City of Strangers

Thursday, April 22, 2010

It is still coming.

	Illustration by Alberto Dal Lago

...Man, it's so tempting to leave the blog post at that, but I've got to stop with these one-line blog posts. They're too addictive!

Suffice to say, then, that City of Strangers, the new Pathfinder Chronicles guide to Varisia's outlaw city of Kaer Maga, has shipped to the printer. What you may not know is that this book has been in the works, in one form or another, for more than two years at this point. What started out as a few-page setting for Seven Swords of Sin grew into one of the first Pathfinder's Journals in Pathfinder Adventure Path #3: "The Hook Mountain Massacre." From there, with it clear to everyone around that I was in love with this city beyond any affection I'd felt for a game setting before (though a few have since come to rival it—*cough*solarsystem*cough*), it was decided that there should be a book... and not just any book. A setting that was at once a bizarre city filled with subterfuge and strange sights, but also containing a monumental dungeon that people could venture into again and again, with different tropes and themes to the various layers. Not a small order (especially considering Erik, James, and Jason had just finished writing the new Castle Greyhawk book, whose map turnovers were a million times cooler than anything I'd ever drawn). If it was going to be done, Erik decided, it had to be done right, and that meant it needed to take as long as it took. Rather than announce the project and a projected release date, we wouldn't so much as acknowledge the book publicly until it had been completely written.

And so, with nothing on the schedule, I officially unofficially began work on City of Strangers. Six months and a learning curve or two later, I turned over the completed manuscript, and the book was officially put on the schedule. If I may say so myself, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. All the gangs are there—the Sweettalkers, who sew their own lips shut, and the troll augurs, who read the future in their own entrails. The wormfolk and the Tallow Boys, the golem-crafting Ardocs and the mysterious Temple of the Child Goddess. All the districts are there, from the egalitarian Bottoms where freed slaves fight a shadow war of abolition, to the necromantic markets of Ankar-Te where zombies trail after their masters like faithful dogs. The Undercity is there, with levels like the Godsmouth Ossuary, the Dark Forest, the Forever Bore, the Still Place, and of course Xavorax, City of Silence, the city-beneath-the-city that houses the mysterious Caulborn. And despite all the words in this book, I'm perhaps most pleased with the maps—it's downright intimidating trying to design a city map of a Jacobsian or Schneiderian level of detail (especially when they're sitting 20 feet from you), yet Jared Blando did an unbelievable job of bringing both the city and the dungeons beneath it to life in a way that both mirrored and exceeded my imagination.

And now it's away to the printer, set to hit stores and subscribers this summer. I hope you enjoy visiting it as much as I have. It's been a long, strange journey...

James Sutter
Editor