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I'll admit I wasn't really super excited about Saga Lands when I first read about it. Years of being disappointed in how most fantasy works tends to boil down my culture to "Warriors obsessed with strength who raid, burn, pillage, and plunder" when there is so much more to the Norse cultural heritage. Our chief deity was a g~@ d+&n trickster god for crying out loud!

But after reading through Lost Omens: Mwangi and Lost Omens: Tian Xia World Guide I can't help but be a little excited and hopeful that Paizo will turn the Lands of the Linnorm King into something more than just a caricature of Norse culture. I also hope that Irrisen can get a similar facelift and not just be "Fantasy Russia", but we'll see.

SO EXCITED FOR THIS AP!!

You and me both! Though I am not sure what I am most excited about between Vaultlines and Bastion of Blasphemies. And Waking Tigers seems so cool as well! For my tastes Paizo has just been announcing banger after banger since Hellbreakers lmao

IDK, a chariot race sounds like the perfect opportunity to break out 2e's Skill Challenge rules, which have the significant advantage of not having been made up for one (1) AP book. Plus they're more accepting of consequences that aren't hit point damage.

Agents of Edgewatch book 3 has an article about colosseum games and playing them out as Skill Challenges. Chariot Races are amongst the list and they basically run it using the Chase System IIRC.

Absalom seems to have a teeming populace underwater, though hardly investigated. Did the police AP address this? An amphibious criminal would have lots of flexibility!

It did not. Not sure if anything of this should be a spoiler, but I will spoiler it to be safe:

An article at the back of Sky King's Tomb's 3rd book mentions the cavern elves. They are called Ayindilar elves and live in "small, isolated, and self-sufficient settlements throughout Nar-Voth and Sekamina that often serve as safe havens for explorers."

So Darkland elves still exists, but they are gonna have very different vibe to what the drow brought.

I honestly prefer building characters for higher level APs with the new ap backgrounds rather than using them as sequel for completely different unrelated campaign or ap, I do appreciate flexibility in how you can use them, but it definitely feels bit of bummer if to run high level ap you'd "need" to have separate long running campaign just to get to that point xD

I agree that you shouldn't need or feel like it is needed to run a lvl1-10 before jumping into a high level AP. But I do appreciate it when the Player's Guide does offer some guidance on if you wanted to do that. Personally I'd prefer it if the Player's Guide was able to give guidance to both those wanting to start fresh and those wanting to use it as a sequel, but I do understand that might be a big ask.

Anyway I still dream of the day when Second Darkness would get hardcover remake (I appreciate Gatewalkers getting hardcover treatment too)

You and me both. Having read through all of Second Darkness in prep for Sky King's Tomb, I ended up implementing some of that story as a B-plot for my campaign lol. I think Second Darkness has a lot of potential as a campaign, but it could use a bit of clean-up. Alas, it is probably not profitable at all for Paizo to remake an old 3.5e campaign for 2e. But I can dream.

I get that a lot of the prominent Darklands ancestries aren't playable but I don't really see Paizo making playable xulgaths or serpentfolk anytime soon. I would like to see playable caligni though.

For my home game I think I suggested to my players that they reflavour Fetchlings to be Caligni, Athamaru to be Ulat-Kini, Nagaji as Serpentfolk, and lizardfolk as Xulgath. It is by no means a perfect solution, but it works. Oh, and for those ancestries that didn't have darkvision innate I let them have it. I should probably have made a specific heritage, but it is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

I know this isn't the main point of your post, and I too really, really, REALLY want a Darklands book--mostly because I love the Darklands, and also want playable Caligni--but intellect devourers do still exist in the setting. They're called xoarians now, with the epithet of "corpse rider," and have been folded into the Dominion of the Black more fully.

In my original draft of my post I had written a sentence to acknowledge that some of those pre-OGL creatures have been simply renamed. But that sentence was lost during one of my rewrites. Still, my main point was that there currently isn't an easy way to learn this lore without scouring the various books both new and old. And so a Lost Omens: Darklands book is desperately needed to address this issue.

And your player's PC is one of their descendents. Maybe trying to discover what happened to his people.

Oh, my (at this point, heavily) homebrewed Sky King's Tomb campaign is well underway at this point. We're at the tail end of Book 2. I ended up trying to marry the old lore about Drow's existing with the new lore about Ayndilar by having the two share a similar origin (Elves fled into the Darklands to escape the destruction of the surface) but then split on their ideology on how to handle living in the Darklands. Drow deciding to go full "survival of the fittest" mode and "the end justify the means" kind of mentality when it comes to what they are willing to do. Whereas the Ayndilar are trying to hide and make hidden settlements that isolate themselves from the horror of the Darklands. And their skin colour change is just the natural "elves will gradually adjust to their surroundings" kind of thing instead of the "elves who are evil are cursed by the higher powers to be dark-skinned".

Just wanted to voice my desire for Paizo making this scenario publicly available for purchase. As all my games are digital I have no desire to pay $60 for a set of miniatures, but I'd love to run this scenario for my group as an introduction to Hellbreakers.

In 1E, elementals and outsiders are among those creature types that can't be raised from the dead or resurrected. That's not the case in 2nd edition Pathfinder, where those effects are limited by the level of the dead creature and the time they've been dead and not by what KIND of creature they were.

Off-topic question but reading this got me curious: RAW can you resurrect an undead who has been destroyed?

So I got a question that isn't neccessarily specific to Vaultlines, but about the Adventure Path releases as whole, but I figured I'd use the Vaultlines listing as an example.

So I can see from the store page that Sen H.H.S., Jacob W. Michaels, and Andrew White are listed as the authors of the AP. I assume these are the three people who, if the APs were still being written as 3 separate boosk, would handle one book each. What I do not see anywhere in the listing is a mention of who it is that is the Adventure Path's "director" or "developer" or whatever the position is called. The one who is in charge of the AP as a whole and making sure the different parts meld together. I am not sure if that position has ever been listed in the store listing for AP products, but if not I am curious to know who specifically is in charge of Vaultlines.

I hope that question makes sense.

The neothelids of Denebrum also need to get replaced—but there we've got seugathis and it's easy to replace them with GIANT seugathis.

Wait, are neothelids OGL? I thought they were Paizo originals that were the Golarion equivelant of Mind Flayers.

The drow were a perfect storm of all of the above NOT applying.

Ain't that the truth. And as someone who like the Drown and utilize them a lot (but also like the invention of the new Ayndilar as a form of non-evil Darklands elf), I imagine it's gonna be a bit of a headache having to try and marry any new drow-less Darklands lore with the reality of my own home table. Like I imagine given how Zirnakaynin is mentioned of being a haunted city ruin, it might end up being used for a future adventure, which will clash with it already being established as the drow capitol. But those are my worries and problems to solve, not Paizo's.

Thank you Jacob for the guess, it turned out to indeed be correct! For anyone else that might be curious but didn't catch it, I jotted down some information about what was said about Vaultlines.

Number one is that it is the first adventure Paizo has written that takes place in the entirety of Darklands (as in, it visits all 3 layers). And the entire adventure takes place in the Darklands. It starts below ground and stays below ground.

The adventure assumes the PCs will be Darklands natives, but it could also be linked to some previous lvl1-10 adventures like Abomination Vaults or Sky King's Tomb. The adventure starts at lvl11, so if the APs don't end with the PCs hitting lvl11 GMs might need to bridge the gap there.

They also showed one new fleshwarp monster, a humanoid with two big, muscley armored hands and one giant hand for a head (but tiny tiny legs).

I am very much looking forward to November. I assume my Sky King's Tomb campaign will be wrapped up by then, so might ask if they want to continue on with Vaultlines.

EDIT: Thank you for hosting, Maya!

Does anyone know when/where this Adventure Path was announced? Just saw it on the store page. Seems to be a lvl11-20 Darklands AP so I'm very excited to know more about it, as I expect my Sky King's Tomb campaign to wrap up this year.

There's honestly very little published at the moment. Most information about Bastardhall is in the 1E Campaign Setting book Rule of Fear with a teeeeeeensy bit in Inner Sea Magic, Dungeons of Golarion, The Dungeoneer's Handbook, and Book of the Dead

Duly noted and thanks once again for the reply!

the August subscriber day will be either 5 days before or 2 days after my birthday, and I can't ask for a better gift than Bastardhall

This is basically how I feel, as my birthday is a few days before the adventure's release. "Recently" (as in, these past few years) I've felt like Paizo have been making adventures just for me due to how many of them have touched on themes or plot points I've wanted to make use of in my own home campaigns. If they release a new naval campaign or an elemental planes / lords focused on then I'll know for sure :P

Thank you to both Cori and James! A follow-up question I now have (since a few books were mentioned); What books would should I look at to read up on the lore of Bastardhall? July is ways away and though I want this adventure in my hands now so I can start prepping, I will make do by reading on lore

As someone who never interacted with the official Golarion setting until 2021 I have no idea what Bastardhall is. But as someone who has tried for a decade to design his own Castlevania-esque campaign and never managed to quite make it work I am unbelievably hyped for this Adventure Path.

On that note, IDK if James is still answering questions, but if you are: Is there a BBEG in this adventure or is it more of just "the mystery of the Castle" kind of plothook?

As long as folks are giving feedback on the use of subsystems in Adventure Paths... I'd love to hear about more recent examples. ...

If the use of those (research, influence, chases, infiltrations, etc.) are still pain points... I'd love to hear about why they are, ESPECIALLY if they're still pain points...

I can regale you with the experiences my table has had with the subsystems. For reference I am currently running Agents of Edgewatch (soon ending, we've just hit lvl20) and Sky King's Tomb (half-way through it). I have also played through the first 3 books of Blood Lords and am currently a player in Season of Ghosts, closing in on the end of book 3.

Me and my group have gotten quite familiar with the basic Victory Points system, as well as the Influence and Research subsystems. (And Rituals as well, if we count those as a subsystem). It's to the point that I or the other GM can just go "This is an influence/research/victory point encounter" and our group knows what to do. We've encountered two paint points with these systems.

The first pain is with influence, where we find that we can blow through the influence statblocks of our enemies within a couple of rounds of influence. This is of course roll dependant, but for most of the APs we tend to be able to max out every influenceable character well within the pre-written time limit given by the adventure.

The second paint point comes with rituals, and it is that it is super easy to make them impossible to pass. Since rituals must have the correct number of secondary casters, and the secondary casters must crit succeed to give a +2 circumstance bonus but need only fail to incure -4 circumstance penalty, it becomes very easy to make the ritual impossible to pass. It's even worse if anyone critical fail, at which point rituals decrease their degree of success by one. This is "fine" when rituals is just an optional thing we do to resurrect our party members, gain undead minions, or some other downtime like activity that isn't crucial to the adventure's progression. But...

On the other hand Research encounters seems to go over pretty well. In the adventures I have played through every research encounter has had a "ticking clock" attached to their research encounters ensuring that we can't just spend forever getting max Research Points. But also makes sure you only need to hit the low thresholds in order to continue the adventure. So no real complaints here.

But now for the two systems that we really struggle with: Chases and especially Infiltrations.

To take chases first, the problem isn't that we don't understand the rules, but more that we find the rules to be... dumb? So the chases are basically just regular Victory Points system, except you are trying to catch up to someone who is overcoming obstacles automatically ahead of you. The problem we find is the immersion breaking of having to have every PC having to roll to overcome every obstacle. Or to be more precise, the fact that the group as a whole need to overcome the obstacle's VP threshold or else we can't progress. If our acrobatic monk leaps onto the market stall roofs and acrobatics checks themselves over the crowd blocking their path, then surely the monk should be able to proceed regardless of if the wizard at the back gets lost in the mass of people, right? But the chase rules says no, the monk has to wait for their party to catch up before they can proceed. This tend to break our immersion and has lead to a lot of frustration with the chase rules at my table.

The main subsystem we struggle with however, is infiltrations! We. Don't. Understand. Infiltrations.
By that I mean, we've read the rules for infiltrations, we sorta understand how they are suppose to work in theory. But none of the infiltrations we've encountered whilst playing through the APs have really... operated in the way that the GM Core subsystem describes...

After finally getting my hands on War of Immortals and reading through the lore, there was a bit in the update on Garund that caught my eye. Appearently there is a pool that gives those who bathes in its waters glimpses of memories from those whom Gorum has killed. And one of those who bathed there was a pirate captain whom says they saw the memories of a long-dead Pirate demigod, and conversely learned of the location of a great treasure. The rub is that the treasure lies somewhere amongst other planes and not on Golarion.

This plot hook speaks to me immensely, and now I really want an AP about a interplanar treasure hunt utilizing pirate ships and racing to get the treasure before anyone else can. I feel like this adventure will tick so many boxes for me. Pirates, planes, sea-creatures. Heck yeah!

Sorry for taking a few days, was very busy these last few days. But for what I've done with the relics in my game is I've added one relic - The Skyweave Prototypes from the Lost Dwarven Treasures section.

Skyweave Prototype
Aspects metal
Forming the Bond The PCs are given the shield by the Stonefist clan.
Advancing the Bond Find and recover the remaining Skyweave Prototypes.
Minor Gifts Absorb Injury, Enhancing Circuitry, Scrap Shot
Major Gifts Precious Anodization, Spirit Blink

The first item they got was the Skyweave Prototype Shield, which is a reinforced steel shield made out of Skymetal. After much research I figured out that Skymetal is most likely Djeezet, so I made it that. I introduced an NPC from the Lost Omens: Highhelm book—Skogg Bloodhammer, the owner of the Cracked Anvil Brewery, which served as the PCs main meeting spot and drinking hole. I noticed that in the description he is always polishing a shield, so I made him be the one currently in possession of the Shield and had him grant it to the PCs after they helped him out at the end of book 1. Advancing the bond will be "as simple" as finding the remaining pieces little by little.

As for the existing relics I was going to change Kalmaug's Journal to function like a staff instead of a Grimoire, but then the player whom was playing an Oracle retired the character and rolled up a wizard, so I kept the journal as is.

Book 2 introduces 2 more relics for a total of six. So the base adventure does account for for there being bigger parties. That being said I agree that the relics may not fit the party in such a way that they all fit.

I'm heading out right now, so I can't give you a full write up on what I've done for my party of 6 PCs, but I'll see if I can't write about this tomorrow. But for the most part I looked at the "Lost Dwarven Treasures" section for inspiration.

What level do the players start out in this AP? 1? 11? Something else?

Didn't see anything about it in the Player's Guide.

The PG says they players are some kind of "dignitaries," so I'm guessing higher than 1st?

The first section says that the PCs start at level 3.

But I digress, getting back to WoW and communication issues, I did notice it was kinda weird that campaign overview explains ancient history with Ghorus and such, but doesn't really explain any of the current and upcoming events of the campaign in detail besides the book summaries themselves.

I second this. The most disappointing thing for me when reading WoW as it was releasing was not knowing what the entire outline of the adventure was going to look like from book 1. I feel like Paizo has in the past been better at explaining up front the central conflict of the AP and what each subsequent book will cover. But in WoW we just got "Here is some backstory about Ghorus, and here is the back cover text we wrote on the store page... It was really not helpful in figuring out what was going on or where the adventure was headed.

The second main complaint I got is that I feel like the pre-marketing was setting the adventure up for a "Civilization vs Nature" theme with the whole "For once, the wilderness is your ally instead of a hazard to be overcome" thing. But instead the adventure ended up being "Fey/Nature civil war" which was not what I bought in for. Of course, this could have been a misinterpretation of the marketing on my part.

I'm running Skull and Shackles right now, and a Skull and Shackles 2e Remaster Remaster with Plunder and Peril bonus content would be significantly fun.

I would love either a updated PF2e version of Skull and Shackles or an entirely new high seas adventure for PF2e.

Sorry, but this gnome is just BUGGIN' me.

Looking through Book 2 and like... she's a guide to what should be a fairly well known location in the Darklands. And... that's it. And why isn't she at all connected to the original expedition to her destroyed home earlier in the book?

Like, you could just hire someone to take you there. So... what's the reason that she in particular is important?

Yeah, Jirelga's irrelevancy (and the handwaving of dealing with the prison warden) is bugging me as well. So inspired some stuff I read online (I forget if it was here or on reddit) I've made her extremely paranoid, jittery, and vengeful against the worm. She wants to find Zogototaru and kill her. So she isn't going to leave once they reach the Court of Ether but instead stick around as an ally of sorts for the party. I also dropped the whole prison thing and just had Jirelga be a prisoner in the Gremlin room of the bakery.

One of the PCs has involvement with forgery and artifact dealing. I think what I'll do to tie in Jirelga is have her sell some relic - maybe something that 'fell' off the worm??? which our intrepid PC comes across and it's got some hints to Felgunn / Targick [still thinking if I should go for it being a 'relic' or just a powerless item]. That would then help with Targick pointing out the need to find her in Part 3. BUT... I dunno.

Seems kinda weak. What do you guys think?

Since I wanted to introduce the relics all a bit earlier, I made it so she had the "relic seed" of the Avernal Cape in the form of a scale belonging to Zogototaru. The relic seed will at the moment just give the fire resistance if you spend an action raising it, but it gives the PCs an indication that there will be a worm relic. Which I think is important as one of the PCs is a Created Fleshwarp who is trying to ascend into Cave Wormhood. So since everyone else has gotten relics so far I wanted to make sure they know "Yours will come as well, young worm." Jirelga and the PC have had... interesting interactions so far. The PC admires Jirelga's grit in surviving being swallowed by Zogototaru and keeps calling her "The one blessed by the worm!" and Jirelga deep down just wants to kill the abomination that reminds her of her home's destruction. But guided by the shard they now travel to the Court of Ether to find the Cave Worm.

Elemental planes. I know they don't do six book APs anymore, but I had this dump idea of having a six-book AP where each book focuses on one of the elemental planes. But even within a shorter 3-book AP I'd like some elemental plane shenanigans.

I'd also like an aquatic adventure of some kind. Be it high seas (something like Treasure Island perhaps?), or a underwater merfolk adventure, or maybe something with the Elemental Plane of water. I don't really care which setting it is in, but an excuse to pull out all the cool water monsters is something I crave.

My only concern though is whether the item is Foundry-compatible for 2e remaster. Does anyone know how that works, carrying over items made for Foundry 2e adventure work for a Foundry 2e remastered adventure?

AFAIK Foundry doesn't really separate Legacy and Remaster in any meaningful way. They took out a lot of the overlapping classes / spells / feats and stuff, but those are all available in a module called "PF2e Legacy" which you can install if you want to use say, the old Wizard schools. But all the old items and monsters should just be in the compendium by base. And I can confirm that the

Yeah, the whole Gala Champion thing confused me a lot to upon reading it. I like the concept of it, but the actual mechanics of the overall scoring is very poorly explained and the book can't seem to agree with itself it is suppose to be a team thing or an individual thing.

Thank you for this write up! This is actually perfect for me to slot into our current investigation in my campaign of Edgewatch. We're at the tail end of book 3 and my players are chasing down the bomb threat posed by Franca Laurentz. As written I am suppose to give them downtime to just prepare for the Irorium being bombed, but my players like being proactive and wants to find Franca and the bomb before she gets a chance to detonate it at the Irorium. This might work perfect as a place for them to ultimately be lead to and deal with in their chase for the bomb!

Good catch! I hadn't really noticed this discrepancy myself. The Foundry module doesn't actually list their levels in the encounter text like in the book does, but looking at the pdf I can see that you are indeed correct.
I had found it a bit strange that there was going to be an encounter against 3 Redcaps on mounts as a solitary redcap has instilled the fear of Pharasma into my players in a previous campaign, but I hadn't actually looked much harder at it.

I will probably just slap the weak template on them as well (or not, depends on what the math turns out to be for 6 PCs).

The Smuggler's Den encounters' listed balance are all for a party of 4 5th-leve PCs.