Lex Winters's page

Now we just wait for fvtt version, too...

i've already mentally scheduled this in for my group, although we're a long way off!

When i first jumped over to 2e a few years ago, i was struck by just how visible a presence AAPI staff and creators were, and I'm glad paizo takes an active role in platforming and celebrating voices and communities that might otherwise be underrepresented. It benefits the game, the pathfinder communities, the ttrpg industry, and most importantly - the AAPI communities themselves.

was glad to finally see bundles return in some form when I saw it earlier yesterday, and the compounding discount with the multi-buy pdf discount was nice to see.

the VAT discrepancy does still make paizo store the more expensive option in a lot of cases, however. So yesterday I spent like $250 on pdfs and foundry modules, but only like $57 of that ended up being on the paizo store - because paizo still charges 20% more, so for bigger items like PFS Full Deluxe Editions, which don't include the pdf anyway, its never worth even looking at it on the store here despite the ostensibly same price tag before checkout.

On the current paizo store, tax is not included until check out, however the listed prices do not indicate that tax is not included, which is contrary to distance selling regulations in the UK - "All price indications that can be seen by consumers must include VAT and any other compulsory charges or taxes"

Additionally, PDFs / ebooks are still being charged VAT, even though they are zero-rated for tax in the UK.

To comply with consumer regulations to allow paizo to sell to UK customers (and similar rules apply for EEA/EU), they need to be correctly indicating and applying VAT based on country of residence.

It was quite disappointing to see the paizo store has a sale on to match fvtt store, with the same advertised prices, but that are actually 20% higher because of the undeclared tax even on products that would not be eligible.

similarly... what are the metaphysical rules on using Banishment and similar plane-based abilities on Chelaxians now. does the universe treat them as Dual Planar Citizens now or what

horrifying prospect of if chelaxian refugees are already "tainted" by the outcome, and simply moving anywhere can bring the corruption with them, similar to the Dark Wanderer in Diablo. After all its not just about the lands of cheliax, it is the soul[s] of the nation.

Kinda funny that Starfinder's Close Combat Soldier made it in to the recommended class list. Like, I get it, it's both thematically appropriate and mechanically good at skirmish battles, but it's still a bit funny to have an official AP go "this content from our other game is a really good fit!"

The funniest part to me is by its inclusion, even if not in the recommendations table, it is more recommended than the pf2e Thaumaturge, which isn't mentioned at all!

Yeah, that makes sense. I was thrown off by the fact Hellbreakers and Season of Ghosts were both sanctioned and explicitly listed as repeatable.

hell yeah!

my group is still very, very, far off playing it, given we're only on chapter 2 of Hellbreakers and we play like 3 hours a week excluding time lost to yapping, but looking forward to picking this up eventually... in like 2029 at our rate of play lmao

in the previous Year of Clockwork Mystery blogpost it was stated

As of the release of the Year 8 intro scenario, all of our scenarios and quests will be repeatable! This will apply retroactively to all previous scenarios as well.

This post, however, states

Those of you with good Perception modifiers will notice that these adventures are all repeatable, meaning they can be played multiple times as long as a different character earns credit each time. We do not intend to go back and make older adventures repeatable; however, going forward, sanctioned adventures will be repeatable, just as scenarios will be later this year.

Is the distinction that all previous PFS Scenarios will be repeatable, but Adventures/AP will not be? Or was this a change of intent between the two posts.

Just to update, Hellbreakers, and presumably many other APs (i know SoG premaster has) are now updated for fvtt14

tbh i do wish it was easier to get to the Changelogs and the github issue base for each AP module without having to go into the module in foundry itself. All the meta links just link to either the fvtt or paizo store pages.

you can have multiple, portable installs of different foundry versions, so there's no need to wait for one system to update if others are ready.

you also gotta keep in mind each major release is a pretty big change under the hood (granted not as big as 12 and 13 were in terms of data structures), and there's a lot of APs.

the system itself was updated pretty quickly.

also, the idea of being impatient after a month is wild to me, coming from systems where it was usual to be 1-2 major versions behind lmao.

i was going to say adapting PFS 07-01 is a great way to add on a prelude to hellbreakers.

I think it's also definitely worth reading through Hellfire Dispatches in full, so you can reflect the wider stuff going on; and I think there's also a few other PFS 07 scenarios that can be worth doing as little cut-away one shot sessions that could really add to the sense of scale and narrative of the AP.

My groups have never been ones to optimise (god knows I wish they would sometimes, you should see how indecisive and slow they are with anything, especially combat!)

I did not restrict the free archetypes for Hellbreakers, and our party ended up as:
- Skilled Human Isgeri Reclaimer Champion (Milani) Hellbreaker
- Razertooth Goblin Warrior Fighter Field Propagandist
- Dromaar Orc Varisian Wanderer Thaumaturge Swashbuckler
- Running Awakened Animal Field Medic Commander Medic
- Skilled Human Archdevil Apostate Rogue Crossbow Infiltrator

so it still ended up all pretty thematically fitting, and nothing super broken in either direction

So apparently there are not any stand-alone FVTT modules for BB2 or Troubles of Grayce - and they are instead combined into a bundled module listed as "Secrets of Grayce".

While like yeah sure, this is actually really good value for fvtt users! Glad to see it, but -

I don't think this was ever mentioned anywhere prior to now, and this blog post is written in a way that implies they both have standalone modules instead of this renamed merger.

Could the blog be updated, or this info be made available anywhere besides the store?

AI is not a search engine or an information repository. it is glorified Predictive Text like on your phone. It just gives you statistically probable "desired" output based on input and vast reserves of stolen data.

You might as well scry with goat entrails if you wanted a similar level of accuracy

no they only update PDFs whenever they run out of physical stock and do another print run.

yes. this makes no sense in the 21st century, let alone this far into it.

I agree wholeheartedly with James that Aroden the god is dead.

[aroden voice] thats right! dead serious about going to itchy and scratchy land!

When in doubt about a clock (because paizo forgot to specify), just default to +2, +1, 0, -1.

its actually indexed under Adventures, rather than Adventure Paths!

Since Wardens of Wildwood, the AP SKU is PZO15. (at time of original SoG it was PZO90)

Since The Great Toy Heist, the Adventure SKU is PZO14.

Season of Ghosts (ORC) is PZO14008(E|-HC).

also, you can generally see the SKU index for each product on the store page! which i didn't realise until just now, but which makes sense.

Given the context of that section I think its meant to be the name of the "League-affiliated ship" mentioned one page earlier. I suspect an earlier draft named the ship but it was cut and the editor missed the reference to it on page 17.

Oh that makes most sense. My first assumption was it an earlier draft name for Everbloom Warehouse, but I think it being the ship definitely seems more logical.

I think it'd be a long time before we revisit it, and doing it too early might feel too similar to some aspects of Hellbreakers, but I would love a political Romance in a post-godsrain Shenmen / surrounding area.

Like, go full Romance of The Three Kingdoms on that s!$#, with "bandit" / petty warlord / liberatory groups, regional powers, local pacts, the different jorogumo factions, gloom warders, the literal spectres of the old regime etc. We've got such a good baseline of groups and factions and potential loci spelled out across LO:TXWG and SoG...

then you throw the effects of godsrain, and the chekov's gun of the gossamer mountain kaiju, Igroon the Dragon Eater into the equation and you've got a ripe power keg ready to burst.

As for what makes a "yet" into a "now": if Tales from the Vast were to blow through our sales projections and become a clear smash hit beyond what anyone was expecting, of course we'd go back and reevaluate whether to turn it into a Foundry module.

but there's not some magic 1:1 transfer in sales there. Yes, there's some power users who will always buy every edition of a published adventure, but the market for physical books vs those who only buy fvtt / pdf is pretty different.

if you're just staring at your physical stock count, you're never going to account for those of us - disproportionately people outside North America - who will never be represented in sales figures without fvtt to buy to begin with. And we're not exactly going to just buy a pdf for full price in the vague hope that it might in some nebulous future years from now make that pdf applicable for secondary use in vtt with another full cost purchase. And certainly not dropping infinite money on hardcover + shipping + VAT + import fees. Especially with the increased base costs recently announced for publications, combined with the loss of the vtt discount for pdf owners.

Its like throwing sand on a fire then wondering why its not keeping you warm.

I would definitely love a like, "Flip Mats - VTT Deluxe Pack" Module, with preconfigured scenes with walls, lighting etc.

Of course, many of the AP modules do in fact contain a few flipmats (or commissioned recreations thereof) already, so perhaps to save a little bit of time they could at least recycle the work already done for those ones.

I can't remember if its in core or from Character Gallery, but you can select the priority order for token packs.

You can also still access both, technically, from the compendiums tab.

alas alack, it's not something paizo or metamorphic have indicated they're going to do, many reasons of which are understandable.

the good news is, the official fvtt store has 20% off sales pretty regularly (At least once a season, so far!), so its a pretty good deal especially accounting for all the extras you get like the dice, the OST, etc.

Hell, the remastered module actually went on sale for 20% off literally only like a week and a half after it came out!

a good rule of thumb is assume it'll take at least 6 months before all the most popular modules and pf2e content are updated for a major release of foundry.

Clock works? uh yeah, i sure hope it does!

Folks have been asking for a 1st to 20th level campaign for a while. That's not something we've been able to do for several years for production and sales related reasons, which I've gone into a lot elsewhere, but for this, the inaugural two all-in-one hardcover Adventure Paths it was important to me to set them up as a throughline that you could play from 1st to 20th level. It's very much the intent to play them this way, but they're also set up so that folks who only want to play one or the other can do that as well. And also set up as two separate books so that we COULD produce them on our schedule and not break banks (or backs) along the way.

Will for sure be watching feedback from folks once both are out to see if this version of producing a full 1st to 20th level experience is successful. Particularly interested in the sales of Hell's Destiny compared to Hellbreakers, and to feedback from folks as to whether they want a stronger connection between the two or the opposite.

hopefully you'll be able to account for the long tail of those of us with groups that take forever to get through an AP so probably won't be buying HD for a good while yet!

Our group is an almost certain lock in for Hell's Destiny, but i imagine it might be a good 16+ months before we get there, playing only around 3 hours (not including time lost to people being late!) each session, maybe 6 weeks out of every 8 lmao.

PDFs are not bundled with digital products any more, because the new store apparently can't handle that, even though it mysteriously works fine for bundling pdfs with physical goods on subscriptions.

Yes, you're expected to shell out another $50 for the pdf.

I can't find the discount anymore

they abolished such discounts with the new webstore. it is more expensive to support paizo digitally, especially as an overseas player.

As we get late in the edition, and we're starting to really swim in character options, lore books and APs, I thought it might be fun to start a thread discussing new kinds of products people would be interested in buying (throw feasibility or practicality to the wind!). What would really improve your gaming experience the most at this point? What would be a nice to have if it were possible? What product could you see that targets a really specific pain point for you?

I've pitched ideas before, like a Deep Rock Galactic inspired randomized delve hot-seat GM box set, but here are some things I've been hankering for recently to get the thread started:

1. Pre-written modular NPC relationship webs. Nothing brings a location or scenario to life more than having fleshed out NPCs with quests, motives, relationships, and grudges. This could be presented as a network map for at-a-glance reminders, alongside NPC details including artwork, relevant info for figuring out how they'd react to different events, and background details that are hard to come up with on the spot. It's the kind of thing I was hoping would be present in Strength of Thousands, but all that hard work was instead left up to me, and since I was doing the work anyway, it was much easier to just come up with my own NPCs.

This one would be great, and would be another clear example of something that the new hardcover AP format can enable far easier than the old format, and it'd really pop off hard for more social and town/region based APs like SoG. Like imagine having a nice definitive Willowshore network diagram, so you're not getting jumpscared by NPCs suddenly having new families, colleagues, etc, popping up mid paragraph half the way through the AP.

Failing this I would also just love an NPC Index table in the backmatter like just a table of Name, pronouns, ancestry, profession (or narrative role), first page introduced.

I think it is an excellent point that for Print you want to keep names unique so they don't collide with other stories, especially for key NPCs. However, it wouldn't necessarily be bad to have some common first names that could be reused, especially for more mundane characters, as they are known, 'common/ubiquitous' names. It might even be good to have some surnames that are almost viral in various regions.

this is also how we get more simple verisimilitude. Like oh yeah here's human commoner Beth "the good one" who works at the Good Dog Inn, please don't confuse her with "Mudpie Beth" - who we call Mudpie on account of her terrible cooking what look like mud - over at the Faithful Hound just round the corner!

By default I always let players see any Clock, unless its a hostile clock that narratively they should not know about (unless ominous unknown clock makes it more dramatic).

I do not always let them see the expected/target maximum points though if its a more open-ended goal, eg during Research if they need say 8 RP, I might set it to a 12 or 20 segment clock.

Useful only if the GM knows there's a difference.

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.

Perhaps the reason there's been less discussion is because there's no link directly from the Hellbreaker AP? I find it a bit odd that the player's guide isn't available on that page. Maybe I'm missing it, or maybe that's a choice. An odd choice in my mind.

Players' Guide is linked, below the video embed, on the hardcover store listing, but not the pdf or fvtt listing.

Doug Hahn wrote:

It’s pretty wild that the new store leans harder into an outdated, print-first model when so much of the customer base has swapped to Foundry and tablets.

Outdated is a bit of a stretch . More people buy physical books than PDFs, ebooks etc … by a pretty big margin, in fact. Alternative ways to consume RPGs (and books in general) have certainly increased, but I promise you print is still king.

for those in the continental United States, maybe.

I for one will literally never own a physical pathfinder product because have you seen the cost of international shipping direct from paizo, and the non-existence of LGS support overseas.

I only finally jumped onto pf2e in 2023, and since then it has only become ever more inhospitable to international hobbyists

at the very least Hellbreakers was still labelled as AP222 within foundry, so i don't think the numbering has gone anywhere.

I imagine there's also a desire to avoid people seeing these high numbers on hardcovers and thinking they're an insurmountably numerous straight throughline of immediate sequential adventures, rather than pretty much just order of publication you can play in pretty much whatever order

when it comes to APs i think i'm happy so long as its internally consistent stylistically.

For things like Lost Omens etc i think it can be really beneficial to have varied art styles, really get the most out of the diverse backgrounds and experience of contracted artists, especially for culturally inspired depictions.

Hellbreakers AP is now officially out on all regular storefronts!

Book: https://store.paizo.com/pathfinder-adventure-path-hellbreakers/
PDF: https://store.paizo.com/pathfinder-adventure-path-hellbreakers-pdf/
FVTT: https://www.foundryvtt.store/products/pf2e-ap222-hellbreakers
FVTT (Paizo): https://store.paizo.com/pathfinder-adventure-path-hellbreakers-foundry-vtt- code

Players' Guide: https://downloads.paizo.com/Hellbreakers_PlayersGuide.pdf

edit: very funny of paizo to put the fvtt version on a non-standard URL, making me change the pre-written post, only for them to fix it a few minutes after, so i had to then un-fix my post! lmao.

Good question, i can't wait to buy the PDF. Any news on this, dear Paizo-people?

PDF is available now.

we're still waiting on FVTT (SoG remaster FVTT for reference came out around 2200UTC or so)

The pdf is now available from paizo store.

Arkat wrote:

echoxero wrote:

Lex Winters wrote:

PG is out, a concise 10 pager.

Where did you find it?

Click on that link.

I mean, yeah, the link goes to the player guide, but I would also be interested to know where I was supposed to find it if someone hadn't thrown it here. Because I can't find a link to the guide on the hellbreaker store page like I can for the rest of the AP.

someone chucked the link in the hellbreakers discord channel, literally like 2 minutes before I was going to manually check if it was up myself.

I am also surprised there aren't more comments, though! I imagine people are out there playing it ^_^

personally i'm stuck waiting for street date and (hopefully) the fvtt module to drop tomorrow! we just did (most of) our session 0 yesterday though, so we'll be ready to start next monday.

but i've been freely yapping away in the hellbreakers discord channel since that got made.

PG is out, a concise 10 pager.

I asked the official Paizo bluesky this afternoon, and whoever runs that skeeted that

It will indeed be released this week!

- Paizo Social Media gremlins

I am curious why there are the original 4 books for foundry vtt and now there is this one new book for foundry vtt. Are both of these the same? If you already bought season of ghosts, wouldn't it automatically update to remastered or no? Are you getting the same maps in both? I haven't bought either, but curious as the single, remastered version is also cheaper.

The original 4 modules continue to be available, if you prefer the OGL based version (As adapted for remaster use in the FVTT PF2e system).

The new, remastered, compilated version, reflects all changes made in the remastered hardcover, plus additional fixes and additions specific for the collected module, such as a new dice set, including the OST in the purchase price, better integration of newer foundry features like animated doors and portals, and expanded and redrawn maps with seasonal variants. I believe the remastered version also technically does include the maps from the original modules, if you so preferred.

You do not get upgraded or any form of free switch between the two versions.

Especially given the new combined module is already included in FVTT Store sales (20% off until the 25th!!!) I would recommend just getting the new one, unless you desperately want to give paizo/metamorphic/foundry more money for a marginally less modernised experience.

If I already purchased the PDF before the remaster, do I need to purchase it again to play the remastered version?

yes. the compilations are a stand-alone product. this also goes for the FVTT modules.