills
• calling for a cease-fire
• when disguise is opposed
• seeing through an illusion that augments a disguise
• two sides each attempting to Intimidate the other
• explaining negative consequences to someone who doesn't like you without using fear tactics
• active and automatic Perception
• precise and imprecise senses
• cover and concealment for Stealth
• states of awareness (unaware, aware of presence, aware of location, and observing)
• hunches with Sense Motive
• Sense Motive is not mind reading
• and more!

Ultimate Intrigue is the toolkit that will let you bring all sorts of new styles of adventure to your gaming table, or enrich your games if you were already throwing those kinds of plotlines and adventures at your PCs. I can't wait to hear what sorts of stories of intrigue you tell using this book!

Mark Seifter
Designer

Tools of Mischief

Thursday, March 17, 2016

Ultimate Intrigue has plenty of feats, spells, and magic items that help your character get herself into all sorts of trouble—and out of trouble as well!

The Brilliant Planner feat lets you make a fund that you can use to pull out the item or resource you need in a particular situation, which can be pretty useful in clutch situations. The fighter gains several new combat feats that enhance his bravery (both against all mind-affecting effects and against social attacks like feint and demoralize) and even allow him to share his bravery with nearby allies. Legendary influence lets mediums choose one feat for each legend and accept influence to gain the feat they chose when they channel that legend (so you can pick things that only help you with one legend, like Selective Channel for hierophant, which has channel, Arcane Armor Training for archmage, and so on). Feats like Subtle Enchantments are great for manipulating others (in this case, it makes it harder to notice the target is enchanted with Sense Motive and gives a 50% that a target who succeeds on the save doesn't notice it had to make a Will save). The three new styles are Fox Style, which lets high-Int characters master feinting, dirty tricks, and the like, Owl Style allows martial characters to use their fighting skill to maneuver around the battlefield fluidly, and Street Style lets urban characters create combo attacks using the environment around them. And that's just a few of the feats you'll find in the book!

On to spells: Intrigue spells in general lend themselves to sneaky and clever usage, but there's plenty of choices for all sorts of characters, even the most straightforward ones. One of the cool new things for spells is the ruse descriptor, which allows you to cast a spell that seems to be another spell unless the person identifying it succeeds by 10 or more. Things like the false resurrection spells, where you pretend to bring someone back to life but actually revive the body with a possessing demon or devil inside, hollow heroism, which works as normal for a while, but then you can change the effect from +2 to -4 at any time, and treacherous teleport where you send the other passengers of the teleport somewhere different than where you go. The entice fey spells allow you to bargain with fey and potentially earn their service and conditional favor lets you call take-backs on a beneficial spell you cast, so you could say "Sure, I'll cast this spell and remove your blindness, but only as long as you promise to follow the paladin code." There's all sorts of other fun measures and countermeasures in the spells so that PCs and their foes can escalate things like reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance, and then there's such fun spells to show off the bling of your magic, like resplendent mansion, which creates an actual mansion on a flat area that last for weeks!

Illustrations by Roberto Pitturru, Jaime Martinez, and Mark Molnar

Finally, items: There's a variety of fun nonmagical intrigue items like a book with a hollow compartment in it and a wrist-launcher that shoots darts, as well as some suggestions of some top tools of the trade from Ultimate Equipment. Some of the cool magic items include a shield that can pick a lock for you while you stand by the door fighting with your other hand, a weapon property that makes your weapon invisible, an armor that lets you redirect divinations meant for someone else to yourself, an erasable book that appears innocuous but secretly records everything people say around it, a pouch that erases the writing within it if anyone else tries to open it, a deck of cards with various doors on them that turn into doors when you put them on a wall, and the quick-change mask, a consumable that lets a vigilante instantly switch identities in a tight spot, and that's just a few of them.

Next week I'll cover the various special subsystem in Ultimate Intrigue, like verbal duels and influence, so be sure to keep a careful eye out; the blog might be plotting a heist to nab your prized McGuffin while you read it!

Mark Seifter
Designer

That Warm Glow of Terrors from Beyond Space and Time—New Pathfinder Products Announced!

Friday, March 10, 2016

Our March 2016 releases are ready to go on an adventure to your game table, and we'll be doing some damage to our sanity this fall—check out our round up of all our new and announced products!

It's been a pretty crazy month around here at Paizo—from the release of the Hell's Vengeance Adventure Path last month (not to mention the free Player's Guide), to the wildly successful Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Humble Bundle, not to mention polishing up our fall releases, preparing for convention season, starting our Twitch channel, we've all been running around getting our dire ducks in a row for the upcoming year!

Apsu and Dahak are just a couple of the gods you will learn more about in Inner Sea Faiths!
Illustrated by Ben Wooten

Heading out to subscriber's mailboxes and friendly local gaming stores everywhere this March are:

• Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Ultimate Intrigue
• Pathfinder Adventure Path #104: Wrath of Thrune (Hell's Vengeance 2 of 6)
• Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Inner Sea Faiths
• Pathfinder Society Scenario #7-19: Labyrinth of Hungry Ghosts
• Pathfinder Flip-Mat: Twisted Caverns
• Pathfinder Adventure Card Game—Class Deck: Oracle
• Pathfinder Comics—Hollow Mountain #4
• Pathfinder Legends—Mummy's Mask #4: Secrets of the Sphinx

We're All Mad Here

One of my favorite things is announcing new products, and we added the Strange Aeons Adventure Path to our August lineup, a truly maddening set of adventures! Lovecraftian creatures are not new to the world of Golarion—they've been there since the beginning, thanks to Creative Director James Jacobs' love of the genre, but we haven't quite done an entire adventure path around them. The wait is over, starting with "In Search of Sanity," penned by our own Editor-in-Chief F. Wesley Schneider, wherein you start off at a wee bit of a disadvantage—in an insane asylum. But that's not all that lies ahead! Check out other new stuff heading your way!

April 2016

• Pathfinder Society Scenario #7-21: The Sun Orchid Scheme

May 2016

Don't forget—PaizoCon is coming May 27th through 30th! Check out all of the details, and don't miss grabbing your tickets!

• Pathfinder Society Scenario #7-22: Bid for Alabastrine
• Pathfinder Society Scenario #7-23: Abducted in Aether

July 2016

• Pathfinder Adventure Card Game—Class Deck: Goblins Burn!

August 2016

• Pathfinder Adventure Path #109: In Search of Sanity (Strange Aeons 1 of 6)
• Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Planes of Power
• Pathfinder Player Companion: Haunted Heroes Handbook
• Pathfinder Flip-Mat Classics: Waterfront Tavern
• Pathfinder Map Pack: Labyrinths
• Pathfinder Adventure Card Game—Class Deck: Gunslinger
• Pathfinder Tales: Starspawn

That's all we've got in our sleeves for now, but stay tuned for next month's releases, including part three of Hell's Vengeance, "The Inferno Gate" and Heaven Unleashed!

Reading a delightul play bound in a yellow-hued tome,

Liz Courts
Community Manager

The Most Intriguing Classes

Wednesday, March 10, 2016

Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Ultimate Intrigue is only a few weeks away, and it's time for the first rules preview blog—this time focusing on classes!

The new class in Ultimate Intrigue is the vigilante. An upstanding member of society by day and adventurer by night, the vigilante has two different identities which can even have different alignments. Unless someone discovers that the two identities are the same, divinations like scrying only work when the vigilante is in the form the diviner is trying to scry. Each vigilante chooses to be either a stalker, focusing on sneaking up on foes and punishing them before the foe notices the stalker is there, or the avenger, focusing on giving foes a more straightforward beatdown and gaining a full base attack bonus. The vigilante class is extremely modular, with a talent option at every level, switching off between social talents that give him an edge in social situations and other intrigue hijinks out of combat, and vigilante talents, which generally provide powerful combat options that he can use in either identity, though it might give him away if people see him using them in his social identity.

Illustrations by Tomasz Chistowski

If you've been with us since the playtest, the biggest change is that zealot and warlock are now archetypes, and while avenger and stalker each have some talents that only that specialization can choose, many of the talents that seemed like they fit the vigilante in general are now available to all vigilantes, as you requested in the playtest. Also, you asked for social talents based on being a craftsman or professional, and those are now available as well!

So I mentioned that warlock and zealot (which were arcane and divine vigilantes for those of you not part of the playtest) are now archetypes. All told, the vigilante has 10 pages of archetypes, the most that any class has ever received in a book. After all, he has plenty of catch-up in order to match his older cousins that have been around for more books. The brute has a hulking out-of control vigilante identity, and he can't always stop the transformation when he's in danger. Cabalists make blood pacts with dark patrons, gaining witch spells, blood powers, and a familiar. Gunmasters bring justice with firearms, and they gain a bunch of deeds as potential vigilante talents. The magical child archetype covers the "magical girl" trope, with a transformation sequence ability (faster switch between identities, but with flashy lights and music), summoner spells, and an otherworldly buddy. Mounted furies are mounted vigilantes like Zorro whose steeds also have a secret identity. Psychometrists are gadgetmasters and tinkerers who create personal occult gadgets to do things like fly (basically creating gadgets that each perform a single occultist focus power). Warlocks, are arcane casters from the magus list, with elemental options and mystic bolts of energy. Wildsouls are vigilantes who gain animalistic features in their vigilante identity. Finally, zealots are secret champions of their faiths, often because their religion is outlawed or persecuted, who cast from the inquisitor list and smite foes of one opposing alignment.

But vigilantes aren't the only ones with archetypes. Exciting archetypes for other classes include the tyrant (a lawful evil antipaladin archetype!), cardinal (a politics-heavy cleric with 6 skill points per level), gray paladin (can be one step from lawful good and smite any foe, but the lack of absolute conviction makes many abilities less absolute), fey caller (unchained summoner that summons a fey, with an all-new fey eidolon), zeitgeist binder (spiritualist that calls in a local zeitgeist based on a settlement statistic like corruption or society), battle scion (Celt/King Arthur blend skald that can call others to a quest and go into a deathlike sleep to return some day), dandy (a courtly ranger with the ability to manipulate rumors instead of wild empathy), vizier (a mesmerist that has a "power behind the throne" ability to make it look like his allies are the real threat while insidiously influencing them for his own agenda), feyspeaker (a fey-themed druid with 6 skill points per level that casts using Charisma!), and plenty more. In addition, the classes chapter two new inquisitions (Crime and Secrets), three new ranger combat styles (deceptive, menacing, and underhanded), four new rogue talents (follow along, shades of gray, hidden mind, and stalker talent), an oracle mystery (Intrigue), and even five intrigue-themed kineticist utility wild talents (earthmeld, flame trap, spying touchsight, greater voice of the wind, and greater watersense).

Tune in next week to hear more about some of the cool feats, spells, and magic items of intrigue!

Mark Seifter
Designer

Undercover Society

Monday, July 13, 2015

The Pathfinder Design Team recently released a second round of the Pathfinder RPG Ultimate Intrigue playtest, listening to the community’s feedback and using it to improve the class. I encourage you both to check the recent blog for updates and to continue providing your feedback in the feedback forum.

Illustration by Eric Braddock, from Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Paths of Prestige

What does this mean for the Pathfinder Society Organized Play campaign? Most importantly, the linked blog has a Chronicle sheet that rewards campaign participants for helping in the playtest during RPG organized play events. The sheet works in many ways like the one released during the Occult Adventures playtest, granting scaling rewards based on how many times you playtest a vigilante character and at what levels. However, the Pathfinder Society team also learned from previous playtests and incorporated a few additional features to improve the experience.

First, very early in discussing the playtest process, we inquired about ways to expand the playtest window. The result the two-stage playtest with the traditional playtest running through July 20th and a second “final thoughts” opportunity to comment extending another month after that. For Pathfinder Society, that’s exactly what we needed to support your accruing playtest credit over two months instead of just one.

Second, we heard that there were too many lines that one needed to fill out to earn the top rewards. We haven’t changed the numbers much, but we have provided a way to earn double credit during the first playtest window. For those wondering whether to risk a new character built using GM credit, note that we’re explicitly allowing rebuilding once the hardcover book hits the shelves.

Finally, GMs were concerned because they felt they could contribute valuable playtest feedback despite not playing a vigilante character themselves. We agreed, and a GM is now able to accrue credit on her own vigilante character so long as someone at the table is using the new class.

Because there was a delay in getting out the Chronicle sheet, you’ll notice that it allows for retroactive credit for those who have already started playtesting during organized play events. Perhaps most importantly, if you already have a vigilante playtest character, it is important that you update your character to use the most recent version of the class. We have updated the Additional Resources page to reflect this.

Linda and I—as well as many members of the editorial and art staff—are back to working on the many new adventures set to debut at Gen Con. It’s going to be a great show and a great opportunity to showcase your assistance in playtesting Pathfinder RPG Occult Adventures! See you there!

John Compton
Developer