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I didn't see anything separate listed elsewhere, so I figured with it being built to work together I thought I'd ask here. The 6 adventures for the Troubles in Grayce Anthology. Roughly how long is each part? I'm guessing about 2 sessions worth of time, so 6-8 hours? Each adventure in Troubles in Grayce covers a level of content. Whether that's 1 session or 10 sessions depends on a particular game table—we don't really use hours to quantify game play length for published adventures in the same way we standardize things on the Org Play side of things.
Rules for items made of precious materials, such as duskwood, appear on pages 252–254 of GM Core. Duskwood reduces an item's bulk by 1, or to Light bulk if the item is already bulk 1. Has no effect on an item that's already Light. That's the only effect being made out of duskwood has on a weapon, so if there are other rules or feats or whatever that require a lower bulk on a weapon, it could help there, I guess, but nothing about duskwood's rules have any other effect on a weapon other than making it less bulk. Regardless, duskwood is too valuable a treasure to give out at that level, so my suggestion remains just make it a normal wood weapon.
Not to sidetrack even further (but related to the Darklands) who wrote the adventure portion of the PF1 module Cradle of Night? It lists 4 authors in the credits. (Jacobs, Schneider, Spicer, Vaughan) All four of us split the writing duties on that one as a result of a scheduling nightmare. I don't recall who wrote what parts off the top of my head.
We traditionally only put authors on a book's cover or author byline... even though in some cases, the book's lead developer does end up writing a portion of things and is the one who builds the overall plot and is the "director" of the show, as it were. Those credits live on the table of contents inside the book. "Development Lead" is the credit you're looking for, by the way. For Vaultlines, that role is filled by Bill Fischer.
This is really funny to me, there was an arc of my campaign set in Absalom that was literally about this! Down to the visions about Aroden's life. Makes sense since I pulled info about the Sanctum from the Absalom book (also by Erik Mona), but it's still cool to see. Yup! That's exactly what's going on. Originally, the Absalom book and this adventure were both supposed to come out at the same time along with the launch of 2nd edition but... that was a bit too ambitious even BEFORE you factor in a pandemic lurking right around the corner.
Neothelids are in OGL lore under the same name and design as an aberrant state of the Mind Flayer lifecycle -- a tadpole that consumed its brood and grew to enormous size rather than being implanted in a humanoid host. Pathfinder lore revamped them as an independent species of aberration loosely tied to the Cthulhu mythos and created the Seugathi as a servitor race. I guess that specific IP wasn't as litigiously protected as the Mind Flayers proper, thus putting them in the same gray area as Drow and Ropers and the like, but now a lot more of that has to go.The neothelids of Denebrum also need to get replaced—but there we've got seugathis and it's easy to replace them with GIANT seugathis.Wait, are neothelids OGL? I thought they were Paizo originals that were the Golarion equivelant of Mind Flayers. Yup. This happened because of a weird loophole/choice that WotC made. While they kept the mind flayers out of the OGL, they put neothelids into the Psionics Handbook, and when they released the contents of that book as open content, that meant that we could use the neothelid in Golarion. We just had to give them a different flavor. This is also how we ended up with access to intellect devourers and others (the brain collector, ANOTHER mind-flayer replacement, but this one originally from the Expert set rules introduced via the adventure "Castle Amber", crept into the OGL via the Epic-Level Handbook). Ropers were always in the OGL, like drow, but unlike drow, ropers were never a cornerstone of an entire Darklands region. So them being replaced in the game's environment is a lot easier–this one IS a case where we just don't talk about ropers anymore, and when the time comes to do an encounter where in the OGL days we would have used a roper, we instead use a gogiteth or something else.
You could not mention them by just not mentioning them - that would not have been what I meant by "gone gone". What I was asking was whether you were going to do that, or deliberately overwrite them. From the rest of your reply (and the Archpaladin's), it seems like you are doing the latter.]Are they actually gone gone, in the sense that former drow cities are now not!drow cities. Or are they just not mentioned?We can't/won't talk about drow going forward in the game so they're indeed gone gone. We're doing the latter. This is one of the only OGL to Remastered hard-reset overwrites we're doing, but we haven't had the chance to do it yet. Saying nothing would have made it feel like we forgot them, but more importantly, saying nothing would increasingly risk assumptions by employees, license holders, and more that they were still there and that nothing changed. Saying nothing wasn't a luxury I felt we had in this case.
Good to here that the regions and the like are still gonna be there, like of course Ilvarandin can't have intellect devourers anymore but maybe they get replaced by someyhing else. I quite like the Darklands as they have societies very alien to the rest of Golarion like those pyshic pirate people that were a ray of hope underground and you can always explore them further like "what are the Darklands of Tian Xia, of Vudra, of Casmaron..." so very exciting stuff Ilvarandin is still there and unchanged. No intellect devourers, but they've been replaced by corpse riders, aka Xoarians. This is a case where the switch from OGL to Remaster went very smoothly, because we've spent the past decades giving our version of "intellect devourers" their own uniquely Pathfinder vibes, so it was easy to rename them and adjust the art a little and presto! The neothelids of Denebrum also need to get replaced—but there we've got seugathis and it's easy to replace them with GIANT seugathis. Other stuff, like duergar, we replaced with hryngar and leaned in more to the Droskar elements (a deity we created for the setting). And other elements are creatures either drawn from public domain sources (deros, morlocks, serpent folk, Lovecraftian stuff) or things wholly invented by us (munavris, urdefhans, vault-builders/vault-keepers), and thus aren't a part of the OGL umbrella at all. The drow were a perfect storm of all of the above NOT applying.
So essentially Lizzid People have replaced the Drow. This is huge oversimplification that's a result of us having to scramble to contextualize a very OGL-dependent region of the setting in a short article (see my post just above for more details). We'll have more to say in Vaultlines and HOPEFULLY in products in the years to come beyond that.
Are they actually gone gone, in the sense that former drow cities are now not!drow cities. Or are they just not mentioned?I assume we are going to be getting information on the Cavern Elves? I assume that the drow cities are gone?That said, drow are one of the things we left behind when we transitioned to the remastered rules, so they're not a part of Vaultlines. We can't/won't talk about drow going forward in the game so they're indeed gone gone. We haven't yet had a solid chance to do a deep dive on the Darklands in a remastered product—the closest being Sky King's Tomb and that was AT THE MOMENT IT ALL HAD TO CHANGE so we were very limited in how we could do stuff there. Hence the 11th hour insertion I wrote about the Darklands in that Adventure Path, meant to try to contextualize a very OGL-reliant (perhaps the MOST OGL-reliant) region of our setting in a new era where we weren't using the OGL, at a time where it looked like anything OGL had to potentially be recalled and destroyed. Fortunately, that's not how it played out and things ended up being a lot less dire! Vaultlines is the first point where we've been able to get a fully Darklands-themed product onto the schedule for various reasons (on the rules, lore, AND adventure side of things), and so it's going to start tackling those answers. You'll have to wait until later this year to see what sections we tackle and how we do it—it won't be EVERYTHING, but it'll be a start. Drow are gone. The Darklands and its maps and locations are not. That means hat the drow-associated regions have to change, and that's a big order that can't be adequately covered in a 6 page article written in the most fraught situation that triggered the need for said article. I'm hopeful we'll get to do lots more Darklands stuff in the future after Vault lines, but we have nothing yet to announce there. Folks continuing to let us know (not just me, who has been pushing for us to do more Darklands stuff since before Pathifnder was an RPG in the first place, but ALL of Paizo) and strong sales/reviews for Vaultlines are two solid ways to help make a future where we do more Darklands stuff a reality.
Murder is one way to get killed, but I wouldn't read too much into the blog's use of that word.
Vaultlines, other than being set in the Darklands, has nothing to do with revisiting or updating Second Darkness at all. It's a brand new different story.
I assume we are going to be getting information on the Cavern Elves? I assume that the drow cities are gone? We'll have more to say about what's going on in the Darklands later in the year once we get closer to this one's release—there will be another Paizo Live stream to talk about it I suspect. That said, drow are one of the things we left behind when we transitioned to the remastered rules, so they're not a part of Vaultlines.
We've not really traditionally had much luck selling posters, especially considering that most folks who want them don't want them folded. Shipping and warehousing posters in tubes is awful. I'd say the chances of us producing posters of this or any of our products without logos, while not being zero, is pretty close to zero.
Could potentially look to the Shoanti—Varisans are well-represented above, but maybe add in Thousand Bone from Curse of the Crimson Throne? Or Krogun Eats What He Kills if you want someone more aggro? Could also be a dwarf from Janderhoff or an orc from Urglin.
I could see him as a reoccurring villain. But I’m excited to learn that the next Lovecraftian AP is just a matter of time! Nothing overtly Lovecraftian in the works yet, don't get me wrong. I'd love to do one, of course, but of the four I'm currently working on in the future, "Bastion of Blasphemies" probably has the most Lovecraft monsters in it (even though it's main theme is not overtly Lovecraftian... less cosmic horror and more folk horror/gothic horror). So... yeah, just a matter of time, I guess, but that matter of time is measured in multiple years rather than months at this point! (It's always difficult for me to idly muse about adventures and Adventure Paths without it coming across as a promise...)
While I do wish I'd been able to develop that Adventure Path rather than just do the outline... he HAS already starred in one, so if (WHEN) we do another Lovecraftian Adventure Path I'd like to focus on a different baddie, personally.
And adding to the list of big baddies I have personally introduced into the setting and haven't done much with yet and would love to explore more at some point in the future, let's add... Spoiler:
Nightripper, Yamasoth, Tchekuth, Aolar, and whatever might or might not be going on with Queen Ileosa... I'm not worried about running out of villains, at least for the Adventure Paths and standalone adventures I'm eager to build over the next several years.
Sounds like the PCs will go to Hell and negotiate Thrune's final defeat with Asmodeus. Maybe wait and see what the adventure does first? Even then, as I've said elsewhere, there remains plenty of other big baddies left to tell stories about in the Inner Sea region. We try to introduce new ones to build up whenever we take older ones out in adventures, too. Like in Spore War... Spoiler:
...Treerazer is gone, but the imminent potential return of Typhon to reality gives us another villian, along with a potential of "what might Tar-Baphon do with a dead nascent demon lord's head" as well... Five other big baddies that come to mind off the top of my head in the Inner Sea region include but are not limited to (and there are more, these are just the five that immediately come to mind)... Spoiler:
Chorak, Choral, Jakalyn, Geb, and Walkena We will continue to use the villains we've set up now and then as villains to oppose in adventures, and will continue to introduce new ones as previous stories conclude. We've got Adventure Paths planned out through the start of 2029, and there's no shortage of villains yet, rest assured.
Yes. Four per year is the goal, but not one every 3 months. Certain months of the year are AWFUL to release big books (such as early in the year when folks have already spent lots of money on the holidays), and other months are GREAT (like the middle of the year during the height of convention season), and those months kinda tend to clump.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
Is the hedgemaze still there? Spoiler: 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.
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.
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!
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! |
