Matthew Finch's page

The free module Rogues in Remballo is now live, and at step one of distribution!

Step One is availability to backers of the Borderland Provinces Kickstarter in a backer-only update. All three versions (PFRPG, 5e, and Swords & Wizardry) can be downloaded from the link in the update. Please don't share the link -- this is a way of spreading out the load on the servers so we don't have a server crash like we did with Wizard's Amulet.

Step Two is general availability. The module will be made generally available tomorrow on on the Kickstarter page for non-backers to download.

Downloading does require putting in some customer information so you can get the link emailed to you, but I think all you are required to input is an email address.
Matt

We're planning on launching the Borderland Provinces Kickstarter for the core region of the Lost Lands campaign on October 15, 2 days from now. Many people have asked about pricing: the answer may be a very nice surprise:

(1) The Basic Campaign Price is $12
Yes, you did read that right. You can start a Borderland Provinces campaign on a $12 budget if your goal is just to have basic information about what's around Rappan Athuk and the other major locations. By getting the pdf Player Guide and Gazeteer, which comes with a pdf of the poster map, you're all set for that type of bare-bones campaign if you're a DIY game master who doesn't plan on using encounter tables, secret GM information, lairs, etc. The Player Gazeteer gives basic descriptions of the map locations, enough to work with if you're a build-it-yourself Game Master. And since the campaign also comes with a free adventure, Rogues in Remballo, you have a pretty complete set of resources to work with.

(2) The "Core" Campaign Hardcover + Map + PDF is $35
A library-quality hardcover of the GM campaign book is only $35 plus shipping, and it comes with the poster map of the region (and free PDFs). This contains all the information we mentioned that's not in the Player Gazeteer. Also available just in pdf, of course.

(3) Additional Resources (make-your-own "resource kit")
An extensive pick-and-choose set of additional resources is where the Kickstarter gets fun, and where you can assemble whatever additional elements you want to supplement your core book, creating an extended "kit" tailored to the way you run your games. The main one is a hardcover book of seven brand-new, full-length adventures, called "Adventures in the Borderland Provinces," which gives you an instant starting point for general campaigning. Plus, there's the above-mentioned Player Gazeteer, a Player Guide, a book we call the "Journey Generator," and lots more. None of these are necessary for play, but all are excellent supplemental resources to add.

Greg will be making the official announcement when we launch: it will be some time on October 15, as soon as Kickstarter gives us the link.

Looking forward to seeing you in the Borderland Provinces!
Matt

So, the veil of secrecy over our next project is starting to fray a bit, which isn't unexpected. We're kept this under wraps for quite a while, and information was bound to get out.

Erik Tenkar, who is a prominent blogger in the OSR, leaked a bit of information today about our upcoming Kickstarter, the Borderland Provinces. It's still a day or so before we make any sort of official announcement, and I was planning on having Greg or Bill do that here at Paizo, but fair's fair: the Pathfinder community ought to share in the leaked information alongside the OSR crowd. Erik isn't at fault here, by the way, we gave him an advance copy of the free module and said he could tease it if he wanted, it's just that we waited a bit on the official announcement because we're still organizing pledge levels and so on.

So Erik scooped us, like a good news-blogger should. :)

He mentions the free module we're going to release with the Kickstarter, and although he's specifically talking about the Swords & Wizardry version, it's going to be released for Pathfinder and for Fifth Edition as well.

So I'll just leave this link here without saying anything official: Tenkar's Tavern Reveals a Secret

I have started posting what will be a series of designer notes about the conversion of Rappan Athuk into PFRPG and also into Swords & Wizardry (FGG's retro-clone of Original D&D). It will also have (mostly non-spoiler) discussions about new levels that are being added and how these are being integrated, written, and designed.

Most of this will focus on the conversion from RA 3e into the old-school rulesets, but there will also be a lot of material about general design matters that are common to Pathfinder.

The first installment of the series is here:

Link to first designer note

I hope everyone enjoys watching the progress of this massive task as it moves forward!

Matt Finch

Here's how you play two-tome bingo (2TB). You're guaranteed to get some sort of wicked combination that your players will hate, fear, and respect you for. Get out your Tome of Horrors Complete and open up your Tome of Adventure Design pdf. Find a d10. It's probably in the desk drawer or the Crown Royal bag. Okay, got it?

No, seriously, find the d10 or open a random number generator. I know you didn't actually do it yet.

Okay, now:
1) Roll 3d100. That's your page number in Tome of Adventure Design. Go to that page and pick a table if more than one is on the page. Roll a result. That's your ToAD playing piece. It might be a corridor width, a backstory, a villainous plot, an attribute of somke kind of critter, a clue, whatever.

2) Now roll 1d1000. That's your Tome of Horrors page. Probably there's only one monster on it. If you get more than one monster, you get to pick.

3) Combine the monster and the table result.

For example, I rolled page 94 for my ToAD page,and rolled on the description of a visitation this: "Caused by the attenuation of the aether, phlogiston, or astral substance at a particular point. Alternatively, it is the attenuation of material matter which causes the visitation."

Then I got a brain rat on page 452 of Tome of Horrors. So here is my result:
A gap in the aetherial membrane of reality has been letting in swarms of brain rats from another dimension; they are using ESP and mind thrusts (this was with the S&W version -- it's probably more specific in the PFRPG book). Totally cool stuff. Then I thought of backing them up with a brain-wererat, and then I thought that maybe something is chasing them ... (!) What sort of extra-dimensional cat-equivalent eats brain rats is pretty scary to contemplate...

In fact it would be fun to get some results on this from people and put them together into a free FGG pdf...

We already did the announcement of the "for sale" status of the new Tome, but I was hoping to talk a bit about the content of it, specifically different methods and theories of table design.

I'm an inveterate table-designer, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that on this board. Whenever I'm writing an adventure I have a tendency to write down the ideas I rejected, and then turn around and look at how you could design a table to duplicate the mental process that came up with the various ideas I considered. Over the course of 30 years of gaming that has created a lot of notes (I discount the first 5 years b/c I don't think anything survived from that early).

Anyway, the Tome of Adventure Design is what I call a "deep" set of tables, as opposed to tables that are designed for use on the fly during a gaming session. On-the-fly tables usually have to be short (or at least have no subtables), and they have to weight the results toward things that are fairly normal -- easy to work in with whatever other results you got.

The whole purpose of the Tome was to provide a much more comprehensive set of ideas that are for use ahead of time during a manic "this shall be my masterpiece!" kind of game-prep. In a couple of the tables there is probability-weighting toward the more "standard" or more immediately obvious results, but not very much and not in many of the tables. When I'm writing an adventure I am browsing for the unusual ideas, not the obvious ones, so the tables tend to reflect that. Many of them are quite long, and have multiple columns so that a large number of ideas can be combined.

I've got a strong prejudice against using computer-generated results on a table because you don't see the other entries that are right next to the selected ones. The human eye actually reads several words at a time, so on a written table you actually get two or three "results" going into the subconscious all at once. Very often the best result isn't the exact one you generated, it's what you generated with one substitution from above or below.

Anyway, that's the overall design parameter for the tables in the Tome; I don't think I have ever seen a set of tables that are built without regard for use on the fly at the gaming table -- these are for in-depth design work, and there's a reason why the adjective we use is "comprehensive."

In fact, if anyone's familiar with Stith Thompson's Index of Folklore and Mythology, this book was started with that sort of comprehensiveness in mind (only compacted by using tables, and fleshed out by including tables that are specifically categorized for game use).

Probably a long and boring post, but if you find the post to be boring I think you'll like the results of the book a lot better.

Here is the url of the preview (this starts you downloading, btw):
http://www.talesofthefroggod.com/files/UBADPre.pdf

And here is the ordering page (you can get the pdf now - the book itself is in the pre-order phase):
http://www.talesofthefroggod.com/index.php/products/the-tome-of-adventure-d esign

Note: Paizo might order this book for their inventory (I do not know), so if you get a volume or membership discount at Paizo you might want to wait a couple of days to see if it's going to be available at the Paizo store so you can get your discount.

I noticed a recent thread from Goldenfrog about how to introduce a group of old-rules gamers to Pathfinder, and I was interested in the reverse of that situation as well, which is running an old-school type game using the Pathfinder rules. That's basically how Necromancer Games approached third edition, simply offering an alternate approach to a lot of the 3e rules (not changing them, just applying them differently) and also presenting them in a completely different writing/art style.

There's an interesting experiment about that going on for Pathfinder, now, and it seems to me at least that there's a whole new model for "conversions" being developed.

Although Necromancer is now spun off into Bill Webb's new Frog God Games, the new company is doing something with Pathfinder that's even more of a retro-innovation (Retro-nouveaux?) which is to set up an interaction between authors who have never written for anything post-1e (in some cases, not even post-0e), and Pathfinder authors. The result is an underlying design based on purely free-form principles, with the Pathfinder engine basically used to interpret and shape the way that underlying design interfaces with the players.

The prime example is a module called Ursined, Sealed, and Delivered, which is written by Dennis Sustare (for those not familiar, Dennis was the author of the druid character class back in 1976). So the underlying module is as "old-school" as you can get in terms of its fundamental design principles. Once interpreted with the PF rules, you get something very interesting. It's like a fusion experiment where the PF rules have a different sort of feel to them.

I think "conventional wisdom" on module conversion is that the more a module is designed to be tailored to the strengths and details of a particular game system, the better it will be. Frog God Games's fusion model turns that on its head. With the objective of creating a unique, different feel, the theory is to begin with a different (more free-form) structure to the adventure, and then build a system's strengths into it as an interface.

It will be interesting to see how different the results of that kind of fusion design actually turn out to be.