Curmudgeonly's page

I'm sorry to hear this news, I hope all those affected land on their feet. I myself was hit by layoffs in 2023, it's really hard to navigate those waters.

Diamond’s exclusive contract prevented us from immediately moving to a new distributor, even after they stopped selling our books. A judge terminated that contract earlier this year, but Diamond has appealed, delaying resolution.

That's messed up by Diamond... I hope you guys hear soon and it's in your favor...

Hi!

I am still waiting for the arrival of the new Beginner Box: Secrets of the Unlit Star.

BUT...I bought the Foundry VTT content and gave it a bit of a test spin over the weekend. It's good and they do an interesting job of easing players into the various mechanics.

BUT...I really can't wrap my head around the layout of the Temple of the Unlit Star. Maybe there's an old school side-view image of the temple in relation to the surface of the ground in the hard copy version of the Beginner Box?

But like...if someone wants to explain it to me here...that would be lovely? ** spoiler omitted **

Foundry's just a platform, who makes content for it is not gated by them. You could write a module for Foundry today.

Paizo would be the one to inform you if a product is being made.

The Demiplane/Roll20 release is done by the demiplane team. They take the assets they put on Demiplane and just transfer them to Roll20.

It is not like the Foundry releases at all, which have the maps remade using their own art assets.

You will get something very similar to what's in Roll20 using the PDFtoFoundry module.

The map of Isger on page 176 has the North on the left, East on top, South to the right and West to the bottom. Same is true in the Interactive Maps PDF.

This seems to counter everything the text is saying in the campaign and was confusing me quite a bit.

I finally compared against the map in the Hellfire Dispatches book, and it has the compass with North on the top.

I ask again, why did Paizo implement these changes? Aside from the inevitable price increases due to inflation, which I think a majority of players, while unhappy about, do understand, why did Paizo choose to throw digital consumers under the bus? Why are they continuing to do so? Why are they, through choosing to take no concrete actions, choosing to do this?

I mean, the answers you seek are in the blog...

We’ve worked hard to hold the line as long as possible, even as development, art, and production costs have continued to rise.

It's been 3 years since PDF prices were changed, and the price no longer is suitable.

And I will point out again, that the hardcover AP books at $49.99 are cheaper despite the price increase compared to buying 3 AP volumes at $19.99. So you would in fact be spending less.

If Paizo was out to screw their digital customers, they'd remove all their rules being available for free online.

What they are trying to do is pay their employees fairly, pay the artists fairly, pay their designers and writers fairly.

Now, if you're frustrated about PDFs and Foundry modules not being bundled anymore, or not having discounts on foundry modules if you own the PDF, that I understand. But they have also answered this, stating they are working on finding a solution. They don't own the store software, so no, they can't provide you with a more concrete answer, solution or date.

You don't need to sell us on it James :P We already said we wanted it!

Remake of Second Darkness is on my wishlist as well.

There was a stream not too long ago where James Jacobs himself brought it up as something he would be interested in doing, so I wouldn't rule it out as a possibility: Youtube link

Though I'm sure the office of expectation management will temper our expectations soon enough :)

I ended up reaching out to CS and they added the PDFs to my account within an hour of my email. Maybe worth it for folks to shoot them an email.

Rue Dickey wrote:

Hey everyone! Thank you for giving each other a heads-up on this! We are experiencing issues with our subscription payment processor and are currently investigating. We hope to resolve this soon and have subscriptions processed and PDFs released as quickly as possible.

I'll follow up here with any further updates as we have them!

Thank you for the update. Please give us information as soon as possible if we need to update our payment method, or if this error will be handled on your end and we don't need to do anything.

I did not file a ticket but my order just now went through with both my subs on it. That being said, my downloads page only has the Galactic Ancestries in file-per-chapter format, and the Lost Omens book is missing.

Same issue. In an effort to not inundate CS with tickets, I'll wait to see if Paizo responds to this thread.

moosher12 wrote:

I ran the game, I initially spent about 20 minutes wondering what it was directing me to, but once I cross checked with my copy of Bestiary 6, I just realized it was referring to what it does, but yes. It does mean Pathfinder 2 Bestiary 1, page 6 and 212. It's awkward formatting, yeah, but sometimes things are poorly formatted. Doesn't change the fact it's referring to the Pathfinder 2E Bestiary.

You can argue what you want, it won't change the fact if you open up PF1E Bestiary 6, you'll get an entry for a CR 13 Protean instead of a level 0 kobold warrior.

But here, have a citation. Check the source section.
https://www.aonprd.com/MonsterDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Oshageros

No, I get it now. I see what you're saying.

But on page 202, under Trollhounds, it says "Pathfinder Bestiary 2 268" so does that mean "Pathfinder Bestiary 1 pages 2 and 268"? No it doesn't because a comma is missing. That's pretty cryptic.

Look, I'm not complaining about the individual little errors. I am complaining that the quality of the product does not meet my expectations. That at the very least it should align with the rest of the core books if you are going to sell them as a ruleset. To me that seems like a fairly reasonable and common sense request.

That's it. I said my peace. Thanks for your time.

It's not obvious at first glance, I had same issue a while back, but look at the italicization of Beastiary 2 vs Beastiary 6. If the number is italicized, then it's part of the book's title, if it's not, it's referring to a page.

So it's either they:

A: Wanted to increase the price of the PDF and FVTT content and chose to remove the discount as a means to do that. In this scenario, they would have lied to the public with their statements.

B:They decided they didn't care enough about a portion of its customer base, and viewed going forward with the change an acceptable loss.

In either of those events, the persona of Paizo is seen as stepping away from their roots of "caring for the players".

It's not simply about the money for me anyways. It's about the feeling of betrayal.

Nah, you're just making up your own scenarios and ignoring what they have already told you:

• * The old store was not sustainable (everyone who used it agrees on that)
  
• * They evaluated a bunch of solutions and settled on this new one
  
• * Being that it's not their software, it natively doesn't support some of Paizo's unique requirements.
  
• * Paizo wants to find a solution to reintroduce the discount and is working with the software company on this.

It's also clear you've never licensed software at an enterprise level. Paizo is not the only client this vendor has. They have their own priorities and goals for their development pipeline. I'm sure Paizo is doing what it can to get their features as high as possible on the company's sprints.

Lastly, I'm sure you'll say that Paizo should have thought of this before picking this solution, and my response to that is, none of us know what other solutions were evaluated and it's much more likely that the other solutions they could afford were simply much worse, as opposed to Paizo being malicious and wanting to screw their increasingly important digital consumers.

The world is not black and white. People can stand to be a bit more patient.

Prices went up, yes... but are people just not doing math or something?

3 set AP books are $20 a piece, for a total of $60.
New single book APs are $50.

It's literally cheaper still to buy the single book PDF than when the APs were split into 3...

Rules are still 100% free on various sites...

I can understand the frustration folks have with not receiving a discount for owning the PDF and wanting to purchase the Foundry VTT module, that one makes sense to me, but Paizo has clearly explained the situation there even if they can't remedy the situation today.

But acting like they are being greedy when their price increase is literally cheaper than how much they charged previously is utterly bizarre.

You had previously mentioned in a stream that you had interest in revisiting / updating Second Darkness.

Will this book cover any of that or is it a wholly separate story?

Thanks Calcryx, how did you find that? it's not listed on the AP pages, that I can see...

Thanks AFigureOfBlue.

@Maya - what do you mean product sales page vs AP landing page? Can you give examples?

For example, I can't see a link to the player's guide on the consolidated Gatewalkers page (https://store.paizo.com/pathfinder-adventure-path-gatewalkers/), though I do see one here (https://store.paizo.com/pathfinder/pathfinder-second-edition/adventure-pat hs/gatewalkers/) thanks to AFigureOfBlue

I also want to point out that there's much inconsistency here. The Gatewalkers PG is bolded at least to make it stand out a little, but Revenge of the Runelords looks like normal text (https://store.paizo.com/pathfinder/adventures/revenge-of-the-runelords/)

I think it would be good to change the page's layout to have it be more explicit, like a new line that just links to the Players Guide like:

Player's Guide

The old AP pages had links to Player's Guides, but either I'm completely blind or the new store doesn't link them anywhere.

Additional Feedback:
The old AP landing page was beautiful and interesting, made you want to click into each product to learn about it. You all should bring it back and link from it to the store product pages.

The new adventures store page has everything alphabetically sorted on the left side, and the top description section, which I sort of understand, but I much preferred seeing the sequential order.

Update: Just got mine

I have not received mine yet

You can hear it from James directly here OceanshieldwolPF 2.5:

Paizo Direct for December

Let him enjoy his vacation :)

I sent this question into the support team with another issue I am having, but I suppose I will ask it here too. Has the discount for owning the pdfs of an adventure towards a foundry module gone away? If it has I find that rather disappointing. I run most of my games through foundry and have been for a long while. The fact that I get the pdfs and the discount on the module is really the whole reason I am doing the subscription to get the physical adventure books. Maybe I just missed something with the new site though.

This is indeed a change due to the new store not being able to gate discounts based on ownership, it was announced in one of the blogs:

Foundry VTT: We’ve been offering two different versions of Foundry VTT products: one that includes the PDF and the code together, and one that offers just the code at a discount for customers who already owned the PDF. The new store unfortunately can’t support gating a product behind PDF ownership, so we’ll be offering our Foundry modules exclusively as code-only items and pricing them similarly to the code-only Paizo products already available for purchase on the official Foundry storefront.

While that does mean that our existing PDF + Foundry bundles and discounts for PDF ownership will be going away with the launch of the new store, we fully plan to explore new options in the near future that can offer a similar combined value to customers who invest deeply into digital content.

https://paizo.com/blog/introducing-the-new-paizo-store

Also, the whole “Don’t worry multi-subscription customers, yes we’re taking away the Free Scenario multi-subscription incentive, but you can just use your gold to purchase the Scenarios we previously gave you for free” isn’t panning out very well. In addition to being a pain to have to go through the whole ‘exchange gold to get a code and then use that code to buy what we used to automatically add to your account for free’ process every month, the scenarios are priced such that we will either have to waste some of the scenario discount or pay money out of pocket.

Example:
-We use 50 gold to get $10 off Scenarios.
-If a scenario costs $6 (ignoring tax and discount), we just wasted $4 worth of value since apparently that unspent scenario discount doesn’t carry over to the next scenario purchase.
-If we instead order two scenarios for a total of $12, we’re paying $2 for the scenarios we used to get for free.

Never thought I’d long for the “good old days” of the mess that was the old store, but here we are. :-(

The blog they had put out specifically intended each $10 code to be for 1 society scenario. https://paizo.com/blog/introducing-paizo-plus

You’ll see that you can get a Pathfinder Society or Starfinder Society scenario for $10 off, which will make most scenarios you choose free.

Sounds like the want the value to be 50 gold = 1 scenario.

Do we need to contact CS about our Gold missing from prior purchases for Paizo Plus? (as well as gold from the subs that just shipped?)

Or will this be resolved automatically?

In the new downloads section, the title of the product doesn't specify if it's the single pdf or split by chapter version, you have to click in to see. It is confusing.

Also, a few bugs with titles:

The Gatewalker Hardcover is listed as 2247461 for the single file version and 2247455 for the split by chapter version.

Monster Core is listed as 2022404 for single file and 2022397 for split by chapter

Age of Ashes Player's Guide is listed as 2020490

I also regularly get an error when attempting to navigate the pagination for the download

I thought our past purchases would get taken into account for the Paizo Plus - but I started with 0 stars and not at legendary status.

Did I misunderstand?

Also Hephaistos: https://sf2e.hephaistos.online/

OceanshieldwolPF 2.5 wrote:

Will Product Discussion threads disappear?

The forum discussion for products will disappear from the product detail page. Those historical pages will still be present in the forums, however.

-Jim

Damn - that's unfortunate. It was a really good place to engage with devs... :(

Technical limitations aside, we do still believe that you should have an option for getting both the Foundry VTT module and the PDF for a given adventure without having to pay full price for both, and we are actively dedicated to finding a way to implement a new solution in the (hopefully near) future

Hmm, this is unfortunate for those of us who get who get the PDF as part of subscriptions.

Jim Butler wrote:

The new store unfortunately can't support gating a product behind PDF ownership, so we'll be offering our Foundry modules exclusively as code-only items and pricing them similarly to the code-only Paizo products already available for purchase on the official Foundry storefront.

The way I read it, you won't be losing the PDF discount as the product that will be available will be priced the same as if you had the PDF under the current system. Assuming the are no other differences between the code only Foundry modules and ones bundled with the PDF, this seems fair enough to me.

It's saying they will be priced the same as they are on the Foundry VTT Marketplace.

$14 currently on Paizo store if you have PDF already.
$29.99 on FVTT Marketplace.

Cori Marie wrote:

Dead God's Hand also suffered from scope increase due to the writer turning in a lot more pages than was asked for. James Jacobs said that in most cases once you hit 5-6 levels of play that's where it becomes AP rather than Adventure.

James was speaking to Pathfinder adventures vs Pathfinder Adventure Paths. On that side of the Gap, we're sticking with the format of an Adventure Path covering a minimum of 9 to 10 levels, with a standalone adventure covering (at most) 5 to 6 levels. Things that land in between will either be trimmed to be a standalone or expanded to be an Adventure Path.

Starfinder is a different game, and things we do on the Pathfinder side should not be assumed to be the status quo for the Starfinder side.

This topic DID just come up in a meeting both teams were in earlier today though! I hope that we can consolidate the terminology going forward at some point in the future to avoid confusion... but in the end, keeping an eye on how many levels of play an adventure covers will be your best bet. Don't get too caught up in the semantics of what is an adventure or what is an Adventure Path, is my advice for now, I guess?

Appreciate the reply James, and glad the topic was discussed at least.

Does anyone else have this in their side cart yet? I have the Alien Core in my side cart and this is expected to come out a month before that.

I just got paizo order email today.

Dead God's Hand also suffered from scope increase due to the writer turning in a lot more pages than was asked for. James Jacobs said that in most cases once you hit 5-6 levels of play that's where it becomes AP rather than Adventure.

His actual quote is "Once you start doing more than 6 levels in a book, its length and scope wants it instead to be an Adventure Path."

This clearly falls under that scope.

But I'm sure James would prefer we didn't argue on semantics.

The point is, there is a stark difference between what is being called a Starfinder AP is and what historically has been a Pathfinder AP is, and it's causing confusion and frustration. Clarifying things would be good.

Maya - the confusion comes from how short this "AP" is, this would firmly land in the standalone adventure category on the PF side.

As a comparison, Dead God's Hand goes 1 level higher, and is clearly a standalone adventure.

Calling this an adventure path feels very disingenuous coming from a Pathfinder player.

Consistency in naming is important so customers can understand what to expect in a purchase.

Outside of remaster stuff, any hints as to what changes were made?

For context, Rage of Elements pdf is just under 24 MB, whereas the next two books were around 10x the size, with similar page counts.

Tian Xia World Guide: 357 MB
Howl of the Wild: 233 MB

And books since then have been between 120-316 MB.

100% this. I don't believe Maya's answer is accurate at all in this instance.

I thought at some point I had read that there was a blank token border included for players, but I haven't been able to find it. Did I make that up, or am i missing it?

It's in this folder: modules\pf2e-ap181-186-blood-lords\assets\art

called bloodlords-blank-token.webp

Having major problems using this module in the current version of Foundry VTT 13. The module will not initialize. Something about importing the scenes within the module does not function. You are forced to initialize the module without importing the scenes. I am forced to make the scenes myself, despite the fact that this module says the scenes have been premade. Bizarre.

The developer has a support site here: https://support.metamorphic-digital.com/

Curmudgeonly wrote:

DemonicDem wrote:

Curmudgeonly wrote:

DemonicDem wrote:

So our GM has noted that they have no idea why Iron Harbor has the flag of Xin-Eurynthia. Does anyone else know?

Iron Harbor itself isn't. The ship (trireme) is. The ship and crew are from Xin-Edasseril.

Thanks for the correction. Still doesn't make much sense. Could just be an error, which is pretty funny because I spent the whole AP questioning people about it.

What part doesn't make sense? It's explained very clearly in the module.

** spoiler omitted **

Xin-Edasseril is not Xin-Eurynthia

ha, thanks for pointing out my part in adding to this confusion!

Curmudgeonly wrote:

DemonicDem wrote:

So our GM has noted that they have no idea why Iron Harbor has the flag of Xin-Eurynthia. Does anyone else know?

Iron Harbor itself isn't. The ship (trireme) is. The ship and crew are from Xin-Edasseril.

Thanks for the correction. Still doesn't make much sense. Could just be an error, which is pretty funny because I spent the whole AP questioning people about it.

What part doesn't make sense? It's explained very clearly in the module.

So our GM has noted that they have no idea why Iron Harbor has the flag of Xin-Eurynthia. Does anyone else know?

Iron Harbor itself isn't. The ship (trireme) is. The ship and crew are from Xin-Edasseril.

Anybody else's physical copy have some missing letters in chapter 2 for some of the research / quests?

"Activating the He lstorm Focus"
" e Clockwork Songbird"
"Copycat Ki ler"
"Two A ditional Events"

Wondering if I just got a weird copy or it's affecting the print run

Maya Coleman wrote:

Mangaholic13 wrote:

Dear Maya Coleman,

Would it be possible for you guys to put out a version of the pdf that does not include the maps? The two-page spread makes it hard to read the rest.

Also,
any chance the table of contents will be added to the pdf in a future update?

Also also,
I like how Vlaka come with sign language automatically. A nice little detailed touch.

Hey Magnaholic! Unsure about PDFs without maps since the PDFs are just digital versions of the books, and the books have maps, but as far as the table of contents, I can confirm it's on page 3 of 180 of the PDF already!

Pathfinder books, and SF1 books, have a PDF table of contents that allows navigating the PDF easily. This book doesn't have one, so you can't easily navigate to the sections you want to.

It would also be a huge improvement to the usability of the PDF if the horizontal maps were not included in the main PDF- they're already included as a separate download. Because they show up horizontally in the PDF, though, the PDF viewing is sized to a massive width, rather than being sized to the width of a normal page.

Between the two, it means zooming in to the right size, scrolling to the right part, and recentering because of the scrolling. In a Pathfinder book, that would just be clicking to the right part of the book from the PDF viewer's navigation sidebar. (Sorry for the over-explanation; just making sure the end-user experience gets across!)

Hmm, my copy of the PDF's table of content (page 2) works as normal (as in I can click on a section and it automatically takes me to that page), and the file has pre-made bookmarks as is standard for all Paizo PDFs.

You'll note that the subscription is "Starfinder Adventures" not "Starfinder Adventure Paths"

There's no Adventure Path subscription that I can see. Are there plans to introduce one to differentiate?

You can maybe understand my confusion when the product itself is labeled an Adventure Path :)

For me, it's about consistency. I'd like to understand what I'm getting if I subscribe.

Please clarify what an AP is for SF2e. So far, the sub gets me an adventure that only covers level 1, and another that's 1-5.

Both of these would not be considered APs for PF2e. SF1e APs seemed to also cover a larger amount levels. So it's a bit weird, to me, what's being offered here.

A 5-level AP is new, though, blurring the lines between what was previously classified as APs and Adventures.

This would definitely fall into the Standalone Adventures line on the PF side, very odd.

As someone starting Starfinder with 2e, will this book cover some of the lore like the Gap I've seen mentioned in the stream?

Or do I need to grab some older books as well?

Hmm, not sure I’m on board with this being part of adventure subscription, when it only covers 1 level.

Was looking forward to the sub switching to larger hardcovers.

Never played SF1e, but I'm very interested in jumping in with 2e.

Six classes for the Core book seems low though, how does that compare to what's in 1e?

shores up some of the areas that didn't land as proper as we'd hoped (for example, I rewrote the arctic expedition section to be less grindy and hopefully more interesting)

Are you able to elaborate on what other areas were shored up?

I want to reup the question about the subscription. Is this going out for all adventure subscribers?

When looking at the subscription page for standalone adventures, it appears in the list for June