Nightdrifter's page

Necro:

Since the game is shutting down later this year, I'm curious if those kickstarter rewards ever got completed? I sold my account years ago so it's been a long time since I've cared about those rewards, but I'm still curious if those were ever completed.

I got the email stating that AP 144 and 145 shipped. I can download 144, but not 145. 145 is listed as being in my downloads, but is listed as being unavailable for download.

Enchanter: Profession (Barrister)

What advantage could charming a judge possibly have on your case?

72. The party needs to find the macguffin to stop the BBEG.

71. There is only one random encounter going from A to B.

If you can get a hold of AD&D DMG there's a few pages that let you randomly generate a dungeon if you want to run something other than a pre-made module.

70. The innkeeper is a former adventurer

Updated tracking of submissions by issue. Number of submissions is consistent with the previous two even numbered issues.

One thing I always think about when handing out magic items is that somebody made that item. So I always mentally compare what I see handed out as loot to what is actually crafted by players. Usually I see the big 6, pearls of power, (edit: 1st level wands like clw), and a random smattering of scrolls being crafted. Then I think of this comic where someone crafts a Bag of Tricks and realize I'll probably never see anyone do that in a game.

So what items do you usually see crafted? Any odd items?

Love the new take on Trinia!

I love this one for all the River Kingdom articles. Great work. But I forget, did a previous issue concentrate on 'Ultimate Campaign' at all, especially the kingdom-building rules? Because that would work great with this issue.

You can see the themes of previous issues listed here. Mostly they've been regional themes like this one.

Kingdom-building articles are allowed in any issue provided they meet the issue's theme. See here for the open call for the next issue (Numeria).

I find this to be an odd business move considering:

*Lisa is the one who pointed out part of TSR's downfall was due to self-competition with different campaign settings

*Paizo's reluctance to reprint old APs as that would mean competing against current APs

I hope this doesn't come back to bite Paizo in the behind.

So ... apparently there's an unannounced compilation project. See page 71.

It's live!

Nightdrifter wrote:

Now taking bets on how many times the word river will appear in this issue...

I would counter that with bets on how many times the word "bandits" will appear......;-)

So close to finding out which one will win out in total usage in this volume: 'river' or 'bandits'...

I never cease to be amused at how folks dig in to every little word we drop to try to interpret anything we type as clues as to the future.

Confirmed: Jolistina Susperio will be returning in the next AP.

If the missiles have some sort of abort capability you port in to the Kremlin and the White House, control the leaders and make them use the abort.

Pretty much this: nine greater teleports and nine dominate persons, so 18 rounds (less if you quicken a bunch of them with rods). Start by holding your actions for 12+ rounds to make it more dramatic.

Gygaxian Search Pattern: Explore a dungeon by rolling randomly at each intersection.

The Gamer: Successfully cast a magic missile spell against a creature shrouded in darkness.

Under the cover of Dorkness: Create a pile of dead bards and use it for cover.

Just stop already!: Stop a player from trying to make a True Strike weapon.

It ... makes mice??: Craft a Bag of Tricks.

Vaarsuvius's favorite tactic: Counterspell more than once in a fight.

In light of how counterspell works, change this to:

Just ready a magic missile to interrupt!: Counterspell more than once in a fight.

Just like Gandalf: As a wizard kill an enemy with your quarterstaff.

Vaarsuvius's favorite tactic: Counterspell more than once in a fight.

Order of the Cowards: Flee from a fight with goblins.

Age penalties apply to perception checks.

I don't even remember the character's name. It was a one-shot game back in 3.0, around 2002ish. 5th level, two players plus a DM. I played a female human sorcerer and the other guy played a male (elf?) fighter.

We were sent on an item recovery mission by the noble of one countryside manor against another. We were pretty low on resources (particularly my spells) on our return. Probably cause we drew a little too much attention on our approach to the enemy manor and ended up fighting most of the guards right at the gate. Oops.

On our return we were greeted by our employer who took us down to the basement to give us our reward. We were told to surrender our weapons first. Metagame we knew something was up, but our characters didn't. We were shown a treasure room and are told to pick our own reward. We step in, the illusory treasure disappears, and the door slams behind us. We then informed of our pending execution the next morning. No weapons, almost no spells, and a looming death.

Instead of brooding over how we'd been set up to steal something only to then get executed by our employer, I look at my remaining spell slots: a 0th level and a 2nd level. Most of the guards leave and the DM is about to call the game. We're completely toast.

I smile and turn to the DM. "I cast knock." The look on his face was just priceless.

Running out of the prison cell, we encounter one guard. I use up my last 0th level slot to cast Daze, buying the fighter a chance to steal a weapon without an AoO. He quickly wins the 1v1 fight against the guard and we book it for the exit, making our way into the woods. No survival skills between us and the only food we had was some muffins we'd picked up during our mission. Though we did have some gems iirc, so we could have bought food if we could get to a town.

It ended there. I always wondered about the fate of those PCs, but I like to bring those 3 words up every once in a while when playing with the guy who DMed.

Have asked this elsewhere, but figured I'd ask here as well just in case: will the new Curse of the Crimson Throne hardcover incorporate Gatlynn Keidros (from AP #100 article)?

Also, who do we thank for finally caving and agreeing to make the hardcover?

Relevant comment by James Jacobs. There's probably more if you search that thread.

I don't know what it is, but Council of Thieves always had a very FF 9 feel to me.

EDIT: Probably because of the play...and the group of thieves, it's a decent FF9 style path, although it ends lower than others and some people aren't a huge fan of the end game villains (I'd suggest buffing them too).

Sounds like CoT might be a good choice for a 2nd AP to run them through when we eventually finish the first one (2nd only cause I don't have CoT and money is a bit tight at the moment). Thanks!

I really am saddened because that sounds like we the players let the GW team down in a hard way after all the promises of being ready for the bugs and the lower-tier graphics and whatnot.

Even if the people who followed the forums were willing to put up with those issues, it's not enough. The forums were only a small slice of the population that you'd need to run a successful MMO.

The big issue so many outside these forums had was the combination of the buggy, unfinished state with having to pay a subscription. There were many who considered the game to still be in an alpha state so they weren't willing to pay for it. Most MMOs are free to play, so to require a subscription in today's market you really need to stand out.

The use of non-standard terms like Early Enrollment didn't help either. To many it made it seem like shady wordplay to pass off an incomplete project as being complete.

Regardless of whether you agree with those viewpoints or not, it's what many people felt. Just go look on any website dedicated to MMOs and look for the PFO section and you'll see that these forums are pretty much the only ones which speak positively about the game.

Everything is better with robots pirates!

There's some categories didn't exist in the beginning, and were either introduced later, or morphed/split off from another category.

Certainly. Eg. Adventure Card Game articles only started appearing in Wayfinder #13, so counts of them before that are all naturally 0. As for changing categories, just treat older categories as combinations of the current categories. Linear combinations if you will. An article from an obsolete category has a combination of crunch, fluff, and magic items? Call it 1/3 crunch, 1/3 fluff, and 1/3 magic item. That's why the earlier issues often ended up with fractional values for certain article types. Not perfect, but it allows a comparison (which is the whole point of the study). Applying categories will always be subjective and every value reported should be treated as having an uncertainty to it.

Since uncertainty of values tends to be poorly understood it basically means that instead of being a singular value it's really a range of possible values. Typically you report the 'central' value (the one in the middle of the range) and how much that can extend up or down (the 'uncertainty'). For this quick and dirty analysis I didn't bother figuring out what the size of that range was as that's too close to what I work on and it can be a lot of work to do properly.

Anyways, a few things that stand out:
*Some early issues (particularly #1 and #3) are really fiction heavy compared to later issues.
*#4 is the 'fluffiest'.
*Odds of a submission being accepted have tended downwards over time, due to increasing number of submissions.
*Weal or Woe and Poem/Song seem to be the most stable categories over time in terms of how many are accepted.
*Since #5 we seem to see a Realm Building article every 3rd issue. Probably a statistical fluke.

Nightdrifter wrote:

Captain Phoenix wrote:

Any chance you'll turn this into a Google doc for future reference... want me to? I think it would be very useful.

Here you go :).

Thank you!

Started a 2nd tab to see the general makeup of each issue. I go through each Wayfinder and make a quick judgement as to what category I think a given article belongs to based on a very quick perusal of the article. It's not going to be completely accurate as some of the articles are hard to categorize on a quick scan. For 'hybrid' articles I assign them values of of less than 1, but totalling to 1 for each type. Eg. a fiction article which has an item statted out (by Paris iirc) is counted as 0.5 fiction, 0.5 magic item. For multiple author articles such as Bestiaries and the like I count the authors.

There's probably errors on my part, but the goal is just to get a rough idea of the makeup.

Trying to predict the theme of Wayfinder #16. There's still a number of regions that aren't covered yet, so I'm restricting all my guesses to regions instead of more open themes like monsters. These are just my personal guesses, so obviously this is all unofficial. It's likely I've missed some relevant products for each region, and obviously Inner Sea Primer and Inner Sea World Guide are relevant to most regions.

======================================================================

Starting with some unlikely candidates:

Crown of the World
*Jade Regent #3 is the only adventure/article on the region.

I'm personally fond of arctic themes, but this seems more like Wayfinder #61 than #16.

Realm of the Mammoth Lords
*3 adventures, but all are PFS Scenarios.
*People of the North touches on the region.

This seems to be a popular region, but there aren't any non-scenario adventures and it's not overly developed, so it doesn't seem likely. Maybe if there's an 'arctic' themed issue combining the above two regions it might work, but Wayfinder #6 somewhat overlaps an arctic theme.

=======================================================================

Next, some candidates that could happen for #16, but which don't strike me as being top of the list.

The Shackles
*There's an adventure path and module set here, so plenty of adventures.
*Isles of the Shackles, Faction Guide, Ships of the Inner Sea, and Pirates of the Inner Sea are all relevent.

It's a little close in theme to Wayfinder #8, so it might be a bit till another pirate related issue.

Numeria
*There's the Iron Gods adventure path (plus 2 scenarios), so plenty of adventures.
*Numeria, Land of Fallen Stars, Technology Guide, Dungeons of Golarion, People of the Stars, and People of the River are all relevant.

It's really close to the River Kingdoms (the theme of #15) and was even technically part of the River Kingdoms once iirc. Based on this comment I'd guess it'll be a couple of issues before we see Numeria, but it shouldn't be too many.

Dragon Empires
*Jade Regent #4-6, The Ruby Phoenix Tournament plus a good number of PFS Scenarios scattered throughout, so plenty of adventures.
*Dragon Empires Primer and Dragon Empires Gazetteer are both relevant.

This is a real wild card imo. Being a continent, it covers a lot of regions.

Sargava
*Serpent's Skull #1+#2 and a few scenarios, so there are some adventures here.
*Sargava, the Lost Colony is the only relevant sourcebook.

Ire of the Storm is coming out in April, so there's the possibility of some overlap with this issue. Plus Wayfinders tend to bring up regions that haven't been covered in a while, so despite this region being a bit overdue (imo) it may have to wait because of Ire.

Hold of Belkzen
*Giantslayer AP + Daughters of Fury are set here, along with Skeletons of Scarwall.
*Orcs of Golarion, Bastards of Golarion, Giant Hunter's Handbook, Giants Revisited, Castles of the Inner Sea, Towns of the Inner Sea, and Belkzen, Hold of the Orc Hordes are all relevant.

While it was mentioned as part of the theme of Wayfinder #5, it has been developed a lot since then. Giantslayer is somewhat recent as an AP, so I think it may be a few issues before we see Belkzen.

Taldor
*3 pathfinder modules, plus one 3.5 module, lots of scenarios, but no APs unless you count Snows of Summer starting there.
*Taldor, Echoes of Glory, Cities of Golarion, and Faction Guide are all relevant.

Taldor is a little overdue for some lovin' imo. The only reason that I don't think it's a top candidate for #16 is that there are some stronger and more popular regions.

=======================================================================

Finally, the strongest candidates for #16 (imo).

Andoran
*A number of 3.5 PFS Scenarios and pathfinder Scenarios + Realm of the Fellnight Queen, plus a good string of 3.5 modules around Falcon's Hollow: Hollow's Last Hope, Revenge of the Kobold King, Tower of the Last Baron, Treasure of Chimera Cove, Carnival of Tears, Crown of the Kobold King, Into the Haunted Forest, and Hungry are the Dead. Plus Guardians of Dragonfall, so there's a ton of adventures set in Andoran.
*Andoran, Spirit of Liberty, Pirates of the Inner Sea, Knights of the Inner Sea, Guide to Darkmoon Vale, Faction Guide, Dungeons of Golarion, Towns of the Inner Sea, Ships of the Inner Sea, and finally Andora, Birthplace of Freedom are all relevant, so no lack of source material to draw on.

Andoran is better developed than Taldor, so less likely than Taldor to have anything being negated by future Paizo works. It lacks an AP, but has an adundance of adventures.

Worldwound + Mendev
*Wrath of the Righteous AP and The Demon Within, so a number of adventures.
*Demon Hunter's Handbook, Mythic Origins, Faction Guide, Lords of Chaos, Lost Cities of Golarion, Lost Kingdoms, Castles of the Inner Sea, The Worldwound, Demons Revisited, and Mythic Realms are all relevant.

Mythic rules aren't everyone's cup of tea, but I don't see them as being absolutely required for crunch articles for the Worldwound. I suppose a mythic themed Wayfinder is possible, but outside of that this is the best bet for mythic crunch articles to be submitted to.

Corrected submissions by Wayfinder:

#15 - 108
#14 - 85
#13 - 131
#12 - 80
#11 - 133
#10 - 98
#9 - 75
#8 - 59
#7 - 69
#6 - 47
#5 - 49
#4 - 40
#3 - 45
#2 - >60
#1 - 31

Thanks Liz!

Submissions by Wayfinder:

#15 - 108
#14 - 85
#13 - 131
#12 - 80
#11 - 133
#10 - 98
#9 - 75
#8 - 59
#7 - 69
#6 - 41 or 49?
#5 - 49
#4 - 40
#3 - 45
#2 - >60
#1 - 31

Updated tallies of submissions by Wayfinder #:

#15 - 108
#14 - 85
#13 - 131
#12 - 80
#11 - 133
#10 - 98
#9 - 75
#8 - 59
#7 - 69
#6 - 41 or 49?
#5 - 49
#4 - ???
#3 - 45
#2 - >60
#1 - 31

I'm surprised that #12 was so low.

This comment offers some insight. Also, odd numbered issues are the printed Paizocon issues, so I'd expect that they'd be more popular.

Looking up the final tallies for recent Wayfinders:

#14 - 85
#13 - 131
#12 - 80
#11 - 133
#10 - 98
#9 - 75
#8 - 59
#7 - ???
#6 - 41 or 49?

@Kalindlara

Bestiary: New creatures to terrorize your PCs! Each creature counts as a separate submission. Submission size: 750 words per creature. However, because multiple creatures are combined to form a single bestiary article, smaller entries will be considered as long as they are complete. (i.e., 750 words is the upper limit for bestiary entries, rather than a hard target. See the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary for examples of proper formatting and content.)

I know time is short, but if anyone has NPC suggestions, I'll consider them for inclusion. So far I have:

Bandit - Human fighter1/rogue1 (thug)
Tymon Gladiator - Half-orc fighter4 (brawler)
Cultist of Gyronna - Changeling mesmerist7 (cult master)

I also have Black Eagle and Daggermark Poisoner slated for inclusion. I might need a level 5 something for the Cultist's cohort, but I can just suggest NPCs from the NPC Codex for that - it's not essential.

So, if anyone has ideas - especially ideas that would dovetail well with their own submissions - I'm listening. ^_^

An owlbear.

Was thinking of incorporating a simplified version of the Hell's Rebels rebellion rules into a Realm Building article ("Rivers Run Rebellious") where the rebellion is seen from the kingdom's side. Instead of running the rebellion the rules would be for hunting down and stopping it using Kingdom Building rules. There are supposed to be rebellions in the River Kingdoms as new fiefdoms rise up and fall, so I figured it'd be fitting. Don't really have the time to finish it, so if anyone wants to submit their own version please feel free to.

As the old saying goes: "Necessity is the mother of invention." When you have magic to help you, there's less need to find a technological solution.

Looks like it's all working now.

1d100 ⇒ 30 Gillmen

1d250 ⇒ 237 Unemployed

Begs the PCs for money on the street incessantly while complaining about how all the non-Azlanti "took er jerbs".

A use for Craft (Basket Weaving)!

Can you do it underwater?

Dhampir PCs

Sivanah.

Out of curiosity how many submissions have been put in so far?

Submitted one article and thinking about a second, but I need some clarifications from Tim/Paris first.

Are there any plans or rules for incorporating Pathfinder Online ("PFO") into this issue? It doesn't have a huge player-base (and is admittedly in dire straits atm), but seeing as PFO is set in the River Kingdoms this issue is the one that best suits it. If there ever was an issue of Wayfinder to tie in PFO this is the one imo. After all, the card game is now being accepted for certain article types now.

That being said there are definitely some issues with PFO articles.

The big one is that PFO doesn't use OGL rules, so any crunch articles are pretty tough. Maybe a summary of the PFO game mechanics might be the closest fit to a crunch article, but that's basically just repeating what's in the PFO guides and may not be of much interest to tabletop players. That and restating game rules doesn't exactly strike new ground.

I do have one idea on how to tie in to PFO though. There will (eventually/hopefully/maybe) be some character histories which will be part of the game as kickstarter rewards. No idea if/when these will make it in game due to the financial difficulties Goblinworks is in. For example, there will (hopefully!) be a location with a short history tied to one of my PFO characters. I was thinking maybe a WoW article which includes that character might be a loose tie in to PFO. The WoW article could even mention to look for that marker in PFO as it gives some of the character's backstory. However, there are potentially legal issues, specifically that (from the kickstarter) "The copyright to the character name and background you provide will be held by Paizo Publishing, LLC, which reserves the right to reject inappropriate, anachronistic, or vulgar content". I don't know what the rules would be on doing a WoW using such a character, so I figure it'd be better to get the okay first.

I apologize if I just derailed this thread with discussions of PFO!

However, some River Pirate archtypes might be needed!

Some inspiration for you: Saskwatchewan River Pirates

Done the first draft of my first wayfinder submission.

It may have been unforeseen at the time of the KS, but what I was asking is when the funding fell through.

Not sure if quoting yourself is kosher, but after some digging I (may?) have a partial answer to my own question:

Based on the Duffy's recording, another >$1m is estimated to be needed for PFO. They've used ~$3.5m (source?), so that puts the full budget at around ~$5million. Those numbers are consistent with the 75% estimate as 75% of $5m is $3.75m. Their expenses seem to be fairly consistent over time (roughly ballparked at $700-800k/6months) if the $3.5 million figure for 2.5 years is roughly correct. Note: there's a lot of variability in what these numbers could be and expenses aren't constant due to new hires, one time fees etc, so perfect accuracy on my part isn't going to happen.

Back in Oct 2014 Ryan seems to hint the budget is closer to $4 million.

So either:

1) the budget changed between then and now (due to lower than expected sub numbers?)

or

2) ~$1m in investor funding had fallen through sometime before Oct 2014 (and presumably after the kickstarter ended in Jan 2013) and without more funding to replace it the current situation could have been foreseen back then.

The recent blog states: "we never thought that the Early Enrollment subscribers could carry the company to Open Enrollment". Note that even the earliest post-KS estimate of Open Enrollment was Q1 2016 which is still in the future, so I'm more inclined to believe it's #2

====================================================================

In order for subs to have made up the ~$1m difference you need pretty optimistic numbers to have it by now. Recall that EE was only supposed to be pioneer pledgers and pioneers got 4 months free. So even with the early estimates of EE starting in Q3 2014 the first sub payments would have begun around Jan-Feb 2015. To have that extra $1m by now would require about 8300 extra subs during that time paying $15/month for 8 months. And that's ignoring the staggered entrance of 2k/month (and assuming 0 attrition) as originally planned which would only increase the 8300 estimate. With more realistic attrition rates the number goes up even more. To be fair they wouldn't need the extra $1m right now, but at least a good chunk of it*.

It's been pretty clear for a long time that anywhere close to another 8000 EE peeps above the current numbers wasn't going to happen, so again we return to the fact that this current situation is something that has probably been seen coming for quite a while.

*I can model this if anyone wants, but for now dinner calls...

====================================================================

tl;dr/math is scary: Based on what I see the only conclusion I can reach is that the funding from investors fell through after the kickstarter and before Oct 2014. Sub numbers were too low to possibly make up the short-fall and this must have been clear to GW. Likely they kept searching for new investors up until the last minute before layoffs.

====================================================================

To be clear I'm not trying to lay blame. I'm just trying to use the numbers I am aware of to see when this current situation could have been foreseen. Obviously the numbers are only guesstimates and in some cases could be wrong.

Liz posted that it'll be closer to 12:30.

+1 to Curse