I recommend you do not give the damn thing out. It was completely busted in Shattered Star and helped make the final encounter way too easy.
That was KIND of the whole idea all along. I always felt it was disappointing to do a big campaign to track down an artifact and then NOT feel like it was worth it in the end. Of course, how "completely busted" it ends up being depends significantly on the players and GM skill too. But also, that's why we haven't included it as a PC resource in campaigns where the Sihedron is the whole point.
I wonder why the ''spirits'' of most previous Runelords are present in the crypt of runes. Afterall, many of them were killed by players (Krune, Karzoug and Alaznist at a minimum. Also Phirandi is in Xin-Edasseril) and would never have been brought there.
It's also hard to explain how Xanderghul would have been able to ''rise'' them considering he would not have access to much material (at best personal objects for the still living Runelords in the crypt).
It's less of their spirits/souls there and more of their legacy/residual power. It's the same sort of thing that differentiates between a ghost and a haunt. To raise them, Xanderghul doesn't need their soul at all—most of these runelords have indeed been judged in the Boneyard and have gone on to the afterlife. All he needs is a fragment of their legacy. The raise runelord ritual is more like the OGL simulacrum ritual than it is anything close to resurrection or create undead. The risen runelords are super-realistic illusions, in effect.
I am getting pretty dismayed by the fact that I missed all this info about new products such as this Adventure anthology as well as the new Beginner Box it mentions in its description even though I spend A LOT of time each day browsing these boards.
Adventure content has been a bit tricky for us to announce, since they don't sell as well as do books aimed at players, and for a while the announcements were skewing more toward those products and we admittedly kinda lost the proverbial path for adventure announcements. Didn't help that last year was particularly chaotic of course. That said, it's something we've taken notice of and are trying to do better about. It's a slow process, but getting adventure announcements out there in a more visible way is for sure something myself and Rue and others are working toward doing better with.
That said, Paizo Live is an increasingly important place for us to make these announcements, so if one is interested in upcoming announcements, it's a good idea to look forward to and mark the date for these streams. Even if you don't watch, you'll know that during/after it's a good idea to check out here or reddit or wherever to see recaps or folks talking about them. I for one will always be eager to chat about the adventures here or on reddit... ESPECIALLY the ones I'm writing or developing!
A little history...
Spoiler:
In the pre-Covid era, we would generally announce one half of the adventures for a year at Paizocon, and the next half of that year at Gen Con. Even then, that was pretty clunky, because it meant that the Paizocon announcements had a very short window of time to build hype before the Gen Con ones muscled their way in and stole the thunder.
The pandemic threw chaos into that, but so did our switch to doing 4 3-part Adventure Paths a year. Post-Covid, we had FOUR Adventure Paths to announce (and one to two standalone adventures), but no longer had the rhythm or option to do so at our two big conventions where we had a strong physical presence of staff at shows. And even then, the old way of announcing one at Paizocon and one at Gen Con resulted in us only announcing 2 of the 4, so that meant that for a few years... two announcements were soft (made online without in-person conventions) and two just didn't happen and typically got "announced" when the pages went live on the store or someone noticed a page on Amazon or the like. Not great.
Took us (and the world) to recover from the pandemic disruptions, for sure, but it HAS been a clunky and awkward trip out of the pandemic to get into a more regimented cadence of Adventure Path announcements. It's frustrating to us too, but hopefully we're on the cusp of a better method going forward!
In the meantime, if folks are ever interested or curious about what's been announced recently, asking here on the boards is never a bad idea!
A thing that I just noticed: The Bastion of Blasphemies product page says that it is the "perfect follow-up" for a completed Troubles in Grayce. But according to its product page the latter had six adventures worth 1 level each, putting you at seventh if you finish it, while Bastion... starts at level 5. Is one of the pages in error, or is there something else going on?
We're doing something similar to what we did with the first Beginner Box/Troubles in Otari/Abomination Vaults, but more planned out since we no longer HAVE to start Adventure Paths at 1st or 11th level.
The order is:
1st level: The new Beginner Box
2nd–4th level: "Troubles in Grayce", which presents 6 adventures (2 2nd level, 2 3rd level, and 2 4th level) so that the players can choose which of the adventures they want to play through to reach 5th level. And if they wanna play all 6, then you can use a slower XP route and play them all.
5th–13th level: "Bastion of Blasphemies"
AND of course, all three stand alone perfectly well if you don't wanna play them all in order.
Apart from the "black coach" bit, it sounds kinda like Scarwall from CotCT (which I would be continuing to explore tonight if the session had not been cancelled, *grumble grumble*). But I guess the specific will be pretty different.
BTW, it is "currently" 4726 AR, right? So 513 years ago?
Turns out, Scarwall is inspired by a lot of the same tropes that Bastardhall is. That's a side effect of me and Wes both having such similar muses and for the first several dozen Adventure Paths working so closely together to make them happen. In effect, Scarwall is my initial take on the "haunted castle" and Bastardhall is Wes, but with both of us helping out the other to make things happen. In a way, you can also think of Scarwall as the test run for Bastardhall, which leans SO MUCH MORE into the Castlevania (and now Dark Souls) elements than Scarwall did.
Scarwall and Bastardhall are both haunted castles... but Scarwall is SO much smaller than Bastardhall. Bastardhall is over three times the encounters and levels of play than Scarwall, but ALSO skews to lower levels. Scarwall is for level 13–15, while Bastardhall is for levels 5–13. So even then they'll feel different simply because the monsters will need to be different.
And yup; just over 500 years ago. Bastardhall's last manifestation on Golarion was a little over a decade before this adventure takes place, which is part of the plot that I'm not gonna spoil more of here.
One question: Since it sounds like the adventure is going to be very much a "you get stuck in this location" is there going to be guidance on how to address backup characters if a PC doesn't make it?
I wrote a big sidebar about precisely this topic for the larger-than-normal introduction, so... yes!
TBF, in certain periods of real-world history it was fairly common for a "stone castle" to have wooden floors/ceilings, wooden beams for support, wooden roofs (covered with slate or other non-flammable material), etc. "Burning down a stone castle" would usually involve all the wood structural components, furniture, tapestries, etc. which would just leave a stone shell and often involve a collapse of the upper portions of the stone walls.
There was still a fire. And stuff did burn down. Just... not the whole castle.
I think almost everything from the wiki actually comes from Rule of Fear, except for the one from Inner Sea Magic. I know the burning down of the castle is on page 56 of Rule of Fear.
Fair enough. Still doesn't change the fact that burning down a stone castle is weird. :-P
Pathfinderwiki has creepy info about Bastardhall and there is a pretty horrifying Tale of Lost Omens blogpost from one of the coach's prey. Even death is no escape.
Note that all prey of the coach are descendants of the Arudora family. Hence the name of what was once Castle Arudora.
Fun stuff, but keep in mind that some of that information has been drawn from Wes's personal games he ran at conventions or mused about here on the blog. In building "Bastion of Blasphemies" I had to make some choices where lore in Wes's games contradicted published lore, but also made some choices to make the adventure my own (particularly the bit about the ENTIRE stone castle burning to the ground), so it's best to consider the info on Pathfinderwiki as scuttlebutt and rumors at this point. Some might be true, some might not be!
As someone who never interacted with the official Golarion setting until 2021 I have no idea what Bastardhall is. But as someone who has tried for a decade to design his own Castlevania-esque campaign and never managed to quite make it work I am unbelievably hyped for this Adventure Path.
On that note, IDK if James is still answering questions, but if you are: Is there a BBEG in this adventure or is it more of just "the mystery of the Castle" kind of plothook?
I am indeed still here (and thanks to Maya for the ping!), but there are a LOT of BBEGs in this adventure, including...
Spoiler:
...the obvious one, the secret one, and the one that could become a BBEG for the Continuing the Campaign stuff beyond this Adventure Path's conclusion.
Just want to check what is the default assumption of the Sihedron from shatterd star Maybe I missed it but I dont remember it being mentioned at all in this ap. Is it assumed it was destroyed during return?
It doesn't play a role in Revenge of the Runelords. It's likely still in the possession of the heroes who played through "Shattered Star" so if you ran that game, you can use that as canon. Officially, it's out there somewhere adventuring along with those heroes—I don't believe we've canonized where it's at yet.
This suddenly got me super excited. Made me immediately think of the old school World of Warcraft dungeons where you'd have the bosses to kill (and eventually farm) but you also would often have quests to accomplish in the dungeons.
That is such a fantastic idea! Nice!
Thanks! But that said... this sort of "in the dungeon side quest thing" isn't new. I strive to include this sort of thing in all of the dungeon crawls I write and help work on, but the visibility of them is often limited to GM communication with the party and/or whether or not the players bother to explore the parts of the dungeon where the quests trigger. With this one, it's pretty obvious that the PCs shouldn't (and honestly CAN'T) just race to the last room and skip all the content.
I don't like when players skip content. It's like fast-forwarding the movie, or reading the last page of the novel. Makes me sad.
Which of the three endings will be canonical, the secret, bad, or good? (I assume it’s not the bad ending)
Haven't really put any thought into it. As a general rule, it's better for us to see reader/player/GM reaction before we canonize an ending, and we avoid doing that anyway as long as we can. Typically, a canonization occurs whenever we do a new product that builds on that old adventure's plot or location, so we can string out that "canon" ending long enough for players and GMs to feel more enabled to embrace their own table's developments.
It absolutely is. That said, it might not be as vast and sprawling as you anticipate. This is because I don't think mazes make for particularly fun game play. It's there, but it's not presented in a way that forces game play to suddenly grind to a halt while the GM forces the players (NOT the PCs) to navigate a real-world puzzle in slow-motion abstraction mode.
Actually now that my group is starting book 2, I have a question;
....what happened to the Therassic Library in Jorgenfist? Why send the PCs to do research on how to find the Emerald Chambers in Korvosa and Riddleport and Magnimar (meeting with the Sihedron Council makes sense at least) but not Jorgenfist, where a massive library on Thassilon lore is located?
It was saved from the temporal distortions, so it should be, like, fine, no?
...I do like the 'talking with Zutha's spirit' thing though, and I'm condensing Shadows at Sundown into the first part of this book because one of my players has played CotCT and is playing a child of their CotCT PC (and another PC is also from Korvosa), but I'm just curious what the reasoning was for splitting the research across 3 locations like that and not just putting it all in Jorgenfist, or a mention of what happens if the players think to try and contact Belimarius.
Nothing happened to the Therassic Library. I probably should have mentioned it though, but the idea was that the information the PCs needed wasn't to be found there anyway—the library is vast, but doesn't contain everything.
From a story point, it was more important to give the PCs of this specific Adventure Path a chance to build touchstones with Varisia's three major city-states, and having them travel here is how that works. This establishes some in-campaign reason to want to save the place, and allowed us to do some updates to those areas in 2nd edition for the first time. Jorgenfist and the library are pretty minor thematic elements there, and having the PCs just go there to study up on things would have been less epic and less sprawling.
Still it would have been a good idea to include a line saying something like: "Since it's rediscovery decades ago, much of the lore in the Therassic Library has been dispersed through Varisia's scholastic circles, so that the first people the PCs contact can confirm that, even with that library's vast holdings, the answers they seek are not found in its holdings."
As for contacting Belimarius... that would be a different plot for a different adventure path and one that would be tricky to pull off without TPKing a group not ready or powerful enough to foolishly contact one of the region's bad gal bosses when they were too low level. Plus... we wanted to save her for later in the story.
Correct. The Emerald Chambers is less of a place to put Xin's bones than it is a memorial in his honor that the runelords then turned into their own crypt. History is written by the winners, and the runelords had well over a thousand years to minimize Xin's footprint.
Will the AP ending be isolated or will it affect other aspects of Ustalav? Obviously, I don't want you to reveal the ending, but my question is whether the campaign events are isolated and everything is resolved here and that's it (like Shades of Blood), or if there's some revelation or something that affects Ustalav, besides the fact that I suppose it won't have to worry about kidnapping carriages anymore. When I think of Bastardhall, Scarwall is the first think that comes to mind, and after Curse, there isn't much to say or see developing there, so I'd like to know.
Depends on if your PCs fail, succeed, or SUPER succeed.
Spoiler:
As with many souls-like games there's multiple potential endings. Let's call them a bad end, a good end, and a secret end. The good end is the one that will impact Ustalav and the area the least. Just re-read what I wrote in "Continuing the Campaign" for the section titled "Worst Case Scenario" and yeah... if your PCs really mess things up, let's just say there'll be a new regional threat to at least three metaregions. And if they get the secret ending, well... REDACTED on account of it being secret!
Mhhhhhh, I have more than one question so I'll let you chose which one you want to answer amongst those :
- On the "player option" side of things, will it have new stuff for some existing class or archetype, and if yes could you tell us which ones? (I'm thinking mostly new class feats and extension of undead archetype in particular, but things like the new druid orders from wildwood or harrow bloodline from stolen fate were also quite hype).
- If it's (mostly) a megadungeon AP, I'm assuming there's going to be a "base town" in which the PC can recover and regroup and have intrigue with a few of the NPCs, can you give us a preview of it's "vibes"/wether there are some plotline or NPC you are especially proud of? I've ran Rise of the Runelord in 1e and am currently running a "precampaign" for 7 Dooms for Sandpoint, and some NPCs really stuck to my players (namely Podiker, Broder Quink and Hannah), so I'm interested in any "outstanding personality" that might pop up in here.
- You said it was inspired by souls like and universal horror movies (amongst other things), any monster in particular you'd like to show us? Or maybe an haunt or just a general scene/moment that you think will really stick with most group that play the AP?
CHEATING! :-P
That said, I'll answer all three without using up the next two posts.
Player Options: This Adventure Path's got an Adventure Toolbox, but it's focused entirely on magic items you can find in the adventure. There are no new archetypes or specific options for classes in the form of feats. Although a few of these items do have significant unusual effects beyond just being magic items...
Spoiler:
...for example, there are some that can permanently increase Hit Points, which is a benefit that applies to every class. But it's also tied significantly to this campaign, so these items aren't gonna be things that PCs will have access to beyond the campaign in other adventures... unless of course a GM wants them to be available!
Megadungeon: The entire campaign...
Spoiler:
... takes place on a single SUPER COMPLEX map, which encompasses all of Bastardhall as well as the island it's on. A very small village of a dozen or so haunted buildings are on that island outside of the castle walls, and as the PCs adventure, they'll start to rescue lost spirits and build up a very small population of flavorful NPCs with their own personalties and goals and side quests and boons they can offer. The thing I'm most delighted with here is how it helps to reward exploration of the castle and gives out downtime resources, like shopping or research opportunities or crafting resources or the like in the form of encounter rewards. And there are a lot more NPCs in the castle itself to interact with. Not every encounter in Bastardhall is a fight.
Inspirations: Can't really share art from the book in these forums, but I will spoil a few critters I was inspired to include from both games:
Spoiler:
From Castlevania, there are spitting aquatic monsters whose role is played by a new monster called a sludge troll (which sort of fill the vacancy left by the scrag, which is an OGL creature we can't use anymore), and some creepy flying head monsters.
From Dark Souls, there's some creepy armored foes, a bunch of nasty pustulent rats, and a secret boss that's something I don't wanna spoil but is BIG and feels like it stepped right out of a boss fight in those games.
We're working to get the Hell's Destiny page up ASAP but it's taking a bit, obviously.
It is indeed coming out between Hellbreakers and Bastion of Blasphemies. To make up for the delay, I will answer the next three questions posted to this thread about Bastion of Blasphemies* posted by three different folks!
*Unless it's still secret or a big spoiler, in which case "I can't tell you that yet!" is still TECHNICALLY an answer!
Pathfinder is bigger than one person's vision. It's been this way from the start.
A core strength of the setting is how we've increasingly worked to get more than just a few voices in there to build the world. And as the demands of the job have grown along with the amount of content we produce, shifting duties like this not only opens doors for other people to help build the world and brings more creativity into the process than one person alone could ever manage... it's also more than a single person's worth of work.
AKA: By splitting the duties of creative direction for Pathifnder between myself and Luis, we get to have personal lives beyond work and don't burn out as a result of having more work than can be responsibly done by one person.
Even bigger AKA: Luis is amazing and his contributions to Golarion have elevated the lore in more ways than I can quantify in a single post here.
That's your explanation, not mine (mine exists but I won't be sharing it), so it's up to you to decide there, I guess. (That said, what I can confirm and what we've already confirmed is that he is dead—he's not "secret alive" as a human somewhere.)
Ok. Please tell me some more about the Hermit on that island, then.
These boards are not my favorite place to give "free lore drops" these days, alas, since that way too easily turns into continuity traps and confusion when folks assume that posts I make here are official additions to the game. It's a tough lesson I've had to learn, that I don't really have the luxury of idly speculating or generating lore in public forums like this without it backfiring somehow down the road. On top of that, it's a personal time-management decision—by not doing this, I can keep myself from distracting myself away from my day job. In effect, time I spend creating new lore here "for free" is time stolen from myself when I should be creating new lore for publications.
Additionally, these days my official responsibility is on the adventure side. Luis Loza is the creative director on the lore side, and I don't want to step on his toes by creating new content like this.
SO... sorry I can't tell you more. As far as I know... there's NOT much more about this fella yet, since a lot of the content we create is meant to spur the imagination of the reader. That's for sure complicated by the fact that anything we publish could eventually turn into something more official.
For stuff like this, the best bet is to ask on forums like this one or on Reddit or wherever—ask fellow gamers if they have any notions or ideas, or can list more obscure publications that speak more to the topic. That not only keeps me out of the equation (and prevents me from accidentally giving the implication that I'm speaking from "on high" with new lore that is meant to be canon), but potentially gets you faster and more accurate and more interesting answers since there's so many voices out there just beyond my own.
Couldn't fit everything into a 3 part story, so some folks like Xoxl got left behind. That said, doing what makes most sense for your table is always the right call.
as a long-time AP subscriber, if you can't make a month, don't sweat it!
That's an option now that we're not on a monthly schedule. It wasn't when we were, because skipping a month caused a really bad set of different cascading complications across the board on our side of things, from the writing schedule all the way up to the shipping schedule and everything in between.
All of which is why I've constantly been pushing folks to review Adventure Paths. But... it's tough to get folks to do that.
What's the best place to do that? There's lots of feedback out there these days but it's kind of scattered all over the place, so if there's a place where such things can get put that they'll be seen, that would be good to know.
A challenge with reviewing APs specifically is how long they take to run, so usually by time I can review it, it's been out for years. But if you want me to tell you all the ways in which Fists of the Ruby Phoenix is great, I don't mind. :D (Seriously, that one is so good I ran it twice and both groups completed it.)
If you want me to see it personally, the best place is to post here on the forums, preferably in the associated areas with that product. I'm also somewhat active over on the 2E Pathfinder Reddit scene.
And reviews of simply READING an Adventure Path are fine and welcome as well.
...or to two different chapters of an AP feeling completely disjointed...
That's always been a thing with AP books and I hope the move to single volumes releasing at the same time will help since they can be written at the same time instead of staggered. At least, I hope so.
While having an Adventure Path as a single book does allow us to have a single author to write the whole thing with less complication (as is the case with "Bastion of Blasphemies") at this point, we're hiring multiple authors to write them in the same way we did before. We've had authors write their sections at the same time for years. This isn't really changing. What IS changing is that we now get to develop the entire thing as a single book rather than three books. We get to edit it as a single book rather than three books. And we get to adjust the schedule a bit more flexibly to account for some adventures needing more time in the "oven" than others without worrying about the grind of the monthly schedule. Hopefully those changes will allow for Adventure Paths to feel less disjointed... but frankly, any project with multiple authors on it is going to run that risk. It's our job as developers to minimize that risk, and again... one book is easier to manage that way than three (or six for that matter).
Having a single author in theory helps, but very few authors are able to do a full Adventure Path on the schedule we need them to be written. Alternately, having author 1 write their part, then giving that to author 2 to read and write their part, and so on, would potentially help... but that pushes the writing window out even further. For that, we'd probably have to start working on Adventure Paths even further out than we already do, which would disrupt the schedule even more.
Adventure Paths are among the most complex things we publish, and we do a LOT of work to make them as good as we can make them. We learn from each one we do as well. And a big part of that learning is hearing back constructive feedback from folks who have read them or played them or run them. And this feedback is MUCH more helpful if it's detailed. All of which is why I've constantly been pushing folks to review Adventure Paths. But... it's tough to get folks to do that.
Is it really a comeuppance if Aroden went to Pharasma and asked her to kill him as a god but let him live as a man (hermit) again in some remote part of the world like that little bitty island southwest of Mediogalti Island? You know...the island almost immediately to the west of the Eye of Abendego?
That's your explanation, not mine (mine exists but I won't be sharing it), so it's up to you to decide there, I guess. (That said, what I can confirm and what we've already confirmed is that he is dead—he's not "secret alive" as a human somewhere.)
This is also true of the remastered Players Guide!
Looking a little closer... it isn't quite the same thing.
The Player's Guide version of the Willowshore Map does not include ALL of the locations across the entire campaign gathered onto one map like we did in the hardcover, but the Player's Guide also does not include those additional locations in the player-facing text.
This was a deliberate choice. It's always something of a tightrope to walk between giving out information and giving out TOO much information in a Player's Guide (be it because of fears about spoilers for the adventure or fears about overwhelming the player with information overload).
In this case, I made the call to NOT spoil locations that show up beyond the first few chapters of the adventure in the Player's Guide, in part because it doesn't hurt the players to not know every location that features in the campaign, but also because canny players would be able to compare the two different guides and specifically note the new locations that were added and realize that those spots in particular are plot-important (which is not the case of the map locations currently featured in the map in the Player's Guide). All of the tags in the text of the player's guide should thus match up fine to the ones in the Player's Guide map.
So... that's not an error. It's a deliberate choice on my part, and not something that I think we should "open the patient back up" to fix in the player's guide. If a GM feels that it's important for a player to know about untagged locations then that can happen during session 0 or the like (this includes locations that a GM adds to their game, of course).
And without the need to fix the map, I'm wary about the complexities of going in to adjust the sidebar. The old phrase, "Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good" comes to mind...
IN any case, sorry about the confusion and potential disappointment these choices and omissions caused.
This is also true of the remastered Players Guide!
It's also a bit disappointing to see the remastered Players Guide still lacks the Friendly Greeting clause in the Eight Practices! Especially after the paizo bsky account directly said to me "nothing will be missing" when I asked about that discrepancy.
That's an issue of copyfitting and I made the call that the difference was minimal... but frustrating that the wrong Willowshore map got put into the Player's Guide. I'll see if I can get things fixed but no promises.
Regarding the Eight Practices thing... just so I'm sure I understand what folks are complaining about:
In the published book, practice #1 includes a little more context by saying "...instead, address them with friendly greetings if you must."
This got cut from the sidebar in the Player's Guide, in an attempt to make the page read better with "WILLOWSHORE GAZETTEER" appearing directly under the sidebar. Making the sidebar that size was an aesthetic choice in other words, and I made the call that the extra info could be cut. If folks want it back I could add it back in but I'd likely trim the intro paragraph above it in order to keep things the same size. (Which is probably the right call since that opening paragraph is already trimmed from what appears in the adventure...).
Can I ask what the thinking was with recommending medium & shaman over liturgist & seer as thematically stronger animist practices?
Over on discord a few of us have agreed we'd have said the reverse if pushed, but really they all work!
They do all work, but the story role of a medium and a shaman felt, to me, to fit the themes and stories of a horror campaign better than liturgists or seers.
I'm sad that all the buzzing posting activity that surrounded monthly releases is gone.
Now, to be hyped about BoB, I will need to wait for the first subscribers' AMA threads just before its release.
3 months is a long time to wait between two AP releases, with only some LO lore posts and often belligerent General and Rules threads to peruse in the meantime.
Ironically, I feel like we'll be BETTER able to build hype for hardcovers, and stores will be MORE interested in putting them on shelves, so while we might miss the monthly buzz on the boards, a big part of the goal here is to stop flooding the market with products that don't get reprinted and self-obsolete if 1/3 (or whatever) of the adventure goes out of print or just doesn't happen to be on the shelf when you shop for it (because someone just bought the last copy or because the store isn't as interested in or capable of stocking such a large number of softcover books).
It won't always be 3 months. The goal is 4 per year, but some months are awful to release products in for various reasons. That means in some cases it'll be longer than 3 months and in others it'll be shorter. Hopefully the fact that we're doing 4 releases a year and not 12 (8 of which almost always fall between the cracks and don't get the attention they deserve because they're not starting up a new Adventure Path) will result in a stronger line overall.
Absolutely let us know how things play out on the customer/reader/gamer side though, once we actually start getting these out there!
This might be a dumb question but will this ap have horror elements to it? Thats the vibe im getting and of course being set in Ustalav helps lol. I loved Carrion Crown from 1e
It absolutely will. It's set in the most haunted castle in the most horror-coded region of the Inner Sea, written by one of the most horror-obsessed writers on staff there is. Some of my specific inspirations for this Adventure Path are drawn from horror movies and horror video games like...
Spoiler:
Video Games: Dark Soules (1, 2, and 3), Bloodborne, Elden Ring, Castlevania
Movies: Folk Horror movies (in particular Blood on Satan's Claw), Hammer horror movies (the ones with the spooky castles in particular), Universal monster horror movies (draclulas and the like)
Authors: Poe, Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, Ramsey Campbell, M.R. James, Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen
Real Life: cryptozoology, creepy crimes, unsettling foods
If there's a horror monster or trope that you like, chances are good it's in here somewhere!
Yup; as mentioned above (and announced last year) Pathfinder Adventure Paths are going to be released all at once in single hardcover volumes starting this year. They'll still cover 9 to 11 levels of content, just like the 3-part softcover ones have been doing for the past several years, but they'll come out only once per quarter instead of once per month.
This seems like it may be an improvement as it will allow a review that will make the APs more cohesive and allow better villain building. Sometimes with the different books being written by different authors at different times it made the APs seem haphazard and disconnected. Whereas a single book could allow more cohesive APs where pieces that weren't well connected are better integrated into the AP story.
As an old time gamer, I'm used to big AP type adventurers or box sets. The individual modules lines were cool too, but I also liked receiving one big book with an adventure like Temple of Elemental Evil or Spider Queen.
While "Bastion of Blasphemies" has one author (me!), that is NOT the norm going forward. We'll continue to split up the writer workload for Adventure Paths the same as we always have. I'm hoping that giving the developers and editors a chance to do the whole thing at once will help solve some of the complaints folks have had about individual adventures seeming "haphazard and disconnected" but also I think that the perception of readers interacting with one book rather than 3 books split apart over 3 months will also help that. Certainly a single book allows us a LOT more freedom to reference stats and rules throughout rather than having to pick and choose which book a new monster appears in and so on.
I've a question about the beginning of Chapter 2. The PCs are suppose to save vs the Nightmare effect each day, but even if they fail, the effect of Fatigue doesn't do anything to the skill actions for the downtime activities for preparing the exodus nor does it prevent downtime activities. Am I missing something outside of the "building up a future encounter"? Or is there something more to the effects of a nightmare spell?
Fatigue only affects exploration activities performed while traveling. That would impact exploration activities made during the exodus. It doesn't prevent downtime. It also impacts AC and saves normally.
Yeah that was announced a while ago and starts this year. Much more convenient for stores to stock a single book instead of 3 volumes.
I really like the single book format when I'm running APs since I only tend to buy one when I am close to finishing what I'm currently running. So the single volume is a lot easier than trying to find all 3-6 books.
I'm really looking forward to seeing how it shakes up the layout of a book. Mostly I'm hoping for a bit of expanded backmatter; the "Adventure Toolbox" sections and gazetteer sections. My guess is that these APs will clock in at roughly the same number of pages, so the content will be pretty similar, just all in one book. I can dream though.
I'm also hoping that working on adventures like this helps free up the production schedule somewhat, tbh.
Backmatter for these won't be expanding really. One of the things we ran into with backmatter for the softcover versions was that it sometimes encroached on the space available to give the actual adventure the attention it needed, but also in some cases we struggled to fill all of the backmatter "slots" with articles that were actually supportive of the adventure in question. These have to be adventures first and foremost. We'll continue to include backmatter stuff (and the Adventure Toolboxes, Bestiaries, and NPC sections will ALWAYS be there), but other stuff will be on a case by case basis. Sort of like how in Seven Dooms for Sandpoint there was only one backmatter article, and it was about the town that the entire thing took place in and nearby. You can see similar choices made for any of our hardcover compilations like Gatewalkers and Abomination Vaults—we don't reprint ALL of the backmatter stuff. Just the stuff that the adventure needs.
While the overall pagecount of a 256* page hardcover is less than tree 96 page softcovers, it's not reallya case of 256 pages vs 288 pages, because we don't reprint the table of contents, advertisements, full page Adventure Toolbox intros, and the like. Its closer to a 256 page vs 270 page thing. The difference of 14 pages (or even a full 32 pages) will have a minimal loosening of production schedule help, but it's more complicated to produce a hardcover and to edit/develop 256 pages at once rather than 96 pages spread out. In the end I strongly feel it'll result in higher quality Adventure Paths that make us more money (since this avoids the problem any periodical faces in the form of diminishing returns), but it's more of a lateral move in the production schedule department than anything else.
*One advantage of doing all-in-one hardcovers is that we can decide to do a different pagecount if it makes sense. We won't go below 256 pages, but we will sometimes go above that. "Bastion of Blasphemies" is 264 pages, for example.
Hoping that might change one day. I can definately see a good ol'Castlevania style romp in and around Bastardhall full of all things creepy and dark would be insanely popular to players of other tabletop systems (and thus a good money maker for Paizo).
Chances of us simultaneously producing simultaneous releases of brand new Adventure Paths in multiple systems are not zero, but they're so close to zero that they might as well be. We might do stuff like we did for Kingmaker and Abomination Vaults again at some point if it makes sense financially and assuming we have the staff to do so responsibly.
Yup; as mentioned above (and announced last year) Pathfinder Adventure Paths are going to be released all at once in single hardcover volumes starting this year. They'll still cover 9 to 11 levels of content, just like the 3-part softcover ones have been doing for the past several years, but they'll come out only once per quarter instead of once per month.
I'm eager to chat more about this one, since I wrote it, but at the moment the time is not quite yet right to say more. I can confirm from the Paizo Live stream that it's all one book, that your PCs start at 5th level and should reach 14th by the end, and that the entire campaign...
Spoiler:
... takes place regionally within and in very close proximity to Bastardhall.
We have no plans to make any version for any system other than Pathfinder. Same as for all of our new Adventure Paths have ever been.
No reason we can't make it a communal effort. The "fixes" here aren't as substantial as stuff needed back in Wrath of the Righteous, but I remember a pretty active thread there that was all about homebrewed solutions to balance problems.
We can collectively do something similar with the Risen and the Doomsday Doors in book 2.
If something we publish inspires GMs to expand on things to make it MORE, then I consider that one of the signs of a successful adventure, honestly. It's easy to forget that while playing a published adventure is an interactive experience as players make choices and GMs adapt, reading and preparing an adventure can also be interactive. It's one of the things that's made me such a fan of tabletop RPGs pretty much my whole life—they invite and encourage reader interactivity and cooperation and spark the imagination in ways that non-interactive media can not.
I would have LOVED to have given each risen runelord a bespoke stat block with their own spells and items and a better variance in level, but... 96 pages is 96 pages.
Is is it to much to hope that, with your no doubt busy schedule, we might see some blog posts going over the bare bone features for such stat blocks? Not full right ups of course (you are too busy for that), base stats lines, character levels, gear list, and unique abilities, would all be brilliant in and of itself. Everything else GMs can easily fill in.
"Cutting room floor" content isn't something we do on our blog, and it's also something that I personally prefer to avoid doing these days anyway for time management reasons for the most part.
The adventure is "The Matchmakers" (from Dungeon #7).
I would like to point out that was a very early issue, which was published decades before Paizo was contracted out to do Wizards of the Coast magazines. Actually pre WotC ownership by many years.
True, but WotC gained all of that when they bought TSR, so as of today all of that content is still owned by them.
In any event, for other folks here, please don't encourage piracy or suggest locations one can illegally download copies of anything on these forums.
Hi there! Alas, while Paizo did work on the D&D magazines for many years, that was 100% a licensed from Wizards of the Coast situation. We do not hold the rights to any of the contents of Dungeon Magazine.
EDITED to make the reply more concise in providing an answer.
I know that the Gap is your "reset button", but... you know full well that not everyone forgot about it, right :p ? There are pre-Gap stuff, like the Golarion Survivor Human heritage.
Then again, deities can move on to other things as time goes on. I could say the same with how outer planes gradually adopted technology instead of keeping their realms "traditional".
BTW, I keep thinking that Nethys cast a forbidden spell that caused Golarion to vanish. I mean, where's Nethys in Starfinder now, huh ;) ?
It's not so much a reset button as it is a work-flow management barrier. Its' tough enough juggling one campaign setting's worth of lore, but perhaps more importantly... the Gap also serves (at least for us, internally) as a reason to not fall into the diminishing notion that all of Pathfinder is nothing more than a prequel whose stories always have to set up Starfinder stuff, or the restrictive notion that all of Starfinder has to make sure that it carries forward things from Pathfinder and can't do anything new. Keeping the two campaigns separate allows each of the (also separate) teams who work on those games and settings more freedom to tell their stories.
IMO, Sarenrae, alongside Desna, should be more worried about something else... in the future...
Starfinder Player Core pg. 38 wrote:
Zon-Shelyn is the divine reunion of Shelyn the Eternal Rose and her estranged brother, the Midnight Lord Zon-Kuthon. Together, the siblings represent the concepts of overcoming suffering through art, finding beauty in strange and unusual places, and reunion with lost loved ones.
As a reminder, Shelyn went missing after the Gap in search of her brother, while Sarenrae and Desna remain active. Back in Pathfinder, Shelyn formed a trouple with Sarenrae and Desna and even had their own pantheon called the Radiant Prism. Zon-Kuthon was also a mortal enemy of both Sarenrae and Desna, which didn't change in the latest edition. Fast forward in Starfinder and I... don't think either are pleased to see their consort "merging" with their nemesis. While Sarenrae and Desna may understand Shelyn's idea, I wouldn't be surprised if Zon-Shelyn churches are luring Shelyn's followers and slowly corrupting them :O
And as an additional reminder... Starfinder and Pathifnder are separate games with separate stories. The Gap is our construction to keep the games apart, so that one team doesn't have to be an expert in the other's constant changing canon. The Zon-Shelyn stuff is Starfinder lore, not Pathfinder lore. We might decide to "set up" some stuff in Starfinder in Pathifnder, but it's not required.
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