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We announce new products roughly 10 months in advance of when they come out, with new ones rolling out every month. The best solution is to watch product solicitations as they come out, and take a look at the prices. We're not raising prices on everything, but I wouldn't be surprised to see huge books like that come with a higher asking price next time around.
The Absalom book has a short section on sports on page 44. The game of ruk, from Katapesh, is a team sport involving knocking a sand-filled ball through a series of rings. Deskata is a sort of urban parkour race increasingly popular in the Puddles.
This is a result of a continuity error in PFS scenarios, wherein an identical character was introduced years apart, with different names. The original events are (if memory serves) from the interactive special event "Grand Convocation 4712," where she appeared under a different name we have since retconned to match Sarnia. Her original name was Kamarina Blakros.
Imrizade is simply the twins' oldest sister. They are not triplets. When Imrizade fled from Absalom, she left Michellia holding the bag.
Are minotaurs native to the Isle of Kortos? In that they have inhabited the island since the era of the First Siege, yes. They were brought to the island from Casmaron by the warlord Voradni Voon in the early decades of Absalom's history, and have inhabited portions of the island ever since.
Leafing through a friend’s copy after reading that lovely fiction piece from the blog, and I’m a little disappointed to see that both Jalmeri characters in the book are unrelated martial artists. I hope we can see a little more variety in the future. Fair! One of those NPCs was added very late in the game as a new watch captain, which accounts for at least a bit of parallel development there. Without him, there'd be only one Jalmeri character, though, so I'm not sure that's much better! There are lots of Vudran characters you could pretty easily modify to have Jalmeri connections, however, so with a bit of elbow grease not all is lost. ;)
I call it Absalom, city of Lost Omens, and the cover goes with that because we didn’t want to repeat Lost Omens there. It is, none the less, in the Lost Omens line, so it gets catalogued that way on the website. Call it what you want. :)
Seems strange to make this so long after the original release. Are the contents the same? Contents will be in line with the most recent print edition. I’m almost all cases (at least for now) that’s still the first, but it’s conceivable that we will have a reprint with changes before we get to the Special Edition. In that case we will go with the most recent standard edition printing.
Very nice. Are we going to see the entire Lost Omens line be deluxified now? I'd prefer deluxe versions, but if it is going to be sporadic it will look weird. Yes, we intend to do all of them monthly starting in July until we catch up, and then plan to release them day and date from that point forward if they sell well enough. People have been asking for these from the start, and since we are so proud of the Lost Omens line and it is doing so well, we figured let’s give it a shot!
Faux leather covers with a metallic ink process to make it shiny and a bound-in ribbon for marking your place. Limited edition, about $20 more than the regular price on account of premium materials. Game content is exactly the same.
It's this. The mistake I made with the Absalom book is in dwelling too much on a very sensitive topic. Yes, the PFS plotline helped by removing legal slavery from the city, but I should have just let well enough alone, mentioning that it had happened in the timeline and then moving on to any of a countless number of other evils. Instead I wanted to flesh out the context more, and make the change a more holistic part of the setting while still giving a few illegal baddies for people to kill. The thing is, with this topic, that's too much. People just hate it in the setting period. We really should not have put it in there in the first place. Trying to deal with "phasing it out" within the context of the story adds fuel to the fire and makes people even more uncomfortable. It's not worth it. So while I suspect the word may come up a time or two in the future, we're just not going to be covering it going forward. A few in-production items might reference it still, but it's no longer going to be a notable part of the Golarion campaign setting. If you want to write a big adventure where people burn Okeno to the ground to have it all make sense within the fiction of the campaign world, you are free to do so. But we are not going to.
Got email about poster map being added - it only seems to have been added to the File per Chapter download (or at least, I've re-downloaded the single file version 4 times and I don't get the 8-panel map in the zip file or the pdf). I would also ask someone to check the resolution of the map download, which looks amazing zoomed out or at 100% zoom, but that's probably the best resolution to view it at, which makes it less useful for looking at small areas (such as individual districts, let alone individual blocks). We're looking into this and will likely update the file next week when we get back to the office (metaphorically speaking...).
I'm going off memory and on my way to a meeting, operating on my increasingly failing memory rather than notes, but I think the aspect of "kill someone and take their Cornucopia and now you're on the High Council as a city leader" was probably not overwhelmingly popular among the folks involved in this decision.
I strongly suspect that everyone has a different answer to this question. For me, a big part of it is that Aroden is dead, and most of the lingering magics fueled by his divine energy should be either dormant or fizzling out by now (I mean, this is what happened to re-open the Worldwound, for example). So when you add to that the fact that the idea always struck me as kind of corny for economic and "maybe too high magic" reasons, it was a pretty easy thing for me to agree with when the PFS team decided they wanted to move away from it. Although obviously important to the city's history, the items also had a relatively brief write-up in the original books and never really played into anything else we had done with the city, so we decided to move on from it. Other developers likely have other answers to this question, but that's mine.
We've updated Geb's look a bit for this one.
Why does the book describe CG pirate Torius Vin from pathfinder tales books as CE ruthless privateer? ^_^; Actually I think what happened is that we had a sidebar with ships known to frequent the harbor, a few of whom had named captains. In the course of expanding that material, we added backstories to the named captains, and I brainfarted and didn’t make the connection to the Pathfinder Tales character, because I am dumb.
Why does the book describe CG pirate Torius Vin from pathfinder tales books as CE ruthless privateer? ^_^; That's an excellent question. Honestly I think I just messed that one up and the name slipped past me. :/ Vile, vile propaganda, perhaps? :I
Thankies Erik. The backmatter of Devil of the Dreaming Palace had retconned the status of the Precipe District, changing it from a monster infested wasteland that no one lived in, voluntarily or not, into a refuge for the poor and homeless that had been forced out because of the renovations, so that’s what I was concerned with. Just looked over the chapter again. There's really none of this in there. I'd have to assume that the Precipice has more than its fair share of squatters, but the Absalom book itself doesn't really touch on that aspect much, if at all.
Not a heartening answer, but I thank you for the answer all the same, Aaron. Much appreciated. I'm not sure what answer you were looking for, but the focus of the Precipice Quarter section is much more on hauntings and monsters and adventure locations than it is focused on poor squatters. I don't think there's anything about pushing out poor people one way or the other. I could be wrong and it appears in a line or two, but it is definitely not the focus of the book or the section.
are the effects of agents of edgewatch/the radiant festival discussed in the precipice quarter chapter or elsewhere in the book? There are a couple of sidebars with references to the campaign. The book is written with the assumption that this campaign has not happened yet, so while there are references to the city forming the Edgewatch to help prepare for the festival and some information about the festival itself, most of that is left to the AP.
So any mentions of minotaurs in general or that one mad scientist troll? Nuar Spiritskin gets a write up, the history section contextualizes minotaurs within the Starstone Isle a bit better (First Siege warlord Voradni Voon is identified as a minotaur, for example), and there are small bits about some minotaur stuff going on in the wilderness. The mad scientist troll, Dr. Bensi Skule, is a major character in the city underworld and gets a pretty extensive write-up.
Yes. Very much so. There's a fair amount of information about the Chelish house (Tevineg) that runs the place, as well.
This is pretty accurate. Finishing Absalom took a lot out of me and while there is relatively little left to do for DGH, I haven't had the time or energy to devote to it for the last couple of months. I will get back to it soon, but for now the adventure is on indefinite hiatus. Apologies to everyone who has been so patiently waiting for it.
You know what, let's cut Mark some slack here. In fact, everyone in the thread please cut some slack toward each other. I have had great times and great conversations with Mark at conventions, and know he cares passionately about Pathfinder and Pathfinder Society. His feelings about this stuff are his to process, and I respect that. If emotions run high, it's because he genuinely cares deeply about Pathfinder. He's not trying to make himself feel important. He is concerned because Pathfinder is important to him. That's the one thing all of you share. Please keep that in mind, even when disagreeing with each other. Thanks.
I am not saying that people did not have concerns. I AM saying that I have ZERO memory of any such concerns ever being raised to me at the time, and last week was the first time I have ever been made aware that the image made anyone uncomfortable.
Mark, you have every right to be disappointed in Paizo for this, but I do want to say that this Nazi business has been grossly mischaracterized. I released a public statement about it on Tuesday that should provide a bit more clarity. You can read it here. I do not recall ever being told that the poster in my office offended anyone, and (as I said in the statement), I categorically apologize for not anticipating that it may have done so. It has not been on display for years. There are a pile of problems floating around, some of which are not easily solved. But "Erik has a swastika in his office," something that has never been true (and was not even alleged), is not one of them.
Paizo also announced its new organized play campaign, Pathfinder Society, headed up by veteran Nicholas Logue, who had co-founded the Wizards’ Living Grayhawk organized play campaign during his tenure at that company. A couple of quick notes and corrections. It's "Lucasfilm," not "Lucasfilms." It's "Greyhawk," not "Grayhawk." When you mention Kyle Hunter as an original employee you are correct, but from what you wrote I inferred that he had been with the company all along, which is not the case. He was the art director for Undefeated, and left the staff during that round of layoffs, only to return last year. If you want an interesting Kyle Hunter fact, he's the guy who designed the Paizo logo. Also, this line: "Paizo also announced its new organized play campaign, Pathfinder Society, headed up by veteran Nicholas Logue, who had co-founded the Wizards’ Living Grayhawk organized play campaign during his tenure at that company." Is not correct. Lisa and I were co-founders of Living Greyhawk. Nick was not involved with that campaign's launch or administration, and I don't know off hand if he ever participated in it at all. More as I keep reading through this. Overall it is very remarkable!
Will this cover any of the isle of kortos? I know its called "Absalom, City of Lost Omens" but I wasnt sure if since we just got the Mwangi Expanse region book if this would cover all of the Isles of Kortos The book is done and in final approvals before going to the printer on Friday, btw. Thanks for your patience as we've polished it up and made it even more awesome. We'll update the release date once we get final word back from the printer, but it's looking like it will release in 2021 for sure, maybe sliding to December just in time for Christmas. More on that specifically soon, but at this point it's out of my hands. The book WILL discuss a few things about the rest of the Isle of Kortos, with a few paragraphs on Diobel and Escadar specifically (though they're more summaries, and interested parties should check out Towns of the Inner Sea for Diobel and Extinction Curse for Escadar if they want more information). There's a TON of information to be gleaned from side references and allusions, like who is working for the Kortos Consortium, what happened to the aeon orb outside Willowsedge, more information on the Siege of the Prophets and its tie to High Harbor and the Isle of Erran, etc. There are 410 NPCs, and a good number have some ties to the island outside Absalom, so there should be plenty of gold to pan, even if the isle itself could also use its own big sourcebook somewhere down the road. I promise this Absalom book is going to keep Wikipedians active for many years to come. :)
Is this really for five characters instead of the usual 4?The Dead God’s Hand is a campaign-arc adventure for five 1st-level characters. Throughout the course of play, the player characters should advance to 4th level. Product is not final and subject to change. That's the way I'm writing it (because that's the way it was in our office campaign), but I suppose that could change in development if someone gets super ornery about it.
A few updates, long overdue. The final adventure will probably get you to 6th level. It's about 9,000 words (of 80,000) from completion, and is still parked behind the Absalom book, which is more or less in its final stages and should go to editing this week or next (meaning my grubby, omnipotent hands are for the most part off it and "the process" carries it through to completion). The Dead God's Hand will now be a 2022 release. Still planning/hoping Absalom is out by Christmas. Creatively, the delay has done a world of good for The Dead God's Hand. The adventure is based off the dungeon I used to run at conventions and the Paizo staff "home game" we played at the office about the time the Advanced Player's Guide came out for Pathfinder 1. I converted the adventure from my notes and audio recordings of all those games, and while that generated a lot of cool asides and corner cases, there were some aspects of how the adventure tied into Absalom and the overall "continuing the campaign" threads that I never felt quite connected in my notes (because they never happened at the table, where our play ended at the end of the adventure). The Dead God's Hand is designed to be a lead-in adventure to a longer campaign, either something we will eventually publish over geologic time or (much more likely) with further adventures of your own design, inspired by some of the plot threads that run through it and stick out the end. In this regards, it is not a wholly self-contained dungeon. By the time you complete the adventure and have interacted with the NPCs and clues discovered within, you not only (I hope) have a satisfying conclusion to the "story" of the Sanctum of Aroden, but you've also got a huge number of story and motivational ties to things that can be resolved later in the campaign. That runs from potentially campaign-lasting major enemies to minor friends, each with their own connections to Absalom and adventure hooks for further development once you make it back to the surface. In these regards, the delay has been enormously helpful. It's allowed me to more elegantly tie the NPCs to Absalom (because there is now much more of Absalom available for tie-ins), massage major elements related to at least five critical NPCs, and so on. It's also nice, as I did just yesterday, to come back to a manuscript that you've had to set aside for a while. It's much better to approach it with fresh eyes, and it's easier to be more objective about what works and what doesn't work. So, the Dead God's Hand will be a much stronger adventure with a much stronger Absalom book to back it up, so at least there's that. But yeah, 2022. Bummer. Sorry.
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