Strength of Thousands Adventure Path

Ooh. An AP set in the Magaambya? I can't wait to play this!

Hmm

Obligatory Hogwarts comment goes here. One thing that I am genuinely interested in here is the following:

How does this Adventure Path plan on tackling the whole "Children as adventurers" angle that is going to be inevitable given that it's billed as a "school/academy" instead of a University?

Perhaps some guidance in the Players Guide and adventure handouts/material to indicate that this is explicitly a COLLEGE of Magic meant for post-adolescence individuals?

Was literally talking to my sister last week and we were discussing how cool a magic school ap set in the magaambya academy would be! Should I be worried about Paizo spies?

Seriously though, this looks like it's going to be fantastic, the author list looks incredible, the concept is exactly what I wanted and the teases we;ve got are so exciting!!

Strength of Thousands gets tons of support in supplemental articles in each volume, including rosters of fellow students and faculty members and an academia downtime subsystem so characters get more skilled throughout their academic years as students (and as teachers). We expect Strength of Thousands to span many in-game years and thrill real-world players for a long time!

Storyteller - Mikhail Palamarchuk

We’ve established a diverse and talented team of authors for the Strength of Thousands Adventure Path. Rather than talk about them, let’s have them tell you who they are in their own words!

What is a Storyteller?

Quote:

Strength of Thousands gets tons of support in supplemental articles in each volume, including rosters of fellow students and faculty members and an academia downtime subsystem so characters get more skilled throughout their academic years as students (and as teachers). We expect Strength of Thousands to span many in-game years and thrill real-world players for a long time!

Storyteller - Mikhail Palamarchuk

We’ve established a diverse and talented team of authors for the Strength of Thousands Adventure Path. Rather than talk about them, let’s have them tell you who they are in their own words!

What is a Storyteller?

Its referring to the picture of a storyteller there :p Latter is the artist's name

The Magaambya is more akin to a college than an elementary school. The PCs are expected to be adults as this Adventure Path begins.

Its referring to the picture of a storyteller there :p Latter is the artist's name

duh.

The Magaambya is more akin to a college than an elementary school. The PCs are expected to be adults as this Adventure Path begins.

That's good to hear as it helps avoid undesirable story elements and pushes it aside from some of the more popular "magic school" fiction that springs to mind.

Thanks JJ!

We expect Strength of Thousands to span many in-game years and thrill real-world players for a long time!

How will this work with Pathfinder's assumption that 1 real-life year is equivalent to 1 in-universe year?

This sounded so awesome in the Pax panel revealing it. Is it 2021 yet?

James Jacobs wrote:

The Magaambya is more akin to a college than an elementary school. The PCs are expected to be adults as this Adventure Path begins.

That's good to hear as it helps avoid undesirable story elements and pushes it aside from some of the more popular "magic school" fiction that springs to mind.

Thanks JJ!

Magic school stories are undeniably popular, which is one of the reasons we're doing this Adventure Path, but Harry Potter is not a primary source of inspiration for it, and it's not going to be pushed by us as the "Harry Potter" Adventure Path. Because it's not. It's a very different story.

Quote:

We expect Strength of Thousands to span many in-game years and thrill real-world players for a long time!

How will this work with Pathfinder's assumption that 1 real-life year is equivalent to 1 in-universe year?

That's an assumption that's by and large something that the fandom has championed, but we've never limited our Adventure Paths to being "each volume takes place over a month." The pace at which the events of an Adventure Path play out at your table are primarially set by your group's pace.

Now and then we'll code time limits or expectations into an Adventure Path (we hard-coded a year of downtime in between the 1st and 2nd volumes of Legacy of Fire, for example, and assume that each volume of Kingmaker takes several months in-world to play out as the PC kingdom grows), but for the most part, even the order in which any one table plays them is up to them.

Perhaps some guidance in the Players Guide and adventure handouts/material to indicate that this is explicitly a COLLEGE of Magic meant for post-adolescence individuals?

Yes, that's where this guidance will be. We avoid putting children in danger in our products, and that means we don't expect the players' characters to be children, either.

I would love if one of the red doors shows up in this - seems very much like it could...

I'm so excited for this. June is much too far away.

I would love if one of the red doors shows up in this - seems very much like it could...

"red door"? Is that distinct from the Doorway to the Red Star?

This AP sounds amazing and that is one heck of an awesome list of authors writing it!

I'm so glad the announcement is finally up! It's been so hard staying quiet about this.

I am super excited for this. I want to play in it, run it, or even both sequentially (though lack of separate Pathfinder groups makes that unlikely...I could do either because we swap who GMs sometimes, but there's not two separate groups).

I am Reign of Winter levels of hype right now.

Gimme.

Gimmegimmegimmegimme.

Ooooh! Very excited for this one!

"Start as students, end up as teachers" as part of a narrative arc reads more like "Graduate students" than "high schoolers" anyway.

Presumably Golarion has a better system for advancement for Academics than the "eternal post-doc treadmill" I pray you are not intimately familiar with.

I'm so glad the announcement is finally up! It's been so hard staying quiet about this.

Congratulations, Michelle! I am so excited to see you announced amongst the authors!

The AP is a cool enough concept by itself but I think I'm most excited about the homebrew-ish system for giving martial classes a bit of magic to be appropriate for the campaign. It sets a precedent I'm very excited to potentially see in other settings such as, for example, the Mana Wastes...

Looks pretty bomb! I just hope the subsystem isn't too fiddly. I'm also excited to see what the "new" adventure path authors have to bring to the table.

I want it. NOW!!!!!!!. Please drop everything else and move up the release date :-) :-) :-)

The AP is a cool enough concept by itself but I think I'm most excited about the homebrew-ish system for giving martial classes a bit of magic to be appropriate for the campaign. It sets a precedent I'm very excited to potentially see in other settings such as, for example, the Mana Wastes...

I believe they've specified it's 'just' the Free Archetype variant with a spellcasting archetype. Still seems fine to me.

Arachnofiend wrote:

The AP is a cool enough concept by itself but I think I'm most excited about the homebrew-ish system for giving martial classes a bit of magic to be appropriate for the campaign. It sets a precedent I'm very excited to potentially see in other settings such as, for example, the Mana Wastes...

I believe they've specified it's 'just' the Free Archetype variant with a spellcasting archetype. Still seems fine to me.

Ahh, that makes sense. Still it sets a precedent for using non-standard rules to fit the setting of an official campaign.

Still it sets a precedent for using non-standard rules to fit the setting of an official campaign.

Aren't the non-lethal weapons rules for Agents of Edgewatch a similar change?

Out of curiosity, is the "layered spellcasting" mentioned in the blog post going to be the Free Archetype optional rule from the Gamemastery Guide?

I would love to run or play this. :sigh: Oh well.

"Start as students, end up as teachers" as part of a narrative arc reads more like "Graduate students" than "high schoolers" anyway.

Presumably Golarion has a better system for advancement for Academics than the "eternal post-doc treadmill" I pray you are not intimately familiar with.

On the other hand most post-docs I know don't have to go out and slay actual monsters as they try to get tenure.

I am so happy to see this happening. This is my dream come true in AP form.

PossibleCabbage wrote:

"Start as students, end up as teachers" as part of a narrative arc reads more like "Graduate students" than "high schoolers" anyway.

Presumably Golarion has a better system for advancement for Academics than the "eternal post-doc treadmill" I pray you are not intimately familiar with.

On the other hand most post-docs I know don't have to go out and slay actual monsters as they try to get tenure.

Given the choice between monsters and a tenure review committee, I'll take the monsters.

Alright, 3 Houses PF2 edition! Going to have to play this one.

A Mwangi AP focused on native peoples written by a diverse team AND Luis Loza is giving Mzali the attention it deserves AND we go to space? And you can play a gnoll in it?

Maybe tradgames aren’t so bad after all.

So in the live stream it was mentioned that there would be options for non-casters to have some casting they can take. Which really sounded like John Smedley and Star Wars Galaxies when he said that if you didn't want to be a Jedi you could always just be force sensitive - AKA a Jedi. This was horribly unsatisfying for those who really didn't want to be a Jedi.

This really made me a sad panda when I heard it. So I wanted to come talk about Legend of the Five Rings and the Yojimbo. Specifically the Yojimbo of the Phoenix Clan who were bodyguards for the Shugenja. They studied in the same schools together but the Yojimbo never learned spells. They learned to protect their Shugenja, to increase the spells cast upon them by their allies and resist those cast by their enemies. Yojimbo were always melee artist, without any casting ability. But they learned at magic schools with the casters.

That is all.

I've spent my career teaching, and now could GM my players as they go from students to teachers--to administration--and beyond?

Very, VERY intrigued. :)

This is easily the most excited I've been for an AP in a long, long time. Kudos to the diverse talent as well!

This is amazing news. Make July 2021 come faster!

Totally hype for this!

So in the live stream it was mentioned that there would be options for non-casters to have some casting they can take. Which really sounded like John Smedley and Star Wars Galaxies when he said that if you didn't want to be a Jedi you could always just be force sensitive - AKA a Jedi. This was horribly unsatisfying for those who really didn't want to be a Jedi.

This really made me a sad panda when I heard it. So I wanted to come talk about Legend of the Five Rings and the Yojimbo. Specifically the Yojimbo of the Phoenix Clan who were bodyguards for the Shugenja. They studied in the same schools together but the Yojimbo never learned spells. They learned to protect their Shugenja, to increase the spells cast upon them by their allies and resist those cast by their enemies. Yojimbo were always melee artist, without any casting ability. But they learned at magic schools with the casters.

That is all.

I like that idea. It would be cool to have as an option some training on fighting or resisting magic, rather than using it.

Without, I think, the emphasis on the martials as bodyguards.

So in the live stream it was mentioned that there would be options for non-casters to have some casting they can take. Which really sounded like John Smedley and Star Wars Galaxies when he said that if you didn't want to be a Jedi you could always just be force sensitive - AKA a Jedi. This was horribly unsatisfying for those who really didn't want to be a Jedi.

This really made me a sad panda when I heard it. So I wanted to come talk about Legend of the Five Rings and the Yojimbo. Specifically the Yojimbo of the Phoenix Clan who were bodyguards for the Shugenja. They studied in the same schools together but the Yojimbo never learned spells. They learned to protect their Shugenja, to increase the spells cast upon them by their allies and resist those cast by their enemies. Yojimbo were always melee artist, without any casting ability. But they learned at magic schools with the casters.

That is all.

I get what you mean but this is a preexisting magic school in the setting with a curriculum that's already been spelled out in setting material. I doubt it would have been satisfactory to retcon the nature of Magaambyan teaching to be inclusive to martials.

Even as someone who almost always plays martials, I think it's okay to have an AP where some classes aren't appropriate for the setting (Paladins weren't appropriate for Hell's Vengeance, for example). I'm just waiting for the Mana Wastes AP that bans casters now. :)

I get what you mean but this is a preexisting magic school in the setting with a curriculum that's already been spelled out in setting material. I doubt it would have been satisfactory to retcon the nature of Magaambyan teaching to be inclusive to martials.

There may well be nuances of the setting I'm missing but we already have the Magic Warriors who only have access to focus spells.

I could see martials with focus spells fitting the kinds of characters a magic school would teach

I'd count focus spell martials as real casters for this purpose too. I guess we'll see how Paizo feels about it; the free archetype rules aren't only going to apply to martials obviously (that would be silly) so a Ranger that starts with Gravity Weapon would likely get the option to pick a non-casting archetype, same as the Wizard.

Neume wrote:

So in the live stream it was mentioned that there would be options for non-casters to have some casting they can take. Which really sounded like John Smedley and Star Wars Galaxies when he said that if you didn't want to be a Jedi you could always just be force sensitive - AKA a Jedi. This was horribly unsatisfying for those who really didn't want to be a Jedi.

This really made me a sad panda when I heard it. So I wanted to come talk about Legend of the Five Rings and the Yojimbo. Specifically the Yojimbo of the Phoenix Clan who were bodyguards for the Shugenja. They studied in the same schools together but the Yojimbo never learned spells. They learned to protect their Shugenja, to increase the spells cast upon them by their allies and resist those cast by their enemies. Yojimbo were always melee artist, without any casting ability. But they learned at magic schools with the casters.

That is all.

I get what you mean but this is a preexisting magic school in the setting with a curriculum that's already been spelled out in setting material. I doubt it would have been satisfactory to retcon the nature of Magaambyan teaching to be inclusive to martials.

Even as someone who almost always plays martials, I think it's okay to have an AP where some classes aren't appropriate for the setting (Paladins weren't appropriate for Hell's Vengeance, for example). I'm just waiting for the Mana Wastes AP that bans casters now. :)

I'm not sure how much detail the curriculum has been spelled out in, but an idea like that doesn't see that much of a retcon. Especially if we're already including "mostly martials with only a little bit of casting". Fluff it as teaching them to use their innate magic to resist or enhance other magic or something.

This sounds great and I'll be looking forward to play in it.

I absolutely love how the major books being released at the beginning of the year are seemingly tied together. Secrets of Magic and LO: Mwangi Expanse will offer magic and lore that can be used in this AP. And that, is simply amazing. Seems to me that this may be a sort of theme we may see in the future. At least, if LO: City of Lost Omens and the Agents of Edgewatch AP are anything to go by. And, if so, i really dig it. I hope this kind of interconnected books continue.

Nice I will have to get this AP.

I have some doubts about this part

Strength of Thousands is open to characters of all kinds, but it’s a magic school, so some spellcasting ability is necessary. If you like playing fighters or monks or other non-spellcasting classes, don’t worry! We’re layering on additional spellcasting ability to all characters in this Adventure Path, so if you can’t normally cast spells, you get a little bit of spellcasting. If you are a spellcaster already, you get a little more. This makes the characters slightly more powerful than normal, but lets them feel like students in the world’s premiere magic school.

does it mean that players could be an exception or that even in that school there might be some combatants "gifted" with some magical power?