So, earlier in the year, the ebb and flow of product workflow had me swooping in to serve as the lead developer for a few installments of the Pathfinder Player Companion line. Two of these products (Haunted Heroes Handbook and Divine Anthology) had already been outlined and assigned to authors, but one of them was completely up in the air and left to me to create. I kicked around a few ideas, but time and time again those ideas were pretty much 100% inappropriate for a player-facing product (they may or may not some day see the light of day in the Campaign Setting line or elsewhere). And then I had an epiphany.
We hadn't done a book about prestige classes in ages.
I love prestige classes.
And so Paths of the Righteous was born. My overwhelming preference for prestige classes is that they should tie into world flavor and reward players for actually bothering to invest in said world's flavor. I knew I didn't want to build a book that just randomly threw unrelated prestige classes out there (since I'd already built that book with Paths of Prestige), and tying the flavor to various religions made a lot of sense, since I've long been a champion of the concept of "every religion should have its own specialized class."
Prestige classes are the perfect solution to this, and so in Paths of the Righteous I decided to focus on the good-aligned faiths of the campaign setting. All of the good aligned core deities got a prestige class, along with two of the good-aligned "other gods"—Kurgess and Milani. That left five spots for prestige classes associated with empyreal lords (of which we had more than enough to choose from!). Once I had the 14 faiths chosen, I also wanted to make sure that these classes would work with as many different character themes as possible. That meant building several prestige classes that suggest non-divine spellcasting classes—there's options for wizards and fighters and swashbucklers and much, much more in this book!
Illustrations by Kent Hamilton and Graey Erb
But enough about the words... what about the arts? As a preview, here's images for the Devoted Muse of Shelyn, the Sacred Sentinel of Torag, and the Sphere Singer of Desna! Oh... and the Stargazer of the empyreal lord Pulura, because KITTY!!!
James Jacobs
Creative Director
