Lex Winters's page

later books basically switch to a lunarsolar calendar, which arguably is more fitting. Presumably there was a mis- or non-communication about which way they were counting seasons between the book authors.

I basically did Book 1 as 31st Desnus / 1st Sarenith through to 31 Arodus, Book 2 is 1st Rova to 30th Neth, Book 3 as 1st Kuthona through to Lunar New Year, and Book 4 as Lunar New Year onwards - but also played up that there's festivals and holidays on both the lunarsolar and civilian seasonal dates.

Happy Pride to all! Just a reminder that although June is Pride Month of course, we really do care about making our spaces welcome and safe for everyone and the queer community all throughout the year. Representation is just as important on December 9th as it is in June! It's always important! We don't poof away after June ends! Although if I did have the ability to disappear in a puff of smoke, I cannot guarantee that I would not use this ability... all the time....

Personally, I poof away, and at home, year round! ️‍

Potential Repackaging Opportunities…

Maybe they could do something like, every other month or so a blog post of like "Staff Back-Catalogue Recommendations" where a couple paizo staff / contractors / whoever can highlight something they really enjoyed from a particular older piece of content - perhaps even ones that may have relevance or spiritual successors in the publishing pipeline, and then the pdfs etc for those old products included are like 10% off for a week.

Like "Hi I'm Jim, The Giant Rat That Makes All Of The Rules™️, and I really recommend Hell's Vengeance because John Cheliax had a cool piece of art on page 67!" and then links through to pdf set on the store for 15% off for the rest of that week.

So does this mean Tales from the Vast will be getting Foundry VTT soon?

There are no plans for a Tales From The Vast FVTT Conversion.

Organized Play is Society Play.

At this time, only Society vtt conversions are affected. APs and Adventures should still continue to be produced for FVTT.

Karai Snillore wrote:

JuliusUK wrote:

They damaged Organized Play when they decided to tell players how they should play, rather than supporting the ways players already wanted to engage with the game.

I haven't been on here in nearly 7 years, and missed the entire transition to 2e. In fact, I actually barely have even got to try 2e and when I took a gander at my local society play they got weirdly closed off.

Can you uh, fill me in. How did Paizo tell players how to play, as opposed to encourage them to play the way they were playing?

The Article wrote:

Authors and members of the community interested in producing sanctioned independent adventure scenarios for use with the current Pathfinder Society and Starfinder Society programs will be able to do so under clear guidelines that we will release before Gen Con.

While I am having the same response as most, and hope the best for Paizo and it's staff, my brain and eyes can't help but drift to this. Are they saying 3rd party individuals will be able to publish Society Scenarios with paizo? Like anyone can just, post a scenario and it will be good as long as it fits the guidelines?

I've missed ORC and Pathfinder Infinite's introductions, so maybe I've missed some serious junk. So am I reading this right?

During the pandemic, a lot of organised play moved online and, for many of us, that was a genuinely positive development. We could play with people from all over the world, join games that fitted our schedules, and participate even when travel wasn't practical.

When restrictions ended, it was entirely reasonable for Paizo to want to encourage a return to in person play. What frustrates me is that, rather than supporting both formats and letting players choose, they appear to have tried to drive people back to physical tables by limiting online play. One example was preventing the Discord channels that had been used to advertise online games from continuing to do so.

To me, the better approach would have...

i think in general paizo has been very overly wedded to the notion that "physical" is "best" and "first"; and to be honest this is to its detriment. Whether its subscriptions requiring physical product that costs at least twice as much if you're not continental US, before taxes and customs; the new storefront just not handling digital goods at all because it was only designed for physical SKU; and of course all the additional overheads, costs, and logistics involved in a physical media first approach. It is mostly understandable that Paizo has always held to its sacred cow of its history as a monthly printed periodical, but I think it has also been an anchor - for good and bad.

It is sad that they've got screwed over this bad by one specific logistical partner, beyond any level of meaningful control, though. And I hope Paizo is able to recover, diversify, grow, and rehire those affected into stronger, securer roles in a stronger, securer paizo in the future. And I trust them to at least try their hardest to get there.

My deepest and sincerest sympathies for all of the people affected by the layoffs.

Lex Winters wrote:

What grim reading.

up the Union.

I'm not sure what you mean here, but I'm interpreting, "Up the Union," as "the Union should be doing more for the workers affected.

no, and I'll thank you not to put words in my mouth, especially for strawman purposes. it's a common expression of support for the union and for all workers.

What grim reading.

up the Union.

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.