Jeggare in the Jungle

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011

With all the excitement of last week's Meet the Iconics post for Hayato, our new iconic samurai—who we unveiled ahead of schedule as part of our auction to help tsunami relief efforts—we unfortunately didn't have a chance to talk about the new web fiction story that started that Wednesday. Which is really too bad, because the new story is awesome on several fronts!

	Illustration by J. P. Targete

In "A Lesson in Taxonomy," Dave Gross brings us a glimpse of Pathfinder Varian Jeggare, the longstanding co-hero of Pathfinder Tales novels, journals, and webfiction stories, as he was in his early days as a Pathfinder, well before he became a venture-captain or met up with his bodyguard Radovan. Just two episodes long, this story takes us through historical Sargava and into the heart of the Mwangi Expanse, where Dave sheds some light on the not-always-amicable practices of competing Pathfinders.

If you're a fan of Wayfinder—and how can you not love free, high-quality, fan-created Pathfinder material?—then this story might look a little familiar. When the Wayfinder folks originally told us that both Dave Gross and Elaine Cunningham had agreed to write new short stories for the zine's Mwangi-themed issue, we were all excited, yet the deal raised some sticky issues regarding continuity and the community use agreement. The solution? We bought Dave and Elaine's stories and let them run first in Wayfinder as a preview before bringing them here to the website for the world to see, thereby making them official Pathfinder Tales content. Everybody wins!

This week represents the final chapter in Dave's safari adventure, and next week we'll have Elaine's fabulous one-shot story "The Illusionist." And after that, we'll be starting a story by one of our very own Paizo staffers. Who could it be, you ask? For the answer, stay tuned...

James Sutter
Fiction Editor