A Novel Approach to Creating the Pathfinder Tales Character Deck

Thursday, September 14, 2017

The Pathfinder Tales Character Deck required the most research of any of the decks. The Pathfinder Tales line includes dozens of novels and short stories, and a veritable digital mountain of web fiction. At one point I had forty tabs and three ebooks open as I scoured through all of the Tales for our best cards. Surprisingly, in that immense field full of amazing options, the team picked three characters almost immediately.

Let's give a hand for our lovely crew. Maybe two hands—Celeste seems to be missing hers.

I've been a fan of Dave Gross's Radovan and Varian for years. We've managed to sneak his work into Season of the Righteous and the Summoner Class Deck, and he happily helped us out with this set, writing the flavor text for his characters.

"Some choose to wield the sword, others the grimoire. I note that we have two hands."

Count Varian can't memorize spells in the normal fashion. Thankfully, he's more than willing to throw money at solving that problem, and has years of fencing expertise as backup. He's also a renowned noble and ambassador of Cheliax, a graduate of the Acadamae, and a Pathfinder Society Venture-Captain. He's done fairly well, if he does say so himself.

"Listen up, you mooks. You die, makes me look bad. You know how much I like to look good."

Radovan's a wise-mouthed hellspawn, ready to literally jump into the fire to save his boss, Varian. Fortunately, the devil Norge keeps Radovan from burning. Less fortunately, the veritable host of devils whispering temptations to Radovan are just waiting for their opportunity to take control of his body, burst out into the world, or turn him into a gateway to Hell. Radovan really does have all the luck.

The deck also includes several signature boons from Radovan and Varian's adventures. I imagine basically all players of Varian will want Arnisant to accompany them. Just look at this face:

"Of course I am not comparing you to my hound. Arnisant is obedient to a fault."

The third character was selected almost as quickly, as we laid out a slew of major characters and images, and Mike quickly said something like: "And here's a bunch of other characters and THE LUNAR NAGA WE'RE GOING TO MAKE." Artist Eric Belisle really did an amazing job on Celeste and the team immediately agreed we had to bring her to life.

Lunar nagas make the best pirate astrologers!

That settled, what to do with all of the other amazing characters in Tales? SO. MANY. ALLIES. And one very talkative weapon.

Warning: Do not buy this deck if you are allergic to pictures of adorable puppies.

I really wanted to highlight the synergy of characters from the same Tales, so that you weren't just picking the best mechanics, but had a genuine reason to keep Hrym united with Rodrick or Torius Vin with his crew, or Zae and Keren Rhinn with Appleslayer. Also, Mike threatened to shank anyone who stood in the way of Appleslayer's inclusion in the deck.

No previously existing allies were included in the making of this deck.

Of course, some of these folks are amazing all on their own. The Tales deck includes some of the best allies we've ever made. We expect fans of Drelm from the Mummy's Mask Character Add-On Deck will like Elyana, who appears alongside Drelm in the novel Plague of Shadows.

But don't imagine that the 23 all-new allies are the only new boons in the Tales deck. There are plenty more, including legendary weapons and tomes of arcane and powerful lore.

Sometimes you just need to find a really scary book. And steal it.

A lot of these boons interact with specific allies; for example, the ally Eando Kline will let you recharge that Wayfinder from your discard pile.

The hope and goal was always that any Pathfinder Tales fan would have no regrets adding this class deck to each and every set. And maybe a few card players can get some great plays out of the cards, then seek out the stories that spawned them.

Keith Richmond
Adventure Card Game Designer