It's a single story, and while it does cover 10 levels of play, we are trying hard to focus on the story's needs and NOT to cram all Darklands content into it all at once... as tempting as that is, considering that we haven't actually done a big update to the Darklands regional lore since "Into the Darklands" back in the pre-Pathifnder 3.5 era. Same with Yamasoth.
All this is doing is vastly intensifying my desire for a Lost Omens: Darklands. Hopefully soon! (I mean, there's so much cool lore all around Golarion, but the subterranean world deserves a proper update for many reasons)
Excellent! Keep letting us know that over on the Rules & Lore side. I shall continue to do what I can to get a Darklands book on the schedule in the meantime, but there's a lot of competing topics for a limited number of books each year!
This is not a bad thing, but I do feel you (the team) have made asymmetry a theme of pathfinder. I think its a good choice as the elephant often forces symmetry across everything. (paladins are the same mechanics for every alignment now) Was it your intention to convey this as a theme of your work? Or just a preference that repeated itself?
It's been one of my personally underlying design and writing philosophies from the start, and one that I've conveyed with mixed success. For example, originally my concept was for the "good" elemental demigods to be all dead, with only evil ones active, in an attempt to give a built-in imbalance to the elemental planes and creatures, since to me, imbalance is more interesting than balance.
It's also a big part of the advice I give adventure writers—avoid symmetrical designs in your dungeons. A symmetrical dungeon map might look appealing to some, but it doesn't to me, and it makes it particularly annoying to adventure in since once players get it, then they only have to explore half the dungeon and then the thrill of discovery is muted for the rest of it. Even if the whole point is to hide a secret room in one half of the otherwise symmetrical dungeon, it's frustrating design because that either ensures the room will be missed, or if it ISN'T missed trains players to waste time searching every square of a symmetrical dungeon for secrets that aren't there.
It's also why we have one god of magic, and not opposing gods of "good magic" and "evil magic."
It's also why I love Hell being so limited in scope compared to the Outer Rifts.
It's also why I made 2 of the 7 runelords be unreplaced for their run, and the other 5 having LOTS of replacements.
Out of curiosity since this will be a high level AP and considering where it's situated is there any chance that the infamous Darklands resident Orgesh will be featured in Vaultlines? When I think of notable personages of the Darklands who would be most likely to take notice of a group of high level adventurers roaming around down there and would try to interact with them he and Yamasoth leap to mind.
I'm not the one developing this AP (that'd be Bill), and I only wrote one monster for the bestiary (which I won't spoiler further here at this point), but as far as I'm aware, Orgesh doesn't play a big role in "Vaultlines."
It's a single story, and while it does cover 10 levels of play, we are trying hard to focus on the story's needs and NOT to cram all Darklands content into it all at once... as tempting as that is, considering that we haven't actually done a big update to the Darklands regional lore since "Into the Darklands" back in the pre-Pathifnder 3.5 era. Same with Yamasoth.
Gonna spolier this wall of text, but here's why Desna's moon-adjacent and not officially a moon goddess.
Spoiler:
Golarion never really had a moon deity at the start, in large part because when we first set things up for the setting in the pre-Pathfinder RPG world using 3.5's OGL, there wasn't a Moon domain in the same way there was a Sun domain (hence Sarenrae). In particular, when I was setting up all of those initial domians for the core 20 deities while designing the Rise of the Runelords Player's Guide (the first place we ever published Golarion world lore for players), I wanted to make sure all the 3.5 domains were well-represented among the core 20 to ensure that player choices were less restrictive than they were in choosing domians directly from the 3.5 options. Desna was an "export" from my homebrew (along with Sarenrae and others), where she was a goddess of outer space, a theme that just wasn't represented at all in the 3.5 options, so that was something I was eager to represent as well—hence her bing a goddess of stars (although she was just as much a travel and luck goddess, because those were 3.5 domains that needed to be filled out).
When the time came to create Pathfinder RPG, we were nervous about estranging our established 3.5 customers, so we took a minimalistic approach to changing rules too much. That included introducing too many new domains—there wasn't room to add a Moon domain at that time, since we needed that room to shore up other themes that other deities needed (particularly the complication between our Death Goddess being not cool with undead not being supported by the rules), and since as a side-effect of the 3.5 start Desna was more of a luck and travel goddess than a moon goddess, that domain didn't get included—there was no need since we didn't have a devoted MOON deity.
Eventually, that became more and more obvious a missing feature and we brought that domain into the game, but by that point, Desna was already fully formed as one of the core deities and changing her to also be a moon goddess was awkward. And so we introduced several other moon deities along the way.
All of that informed 2E's version of things. There's still no "moon" deity in the core 20, but frankly I kind of like that—forced symmetry is a design choice I often avoid, since that can so-easily lead down the route of having things define each other by what they're not, or by their opposites, and that always kinda felt lazy to me, personally.
Eventually the lack of a core moon deity in the Inner Sea got thematically quantified with the lore addition of Acavna, who sacrificed herself to save Golarion from total destruction during Earthfall. There not being a "replacement" moon deity in the Inner Sea was thematically intended to fit into that theme of loss and sacrifice from her act.
But there are plenty of other moon deities out there today to choose from. There remain the moon-adjacent deities who are associated with the night or outer space (Desna, Zon-Kuthon, Nocticula, etc.) but there are full-fledged moon deities too. The one with the largest spread out there is probably Tsukiyo.
But until we got to that point, we did now and then equate Desna to the Moon for some stuff, as a side effect of her being an outer space goddess.
In my games I pretty much always let players see these points. Not only is it a great way to help keep them engaged in the encounter or situation, but it gives the players a pretty important indicator of progress. Even if they don't know how many points they need, just seeing number go up is fun. Also, seeing those numbers increase is "proof" to the players that the GM is keeping track of things and will not forget to have things trigger at the right point—it's a tool to keep the GM looking fair and honest. The more as a GM you don't hide, the more your players trust you, and the more leeway they'll give you when you DO need to keep secrets. (In part, this is also why I strongly favor giving out XP over milestones.)
That said... this wish: "2. Self-Contained, Classic Dungeons. I want to be able to buy classic, video-gamey, isekai anime-esque, nearly static, premade dungeons with multiple floors, traps, secret rooms, treasure, and probably respawning enemies. Spend no effort working it into the wider world, but give it at least some token internal consistency. Give me player maps with secrets cleverly hidden. Throw in some randomizing elements so I can reuse it. Don't worry about making it have satisfying fights and mechanics for every kind of character, just print other dungeons with different mixes they can challenge next. Feel free to make some have mystery elements, some just being jokes, and some having a cool self-contained story."
...is (mostly) coming out later this year! Although it IS worked into the wider world, in that Bastardhall is a location we've had in Ustalav for a long time but, until now, haven't done anything with it
What won't be a part of this from that wish is player maps with hidden secrets, nor will there be any randomizing elements. While those thigns would be rad (I especially love the idea of a "new game plus" type mode, considering this adventure's strong Dark Souls/Castlevania DNA)... this one just didn't have the room for that sort of extra content.
The character I played in Jim Butler's campaign back in the late 90s was a spider-obsessed druid named "Ruvagog." Which at the time, naming him after "Rovagug" was more of an inside joke for me and the one other friend in that campaign who had played in my homebrew game back in college. Wonder what late 90s James would think about that inside joke becoming an outside joke? Or that his GM would one day be his boss? TIME IS WEIRD.
While I dont disagree there would need to have been significant retcons I dont think they would have been insurmountable (Stop me if I'm wrong but if memory serves only one drow city has ever really had much attention payed to it and that was the one in second Darkness.)
Out of interest, if you're willing to have very significant retcons to the scale I was discussing in my post, what is it about Ayindilar that are insufficient for your interest? They're very much not trying to fill the same purpose as drow, and are not a replacement for them, but they're about as related to drow as the example I used in my last post, I think.
Actually thats what I was arguing for replace the drow for the Aiyindilar keep one group in Zirnakaynin as the daemon worshiping ones and have the rest be more nuance like what they did with the goblins and orcs maybe somewhat weary of outsiders and rather than mostly gone replaced by snakemen.
The plan is not to replace the drow stuff with one thing. It won't be a one-to-one swap. It's more complicated than that, which means it's not something we can easily do in the same way we did a "we don't have shambling mounds anymore but try sargassum heaps" sort of way or even a "green dragons are gone but try out horned dragons" sort of way.
Some of it will be serpentfolk. Some will be Aiyindilar. Some will be stuff we haven't yet put on paper. None of that stuff is done cooking yet.
Paizo has never liked the drow. Someone (I believed James Jacobs) admitted that Second Darkness was more of an obligation due to how popular drow were at the time.
Not so much an obligation, but more of a cold-cash-grab, I guess?
In our time working on the D&D magazines, we tracked closely how each issue did. We noticed that every time we put certain things on covers, those issues flat out sold better. Dragons did that consistently.
So did drow.
And so, going into a "We are no longer doing D&D stuff but all of our fans WANT us to do D&D stuff" era where we weren't sure we as a company would be around long enough to make it to the end of the year (much less the end of a single Adventure Path), we decided pretty early on (and before we learned about 4th edition changing the game in ways that would end up being pretty disruptive to our plans) that in order to prove to our established magazine/D&D fans that we were still the people making the adventures and content they'd already shown us they loved, AND because we suspected putting drow on the cover would boost sales, we decided to do a drow-focused Adventure Path as our third one. We also doubled down (too much, in hindsight) on the "all drow are evil" motif, because of a perception from our fans and customers and the gaming zeitgeist at the time that the "old guard" (who were at that point a big part of Paizo's strongest fans) were annoyed at the "softening" of the drow and that everything drow was just Drizzt or Drizzt clones. And so we leaned in on the "our drow are EVIL DEMON WORSHIPERS just like you liked them back in 1st edition AD&D!"
That all did us very little favors in the long run, obviously.
Drow are complicated for a lot of reasons. Unlike, say, kobolds, which have a much closer association with mythology, and which have appeared in multiple different forms throughout multiple different games and stories (even in D&D, where they've been at times "litlte dog people" or "little dragons," depending on the edition)...
What gamers like about drow is not their mythological roots, but what D&D made them into, and what D&D KEPT them as across multiple editions, and what D&D popularized them with via arguably the most iconic and beloved novel character across all of the D&D novels. All of that is D&D stuff, and part of the OGL crisis was Paizo finally realizing it's healthier to not have your company's well-being (and the employment of its MANY employees) something that can be threatened by the whims and complications of another company.
A LOT of what we use in Pathfinder from the OGL is stuff that either we've already done years of work making into our own by reinventing them or basing them on real-world mythology, OR things we just never really leaned in hard to as a core part of the setting. Drow are one of the few things that we did, and we probably shouldn't have, in hindsight.
Tiamat is another example of this sort of thing, and one we did a better job course correcting on earlier.
NOT doing a big book about the Darklands at any point during all of 1st edition (remember, "Into the Darklands" and "Second Darkness" were both 3.5 products created and released before we knew we had to do something drastic because we weren't going with D&D 4E) ended up with a game of "kick the ball down the street" and we never really took the time to address the drow (other than ensuring that we avoided the gross blackface element by striving to illustrate them, when they did appear, as having lighter blue or purple or lilac colored skin) in a way that would protect us from future unknowns (the OGL crisis) in the same way we did with other things like goblins or trolls.
That all said, I do understand folks being frustrated about this. Trust me, I'm frustrated too. In a perfect world, I'd be able to remaster and republish all of Second Darkness to recontextualize those events in a way that builds on Paizo/Pathifnder/Golarion's lore, but... there's like a 0.00000001% chance of that ever happening for all sorts of reasons—not the least of which being lack of resources competing with other projects that will automaticaly be more successful... or the specter that haunted us with Gatewalkers ("Why are you bothering to republish an Adventure Path that not everyone liked?").
EVENTUALLY we'll start to publish Darklands lore to bring the setting into the remastered world. That starts with Vaultlines. It won't end there, if I have anything to say about it, but I certainly WON'T have anything to say about that publicly for some time.
In the meantime, in your home games, you're 100% free to keep drow in there as they have been. That will never change.
It's maybe a fun idea for a PC, but it's an awful idea for print. While in the real world there's plenty of duplicate names (I don't know that there's been a Paizo with only one James working at it since MAYBE the early 2000s), in fiction, it looks like a mistake. We try hard to avoid it, and when we forget (like when I used a favored villain name from my homebrew, "Staunton Vhane", accidentally both as the name of the Forever Man under Magnimar and then again as the major character in "Wrath of the Righteous") it looks like a mistake and/or makes people think the NPCs are related by blood, when they're not.
As far as I understand, Vaultlines is supposed to start at level 11. Will there be a recommendation – like with Bastion of Blasphemies – for what to play beforehand?
Unlike Bastion of Blasphemies, Vaultlines is not built to have a "built in" on ramp. Any 1st to 10th Adventure Path would work in theory, but there isn't one that's an obvious choice. Standard mode for higher level Adventure Paths, really.
And honestly, the idea that you have to play a PC from 1st to 10th level before you can play a higher level Adventure Path kinda does no favors to us publishing more high level adventure paths. It takes a long time to play through 10 levels of content, and we do want to keep publishing higher level stuff, so normalizing the idea of starting a new PC at higher than 1st level is perhaps a good goal here?
Not to poo-poo the idea of playing a PC from 1st to 20th—that is BY FAR my preferred method to do things, but... yeah. That takes time!
Given how prominent the one Pathfinder was in particular they really ought to bring her back on screen to answer for her actions since it is effectively a complete heel turn
Frankly, that whole article was a panic write.
Spoiler:
When we DO get around at some point talking about the remasterd Darklands and what's going on in the drow vacuum, we'll hopefully not only have a LOT more space to discuss things, but also have the advantage of both:
1) Having had years to think things through before publishing something ASAP because who knows if we'll even be able to sell any of our OGL backstock in the future?
2) Not operating under the shadow of "If the OGL goes away and we have to do something extensive like pulp all of our backstock and can we even survive that?"
As we all know, the OGL crisis ended up being a proverbial tempest in a tea pot, and the end result was very workable and bearable and reasonable, but at the time this all was happening we were very much in CRISIS MODE in trying to get things that were shipping out that month (or even that week). For a short time, I was pretty sure Pathfinder #200 was going to have to be cancelled, for example, because it was SO reliant on OGL content, as a result of it being so deep-dive-mode into nostalgia. The publication of the "This is the state of the Darklands" article in the then-about-to-go-to-print volume of Sky King's Tomb was a "if we don't do this and things go bad, we might be screwed" decision.
It felt then and feels now pretty gross and awful to have had to throw Koriah under the proverbial bus in order to provide some in-world context for this all. I'd love to retcon THAT retcon if possible.
That all said, even though we now live in a world years removed from that panic, the decision stands that we've moved away from OGL content, and the Darklands, as one of the most heavily OGL reliant regions we've got in Golarion AND one of the least discussed in the lore books and adventures means that it's been in this weird sort of limbo for far longer than I've felt comfortable with.
Vaultlines will be our first chance to start recontextualizing things here in a more responsible way with more than 5 pages of last-minute scramble-writing to cover it all.
BUT to manage expectations, Vaultlines is an Adventure Path first and is NOT a Darklands lore book. This means that it'll cover what it needs to cover, and will set things up for future content to expand things, but it's not going to answer everything. We'll do our best, though!
The whole point of traditionally diferentiating between deity and demigod was and remains:
Deity: Doesn't use rules, no stat block, can do anything needed to propel a story as the creator of the story desires. Since they don't have a stat block, they cannot be killed through traditional encounter mode combat.
Demigod: Does use rules. Has a stat block. Has to follow the monster/NPC rules to interact with a story. Since they can have a stat block, they can be killed through traditional encounter mode combat.
In 1st edition, demigods occupied CR 26–CR 30. Things that could grant divine spells that were below CR 26 were other things, like Treerazer (a nascent demon lord) or a green man or a deep one elder, etc. All unique cases.
In 2nd edition, the level scale caps out at 25 for effects (this took us until War of Immortals to solidify, so there's some examples of level 28 stuff mentioned in earlier stuff; those need to be adjusted as needed if/when we bring them back to the remastered game). Things that once had CR 26–30 stat blocks are now mythic creatures and will generally occupy a level band of 22–25.
In 1st edition, demigods offered fewer domains than deities, and the lower level ones offered fewer than that. In 2nd edition, that isn't the case. All divinities offer the same basic number of domains (and in some expanded cases I guess there's "alternate" domains that can number one or two or maybe even more).
"Living god" is not a rules term, really. It's just flowery language that hasn't really had a definition put in print yet.
We haven't given any rules yet for what happens if you pass the test of the Starstone, but the four who have (Aroden, Iomedae, Norgorber, and Cayden) are all full-fledged deities (or were at the time they died, in Aroden's case). They may have spent time as demigods with stat blocks before we let PCs into the timeline, but in historical lore we don't bother making that sort of differentiation since it's history and not "on screen" during game play.
TL; DR: We haven't given rules for the Test of the Starstone yet, so if you wanna put it in your game, make it up as you see fit—which frankly will fit what WE do since the whole idea is that the test itself changes every time. It's not the same for every person.
James could we get a god of Rogues that is path who's not a murderous Psychopath no need to do the current one in just one who is natural and not evil.
There are literally hundreds of deities in the setting to choose from. You don't HAVE to pick one of the core 20. Look through the Appendix to Divine Mysteries and I'm sure there's one that'll work for your character. If you're specifically looking for a good one, maybe focus on the Empyreal Lords, like Kelinhat perhaps?
Kingdom building for sure could have used more time in the oven... but resources were strained to the breaking point as I'd mentioned, and at that time we were also unsure if folks would WANT a 2nd edition so there was a mandate to make sure that the kingdom building stuff was as system agnostic as possible so that it could be used as-is for whatever system. Be it Pathifnder 1E, 2E, D&D, or whatever.
Fortunately, the campaign is fine to run with the kingdom in the background option. Or if you prefer, any of the various alternate options folks have built as replacements, of course!
Anyway... thanks for the kind words! Very much appreciated.
When we played, our GM had no reason to compare-and-contrast the Eight Practices, so we kept bungling it while our GM thought we were either forgetting, or roleplaying as foolish.
I finally spotted the difference when I checked the version in the Foundry module instead, around the final time it was useful to us....
literally the exact thing that tripped my group up in the original release , only to be told it would be fixed, only for it to be the same.
Again–I'm very sorry about the mixup and miscommunication. It's something that came to my attention at the literal last few minutes of production, and it ended up being something that I just wasn't able to carry through in the right way.
This is, anecdotally, a GREAT example of why it's SO important for us to be able to read reviews and feedback and the like for adventures we publish. Whenever I do a compilation like this I spend days going through posts here, on reddit, and elsewhere—anywhere I can find—and collate all of that feedback into a main document so that I can use it as a checklist of things to address and improve while I do the compilation's development. For whatever reason... this particular complaint never showed up in that initial research, either because no one mentioned it online or (more likely) not enough people mentioned it online in places I have access to and/or know about to do this preparatory research.
It's very frustrating to me as well. I take a bit of solace (not much, but a bit) knowing this particular error is, in the grand scheme of things, pretty minor—and one that a GM who's prepared for it can fix easy, and one that isn't likely to negatively impact game play or story significantly as the plot moves on after the initial couple of chapters of the first book.
We have made bigger mistakes before and will make bigger mistakes in the future. Learning to live with them, learn from them, and "not make the perfect the enemy of the good" is one of the hardest parts of this job.
That all said, thank you for the feedback! It's all important to consider. We try new things for every Adventure Path, and some times those new things don't work as great as we hoped. But if we don't experiment with new methods, we can't grow!
Art, since you called that out, is a VERY limited resource. It costs lots more than words, and takes up lots of space. In a typical adventure, it's always a game of Sophie's Choice deciding what to illustrate and what not to. In a campaign like Revenge of the Runelords, where almost every encounter begs for an illustration, it's almost an impossible game to win.
The three products all set their respective adventures in Ustalav, but each product is in a different part of Ustalav. There are links between them to help the GM explain how a group of PCs go from the new Beginner Box to Troubles in Grayce and then on to Bastion of Blasphemies.
The levels are: Beginner Box (1st level), Troubles in Grayce (2nd to 4th level, with 2 adventures for each level so the GM and players can pick and choose which 3 of the 6 they want to play—or play all of them on a slower XP progression for this section), Bastion of Blasphemies (5th to 13th level or potentially even to 14th level).
The Bastion of Blasphemies player's guide will come out in time to advice character builds for Bastion of Blasphemies, but I don't know that it will be there in time for the ones that come before. We'll try but that sounds difficult to pull off for lots of technical reasons. That said, at the very least, I think that it'd be important to include in the player's guide advice to the PCs and GM that says "As your players prepare for Bastion of Blasphemies, make sure to give the PCs time to retrain if they wish to select different options for their characters to align more closely with the suggestions in this player's guide!" (That said, Bastion of Blasphemies mostly assumes a pretty "baseline" group of characters, which if you start with the more streamlined and limited options in a Beginner Box will be fine.)
For our published adventures, our goal is to present a baseline "average" challenge for a group of 4 PCs. It's interesting to note that Season of Ghosts, which I deliberately tuned to be a bit below that average even to be on the easy side, has been recieved as one of the most beloved Adventure Paths of 2nd edition DESPITE folks noting the ease of its fights.
But yes. By aiming for a middle of the road presentation, we hope to make our adventures more equally adjustable for a wider range of GMs to tune to their group... be that a group of 8 players, a single player, a group of first time players, or a group who's been gaming for decades and works like a well-oiled machine.
Any game that requires a GM kinda HAS to rely on the GM to bring the final experience over the proverbial finish line for their players. Our goal is to get the GM as close as possible to that point that we can... and the "GM" in this case has to represent "all potential GMs."
PC undead kinda force the rules to act funny, I guess. PC Skeletons also take bleed damage, for example. Weird.
Small tangent, but... do PC skeletons take bleed damage? When they were printed in Book of the Dead they didn't, since the legacy rules for bleed damage specifically excluded undead (this was part of the rules for bleed damage, not part of the rules for the undead trait, and therefore wasn't something overwritten the PC version of 'basic undead benefits'; Core Rulebook 452: "As such, it [bleed damage] has no effect on nonliving creatures or living creatures that don’t need blood to live.") and nothing in Book of the Dead indicated that they were exempt from that.
The remaster (in an errata) removed that flat-out immunity from the bleed rules, and the remaster instead selectively adds bleed immunity it to the relevant stat blocks as they've been reprinted (which is a huge improvement, by the way, I greatly appreciate not having immunities hidden elsewhere in the rules text), so I figured if/when the skeleton ancestry gets remastered it (or the basic undead benefits) would get that same note added to it like the reprinted undead stat blocks have been getting in order to keep the same gameplay as they had when they were released under the legacy rules.
In my games, no, PC skeletons wouldn't take bleed damage. But also I probably wouldn't allow PC skeletons in my games, because personally I much prefer more traditional games. If I were to do an "all undead PCs" story, I'd START with the rules in Book of the Dead and probably limit the player choices to a very small selection and then build the adventure with the assumptions that they're all skeletons or all ghouls or whatever, to lean into their unusual ancestry and to justify the non-standard choice.
But that all said... do what works best for your game!
As with all the great mythological stories, it's a lot more fun and creates a lot more adventure opportunities when we present deities (the closest thing we as the world creators have to something akin to a "protagonist" to use in writing stories that we, ultimately, have no agency over in deciding what your PCs, the ACTUAL protagonists, are going to do) is to present them as flawed characters who make mistakes. A deity who perfectly personifies their job and never makes errors is no fun!
Paizo went into remote work mode and the world ground to a halt. I had to come in to help develop Bestiary 2 at about that time as well while the design team was focusing on other content. All of which ended up turning an already enormous development task for Kingmaker into something of a nightmare. Lisa and Vic, the owners of the company, even pitched in to help with editing passes, and we had a lot of struggles as well with folks on staff dealing with what, at the time, sorta felt like the imminent end of the world in that first pandemic year. Some of us caught covid. Some of us had stress-related and other issues. Shipping and paper costs and ink prices and warehousing things all made things pretty topsy-turvy.
This is just more fuel for my conspiracy theory that Paizo Inc. is secretly just a bunch of nerds in a corporate trenchcoat.
You misspelled "based in fact and quite accurate" as "conspiracy" there. :-P
It was complex and never really well-explained to the public.<snip>...
Great post, James. I love hearing this level of engagement from your team and getting the scoop on why things developed the way they did. I'm playing through Kingmaker P2 for the first time currently, so it's especially interesting to me to learn this background detail.
From my perspective, the complaints I've heard about these "warts" are undeserved. I love this kind of play, so I think the systems are great especially with V&K's additions. For some folks, simple play is better, so I get the negativity.
Covid was underplayed wild. I ended up moving to another country during it. Unbelievable change for being stuck in the house.
Thanks for the kind words! It's important to hear good news on projects and books like this—too often the only voices that we hear seem to be the ones who are frustrated or dissatisfied, and that's not great for morale after spending years working on something to make it as good as you can make it... even if hearing about the places you can improve on and learning about mistakes not to repeat IS still important!
Though on the note for Kingmaker, I think I remember hearing somewhere that Kingmaker Remastered was not Paizo directly, but Legendary Games approved by Paizo, sort of a second party deal. Any truth to that?
It was complex and never really well-explained to the public. We initially wanted the 2nd edition of Kingmaker to be a big 1st-year release for 2nd edition, to give players from 1st edition a fun way to get into the new game but also to support the new edition with an all-inclusive 1st to 20th level campaign to buy and start playing.
Turns out, releasing a new edition of a game at the same time we're also launching a new adventure path (Age of Ashes) and a set of new Lost Omens lore books all within a few months of each other was... overly ambitious.
At that time, my primary job was working on Age of Ashes. In order to get a "head start" on the first round of development tasks for Kingmaker, which included manually transposing the 1st edition text from the final files back into word documents and styling them up for easy development and then doing the first pass of the rules updates was outsourced to Legendary Games.
I came in to do the primary development pass for the entire book after that, squeezing in my work there as soon as I could AFTER I finished developing the six volumes of Age of Ashes.
We crowdfunded Kingmaker, and that caused the scope of its products to expand significantly, including a 5E version that Legendary was a LOT more in the "lead the charge" role on.
And then... Covid happened.
Paizo went into remote work mode and the world ground to a halt. I had to come in to help develop Bestiary 2 at about that time as well while the design team was focusing on other content. All of which ended up turning an already enormous development task for Kingmaker into something of a nightmare. Lisa and Vic, the owners of the company, even pitched in to help with editing passes, and we had a lot of struggles as well with folks on staff dealing with what, at the time, sorta felt like the imminent end of the world in that first pandemic year. Some of us caught covid. Some of us had stress-related and other issues. Shipping and paper costs and ink prices and warehousing things all made things pretty topsy-turvy.
It was a mess, and in hindsight there's a LOT we could and should have done differently for this thing, even in a world where the pandemic didn't happen. We learned a lot for sure, but yeah... Kingmaker has some warts. I'm still really proud of the final product, but also can't really regard it without some deep feelings of repressed trauma and distress about the whole thing.
(Side note: This all is why the Absalom book took so long to come out, and also why Dead God's Hand took even longer and is finally coming out later this year. The pandemic was pretty disruptive.)
TL; DR: Kingmaker was entirely a Paizo creation. We had help from Legendary, but this was a project I more or less soloed the primary development tasks for.
PC undead kinda force the rules to act funny, I guess. PC Skeletons also take bleed damage, for example. Weird.
As for mindless undead, they are animated purely by the void necromancy energy and utilize only a slight sliver of the soul. This means a person whose body is turned into a zombie or skeleton or other mindless undead can be resurrected normally. It also means that the body that's being turned into a skeleton or zombie can be as dead as long as it wants before it's animated, since it doesn't require the soul's corruption. The rules don't 100% support that I think, but the lore does—if a soul's been judged, it can't become a sapient undead any more than it can be brought back to life.
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?
My take: Once you destroy an undead (and assuming it doesn't require extra steps to make that destruction stick like you get with ghosts and liches and vampires), the soul is released and you can resurrect/raise the soul back to life—if it's not been dead longer than your spell can handle, and if the soul WANTS to come back to life, of course. Those spells do not return the soul to its previous undead state. I don't believe we have any spell in effect yet that lets you "reanimate" a destroyed undead back from destruction. Cool idea for a spell even if it's something that's more likely to be on the GM side of the toolbox, at which point the GM can just create those effects as they need as items or monster abilities or plot devices for the adventure to use anyway...
EDIT: Adding in because I should: This is my personal take and even though I'm the creative director of narrative for Pathfinder and I'm posting this on the Paizo forums, the above response is my own personal take on the matter how I'd rule it in games I run and is not meant to be "official errata".
It's from 1st edition, but it's lore-based and still accurate as far as I know:
Pages 64–69 of *Planar Adventures* goes into great detail about how the River of Souls and the soul cycle works. The nutshell version there is that elementals as "outsiders" (a blanket term used in 1st edition to cover all forms of life from other planes that weren't mortals) that die have their quintessence (the sum total of their physical and mental and spiritual remains, which includes their soul) re-absorbed into reality. This re-absorbed energy gravitates toward the plane the elemental is associated with, and if for whatever reason it doesn't go there, it eventually gets sucked into the Maelstrom and churned back through the Antipode to be "recycled" into new soul energy... or in rarer cases is eaten and lost to supernatural predators.
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.
a small region around the serpentfolk city underneath northern Varisia
Just realized that Varisia and Valusia sound suspiciously similar.
As the inventor of the word Varisia and a long-time fan of Robert E. Howard, I can confirm this is a coincidence...
...but also can confirm that every writer has their own method and inspiration and technique for making up names, and that process is invariably shaped and influenced by that writer's favorite writers, so Varisia and Valusia being similar sounding doesn't surprise me, even though I never made that connection until I read this post.
His fingerprints are all OVER Golarion, since he was there at the start and was an immense help in getting the Adventure Path rolling in the first place. Wes = Awesome.
I didn't see anything separate listed elsewhere, so I figured with it being built to work together I thought I'd ask here. The 6 adventures for the Troubles in Grayce Anthology. Roughly how long is each part? I'm guessing about 2 sessions worth of time, so 6-8 hours?
Each adventure in Troubles in Grayce covers a level of content. Whether that's 1 session or 10 sessions depends on a particular game table—we don't really use hours to quantify game play length for published adventures in the same way we standardize things on the Org Play side of things.
Would the Wood that the weapon is made out of make handling it any easier, since it's lighter? Or is the rule on item sizes a hard fast rule, irrelevant of the building materials?
Rules for items made of precious materials, such as duskwood, appear on pages 252–254 of GM Core. Duskwood reduces an item's bulk by 1, or to Light bulk if the item is already bulk 1. Has no effect on an item that's already Light. That's the only effect being made out of duskwood has on a weapon, so if there are other rules or feats or whatever that require a lower bulk on a weapon, it could help there, I guess, but nothing about duskwood's rules have any other effect on a weapon other than making it less bulk.
Regardless, duskwood is too valuable a treasure to give out at that level, so my suggestion remains just make it a normal wood weapon.
Not to sidetrack even further (but related to the Darklands) who wrote the adventure portion of the PF1 module Cradle of Night? It lists 4 authors in the credits. (Jacobs, Schneider, Spicer, Vaughan)
All four of us split the writing duties on that one as a result of a scheduling nightmare. I don't recall who wrote what parts off the top of my head.
We traditionally only put authors on a book's cover or author byline... even though in some cases, the book's lead developer does end up writing a portion of things and is the one who builds the overall plot and is the "director" of the show, as it were. Those credits live on the table of contents inside the book.
"Development Lead" is the credit you're looking for, by the way. For Vaultlines, that role is filled by Bill Fischer.
This is really funny to me, there was an arc of my campaign set in Absalom that was literally about this! Down to the visions about Aroden's life. Makes sense since I pulled info about the Sanctum from the Absalom book (also by Erik Mona), but it's still cool to see.
Yup! That's exactly what's going on. Originally, the Absalom book and this adventure were both supposed to come out at the same time along with the launch of 2nd edition but... that was a bit too ambitious even BEFORE you factor in a pandemic lurking right around the corner.
We have never had plans to reveal more about how Aroden died, nor do we have any plans to do so. This showed up twice. Weird. But that makes it even MORE OFFICIAL, yeah? So I'm leaving it. :-P
... history and how he became a god and what happened before that, but does not offer clues about his fate. It might do a little bit of teasing about that though...
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.
Neothelids are in OGL lore under the same name and design as an aberrant state of the Mind Flayer lifecycle -- a tadpole that consumed its brood and grew to enormous size rather than being implanted in a humanoid host. Pathfinder lore revamped them as an independent species of aberration loosely tied to the Cthulhu mythos and created the Seugathi as a servitor race. I guess that specific IP wasn't as litigiously protected as the Mind Flayers proper, thus putting them in the same gray area as Drow and Ropers and the like, but now a lot more of that has to go.
Yup.
This happened because of a weird loophole/choice that WotC made. While they kept the mind flayers out of the OGL, they put neothelids into the Psionics Handbook, and when they released the contents of that book as open content, that meant that we could use the neothelid in Golarion. We just had to give them a different flavor. This is also how we ended up with access to intellect devourers and others (the brain collector, ANOTHER mind-flayer replacement, but this one originally from the Expert set rules introduced via the adventure "Castle Amber", crept into the OGL via the Epic-Level Handbook).
Ropers were always in the OGL, like drow, but unlike drow, ropers were never a cornerstone of an entire Darklands region. So them being replaced in the game's environment is a lot easier–this one IS a case where we just don't talk about ropers anymore, and when the time comes to do an encounter where in the OGL days we would have used a roper, we instead use a gogiteth or something else.
]Are they actually gone gone, in the sense that former drow cities are now not!drow cities. Or are they just not mentioned?
We can't/won't talk about drow going forward in the game so they're indeed gone gone.
You could not mention them by just not mentioning them - that would not have been what I meant by "gone gone". What I was asking was whether you were going to do that, or deliberately overwrite them. From the rest of your reply (and the Archpaladin's), it seems like you are doing the latter.
We're doing the latter. This is one of the only OGL to Remastered hard-reset overwrites we're doing, but we haven't had the chance to do it yet. Saying nothing would have made it feel like we forgot them, but more importantly, saying nothing would increasingly risk assumptions by employees, license holders, and more that they were still there and that nothing changed. Saying nothing wasn't a luxury I felt we had in this case.
Good to here that the regions and the like are still gonna be there, like of course Ilvarandin can't have intellect devourers anymore but maybe they get replaced by someyhing else. I quite like the Darklands as they have societies very alien to the rest of Golarion like those pyshic pirate people that were a ray of hope underground and you can always explore them further like "what are the Darklands of Tian Xia, of Vudra, of Casmaron..." so very exciting stuff
Ilvarandin is still there and unchanged. No intellect devourers, but they've been replaced by corpse riders, aka Xoarians. This is a case where the switch from OGL to Remaster went very smoothly, because we've spent the past decades giving our version of "intellect devourers" their own uniquely Pathfinder vibes, so it was easy to rename them and adjust the art a little and presto!
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.
Other stuff, like duergar, we replaced with hryngar and leaned in more to the Droskar elements (a deity we created for the setting).
And other elements are creatures either drawn from public domain sources (deros, morlocks, serpent folk, Lovecraftian stuff) or things wholly invented by us (munavris, urdefhans, vault-builders/vault-keepers), and thus aren't a part of the OGL umbrella at all.
The drow were a perfect storm of all of the above NOT applying.
So essentially Lizzid People have replaced the Drow.
This is huge oversimplification that's a result of us having to scramble to contextualize a very OGL-dependent region of the setting in a short article (see my post just above for more details). We'll have more to say in Vaultlines and HOPEFULLY in products in the years to come beyond that.
I assume we are going to be getting information on the Cavern Elves? I assume that the drow cities are gone?
That said, drow are one of the things we left behind when we transitioned to the remastered rules, so they're not a part of Vaultlines.
Are they actually gone gone, in the sense that former drow cities are now not!drow cities. Or are they just not mentioned?
We can't/won't talk about drow going forward in the game so they're indeed gone gone. We haven't yet had a solid chance to do a deep dive on the Darklands in a remastered product—the closest being Sky King's Tomb and that was AT THE MOMENT IT ALL HAD TO CHANGE so we were very limited in how we could do stuff there. Hence the 11th hour insertion I wrote about the Darklands in that Adventure Path, meant to try to contextualize a very OGL-reliant (perhaps the MOST OGL-reliant) region of our setting in a new era where we weren't using the OGL, at a time where it looked like anything OGL had to potentially be recalled and destroyed. Fortunately, that's not how it played out and things ended up being a lot less dire!
Vaultlines is the first point where we've been able to get a fully Darklands-themed product onto the schedule for various reasons (on the rules, lore, AND adventure side of things), and so it's going to start tackling those answers. You'll have to wait until later this year to see what sections we tackle and how we do it—it won't be EVERYTHING, but it'll be a start.
Drow are gone. The Darklands and its maps and locations are not. That means hat the drow-associated regions have to change, and that's a big order that can't be adequately covered in a 6 page article written in the most fraught situation that triggered the need for said article. I'm hopeful we'll get to do lots more Darklands stuff in the future after Vault lines, but we have nothing yet to announce there. Folks continuing to let us know (not just me, who has been pushing for us to do more Darklands stuff since before Pathifnder was an RPG in the first place, but ALL of Paizo) and strong sales/reviews for Vaultlines are two solid ways to help make a future where we do more Darklands stuff a reality.
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?
Vaultlines, other than being set in the Darklands, has nothing to do with revisiting or updating Second Darkness at all. It's a brand new different story.
I assume we are going to be getting information on the Cavern Elves? I assume that the drow cities are gone?
We'll have more to say about what's going on in the Darklands later in the year once we get closer to this one's release—there will be another Paizo Live stream to talk about it I suspect.
That said, drow are one of the things we left behind when we transitioned to the remastered rules, so they're not a part of Vaultlines.
We've not really traditionally had much luck selling posters, especially considering that most folks who want them don't want them folded. Shipping and warehousing posters in tubes is awful. I'd say the chances of us producing posters of this or any of our products without logos, while not being zero, is pretty close to zero.
Creative Director
