PaizoCon Begins in... Less Than 24 Hours!

Thursday, May 25, 2017

As I scramble to get my games ready for PaizoCon, I realized that I hadn't yet prepared a blog for Adventurer's Guide for today. I suspect I'll be talking quite a bit about the book in seminars and to folks for the next few days, but in the meantime, let me just show off a few more pieces of art that I particularly like... I'll have one more post next week with a bit more to say about how to integrate Adventurer's Guide into your game if all goes according to plan as well. In the meantime... enjoy the pictures!

Illustrations by Geraud Soulie, Willian Liu, and Alexandre Chaudret

James Jacobs
Creative Director

Organizations of the Adventurer's Guide

Thursday, May 4, 2017

So I just finished the final Bestiary 6 preview blog last week, so you know what that means! Yup… time to start doing preview blogs for the next hardcover down the line—the Adventurer's Guide!

As opposed to the hardcovers before (Bestiary 6) and after (Book of the Damned), the Adventurer's Guide is very much a product for players. The central idea of this book is to focus on several of the more famous (or infamous) organizations active in the Inner Sea region of Golarion. This book is not intended to present these organizations as things your characters can join (we've covered that topic before in numerous ways, after all) but instead to use these groups as themes for the presentation of new archetypes, prestige classes, magic items, spells, feats, and other player options for your characters to take. In effect, these groups serve as your characters' adventuring guides, in that once you become affiliated with them, they can guide your character into new specializations, talents, and powers.

We'll have more to say about the new options in the book later, of course. For now, though, I wanted to take the opportunity to reveal the full list of organizations that are featured in this volume. Some of them are long-standing groups in the setting we've done a lot with before, while others are relatively new. Many of them had their genesis in various Adventure Paths as well, and you can use the additional information in Adventurer's Guide either to bolster their associated Adventure Path in your game or to expand the organization's role beyond that Adventure Path. This does mean that Adventurer's Guide blurs the line between the traditionally "world-neutral" hardcover rulebooks and the setting books—but that's intentional, since this allows us to draw upon over a decade of lore and inspiration to give additional weight to all these new options for the game. And of course, if you're a GM, these options work just as well for you in building memorable new NPCs for your game as well!

In any event, the organizations covered in Adventurer's Guide are...

• Al-Zabriti (Deep-Desert Traditionalists)
• Aldori Swordlords (Masters of the Clash of Blades)
• Aspis Consortium (Profiteering Syndicate)
• Bellflower Network (Eradicators of Halfling Slavery)
• Council of Thieves (Rulers of a Criminal Underworld)
• Cyphermages (Inheritors of Ancient Arcane Traditions)
• Eagle Knights (Vanguard of Liberty)
• Gray Maidens (Remnants of a Tyrant's Reign)
• Hellknights (Merciless Enforcers of the Law)
• Houses of Perfection (Trio of Elite Mystical Monasteries inspired by the Elements)
• Lantern Bearers (A Light Against the Coming Darkness)
• Magaambya (Inheritors of an Ancient Academy of Arcane Learning)
• Mammoth Lords (Beast-Riding Barbarian Tribes)
• Pathfinder Society (Adventuring Scholars of Historical Lore)
• Red Mantis (Notorious Cult of Deadly Assassins)
• Rivethun (Animists Harnessing Personal Struggles for Spiritual Growth)
• Silver Ravens (Rebels Against an Oppressive Regime)
• Storm Kindlers (Storm-Seeking Devotees of Gozreh)

Each organization opens with an evocative half-page illustration to set the mood. I've only got room to show off three for now, though!

Rivethun Introduction
Illustration by William O'Brien

Red Mantis Introduction
Illustration by Willian Liu

Magaambya Introduction
Illustration by Florian Stitz

James Jacobs
Creative Director