And THAT said: it's also worth noting that the Fail Forward section in the GM Core is important, and it's a skill all GMs should develop. We can't anticipate every potential pain point a group has, and have to assume that most groups will be well-rounded when it comes to presenting adventures. If your group does something like has no representation for a specific skill or an entire category of ability-related skills, you as the GM need to adjust the adventure as appropriate so that it doesn't soft-lock your group out of progression as a result of their unexpected choices.
This is a big reason why we take the time to produce the free Players' Guides for Adventure Paths—we want to help players (and GMs!) to build characters that will fit in with the campaign they're about to start. Taking the mention above about Survival in Spore War—this skill is very important in that game (which has large sections that take place in the wild), which is why we listed it as "Strongly Recommended" in the list of skills for PCs on page 11 of the Player's Guide to that Adventure Path. While these are called "Player's Guides" the GM should read them as well to make sure that if they notice their players are, say, building characters that leave a gap in their expected abilities, the GM can step in during character generation to bring attention to this. Or if you're worried about spoilers or curtailing player freedom of choice, take note yourself to adjust the adventures before hand.
We really do want you all to have fun playing our adventures, and the Players' Guides are one of the best tools we have to try to ensure fun!
Feedback like this is super helpful; thank you! We're always working on improving our adventures, and getting feedback is one of the best ways to do so.
That said, to help increase chances of us seeing the feedback, it's best to post this sort of feedback for adventures in the Adventure Path or Adventure section of the forums, rather than in General Discussion. It's REALLY helpful to post it in the form of reviews or in a thread devoted to the adventure or Adventure Path in question. And it's also REALLY helpful to get feedback on more recent adventures—feedback on older things like Strength of Thousands is helpful, but sometimes that feedback is pre-outdated, with us already having taken steps to address the issue. (Not saying that's the case here, but the older a product is, the more likely it isn't as useful for us today to implement on adventures we're pubishing later in the year or beyond.)
One thing I make sure to do as well whenever I compile an old adventure or Adventure Path is to scour the boards for feedback just like this, but the boards are big and I don't look much beyond the actual adventure forums themselves, just to manage my own workflow, so a post like this in General Discussion would very likely be missed.
Again, thanks for all the feedback! Just trying to help direct it a bit more so it's more noticeable to us on the Narrative team.
With the pivot away from OGL demons that are WotC IP, it feels like a fun opportunity to have more demonic critters based on Golarion-specific lore like ties to Pazuzu or Socothbenoth or Dagon, which I've explored in the 'inconsequential critters' thread. Has that seemed like an option worthy of exploring, or just kind of derivative to you?
I do love the idea of just flat out replacing some OGL critters niches with similarly positioned beasties, like sahuagin with deep ones, or aboleth with krakens, but understand that this isn't to everyone's taste.
Yup, and we've already been exploring some of these. Deep Ones are in Monster Core 2, for example, and there's some new Pazuzu stuff back in Stolen Fate. Spore War had a LOT of new demon stuff in it. Socothbenoth, with his sexual violence themes, is unlikely to be someone we do much more with in Pathifnder, though.
With eight years' hindsight: any advice on a Return of the Runelords campaign?
I've just started running it (with a group that went through Rise and Shattered Star); the individual adventures are great but I'm slightly struggling with how to make the connections work. (e.g what do the heroes really gain from chasing down Thybidos)
My main advice would be to convert it to 2nd edition and play it with those rules. :-P (EDITED TO ADD: Note that since you're running this privately, not publishing it, you can mix and match OGL and Remastered rules. No need to swap out OGL monsters for remastered replacements!)
But apart from that, the first step I take whenever I'm prepping an old Adventure Path for revision is to go through the forums here, look around on Reddit, and elsewhere to make a big list of all the suggestions and pain points and applause folks have given it over the years. This helps me to figure out what parts work, what parts need fixing, and what parts could be expanded upon.
As for the "connections," don't worry about trying to make everything lead into everything. A lot of an Adventure Path is just about building an overall theme and expanding the world lore for players to discover (and of course, giving them things to do to earn XP and to find treasure). Make sure to chat with your players between sessions too; see what's working and what parts of the story they're interested in, and that can help you focus on what areas to bolster and what areas to just let pass by.
Zach Cregger, the writer/director of Weapons is working on a new Resident Evil movie? Are you excited for this?
No such thing as a question hog. ASK AWAY!!!
I did see Weapons. It was one of my favorite movies of the year. Funny and creepy and brilliant all at once. PLUS it helped represent horror wins at the Academy Awards—more horror movies became oscar winners this year than ever!
I also quite admired Barbarians.
I'm simultaneously kinda disappointed that Zach Cregger isn't doing more original horror and is getting on a franchise bus, but at the same time I think that franchise needs someone like Zach to step in. I personally don't have a lot of nostalgia attached to Resident Evil... but I do enjoy the games, and had a lot of fun recently with Resident Evil Requiem. PLUS the original inspiration for the entire franchise, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Sweet Home, is great.
All that said, yeah, I'm excited to see what he does with the next Resident Evil movie.
Thanks, James. I went ahead and ordered Tanabe's The Shadow Out of Time adaptation. Just got it a few hours ago, and look forward to reading it.
Excellent! He's got a lot of others too, so track them down if you enjoy Shadow out of Time! He's got Dunwich Horror coming out later this year I think.
The OEM (Office of Expectations Management) rates this project a 2 out of 10 as a result.
Sad, but expected. Though I imagine it would be quite difficult to do Second Darkness without the drow. Although it could potentially be just about a city or cult of evil Ayndilar elves.
Replacing the drow would be one of the tricky parts that requires a fair amount of rewriting, but it's also the primary reason I would love to do this. It wouldn't just be a "cult of evil Ayndilar elves." It's a big enough change to not have drow that it needs to be something better than just a find/replace drow for ayndilar. Other things I'd love to tackle in a reworking of this would be:
Spoiler:
1) A better transition between book 2 and book 3 that'd present a new adventure to close out the Riddleport section, give closure to the gaming hall story, and transition the story more logically into the next section.
2) A full revision of the personality and politics of the elves of Kyonin, so that they don't behave like Tolkien's/D&D's haughty isolated xenophobes and behave more like Pathifnder elves, which also makes it more palatable to the players to be helping them and makes the Winter Council seem more outlandish and evil. This would likely result in at least a level's worth of additional brand new adventure content in the first half of book 5.
3) LOTS of other ripple effect adjustments due to OGL changes, particularly when you work on demon or aboleth or Darklands stuff beyond the drow themselves.
4) And in the end, I'd want it to go to 20th level. The original, as with all of the 3.5 Adventure Paths, topped out at about 16th level. And even beyond that, 2nd Edition adventures require more content to level up anyway—the XP churn was faster in 3.5. This'd mean adding probably about 5 levels of new content, split between the gap between books 1 and 2, the start of book 5, and likely further expanding book 6.
5) All of that, plus revise the drow to whatever replaces them.
It'd be a challenge. A FUN challenge, but a challenge nevertheless.
If I had all the power I'd probably do a Second Darkness revisit, for sure. I'd probably end up having to rewrite a lot of it—whether that'd be me doing that myself (as well as writing the missing adventure that bridges books 2 and 3), or hiring authors to help out (although some of those who worked on the original back in the 3.5 days aren't with us anymore, alas, or might not be comfortable with 2E or interested/available) would be part of it. Regardless, it would for sure take longer than most other revisions but still less time to do than a "from scratch" Adventure Path.
All of which combines into a "I personally would enjoy the challenge and I think it'd be worth it to me, but I don't know that it's worth it to Paizo and the customer base, and we don't have the resources to do this anytime soon anyway." (With "soon" here standing in for "within the next few years" at the minimum.)
The OEM (Office of Expectations Management) rates this project a 2 out of 10 as a result.
As a designer (actual Creative Director), when you get to DM your own Homegame on your own time (and the prep-time for such), do you find yourself only working on Pathfinder-canon material? Really, what I'm asking is if you ever go back and grab (for example) N1 "Against the Cult of the Reptile God" or maybe even Dungeon 41 and "The Lady of the Mists" -- or perhaps even "The Razing of Redshore" or "Twilight's Last Gleaming" or "Headless" and, for inspiration and nostalgia, DM some reruns at your table -- re-written / re-imagined reruns? Maybe even find a great place in Avistan to place "The Ghost Tower of Inverness" or a Gate to Rel Mord in The Flanaess? .... Or do you find yourself exclusively sticking to the world you and your colleagues have designed?
THANKS!
I generally mix things up. I like running games that are more sandboxy than they are "pathy," and have a LOT of stuff on hand to pull from for the campaign, based on how the players go. Sometimes, that might be an adventure from Pathifnder or D&D. Sometimes it might just be an old map. Sometimes I might make the adventure up whole-cloth as I go. I almost never fully write things out, and run the games improv style with whatever monster/NPC stats I might need handy. But I keep lots of notes, so that later, if/when I wanna turn them into something publishable, I have a framework to build from.
Interesting you mention "Against the Cult of the Reptile God", in particular...
Spoiler:
...Because I ran that adventure for a campaign I was running for folks at Paizo in 2019–2020 (before said campaign eventually went into VTT mode during the pandemic only to fizzle out, alas). I ended up mostly just using the map and maybe 75% of the encounters, and reflavored the whole thing as a xulgath cult headquarters where they worshiped a certain demon lord and dwelt below a strange old ruin named Rusthenge. Which, of course, went on to get rewritten entirely by Vanessa when I hired her to take the Rusthenge and demon lord aspect out and start things over for that adventure. (ALSO from the same campaign, the map of the nearby town I used was an old map of Diamond Lake I drew back in college that didn't end up being the one used for "Age of Worms" since Erik wanted to do his own map of the town, and ALSO from the same campaign that's where I first threw the haunted house that ended up being in Malevolence at players). So that campaign used all three: Repurposed old adventures, old maps, and brand new content.
Oh that's a nostalgia trip I wasn't expecting. I haven't prepared questions!
So what is your favorite idea you never got to do? (like something that had to get scrapped or otherwise figured out "Nah I can't actually do that, but it'd be cool" rather than something that got shelved for later)
I'm wary of answering this, since sometimes those ideas I've been wanting to do forever but never got a chance to be a thing actauly DO become things. See "Bastion of Blasphemies" for a recent example, and there's some other stuff I'm eager to share that I've been working on but can't talk about yet.
One thing that I suppose I could nominate here would be that I never got to finish up the Demonomicon of Iggwilv articles for Dragon Magazine. There were still some demon lords that I was looking forward to doing entries for, particularly Obox-ob or Juiblex, but I'm pretty sure that I'm not gonna be going back to doing more of those ever.
I always enjoyed checking out your prior thread. Welcome back!
How often do you get to play now a days?
Any good video games recently?
I'm playing as a player in a highly homebrewed weekly 1E Pathfinder game on Sunday afternoons, and am running a 2E Pathfinder game for folks here at work every other Thursday after work (although the last month of the game's schedule got savaged a bit, alas). I kind of have potential ideas of maybe someday turning that game into an adventure—that's where Rusthenge and Seven Dooms for Sandpoint and Malevolence came from, and to a lesser extent Curse of the Crimson Throne and Serpent's Skull back in the day.
As for video games:
Resident Evil: Requiem was great
Slay the Spire 2 is glorious
Chapter 5 of The Long Dark's Wintermute campaign is a lot of fun and is the current obsession.
Northern Journey was lots of fun until I got to an annoying hanglider sequence near the end that kinda made me quit in frustration.
But Nioh 3 is the one that I played the most obsessively recently, I suppose.
And I wanna get back to Fallout 76, now that Bigfoot's in the mix!
Have you read any good Cthulhu Mythos books or short stories lately, or seen any such movies/TV shows?
Always! Hmm. Let's see... on the movie side from this year alone, the best mythos adjacent things I've seen would be:
"Iron Lung" (A+) followed by "The Deep Dark" (B–)
I suppose "Who Can Kill A Child" (A) could be argued as Lovecraftian, since it's about an evil apocalyptic force on an island that if it escapes to the mainland would bring the end of civilization, but it's maybe more folk horror or societal horror?
On the books/short story side, been jumping back and forth from a bunch of different authors including Frank Belknap Long and Carl Jacobi (both of whom I just picked up GIANT omnibus hardcovers of). The latest anthologies from John Langan ("Lost in the Dark") and Laird Barron ("Not a Speck of Light") have some fun cosmic horror, and I just started reading some of Attila Veres' short stories and they're GREAT. The best actual Lovecraft thing I've recently read was Gou Tanabe's manga adaptation of "The Shadow out of Time." That thing is DENSE—with words and art—in a good way!
Years ago, an AMA style thread here in the off-topic discussions was a pretty sprawling and fun place for folks to chat with me about stuff, but I ended up bringing the thread to an end during the pandemic when the internet got extra spicy.
But I miss it! Dunno if folks are still interested in asking questions here, but if they are, ask away and I'll provide answers...
...but not to anything/everything. There's a reason why this thread lives in the "Off-Topic Discussions" part of the boards, after all.
RULES
1) I won't be answering rules questions at all.
2) I will answer questions about Pathfinder lore or adventures, but those will NOT be "official" Paizo answers; just my take/opinion based on my preference and history with the topic. If you want official answers, please direct those questions to the on-topic thread for that line or product. If it's on a product that I've worked on, I'll answer those questions there.
3) Don't ask about how Aroden died.
4) Have fun and keep your questions fun and positive and entertaining!
IIRC neothelids are going to be returning as well and renamed something closer to the seugathi they spawn, rule over, and eat. The Pathfinder neothelid is pretty different from the D&D neothelid, aside from the name, which to be honest never quite fit them in my eyes.
I HAVE put some thought into this, and with a VERY LARGE ASTERISK that nothing said here is anything more than potential rumination and isn't anythign close to a promise...
...My plan for the previously-called-neothleids is to rename them, rebuild their stats, keep them at the same level, and present them as giant enormous seugathis who go all-in on worshiping the Elder Mythos stuff to lean in to the idea that the Dominion of the Black (AKA xoarians and Ilvarandin) don't get along with the "Cthulhus" (AKA the once-known-as-neothelids and Denebrum).
But the stats for the neothelid itself, apart from remaining the same level as its previous CR, will be entirely reworked into something more load-bearing for their role in Golarion.
4 PF2 APs that involve the Darklands. We have had PF2 Setting books for less.
And beyond that, adventures like Rusthenge, Seven Dooms for Sandpoint, Shades of Blood, Revenge of the Runelords all have some Darklands-adjacent elements. More as well. Any adventure where the dungeon or cave or whatever has a tunnel leading off-map and usually has a "The area further than this point is beyond the scope of this adventure..." disclaimer is basically us saying "This way to the Darklands." We include them in so many dungeons to give a bit of verisimilitude as to why hand how the monsters in those lower levels come and go.
The Darklands is everywhere, because it's always right down below your feet!
Excellent! Keep letting us know that over on the Rules & Lore side.
Oh, are requests like this suppose to be submitted to the Rules subforum?
The Rules and Lore team is ultimately the team that decides on what books in that line get worked on (With Erik as publisher having the decision power above that of course), so letting them know you want a Darklands lore book (or any lore book) is gonna work better if you make those requests there.
I mean, they can be made here in the narrative side of things too, of course, and I can make suggestions and the like to the Rules and Lore team or up to Erik, but I'm not a paying customer...
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.
Creative Director
