Pardon Our Dust: What We Said (and Didn't Say) About the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game at PaizoCon

Thursday, June 1, 2017

Every year for the past four years, I have gone onstage at the PaizoCon banquet and talked about upcoming releases for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. This year, that didn't happen. This is because I wasn't ready to say what everyone wanted me to say: what the name of the next base set is. I do have one in mind, but what we want to do with it isn't something we're sure we can do with it.

The adventure card game has been way more successful than we ever imagined. We're now four base sets, 24 expansion decks, four and a half Pathfinder Society Adventure Card Guild seasons, and 20 Class Decks into the release cycle, and that's not even counting the things we've finished but not released. Plus, there's another whole adventure card game, Apocrypha, that my company Lone Shark Games is about to release, and it does some things in different ways than the Pathfinder ACG does. We'd be fools not to learn from all of that. So here are our plans.

What We Expect to Do With the Next Base Set

Each PACG Adventure Path is massive. To play it you have to make a huge commitment: $180 at retail. And playing one base set doesn't make playing another any cheaper. Plus, when we change from one Organized Play season to the next, we make you crack open a box you might not yet own. We have big expensive game boxes and relatively inexpensive tuckboxes, but very little in the middle. The big boxes don't fit so great on many retailers' shelves, and some retailers put the smaller boxes behind the register, making them harder to buy.

So we'd like to change the product mix and presentation of the game. We're asking ourselves a lot of questions. Do you really need a new Cure card every time we start a new storyline? Does every chapter of an adventure have to use exactly 110 cards? Is there a way we can introduce a location in Adventure 4 and use it again in Adventure 5 without violating the Afghanistan Principle? What if we want a new Adventure Path to have a lot more monsters (or a lot fewer armors) than we put into Rise of the Runelords? Does it make sense that scenarios are limited to the number of words we can fit onto a single card? Does story really have to be constrained to a couple inches of text on a handful of cards?

And also: Not every story we want to tell is a sprawling Adventure Path that takes RPG characters from 1st-level pipsqueak to 20th-level potentate. There are a lot more tales in the Pathfinder catalogue. We'd like to be able to tell some of the smaller ones too.

If you've played a Pathfinder Society Adventure Card Guild game, you know that we've already explored some of these questions. PFSACG adventures feature much more story, wildly complex scenarios, and deep cross-adventure development. We've even experimented with smaller stories in the 2-part Season of the Goblins. And now it's time to bring all that to the bigger picture.

But it's important to recognize that these big changes we're talking about are primarily about presentation, not game mechanics. We're not talking "PACG: Second Edition" here; we don't need to change the rules and mechanics much more than we usually change them for a new Base Set. Let's be explicit: we're not going to invalidate your old cards. The things we've made so far will play just fine with things from the next base set, and we'll give you easy fixes for anything that doesn't, like when we changed "before the encounter" to "before you act" between Rise of the Runelords and Skull & Shackles.

We have a lot of theories as to how all these things will work, and what Adventure Path is best to go with such a rethinking. When last week came around, Paizo asked me if I was ready to talk about it. I wasn't. So Vic stood up at the banquet and announced that we aren't going to release a new base set until Gen Con 2018 at the earliest. We're going to try a lot of things; some of them won't work, and that's going to cost us time. And once we do figure out what we want, we'll have to make some prototypes: new boxes, a new tray... maybe even multiple trays. So maybe the 2018 holiday season is more likely, or even Spring 2019. But we won't leave you with a vacuum in the meantime.

What We Expect to Do With the Class Decks

We expect to continue releasing Class Decks with as many cool ideas as we can think of. Decks for August through October went to the printer last week; decks for November through February are in active development, and decks for March through May are... um, on deck. (We've started unofficially calling them character decks, because at best half of the new ones revolve around a single class. Of the next seven decks starting in August, only two—Magus and Hunter—are single-Class Decks.

I talked a little about those two at the PACG seminar at PaizoCon. The Magus Class Deck fills a giant hole in the product line, as we don't have a focused Arcane/Melee deck. In addition to a new take on Seltyiel, we're introducing PACG's first angelkin (you might call her an aasimar), alongside a character that has appeared twice in the RPG line. (I'm expecting your guesses in the discussion thread!)

The Hunter Class Deck is Adowyn's set, and it's loaded with animals. In fact, it's a pretty darn good alt-Ranger deck, which is one way of addressing another concern of players at PaizoCon: that the initial seven Class Decks—the ones that had four characters in them—had a smaller set of boons to choose from than the subsequent three-character Class Decks. If you want another way to play Harsk, you can get pretty far with the Hunter Class Deck. (We're thinking about ways to upgrade those initial seven too. Nothing to say yet on that front, but it's in our brains.)

The other five decks in these waves—Pathfinder Tales, Hell's Vengeance 1 and Hell's Vengeance 2, and Occult Adventures 1 and Occult Adventures 2—let us flex our design muscles in ways we've never done. I didn't have much to say at the con about Occult Adventures since those decks aren't designed. But I did talk about Tales: In addition to the characters of Radovan, Varian, and Celeste, Tales has all new allies, and a whole lot of them at that. They work together in interesting ways, too. If you like Zae, Keren Rhinn, and Appleslayer from Gears of Faith, you'll be rewarded for keeping them together.

The so-called "evil iconics" in the Hell's Vengeance decks take the more antisocial behavior demonstrated by our goblin characters to a new level. And these might be the best characters to play in Wrath of the Righteous. On the PACG panel, Pathfinder Society coordinator Tonya Woldridge mentioned that the evil characters in PACG are your only opportunity for playing evil characters in Pathfinder Society. Speaking of which...

What We Expect to Do With Organized Play

Tonya unveiled Season of Factions' Favor, the next season of PACG Organized Play, which will debut at Gen Con in August and conclude at next PaizoCon in May. Plotted by Tonya and John Compton, SoFF will weave into the Pathfinder Society Roleplaying Guild Year of Factions' Favor storyline, which in turn will weave into the War for the Crown storyline in the Pathfinder Adventure Path line. Season of Factions' Favor will use the Mummy's Mask set, just like Season of Plundered Tombs did.

SoFF will also do something we've never done before: tie new Class Deck releases directly into the storyline. A pair of special scenarios will explain exactly how those evil Hell's Vengeance folks wind up working for the Pathfinder Society. It'll be really cool.

That may or may not be the only season we launch between now and the next base set. At PaizoCon, I sat down to play the unofficial We Are Dragons "season" by Tyler Beck and 2017 Pathfinder Society Volunteer of the Year David Jacobson, where the main characters are kobolds. I'm not saying we're going to make that official, but man, kobolds are wicked fun.

What We Expect to Do With the Digital Game

Our partners at Obsidian also had some great news at PaizoCon. Their Pathfinder Adventures app, currently available exclusively for iOS and Android phones and tablets, is coming to PC and OS X soon.

And oh man, did the crowd love it when this was revealed:

Rise of the Goblins will introduce five new scenarios inspired by We Be Goblins and our Season of the Goblins, with Ranzak and Poog of Zarongel as playable characters, plus alternative goblin skins for the 11 core iconics. And new asymmetrical goblin dice. If goblins could read, they'd be cheering this news right now.

What We Don't Expect to Do Any Time Soon

The Starfinder Adventure Card Game, that's what. Starfinder was the buzz of PaizoCon, and all anyone could ask me about was whether we were making a Starfinder ACG. I crushed that speculation dead on the spot. One of the main reasons we decided to make Pathfinder our first adventure card game was the ten thousand or so pieces of awesome Pathfinder art that we could use. Starfinder has less than ten thousand pieces of art at this point. A lot less. (But it is all awesome. In particular, Remko Troost's iconics. Sweet stuff.) With PACG, it also helped that we had great storylines to adapt, but the first Starfinder Adventure Path, Dead Suns, won't be completed until next June.

So, maybe ask me about that next PaizoCon, or the one after. Meanwhile, we've got a whole lot of work to do on Pathfinder. Thanks for reading, and thanks to PaizoCon for having us there!

Mike Selinker
Adventure Card Game Lead Designer