Guides, Characters, and Conventions!

Monday, August 14, 2017

Well, I'm at Gen Con in the middle of the Sagamore Ballroom. Spent the morning sorting banners and getting them ready for hanging. This afternoon, the team put the final touches on Pathfinder Society and Starfinder Society Roleplaying Guild Guides. So without further ado, the Guides!

Season 9 of the Pathfinder Society Roleplaying Guild Guide doesn't see the upheaval of last year's changes. Instead, we reviewed forum threads to find questions and clarifications. As a result, this is a buff and polish job. The biggest changes are in formatting. Our graphic designer, Emily, changed up some layout and made a stunning product. I really like the coloring and design she put together for Season 9 and am interested to hear your thoughts.

Season 1 of the Starfinder Society Roleplaying Guild Guide borrows heavily from the Pathfinder Guide. Which makes sense, since many of the items included in the guide are organized play pieces. Much like Starfinder, you'll find many similarities. But where things are different, they are different. Some of this appeared in preview blogs over the past few months, like boon slots and infamy. We've also included the two Starfinder Society base class ships, the Pegasus and the Drake. An expanded Faction chapter outlines faction boons for each of our five factions. So while you could skim over the guide and get the bare bones, I encourage you to delve deep and enjoy the new campaign.

Both Starfinder Society Roleplaying Guild Quest: Into the Unknown and Starfinder Society Scenario #1-00: Claim to Salvation utilize pre-generated iconic characters. It is our pleasure to reveal these today. Starfinder Designer Owen K. C. Stevens took point on turning our iconic characters—Altronus, Iseph, Keskadai, Navasi, Obazaya, Quinn, and Raia—into playable characters. As with the Pathfinder pregenerated iconic characters, they're now available for download as a Community Use Package.

My closing bit of information is about a change in our convention attendance schedule. After some deliberation, we decided to forgo our attendance at PAX West. Instead, this November, several staffers are attending PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Of all the PAX events, Unplugged is most aligned with our products and goals and as such, we wish to focus our efforts there.

But Seattleites' should not despair. There are still a number of local conventions with Paizo organized play activities: Dragonflight in August, Geek Girl Con in September, OrcaCon in January, and Norwescon in March. In addition, after Gen Con ends, we will take a look at the schedule of organized play activities at Emerald City Comic Con next March and get more information out to potential show attendees. Of course, you can always come to PaizoCon 2018, which is scheduled for May 25-28th in Seatac, Washington!

On Wednesday, the team will continue previewing our Gen Con releases. Until then, I bid you happy reading!

Explore, Report, Cooperate!

Tonya Woldridge
Organized Play Manager