Axoq's page

The way this was announced is so strange. We have a clear indication that Organized Play is ending, phrased as though it's not the first we're hearing of it. Then we have some speculation that the product line itself is ending, without anyone in the know confirming or denying. This is all in a thread where the first post is from a Lone Shark employee.

Could we please have some official, clear word that nothing will follow Curse as a set?

I can't tell you exactly what's coming, since I'm not affiliated with Paizo or Lone Shark, but I do know that the intention is to put out more content in the form of more storybooks and cards. Lone Shark has said that they're taking a break and pursuing other things for a while. No idea when, but I do have faith that more will come at some point.

In the meantime, there is Organized Play, there are homebrew scenarios, and there's also fun to be had designing your own stuff.

I'm sure other people will chime in with details of options -- people who know more about them than I do.

Oh! And with regard to what to get next, the earlier PACG games work just like Rise of the Runelords: The big box has B and 1 cards, and you have to buy each of 2-6 separately. That's a lot, and they've stopped doing that now.

The last two things they've put out are the Core Set and Curse of the Crimson Throne. Going forward everything they publish will be something to inject into the Core Set. (You're always going to want a Cure spell and your Longsword and the Thieves' Tools and all the basic blessings... why buy those over and over? They're in the Core Set, and the Adventure Paths' boxes will only have the things you need for that path specifically.)

How did you do with the rules in Rise of the Runelords? If you had no trouble with the difficulty, I might suggest getting the Core Set and maybe CotCT next if you're looking at another Path to purchase. They made a LOT of changes, but if your group can handle it, jumping straight there seems the smart move to me. If not, you might want to pick up one of Skull & Shackles, Mummy's Mask, or Wrath of the Righteous next, because they're closer in feel to what you've played, and you can see a more advanced version of the game. (I would recommend them in the order S&S, MM, WotR if this is an issue, since Wrath is easily the hardest Path they've done. S&S is good fun and MM is more modern but still with somewhat advanced rules, closest to the big shift going to the Core Set.)

There are also some scenarios written by Ron Lundeen (who now works with Paizo) that use the older sets:

http://www.welbybumpus.com/menu.php

The Shield of Rannick path uses Rise of the Runelords cards exclusively. I haven't played it, but I did play his homebrew for Skull and Shackles and it was great.

And the update: Blog Post.

There's no specific formula, I don't think. I'd saw use the other cards as a guideline -- look at your Barrier 3's if you're designing a level-3 Barrier to see what checks are possible. Combat checks can always be higher than non-combat checks.

The only formula I know of is that recharge checks are usually 2 higher than acquire checks. (Look at your spells, for example.)

We all feel the same way.

The link is bound to show up soon, but what we've heard is, they launched Core, CotCT and the new stuff for Organized Play all at the same time, and boy are their arms tired. They're taking some time to figure out their next step. (I secretly hope they're going to announce something in May at PaizoCon, but that's completely unsubstantiated guesswork on my part.)

I just bumped a thread on this random scenario structure, but now I wonder if it didn't get attention because it's in the wrong place.

The Reward for all of the random scenarios is to get one new card out of the vault, but the rules of Survive the Siege don't allow you to ever encounter a boon except when something like a Cache barrier grants you one. When Sieges first appeared in Mummy's Mask, the reward was to have access to all the cards you saved, but not in the Core Set? So, we could just let all those boons that we carefully shuffled and arranged into locations drain away until we had one card left somewhere and we guard that card with our lives and the outcome is the same as if we protected them all? That feels pointless now.

Was this the intention?

Bumping this since my group randomly picked "Surviving the Siege" last night, and wow, yeah, if this is true then any time we roll the Siege up again, we're just going to reroll it. We don't have to bother saving anything but one card left in one location, and there's no incentive to do better than that? This feels wrong.

If you know you're going to play them all, I'd suggest playing all the pre-Core sets before advancing to Core. The change is radical with the move to Core. (Play them in order, and you can see the game evolving before your eyes.)

If you're not a completionist, I might recommend going to Core straight away. I love the changes in the new set.

For those of us who aspire to make our own material, it really helps to know how you guys make things work, and decide how things don't work. I'd love more blogs like this.

I feel you. I had the same thing happen to me at PaizoCon, but didn't do nearly as well. Bravo!

The second power on this blessing in Core says:

Discard to move to a random location, then explore. This exploration, reroll any dice showing 1 and 2.

Does that reroll power only apply during checks? (If I encounter the monster Elemental, which makes me roll to determine its element type, I don't reroll a 1 in that case, do I?) Also, that last "and" should be "or", yes?

Overall, I did have a good time at PaizoCon this year, but I do feel that I need to share what happened at this event, since it was pretty anomalous and an officially run event. TL;DR: wow, what a clusterfumble -- missing personnel and poor management of the event.

I didn't know a lot about the structure of the Open going in, except to know that there was often team elimination through the days of the event, and the game was time-delimited -- it needed to end when the slot ended.

Because I hadn't been in an official event in the ballroom before, I didn't know there would be a long line of people taking tickets at the door. I arrived at close to Friday at 7:00, so I was delayed getting in. Also earlier that day I had seen a ticket for my team's slot, Team 3, on the pick-up table, but I also looked again later and saw it was gone.

So I get to the table at around 7:10 or 7:15. So far, all of this is my fault.

When I get to the table, I'm alone save for the GM, and I continue to be alone until about 7:25 when I point out there isn't a line of people trying to get in anymore. While four people apparently decided they didn't want to play this, the fact that I'm alone isn't anybody's fault. It's not going to help for what's going forward, but no one is to blame.

At this point, the GM starts the game. There is no team elimination; everyone will play all three days. He tells me, out loud, that I will need to make my own characters. I don't know if this event is going to be run again somewhere, so:

I figure I now have about an hour and a half to get through that and the game, so I get moving. By eight o'clock, I have completed two of the four parts of that task, and I'm most of the way toward completing a third when another player walks up. I'm not going to shame anybody here and I don't know this person's name in any case, but he tells the GM that he has a ticket for this game... at 10 pm for Team 4.

I'm not listening very carefully, because I'm panicking, but the task I've been given would be fair for four people but not really fair for one -- again, not anyone's fault, since it's designed and intended for a team of four. The upshot is that he offers to help, and I believe he's joining my team. He says he's very familiar with, um,

And the new guy carefully. Looks. Through. The cards. It's 8:40 when he's done, but the GM allows me? us? to use the one-hour gap between the games because of the circumstances, which I appreciate. The GM now reveals the details of the scenario. It's not designed to be hellish this year, merely hard, and I'll be playing all three days (though he won't be GMming the other two because of his schedule). However,

Valeros plays first, and the first card turned is the henchman. The GM shuffled all the locations, so this is above-board and very encouraging. Valeros's opening hand has only one weapon, but the combat check isn't that bad, actually, and the closing cost is an even lower combat check, so I elect to shuffle that weapon into my deck for extra dice and save my blessing for the close.

The new guy interrupts me -- am I sure I want to do that? I tell him that Val should have no problem with the check. And he says, "But if he doesn't have a weapon, his Melee goes down to a d4." And a chill runs down my spine.

The GM and I explain the facts of life to him, and this guy is going to return home a hero after he tells whatever people he's been playing with how much less horrible their game is going to be. Reread your rulebooks, New Guy.

But in the here and now, I figure I'm perhaps more alone than I would have been running all four characters, since I have to watch him. He nearly fails a check against a barrier when I have a Blessing of Abadar and the incentive to use it, and I play with my hand on the table so you can see what I have. He just didn't look. Or ask. That kind of thing.

Overall, I? we? close three locations and we've examined the henchman on top of a fourth when three more people roll up to get their 10 o'clock game started. So I'm done.

The New Guy then joins his appointed Team 4, with all the intel from the game he's played, plus his part of that preliminary task completed with extensive use of my time slot.

I debate whether to go back for the next day, given that there's probably no chance I could win. I decide to anyway because I know what I'm getting myself into, and it could be fun. (And New Guy is no longer welcome at my table.)

The setup for the official schedule for this event is that sign-ups are only available for the Friday sessions, and if you're in one of those, you are automatically in for the other two, but no tickets are available (since having any random other person sign up for those days will only cause problems, but on the upside, it might have given me a teammate).

There are lines to get into the main ballroom again. I arrive early this time, but I do not belong in either line. I do not have a ticket to this event -- no such tickets exist -- and I am not hoping to get into the event without a ticket, since I am supposed to be there. So I have to talk my way into the ballroom to avoid being late again. The people at the door have no idea what I'm talking about, but they let me enter.

I find the table with the sheets detailing the next stage of the Open, and the same deck boxes containing the characters I had used the previous day. There is no GM, and there is no table nearby that isn't full of people, and no one told me, J/K, your team of one was eliminated in a game with no team elimination. I wait for 20 minutes, and then I bail and weasel my way into cartmanbeck &Co's game instead.

I don't bother to come back for Sunday's Open event.

I know some people at Lone Shark and otherwise associated with PACG, including the author of the Open scenarios, Jen McTeague. I know people that have seen these scenarios run before. They tell me that I was supposed to be handed the scenario sheet at the beginning so I would know what was coming before I even started that preliminary task, not read aloud small sections from it (so the ten or fifteen minutes I lost waiting for people could have been spent reading that and getting started), and that additionally

This event is billed as a competitive event, and some of us as gamers take the idea of "competitive" seriously. If players are allowed to gain unfair advantages, if the rules aren't going to be enforced as the scenario writers intend, and if Paizo volunteers are not going to show up for their appointed times possibly due to the wobbly, quantum nature of the slots themselves, maybe don't bill them as competitive and let people know what they're getting themselves into.

If I return to PaizoCon at all, right now the main draw is going to be {cartmanbeck et al.}'s next game, which I simply won't be able to play anywhere else, and I'll stay far away from the officially run events, if they're run like this. And that's probably not the conclusion Paizo wants its players to come to.

@NielsenE -- the words from the word search are all strongly related to each other, and the average length of the words is around five or six letters. None of the words in the word search is the answer to the puzzle.

I'm stuck on the back page, which seems to require familiarity with the RPG, but I'm a card gamer so I lack a lot of vocabulary to know whether the things I want to use are Things or not.

Yes. I once ended up in an argument with a colleague because I didn't realize that "employed", "unemployed", "not employed" and the less common "not unemployed" were four different things from an economics standpoint, not two.

So it is with checks under 1.0 rules. Just because a bane is not defeated does not imply it is undefeated. (You can evade it, for example. You didn't defeat it, but it is not undefeated.) If you pass on a check to acquire a boon, you didn't fail a check, though you did fail to acquire the boon.

This blog does have me curious about the new "freely" mechanic. Over the recent blogs, I expected to see more cards making use of this mechanic - blessings, in particular. I haven't seen many yet, though. Or I haven't been paying proper attention, more likely.

I suspect they've been showing us cards that mostly resemble PACG 1.0 with small modifications so we can contrast the two without descending into more jargon than we know how to handle.

Hmm, then I'm confused (again). There are only four team slots open on Friday, each allowing four people, and all four have scheduled times throughout the weekend. If there's team elimination, why are there four slots scheduled on Sunday as well?

I'm familiar enough with PACG itself, or at least the version before the new Core set. I'm my group's rules enforcer most of the time. They tend to take their time with decisions, though, so playing for speed may be a shock.

I appreciate this. My big source of frustration has been that it's felt like Events with a capital E are all that are going on (though based on what's been revealed here, that's far from true) and it's been hard for this newcomer to figure out the ins and outs. I've trusted when people have said in various places, don't worry, it'll be great, but the preparations have been... worrying. The fact that there's a lot going on that's more unstructured gives me assurance that I'm not coming down there just to sit idle. I'm looking forward to this. Thanks, Tonya!

I've fixed the problem myself, I hope. I released the third part of Mummy -- I already wasn't going to be able to do the whole thing anyway, since, like Void_Eagle, I got into sessions #1 and #3 only through the lottery. That should mean that I can do this and the PACG Q&A besides.

That's good to hear.

I've been going through a lot of frustration figuring this system out...

There's one event I can sign up for, but it explicitly says that teams should expect to play all three days, and the others are booked, so even if I take it, I'm only creating a problem. I booked it anyway. What else can I do?

Turns out that event, Ruins of Bonekeep, is just blocked for the later days so no one can sign up -- you sign up for the first and you get all three. (Judging by that thread, everyone knew this but the new guy.) Except this created a scheduling conflict for me that the website couldn't detect, and now I feel like I need to clean that up, but I don't know how... I've asked in the Bonekeep thread what the organizer would prefer, given that these two events conflict in several ways.

I'm working at making this work... but it is work.

Oops. I've created a conflict for myself that the system doesn't know about.

I'm a first-timer and I've been having trouble navigating this lottery/registration system thing, so the only lottery events I scored were the Friday and Sunday slots for I Want My Mummy. I went through trying to find other things to fill my time, saw this campaign and was interested, but I saw that the later slots were taken. Ahem. But there was a Friday one in Team 3, and I grabbed it. If Mr. Saturday and Sunday in team 3 didn't want it, I'd take it, and if a fuss was raised, I'll relinquish it.

All this was, of course, before I found this thread to see how it all works, which means, hooray!, I've stumbled into all three days worth of events (unless I have this all wrong again), but boo!, the Sunday Mummy session conflicts with this event, as Void_Eagle points out.

So I'm asking the organizer of this event: What should I do? Clearly I should not be permitted to act on this anymore, since I haven't got the first clue what I'm doing.

There's a table when at the con, in the main lobby near the ballroom(smaller one) used as the store that is set up for tickets people don't want to use anymore. If you are lucky you might find the ticket to that event if you cannot get a trade into it before the con itself.

Thanks for the tip. It's something to keep an eye out for.

As a separate question, do people just play? Is there space for people to just sit down and go through scenarios from one of the many copies of the game that are likely to be floating around the convention, without it being an Event?

I got two out of the three modules for the original lottery event, so I'll miss the one in the middle.

I'm at work, and everything is already full by lunch time, except for events that are running continuously, but are the same event over and over. There isn't a reason for me to show up on Saturday, other than the banquet that I specifically paid for.

There's one event I can sign up for, but it explicitly says that teams should expect to play all three days, and the others are booked, so even if I take it, I'm only creating a problem. I booked it anyway. What else can I do?

I suppose I can hope for a "trade" (not that I have any slots to trade back). Although that looks like, again, I have to monitor this forum constantly, hoping for something to come up? How do people get anything when they have other things in their lives other than watching this website? I have to say, I'm not terribly impressed.

But it isn't clear what to do with scenarios in the core box.
Am I supposed to play this scenarios be or playing the curse( as it was previously?). Or curse is supposed to be played with fresh characters? Obviously playing core after curse isn't balanced.

We do know that they're separate adventure paths with different names: Dragon's Demand vs. Curse of the Crimson Throne. You should be able to play them in either order, and you'll do so with fresh characters rather than carrying them over from one path to the other.

Perhaps the scenarios in DD show off the new features of PACG 1.1?

What process do we use to opt in? I had read that it was in the My Subscriptions section of the account page, but I can't find the link or button that lets me do it.

Hey, Axoq, a couple more ACG events were added to the lottery, so you might have some choices to make now!

Shoot. I was at another event this weekend and had no idea that the list at the beginning wasn't finalized. I'm not seeing events in the list that weren't there before, which suggests that events that were previously listed as impossible to register for were converted to lottery events. I'm worried that I'm going to have a lot of free time on my hands.

Thanks, Matsu and Kate. I guess that's how I'll have to play it.

Hi, all. I could use the advice of more experienced con-goers to help me figure out the lottery system.

I play the Adventure Card Game, and I decided to come down so I could get the new edition in my hot little hands as soon as possible, and to meet other fans.

I have never played an RPG of any description in my life. This event doesn't feel like the place to discover I hate it/I'm no good at it, and I would especially feel bad if I fluked into a lottery-based game to discover this.

It seems there's a number of events based on PACG happening, probably enough to keep me occupied at all hours of each day, but only one that's on the lottery, and it seems to be a three-day event, meaning I should put a 4 on all three days. Beyond that, I see maybe one event (counterprogrammed against the Saturday session, or against the info session at 9 am on Friday) that I'm interested in.

We've been advised not to put just 4s and 0s, and for good reason -- if my name doesn't show up on the list before that event fills, I get nothing, but I'm not sure what else to do here. Help?

Thanks.

We know the boxes are smaller. They revealed this in one of the early Core Principles blog posts:

The Core Set will come in a 9"×12" box—that's just a little larger than the Pathfinder RPG Beginner Box—that holds your cards, dice, pawns (more on that later), and rulebooks. And Curse will be even smaller than that: 7.5"×9"—just a bit bigger than the Pathfinder RPG Pocket Edition. And all of Curse will be in that box—no more individual adventure boxes, and no more five-month delays between the first part and the last.

Octothorpe, pound sign, number sign, hash/hashtag. I usually use number sign.

In this context, though, I'd say "the Scenario's adventure deck number". Presumably we'll come up with something shorter that may or may not match the term used in the manual. ("The Veteran bonus" is tempting to me.)

So many syllables. Those are the standard names, and none of them are snappy enough. Or specific enough except the sce na ri o's ad ven ture deck num ber.

Plus veteran? Plus A (for Adventure deck)?

Getting back to the material from this post, out of curiosity, how do you pronounce #?

Proxies sound like a good idea. Will there be at least 2 of each type such as 2 A1s so one can be kept next to the card it proxies?

The blog post was pretty clear that the cards were unique, I thought. Most probably Proxies A1-A4 all stand in for the same henchman, B1 is the villain, etc.

I'm currently in the middle of a homebrew game -- Bloodlust Corsairs, a Ron Lundeen re-imagining of Skull and Shackles which I can very much recommend. We had two people who decided to play Class Deck characters rather than ones that came with S&S, and so we dumped their character deck contents into the box. This was also while the Ultimate decks were just coming out, so we threw in the Ultimate Combat and UMagic decks as well. We haven't been making any kind of moves towards thinning out those decks in the larger game, so all those cards are sticking around, modulo banishing Basics and Elites. (Never before had we banished so many Blessings of the Gods. Now we can't get rid of them fast enough.)

Does the game feel watered down and less on the theme of pirates? Well, aside from the argument that something "watered down" would actually be more appropriate for pirates, not really. The boons are more varied, but the banes are all still pirate-themed, and the banes at least outnumber the boons. The game certainly does not feel more generic.

Does it make it harder to acquire to acquire that killer item or ally that such-and-such a character ought to have? Somewhat, although the introduction of the Ultimate decks into the mix helps with that because that's their role. They're supposed to be supplements to the Class Decks, especially in the earlier going when nearly all the cards from those decks were taken from the AP decks. They're supposed to make your eyes get all sparkly when you get the chance to acquire one. I also have a hard time seeing any must-have specific boons that your party is considerably worse off without (outside of that one from a different AP:

Does it affect the interaction of the blessings deck/hourglass/clock? Yes, this is more of an effect. A number of the Ultimate blessings don't have matches or simply don't do anything interesting even when there is a match. It also made me want to carry a Blessing of the Gods in my deck just so I can copy powers every once in a while for those rare blessings we may never acquire. It's also weird to see the occasional EgypOsirian or Worldwound god spring up where you weren't expecting one. But this is a minor flaw.

All in all, the game doesn't feel all that different except that there is a lot more variety in the boons to acquire. This might be because it's a homebrew, where there's less room for calibration. The Lundeen games never add cards for theme, so the feeling of this card is clearly meant to do that isn't there. Packing extra cards in when replaying an AP doesn't seem all that bad.

(On the other hand, we all have craptacular non-Basic, non-Elite cards we all wish we could find an excuse to remove from the game. I sure won't try to stop you. :-) )

With the redesign of a core box plus an AP box required to play, though, I'll need a core box for each AP box in order to do that. Either that or I'm going to have to do some serious bookkeeping and split the core box cards from an AP in order to play a scenario in another AP, and this can be a pain when those core cards are in characters' decks.

So even though we might see an absolute price reduction overall (AP boxes will cost less than current AP boxes because the core cards are in another set), we either won't realize this overall savings (if we buy a core box for each AP box), won't be able to play concurrently in each AP (if we don't have a core box for each AP box), or will have to exercise very inefficient bookkeeping methods to split core box cards out from AP boxes in order to play in other APs.

This has occurred to me too, although with only one new full AP using the core set for the foreseeable future, this isn't going to be a real problem for a while. And the original four will still be playable separately -- I don't believe they're requiring those four be played with the core set. I think the backwards compatibility refers to rules changes, which should easily be implemented.

Being able to play five games simultaneously is probably going to be enough for most people.

If there one thing I own more of than PFACG cards, it's LEGO.

I know what I am building this weekend.

Mahalo!

My work here is done.

Wow, that's a lot of cool ideas you had - thanks for sharing! :)

How do your upgrades influence the setup time? I hope it doesn't suffer too much.

Not too badly, actually. While people are shuffling the various decks, I set out the location cards on their stands and put out the cubes. Once that's done, there's a nice clear display of what cards belong in each location, and they can be dealt out quickly without straining to check numbers.

Mike Selinker wrote:

Okay, try not to go down the rabbit-hole on all those new terms like "hourglass," "small location," "heal," "story bane," "closing henchmen," "Proxy A," and "danger."

You should have put that before the image. I went down so many rabbit holes as I studied the image. ;) Everything makes sense, though ("small location" is the only term that I haven't solidly locked down). I especially like the flexibility of the reward for that particular scenario.

We have seen that the locations can now be set up with varying numbers of cards in them, so perhaps that instruction is to set up a beginner game with only ~6 cards per location, instead of ~9 or ~12?

Would it be feasible to have longer PACG APs? How might characters designed for such an AP look? Could it be done in a way that is backwards compatible with the existing characters?

I think this is one of the issues they're looking to address with the reboot. What we've heard is that, rather than releasing the adventures in a path in 110-card packs, at the least CotCT is being released all in one box, so they can be as big or as small as it takes to tell the story.

As to the question of raising characters up through that range of levels: I think a starting character with nothing checked is essentially a level 1 character (and I say this, never having played the RPG) so the real challenge is mimicking a level 20 character. It may be that the way to do that is with something like the mythic path cards which would award additional powers. You'd need an array of them somehow to match the variation of roles.

The real trick is getting the escalation on both sides right. Just increasing the difficulty to defeat isn't enough, I think.

I can't answer the intent of the Cloak of the Winds, but for Sedja, no, you do not have to be one of those characters. This makes it useful to move everyone away from you before you actually explore if being alone at a location is an advantage.

Oh, I could see the utility of it immediately, but just because it'd be cool/helpful to be able to do something doesn't mean TPTB will let you do it. :-) Thanks!

Cloak of Winds from the Oracle deck has an Arcane/Intelligence/Wisdom/Divine check to acquire, and an Arcane/Divine check to recharge. Should it have the Arcane trait in addition to the Divine trait?

Sedja from Mummy's Mask (4) says to move any characters from your location together to another location. Do you have to be one of those characters?

Thanks!

I'm generally a believer that anything and everything you need to know to play a card game should be printed on the cards and so I agree with concerns that the game will get mired in keywords.

You think you mean this. You don't.

What you have said means that you want the sequence of every turn printed on the cards, you want the rule about being able to help with any other player's check but not able to defeat any card on behalf of any other player, about how to handle a villain's being found and closing/blocking locations, and taking blessings from the blessings deck if you fail to defeat the villain and taking them from the box if you don't, remainders about what "a die" means on a card that adds one, the precise meanings of recharge, reveal, discard, bury, banish...

I've made cards on Drive Thru before. That paragraph, which is merely a summary of some of the rules you're talking about putting onto cards, would pretty much fill a card. You haven't left any room for a card to do what it does, in favour of talking about what every card does. That's what the rulebook is for.

"We have to do x because of y."

"How do you know that?"
"It's in the rulebook."
*collective groan from the entire table*

If your players don't feel like learning the rules of the game they're playing, that's on them. The majority of the rest of us are fine, thanks.

For the new Base Set, our current plan is that character decks are the only thing that's ever called a "deck." Location decks are now simply "locations," and the blessing deck is now... something we'll talk about later.

..."the clock"? We've seen it called the hourglass in previews of the new material, but you guys did encourage us to point the cards we deal off that thing at the current player, which means they point outwards and the direction it points moves around in a circle. And it's four letters shorter than "hourglass".

Just sayin'.

I will point out: the folks at Paizo have precisely zero to do with the production of the game you guys are complaining about.

Not sure where to post this, but:

The Warpriest Class Deck List available for download here lists "Acidic Greatsword +1" and two other swords as characters, and has two entries for "Blessing of the Lord in Iron". These probably should be fixed.

Yes, the DriveThru cards will always list those extra skills at the end, rather than under the main skill that they derive from. The program isn't quite clever enough to do it the same way as the official cards.

There isn't a Strange Aeons module for PACG. What were you looking for?

Other interesting details: The Core set will be playable by itself.

CotCT will be released all at one go, rather than month by month?

Storybooks will be the new way of delivering scenarios, rather than on just cards, more in line with the way OP scenarios are done.

Pawns will be included with sets going forward, starting with all existing 2e iconics in the Core set, and if any non-iconic characters appear in future paths, they'll be in there.

And playtesting seems to be going well, since they feel that they're on the right track.

Since the new base set is designed to be modular, I’d love to also see mini-expansions—decks which have a character and 3 scenarios (can pull from the various modules and PFS scenarios, or come up with brand new short stories). Such a deck makeup would provide some additional variety not only in replaying old APs but also gives you brand new game to play, and I think it should be possible to fit all of that in 110 cards (rules insert card, 3 character cards, 1 adventure card, 3 scenario cards, 3 villain cards makes 11 cards, you’ll probably want 50ish boons to flesh out the character, which leaves 49ish cards for locations, henchmen, and other banes—if we do henchmen proxying a la OP then that gives even more space).

Some of us have suggested Bane Add-On Decks, so that if you want to make your own adventure path, however long, but want to do a theme other than mummies, demons or pirates, shorter modules would serve the same purpose.

From the Playtest FAQ:

Will there be a new edition of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game to go along with the new edition of the roleplaying game?

The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game isn't so closely tied to the RPG rules that it needs a new edition. But as it happens, we are working on a redesign of the Adventure Card Game, and the new edition of the RPG will certainly be reflected in that.

This is seriously tempting me into finding some way to come.