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What are we calling the lightsabers, I wonder?
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At least Tian Xia has gotten some love from the campaign setting line. I think Arcadia, Garund, Azlant, or Casmaron should be next. I suppose that if they never get around to doing Arcadia, I could basically steal the Totems of the Dead setting and change a few names. That kinda defeats the purpose, though—I can homebrew well enough; I want to see what Paizo comes up with.
Boo hoo. All of that material was produced for 3.5 as well. This is the first Darklands sourcebook for PFRPG and it's been a long time coming. Are you seriously trying to "boo hoo" me while complaining that the Darklands material you already have is for 3.5? Really?
We've already got a Darklands book, plus an entire adventure path focused (largely) on the Darklands. When do we get to see some NEW material? Y'know what I think is still "missing" from the Pathfinder setting canon? Akiton revisited. Eox revisited. Varisia Revisited (especially focusing on the Storval Plateau area), Realms of the Mammoth Lords, etc. When are we going to hear something about Nex and Geb, or Arcadia?
It's very much pre 3.5. It was actually WotC's first stab at using the d20 mechanic for anything other than D&D. They chose to team up with Chaosium to present a d20 version of Call of Cthulhu because that game is SO different than D&D, that if they could use the d20 rules to create a workable version of that game, that would prove how versatile the d20 rules were. I know, I know... this is old. But to be precise, it's was their third: assuming that you count the Wheel of Time and Star Wars as sufficiently different from D&D.
Don't assume that. I specifically spoke to the thread overall.
There sure is an awful lot of unjustified entitlement in this conversation--from demands that the book be a PDF to demands that Paizo "explain" why each and every whiny customer isn't 100% happy with their purchase. It's the same as any other purchase. You buy it if you want it, and caveat emptor. Do your research. Paizo puts out a lot of products, and not every one is going to appeal to every customer the same. For me, it was Faction Guide that made me open up my eyes. What I wanted as a great description of a bunch of organizations that I could use in a game. What I got was a fiddly new rule system that I didn't need, and in many cases less description than was already available in the campaign setting anyway. Did I loudly proclaim over the internet that Paizo cheated me and owed me an explanation? No, I realized that my expectations were not necessarily aligned with Paizo's design goals. From that point on, I made sure that I did some research and didn't just buy everything sight-unseen from Paizo anymore. Rather, what annoys me is that Vision of WAR has been out for weeks and we're still waiting for our Amazon pre-orders to ship. I had a gift-card, give me a break. But I don't blame Paizo for that either. I'm OK with delayed gratification.
Wayne Reynolds really defined the way Pathfinder looks, so any book with iconics fighting monsters will be added value on a gaming table. I'm a little disappointed with the impatient people - this has never been a Need item, always a Greed item, and it doesn't matter that it takes longer because other Need items take priority in publishing. You'd better thank Asmodeus they do. Nothing sold by Paizo is a NEED item. It does matter to customers of this product who may or may not be picking up everything else Paizo does that everything else Paizo does seems to take priority and bump this back. To suggest that is just absurd. Of course I'm impatient because I don't buy adventure paths or modules, and the setting books lately have kinda run out of steam in terms of being ones that I'm really interested in, at least. This is the most exciting Paizo product coming out this year from my perspective, so naturally I don't want it to be continuously de-prioritized so more modules or adventure path volumes can come out. I understand why that happens, certainly, but asking me to basically sit down and shut up and go ahead and wait who knows how many more months for this to come out isn't very helpful. Naturally, I'm going to say that these continued delays are frustrating... because they are. That said... doubling the page count? I'm cool with waiting a few more months for THAT! :) I'm more disappointed in all the huffy, "if it's not PDF, then I won't buy it!" responses. Did anyone ever really think that an art book would be sold as a pdf? Especially when finding WAR art online is getting more and more difficult; he's clearly making an effort to prune what's available, especially in hi-res format, in favor of samplers in low-res formats. I've never heard of such a thing as a coffee table artbook coming out in pdf, and I'd have been shocked to see it greenlit. (Not unhappy, mind you, but shocked. If I could get hi-res images out of a pdf version, I'd do some hi-res printing and framing and decorate my house with WAR pieces. But just because I'd like something to happen doesn't mean that I'm clueless or brattily entitled about it--I would never have expected that to happen.) Besides, if it's Pathfinder specific artwork you're looking for, just extract them from your Pathfinder pdfs. That's what I do when I want a WAR picture to show to my players.
But, I really would like to see some interesting non-evil undead too. It sounds like they're definitely going to be a no-show though. :( The pale rider certainly sounds cool, I just wish it didn't get pushed as having to be evil. Not me. Thematically, that seems to completely miss the point of the undead. Here's hoping for some darkness-themed/ugly/weird/alien-looking celestials at least. And that misses the point thematically of celestials.
And may I add that it is a wikkid looking Bestiary 3 sneak peek you have there. Clearly Ursula and King Triton have a sordid episode from their past that Disney has been glossing over.
What I most want to see is the Wayne Reynolds cover art without the logo on it. Any chance we can get that posted as a preview?
That's a very cool and evocative piece of artwork. But holy moly; that's a big fox. Maybe it's actually a maned wolf?
Yup, but this one had to be rushed out due to the upcoming auction. The others will be along in due time... I hope that doesn't mean something like, "We'll do the next one six months from now." Iconic action has been sorely missed on the blog!
Also, pirates vs. Cthulhu is good business. Heh. Very true indeed.
Prays his favorite iconics live through the book... Well, it's hard to have favorites from the full line-up, since we're still missing a good chunk of iconic biographies, hint hint.
You're correct. Those write-ups are still to come, when we have a little more breathing room at the office. And fortunately, this way Kevin didn't have to pick and choose or bend poetic convention. I'm shaking my virtual fist at you, for still not putting any of those up, just so you know.
Why not, I wonder?
Currently in Magnimar. Ideally... I'd like to be in either Katapesh or Ilizmagorti. Or possibly hip-deep the Mwangi Expanse somewhere.
OK, I just did a quick overlay of the old Campaign Setting map and the new world map. They don't line up exactly because... well, they don't. I couldn't figure out how to stretch or squash them to make them match up. Avistan needed to shrink by about 25% while northern Garund stayed the same size in order to make it all fit. Could be projection issues too... the global map would have more skewing the closer you get to the poles, assuming a map centered on the equator. Since both maps have corners and a rectangular shape, I assume it's a Mercator-like projection.
In between Skinsaw Murders and Hook Mountain Massacre, this is the dialogue between my character, a barbarian from the north, and another character, an elf with a superiority complex, about my character's crush on Ameiko. http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/8280929/
And Europe is only considered a continent for cultural and historical reasons. It's just a small appendage, with a few sub-appendages, at the western extremity of the Eurasian landmass. Well, that depends on what definition of "continent" you use. There actually isn't a formal, scientific one, oddly enough. So it's not wrong to say that Asia is a separate continent from Europe. Heck, it's not wrong to say that the far eastern edge of Asia is actually part of the North American continent, up to the Cherskiy Mountains. India is a separate microcontinent that happens to be stuck to Asia currently. The same is true of Arabia amd Turkey/Anatolia. And even "Asia" itself can be further divided into the Siberian, Amur, Kazakh, etc. continents, that happen to be traveling together under the current continental configuration, but haven't always in the past and may not always in the future. Of course, on the other extreme, not only are Europe and Asia the same continent, but Africa, as a contiguous landmass, sharing continental shelf, should really be considered part of the same supercontinent too. Pedantic geological nitpick of the day, sorry.
Fun stuff. Way to whet our appetities for the upcoming Tian Xia stuff later, too.
That's kind of like wondering how every Lovecraft story has somebody who happens to have read the Necronomicon, when there's only supposed to be something like three copies in existance. Maybe the Necronomicon was originally written in Thassilonian!! Abdul Alhazred, the Mad Runelord!
Sounds intriguing. And if you continue to give us decently sized and resolution Wayne Reynolds pictures along with your rules discussion, all the better!
In Golarion, if you were to do a shared world style anthology, it would likely be best to set it in one specific area with a specific theme, say, "Tales of the Nightstalls" with a Katapesh setting with all the tales set in the bazaar and some overarching plot threading from one to another as all of the individual characters dealt with their own stories save for the interstitial which sets the frame in Arabian Nights fashion and tells its own tale, bolstered by all the other tales. I would buy that in a heartbeat! Beyond that, what's been said about paperback and hardback formats for libraries needs to be stressed. Trade paperbacks are an unfortunate betwixt and between position and librarians really don't know what to do with them unless they have their own binderies to turn them into more durable hardbacks. Just to make sure there's no confusion, since an earlier post made this claim as well... the Pathfinder fiction are not trade paperbacks; they're mass market paperbacks. Since a lot of genre fiction is only ever released as mass market paperback, libraries have had to deal with the format for quite some time whether they like them or not. Most copies I have seen have the covers taped up with some stiff tape of some kind that hardens the cover and makes the whole thing at least as durable as a TPB in practice. I think we're making too much of the format. I'd be surprised to see Pathfinder fiction in any format other than MMPB. Most WotC and Black Library fiction is published in that format too, with the exception of the Black Library omnibus collections, in TPB format.
That said, I'm of the "If you can hear the sound of dice rolling, it's not working as a story" philosophy. So am I. Good call!
1) The novels feel a bit constrained. While, in general, I think modern fantasy is bloated and over-written, lately I've noticed a trend in almost going too far the other direction. It's OK to let the author's explore the settings and characters a bit. I feel like the current novels are rushing through the plot too quickly for us to develop a relationship with either. 2) Filing them with the D&D fiction at bookstores, really. That and kick-butt cover art. 3) Not a great sample size, but looking more broadly at your competitors covers in gaming related fiction, I love the art by Raymond Swanland and Wayne Reynolds. Those always make me pick the book off the shelf and have a look. Same for Christian McGrath, although I haven't seen that he does a lot of game-related covers. He sure does a lot of fantasy and sci-fi covers in general, though. He's all over the place at any bookstore I look at. 4) www.sfsite.com? 5) ... Not at the moment, no.
Foxy! And the girls don't look bad either. It's fun to see the new Advanced class iconics start to make a showing on the covers, too. Are we ever going to get the rest of those character bios on the blog? Anyone know some good creepy background music? Yeah, sure. I have tons of it. Try anything by Nox Arcana or Midnight Syndicate for a pretty good "Halloween Haunted House" type feel. For specifically gothic horror with real instruments, check out Danny Elfman's soundtracks for Sleepy Hollow and The Wolfman. The soundtrack to Bram Stoker's Dracula from the 90s is pretty good too, but you'll have to avoid some of the songs that are overly romantic sounding, and for the love of all that's holy, don't play the Annie Lennox song during a session. Not quite so gothic, but still very appropriate for just about campaign that's got any kind of horror vibe to it at all, you could check out the soundtracks for Solomon Kane, Constantine, Van Helsing, and especially End of Days. Note: I'm not recommending the movies by any means, just the soundtracks as non-stop creepiness in background music that's great for RPG sessions. For something a little more exotic, there's some really creepy music in the soundtracks for The Mummy, Stargate, and Raiders of the Lost Ark but you have to take out the more upbeat adventurous sounding tracks, or the really familiar songs like "Raiders March" if you want to maintain a creepy mood. You can also listen to most of the tracks of most of these soundtracks on youtube to see if you like them before you go out of your way to hunt down the CDs or mp3 downloads.
It's a bit belated, but here's my review. I quite enjoyed the novel; moreso than most shared world fiction I've read, certainly. The switch between POV characters didn't bother me at all. In fact, it's a common technique in a lot of mainstream thriller type novels, which this book resembles in structure, in many ways.
1. Can't remember, and I'm away from my copy of the book until this evening, at least. I'll just skip this one for now. 2. Team Radovan. I've always had a soft-spot for tieflings, and I really like the almost Chandler-esque tone that his chapters take. Radovan is more Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe while Jeggare comes across more as a combination of Nick and Nora Charles. I just like the hardboiled, jaded private eye more than the former private eye turned indolent socialite dragged back into "private eyeing" almost against his will. Of course, that situation is somewhat changed by the end of the novel, so I don't know that it'll apply to subsequent V&R adventures. 3. I'm not sure that any of the secondary characters struck me as ones I'd care to see again, honestly. It least not immediately. There weren't any Pathfinder society "home office" type characters, like a Marcus Brody or an M, Q or Moneypenny that I remember, and a lot of the other characters seemed particularly rooted in Ustalav and the particulars of this plot and scenario, rather than the greater saga of V&R. I kind of like the idea suggested above that there almost be a succession of "Bond girl" like secondary characters that don't carry over from story to story. I think it'd also be fun to see a rival to V&R develop over time; a Belloq to their Indiana Jones, if you will. But I don't remember thinking anyone from this novel struck me as a likely candidate for that either.
Thanks, guys. Any responses from any Paizo guys? Or better yet, a bio blog post? :) I know it's a bit much, but it'd be fun to see iconic characters for all the new APG archetypes, too. That's probably a better fan project than corporate project, though.
I'd love to see the iconic character bio's continued. It's been quite a while since we had the Cavalier and Alchemist done up, and the rest of the new base classes still haven't been done. Will the anti-paladin get a character bio?
Technically, a scorpion is an arachnid, and not a 'bug' :P Well, technically, "bug" isn't a technical term, and is an informal term that typically refers to all non-crustacean arthropods. Including arachnids. I presume you're refering to Hemipterans, the so-called "true bugs." But, technically, again, Wes didn't call them "true bugs", he just called them bugs. :p
I hate to be a nitpicky nitpicker, but the Triopses evolved during the Carboniferous, 300 million years ago, more or less. The first terrestrial creatures set foot on the land in the late Silurian, over a hundred million years earlier.
Love the subtle reference to Indiana Jones there... ;)
#2 could possibly be a psiwyrm from ToH III... although it's CR is too low. Proprietary. EDIT: Whoops! quoted wrong post.
Sorry; I feel like this was an idle comment I made that's grown into more than I meant it to. The whole notion of reformatting and then waiting for a review before it's added was, I guess, sufficient deterent to turn my mind to "I'll just post it on my own website, then." It's not that it's particularly difficult, it's just that neither is posting it on my own site. It's one of those kinds of things where even a minor inconvenience is noticeable compared to the alternative.
Heh. Sorry, guys. Didn't mean to sound critical. I was just thinking "out loud." As you say, the guidelines felt to me, on reading them, only a step away from publisher submission guidelines, which was no doubt the point. But it'll certainly drive down the submission count, I'd imagine. I was going to submit an entry for the recent contest, but because a major family vacation that lasted for more than two weeks was smack dab in the middle of the submission period, so I never got around to it. But I still would like to find a home for it somewhere. But on looking at the submission process, I have to admit that I thought maybe I'd rather just throw it up on my own webpage after all. I don't know that a lot of fanfic authors are really looking for peer review or editing; just someplace to get some exposure.
It seems odd to me that both this site and the Pathfinder Chronicles seem to have fairly strict submission guidelines. I suppose there's some value in that if you want to feel like you're really submitting fiction to some serious venue or something, but for posting fanfic on the internet? Wouldn't it be a lot more convenient to have looser submission guidelines so you don't encourage people to just post stuff up on their own webpages, using the community use guidelines on their own, and posting an announcement on the message boards to drive traffic?
True story. Though we don't really have much of an outlet for iconic stats anymore. There's always the blog! :) Anyway, it's neither here nor there, just idle curiousity. But while I'm at it, can I just officially register my appreciation for the very interesting, darker, more sword & sorcery non-heroic nature of the recent iconic bios, and put out a request for the rest of them to get posted sooner rather than later? Those are some of my favorite blog posts.
What do you mean? The final of this specific piece of art will be showing up in Ultimate Magus, but we don't currently have plans to tinker with anything elsewhere. Actually, I mean the stats. Seltyiel will now belong to this class, and not be a fighter/wizard anymore?
So... does this replace the original version of Seltyiel, then? Just out of curiosity?
From a rules standpoint, yeah... it's not anymore tied to Golarion than the 3.5 game was tied to Greyhawk. But from a customer standpoint, and a product standpoint... all the things that are difficult to quantify yet incredibly important... I think Pathfinder and Golarion have been tightly tied together. It doesn't have to have been that way, it just is, because Paizo release more setting info than anything else. And certainly you could use the Pathfinder RPG to play Eberron or Forgotten Realms or whatever... I just suspect that not many people do.
I was going to log in to post that I was interested in modular setting elements, a la Freeport, but I see I've already been beaten to the punch, and that a better term has already been coined, too! So... OK. You go, guys. That said, it's unusual for me to not be interested in settings. I've always been interested in settings for D&D, and the Pathfinder rules are just an evolution of D&D. I don't know if, in the long term, it's a good thing or a bad thing that the Golarion setting and the Pathfinder rules have become so tightly tied together, when with D&D I'd frequently bounce from setting to setting -- Eberron to Iron Kingdoms to Forgotten Realms to homebrew to... well, you know. In the short term, I think it's good, because it drives sales, and heck, I actually really quite like Golarion as a setting. But in five years, when Golarion is as detailed as Forgotten Realms was in it's late 2e heyday? Don't know.
That's whopping? I guess I've become jaded after struggling through George R. R. Martin, Robert Jordan and Steven Erikson. :)
We seriously need to see this cover art on the blog without the text so I can snag it for my digital fantasy art collection. :winkgun:
"Girt Bear-Wearer" was my joke name for my barbarian, by the way. For some reason we got talking about how barbarians were always decked out in bear pelts, and it went from there. Only wussy barbarians wear bear pelts. Real men wear saber-tooth pelts, duh.
Well, if I can ignore the 118 replies and just address the original post; I 100% agree and have done pretty much exactly that in every setting I've ever spent any time developing cosmology for. A fiend is a fiend is a fiend, and any hostile outsider is a fiend. Demon, daemon and devil are all interchangeable "in game" and at best serve as stat differentiators in a metagame sense. The Hells are a big bubbly mass of outer realms, some of them reachable from a shadowy "porch" plane, some of them only reachable by passing through several other hellish realms on the way there. Prime Hellish real estate is closer to the Material Plane, but there are various reasons why fiendlords might want to set up their kingdoms deeper in. The distinctions in game don't make much sense to me, or at least I don't feel they are worth preserving. Like I said, any evil... heck, any hostile outsider is a fiend. A given kingdom might have creatures that are written up as devils, demons or yugoloths all mixed together, while another kingdom might have a completely different mix of the same. Efreets and slaad---are they really thematically different than fiends? Not to me. They're in the mix as well.
Barsoom is definately my favorite Mars, but Bracket's Mars is a pretty close second. Too bad it was described so scattershot. Sadly, I think Moorcock's Mars books are absolutely terrible. I read them a few years ago in the White Wolf collection Kane of Old Mars and they were absolutely dreadful.
:sobs:
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