Zi Mishkal's page

Thank you Mark for your reply. I had a long reply in turn adressing the points you made but honestly, it's not worth my effort. Good luck with the company.

I have a few comments about this latest round of price increases, which I'm sure will go over about as well as anything that isn't overly supportive of Paizo on these boards.

1. There's going to come a point where the glossy panels, copious artwork, wide margins, etc... are going to simply be too much of a burden on the consumer. And frankly, I think you're close already. To add my voice to the others, I already only get the bare minimum in books for PF2e and this is only going to cut that amount down. Moreover, when I do buy Paizo product its either (a) on sale or (b) secondhand. And Paizo products do seem to be on sale more and more often.

2. Using inflation as a crutch is a non-starter for me. You've set up shop outside of Seattle, Washington (The Seattle Times this year listed Seattle as one of the 10 most expensive places to live in the US). Its just basic math that you have to charge Seattle prices to make a living in Seattle. You have to pay your employees, your taxes, your utilities in Seattle dollars. Which is fine, except, surprise! not everyone lives in Seattle. There's people who play in the Midwest, in Appalachia, in small towns all over the country and your "passing the cost onto us" will continue to drive them away.

As a small company, I simply cannot see how this is a successful long term strategy for you. Yes, prices are going up - but they are going up for everyone - not just Paizo. And when it comes to the choice between people paying for rent, food, school, clothes or a bloated sourcebook that costs nearly $100- because every third page is glossy splash art, most people are not going to choose the latter. Moreover, I'm sure there are people like me who are looking at the remastered editions and thinking "maybe this is a good time to try another system" - not WotC and not Paizo. Because I can get more value for my shrinking dollar by looking for games with a little more fiscal discipline.

the feat is waaay too situational for a 14th level feat. and honestly the damage is middling at best for a 14th level caster, considering the unlikelihood of it actually going off to any real effect. I expect 95+% of the players will bypass this one.

I don't understand this new design philosophy where so very little is impactful in any part of this game. It's all so underwhelming, and frankly for the amount of money we are expected to fork over for rules, modules and accessories, the game should be epic. But every step forward seems a step away from epic.

the acronyms make my head hurt.
I'm fully expecting the hybrid amalgam License framework for using only part of the ORC license next.
Yes the HALF-ORC.

I'm clearly in the minority here, but I find these edicts and anathemas to be very vague and superficial - almost to the point of racial stereotyping. Maybe we will get better ones in the Highhelm book, but reading through these give me very little sense about what makes a dwarf a dwarf.

Popular Edicts
create art with beauty and utility - how is this dwarven? If you put this down and asked me to pick an ancestry to go with that, I would have guessed elven or human.
hunt the enemies of your people - again, could be anyone. I would have guessed half-orc or lizardfolk.
keep your clan dagger close - obviously dwarven, but this still feels like something tacked on late in the process.

Popular Anathema
leave an activity or promise uncompleted - this is probably the most dwarven one out there, but it still seems like its poorly worded. Are dwarves obsessive about contracts? Would this make Asmodeous somehow appeal to them? Or is it that they toil diligently at a project? And maybe one of their shortcomings is the ability to pivot away from a process that isn't working?
forsake your family - Again, very superficial. At least, this should be clan? After all, its a clan dagger, not a family. Still, I would have worded this as "stick with your clan and kinsmen above all else" or something like that.

Also the phrase "popular anathema" sounds weird. Like its something they are jockeying for. You know, all the cool dwarves don't forsake their family. 'Common' may be a more apt description.

At this price point, this is an amazingly hard NO.

I left Hero Lab for a reason. But I fear the writing I see on the wall. This is the beginning of the end of the "free ride" for Archives of Nethys and Pathbuilder. Its also the beginning of the "math creep" to go with the "feat creep" that is already in full swing. At least in PF1, you could make fun characters that did amazing things. Sure, it was a bunch of work, but the math wasn't so absurdly limiting that it sucked all the fun out of the game.

Depends on what D&D fans you're talking about. Old grognards who cling to their OD&D copy will likely not care. But sensitive, centre-leftist anti-capitalist kids who got in the game through the Critical Role/cosplay/"I can be a trans nymph here, and nobody will judge me" pipeline? WotC might be severely underestimating how toasty and quick to self-ogranise against a corporate cash grab these rainbow folks are.

I'd love for that to be the case. I was thinking more that apathy and taking the path of least resistance seems to be the way things go these days and therefore most people wouldn't leave or be particularly perturbed by the move.

Lol. I'm jaded by life is all :P

WotC has a VERY long shot here, but it has a shot. And in American law, where business-to-business litigation is brutal and frequently more about who has the money than who is right, a long shot might be all they need to win.

Moreover, they don't necessarily need to 'win' any court case. They simply need to ruin the business model of their competitors. How long can Paizo exist, for example, if they can't sell 90-100% of their product? How about Hero Lab? Owlcat? Pathbuilder? etc. etc.

Court cases tend to drag on. If WotC can get make their new OGL enforceable while that goes on.. it's going to be game over. Because frankly, while the outrage among the rest of the RPG will be immense and overwhelming, the outrage among DnD fans is likely to be muted at best.

Hi all,

From early 2019 to early 2022, our little group played a weekly game of Tyrant's Grasp. Over the course of 100+ sessions of 3-4 hours a piece, we told the story of a wildly divergent AP that brought in lore from all across the PF multiverse. Although going into any real detail would be at least a novella, I thought that it might be interesting to share at least a brief summary of what occurred.

Note: The following summary contains spoilers to not only TG, but also minor spoilers to portions of at least a half dozen other modules and APs. It also takes place in a Golarion where two other APs have occurred. Our group has been playing in the PF universe for a decade now and has quite the unique local history. If asked, I will gladly explain things in detail:

Thirty-six Days till the End of the World - A Tyrant’s Grasp recap

Part One - the beginning to the fall of Vigil.

1 Arodus 4739 - In the new nation of Veridia in the Stolen Lands (Veridia was created as a result of the Kingmaker campaign), a band of young adventurers assist the King Orla Brandywine in her unnatural sleepwalking escapades. (Content taken from “The Night March of Kalkamedes” as a way to introduce the party). At the end of the adventure, the party meets a Ghaele named Suliana and is tasked with taking an artifact - The Grace of the Last Azlanti - to Yarlzan Urgol in Lastwall. Yarlzan was one of the heroes of the Kingmaker campaign. With Orla’s blessing, the PCs agree to make the overland trek to Lastwall under the guise of a diplomatic envoy to Lastwall.

The party consists of:
Decibel Rieveres - a human female bard and resident of Roslar’s Coffer in Lastwall. She grew up in Veridia, a refugee from a massacre that happened in Roslar’s Coffer many years ago.
Nico Polio - A human male cleric in the employ of the Lastwall military. He comes from a military family long in service of Lastwall.
Rina Osi - a male tiefling paladin who grew up in Vigil among some of the leftover clerics of Aroden’s faith. He took the halfhearted teachings of Aroden so close to his heart that he somehow managed to exhibit paladin abilities even though he was following a dead god.
Cole Mishkal - a male, half-elven spellcaster and offspring of another of the Kingmaker heroes. His father disappeared several months before the start of the adventure.
Queyen - a male Vanaran monk. He exhibits the uncanny ability to annoy anyone he talks to.
Rava - a male Vanaran ranger. He is in Avistan for the first time to broaden his horizons and find adventure.

2 Arodus 4739 - The PCs leave for Lastwall, travelling overland and booking passage on a boat across Lake Encarthan.

17 Arodus 4739 - The PCs arrive at Vellumis in Lastwall. Here, they learn the direct route to the north to Vigil is unsafe to travel due to orc raids from the forest. They book passage along the river to Roslar’s Coffer to go the ‘long way around’. Nico checks in with his superiors to find that the Lastwall military is spread more than usual due to increased humanoid activity. The feeling is that Belkzen is prepping for another major push against the country.

21 Arodus 4739 - The PCs arrive in the afternoon at Roslar’s Coffer. Deci reunites with friends and family. She learns that two friends - Saisha and Frederick are to be wed in the fall. Nico reveals that this town is important to him as well - his father was slain as one of the defenders of the orc massacre here years ago. He and Rina travel to his father’s grave.
In the evening, the party dines at Deci’s aunt and uncle’s tavern. Following dinner, over tea and beer, everyone in the town is destroyed by the Tyrant’s first test of the Radiant Fire.

22 Arodus 4739 - The party awakens in the Boneyard, and escapes the shadow representation of the tomb in the Boneyard’s version of Roslar’s Coffer. Queyen is killed along the way (the player dropped out of the campaign). The remainder of the party recognize their location in the multiverse. They meet a psychopomp who explains to them how to get out of the Boneyard. They talk to the waiting spirits and learn a little bit about what happened to the town including the fact that a hooded crone was seen walking the streets the night before.

23 Arodus 4739 - The party fights its way through the Nine Eaves.

24 Arodus 4739 - The party fights its way through the Scriptorium. They meet Berthold, a ratling and adopt him. Berthold becomes interested in Rina, the Paladin and by extension, Aroden. Ms. Pedipalp manages to escape the PCs, leaving them anxious she might return later.

25 Arodus 4739 - The party fights its way through the tooth fairies’ castle, declining to give up any of their teeth in the process. After this session, the party is 4th level and several players are at least a little uncomfortable about the dark tone of the AP to this point.

26 Arodus 4739 - The party returns to the Boneyard version of Roslar’s Coffer. Deci insists on saying good-bye to the many people she knows there. She is concerned because some of the people she knows are not present in the Boneyard - specifically Saisha, Frederick and her aunt and uncle. Umble and Thoot (the psychopomps) tell them how to get out of the Boneyard. But en route, a garden blocks their path and the PCs have to fight their way through it. They meet and befriend Reedreaper - a warrior from Osirion - who allies with them. They encounter Mictena and convince her to let them pass back to Golarion. They return to Golarion to discover they each have somehow achieved a mythic tier.

27 Arodus 4739 - The party wakes up on Golarion in a ruined version of Roslar’s Coffer. They discover Saisha survived by hiding in a cellar under the barn, and that she is secretly an earth kineticist. They make their way through the town, and encounter Tuuli Kanerva, a female duskwalker sent by Pharasma with the essence taken from Queyen so that she also has a Mythic Tier (a new player joined the campaign). Deci finds and frees the bound spirits of her relatives in the town, but upon freeing them, they merge with her musical instrument - an oud. They set Frederick’s spirit free as well.

28 Arodus 4739 - The party ambushes some of the Whispering Way cultists and kill them. Rava finds a half-starved cat and adopts it as his animal companion. They find other WW cultists and manage to interrogate them for some other information including how to get out of Roslar’s Coffer.

29 Arodus 4739 - The party enters the graveyard at the southeast of town. A worm that walks, formed of partial essences of the good people who dewlled in the town greets them. The party decides that ‘Roslar’ as the WtW calls itself is not evil and allows it to leave in peace. Nico notices his father’s grave has been excavated.. possibly from within. The party grimly travels through the tomb, clearing it out. They meet Regio Polio - Nico’s father, now a graveknight. A brief conflict ensued and Regio was slain. Nico was confused, first by the ineffectual tactics his father used, second by the graveknights seeming desire to escape rather than fight and third by his father’s utterance that he was “Only following orders - like at Kassen”. Nico kept his father’s armor for cleansing.

30 Arodus 4739 - The party fought through the Bastion of Light, clearing the first floor.

31 Arodus 4739 - The party nearly died clearing the second floor of the Bastion of Light. They found two sisters, Orlava and Savenna, who were accomplices to the WW and provided the party with a wealth of information about what was happening in Roslar’s Coffer. The party took them as prisoners with the intent to return them to Vigil.
Later that evening, the party met Arazni in disguise as a hooded old crone. She urged the party to head to Vigil, report the use of the radiant fire and look for someone named Gildias.

1 Rova 4739 - The party repelled an orcish attack at a border fort north of Roslar’s Coffer. They managed a sending off to Vigil and received teleportation to the city. Once in the city they were debriefed and made a temporary base at a tavern called ‘The Shield’s Banquet’. The party debated whether to (a) hunt for Gildias, (b) investigate a Dwarven monastery to the south near Falcon’s Hollow (the location of one of the seals that keeps the WT in check) (c) investigate whether the shards of the Shattered Shield have been stolen or (d) try to convince the important people in Vigil of this new threat.

2 Rova 4739 - The party spent half a day trying to convince the important people in Vigil with little success. Rina spent part of the day touring Arodenite places. Rava spent the day sightseeing. Deci and Saisha partied. In the end they decided to visit Falcon’s Hollow and see if that seal remained intact.

3 Rova 4739 - The party arranged teleportation to Falcon’s Hollow. There they learned that the seal had, in fact, been broken years before. They relayed this information back to Vigil via sending.

4 Rova 4739 - The party solved Falcon’s Hollow’s societal problems and left as heroes. Several wondered if Aroden had returned. Rina explained that Aroden had not, but Aroden’s ideals carried weight and if people kept those ideals in their heart, it would be as if he never left.
The party also defeated a huge green dragon that was near the village. The party did not kill Thalilurirex, but subdued him and offered him his life in exchange for some future service.

5 Rova 4739 - Rina returns to Vigil and speaks to his old mentors. They confide to him that Aroden’s faith is gone, and his teachings are meaningless. Moreover, real, actual Aroden was a bit of a jerk - not much like the ideal. They have heard about Roslar’s Coffer and are leaving Vigil, rather than stay and help. Enraged, Rina resolves to leave the ‘religion’ of Aroden, but keep the idealised tenets.
Nico gets reprimanded for digging too deeply and independently into the Roslar’s Coffer problem. The investigations are starting to sow panic. Deci charms her way into a private viewing of the Shattered Shield fragments. Cole researches the history of Arazni, Aroden and knights of Ozem. Tuuli visits the high priestess of Pharasma in Vigil and learns that she has been having premonitions of the city being destroyed in fire. Rava finds a wonderful Vanaran restaurant and has a meal. He talks to a bunch of locals and learns about a system of sewers under the city - a veritable city under the city.

6 Rova 4739 - Rava discovers an entrance to the sewers. The rest of the party splits up and manages to track down several leads within the city about Gildias, the possibility of the Shattered Shield being a forgery and infiltration into the city from one of the border crossings. The group reconvenes at the sewers where they learn more about the Whispering Way from a very prescient neo-otyugh.

7 Rova 4739 - The party continues to tread through the sewers, defeating foes as they go. Some of the cultists have the markings of Seal Breakers - a sect devoted to releasing Rovagug from his prison within Golarion! They returned to the surface to learn how forgeries of the Shattered Shield were made. While travelling through the town the party were very nearly TPKed by a sneak attack from Killenbrant, but managed to escape to the church of Iomedae where they find a kindred spirit in the leader of the church - the Second Sword. Yarlzan arrives and everyone compares notes. The Seal Breakers were trying to find a way to steal the shattered shield, but they stopped right after Roslar’s Coffer was destroyed. Later, they also learned that another group did steal the shattered shield pieces and replaced them with forgeries. They party is convinced the answers lie deeper in the sewers.

8 Rova 4739 - The party finds the hidden Seal Breaker fortress underneath the city and begins to systematically go through it. They befriend Dundun, who was untrustworthy until the battle with Yosidium. Because of dice rolls, the battle goes poorly for Yosidium, and midway through the battle another blast of the Radiant Fire is unleashed - this time destroying Vigil. The PCs immediately gain a second mythic tier.
They climb their way out of several hundred feet of rubble into a ruined city. They made their way to the ruined Church of Iomedae and rescued the Second Sword and recovered several important relics. Along the way they encountered Ceto Maldera who revealed herself to be a member of the Knights of the Splinter - a radical sect of Lastwall driven to provoke a final confrontation with the WT regardless of the consequences.
The party then led a large band of refugees to the docks in a running battle through several blocks of Lastwall. The party and refugees were cornered near the docks by waves of undead. The Tyrant himself demonstrated an until now unknown connection between himself and the party, stunning the party with a psychic blast. At the last moment they were saved by Yarlzan and the remnants of the Vigil guard. Among the creatures under the WT’s control were scaeduinar - sentient denizens of the negative energy plane. What role they have in the conflict remains unknown. As the refugees escape across the river, the remnants of Vigil collapse into a giant sinkhole created by the blast, depriving the Tyrant of his instant army. As Yarlzan explains - Vigil was always a trap for the Tyrant. The city was meant to be sacrificed to give the rest of Lastwall time to respond to the threat. Thats why the undercity was hollowed out. When the river broke through into the undercity, the supports eroded away and the city was destroyed.

Coincident with the destruction of the Vigil, the seal over Gallowspire is also destroyed. The WT begins to move his forces. A raiding party of 50 high level ghasts leaves Vilyrich and heads southward. The Witchgates are re-established, trapping Ceto Malderra in the process.

I'd be curious to see what's actually new and different with their take on dwarves here. Giving each clan a "theme" is nice and makes for good storytelling, but I feel that it hardly expands what it means to be a dwarf. If anything, this feels more like dwarven society is bounded like a caste system. How will that play in Paizo's usually diverse and opportune-rich world?

We had our session zero and our party of four includes:

a dwarven rogue, a dwarven cleric, a grippli swashbuckler and a human sorcerer.

Picking the sorcerer out of the short people will be a snap. (or a twang of the crossbow).

Much appreciated. Looking at the AP + Companion stuff, it's very overwhelming and disorienting with all these events spread out over numerous locations without a unifying document.

They've created a new discussion sub-forum for Kingmaker2E.

Perhaps some mod can shift this thread over to there?

Yeah, I agree. There seems to be a ton of info and I’m not even sure where to start. What are you doing for maps at the table?

For maps I bought a chessex battlemat and some dry erase markers. I'm going to use the hell out of that. I've got some artistic skill, so I'm not worried about that. Minis (pre-painted and unpainted) I've been collecting for the past decade, so I'm good there.

The kingdom map I'm using is this one that I made back before this project was announced. I have an 11x17 print out of it as a GM aid and I went to my local office copy place (Office Depot in my case) and made a 24x36ish map which they also laminated. That cost me like $40- back in 2018. But the hexes are 1" / square. I plan on hiding the unexplored hexes with round stick on labels.

Other maps I will draw as needed. There is a rumor that Kingmaker will be out for Foundry VTT and I can't recommend that VTT enough.

Lastly, I plan on making the PC stronghold out of foamboard once the party decides on a floorplan. Or maybe LEGOs. hehe. As GM I try to keep my party's interest with a fair amount of 'wow' (and also good GM Skills).

Anyway, I also haven't read all of it, so I may be missing some context of what's in the 2E version that's driving some of your comments. But they are saying that they've added content to the AP that wasn't in the CRPG, so there's that.

I did skim through the new version of the kingdom building rules, and that looks more compact, which could be a plus. Still, I can't ever really get a good feel about rules systems without playing them; just reading them isn't enough.

I agree that the pages look great, and I can't wait to get my physical copy.

Yeah, I'm a little wary of the new kingdom building rules. I've already decided to ditch the army rules for a homebrew of the old AD&D Battlesystem rules. I'm kinda shocked how easily those could be ported over.

I'm not sure what they did add that wasn't in the CRPG (which I haven't finished tbh - on the equivalent of Book 5). What I am seeing is this weird mix of stuff nearly verbatim lifted from the original AP, maps, images and all and stuff that seems to be lifted straight from the CRPG. I find it a little janky at times, but that may be me.

I am looking forward to the books, and I am looking forward to GMming this. We're doing an in-person campaign and kick off in ten days. I've been through KM as a player so I'm fine just with the updated stat blocks. But whereas the 1e KM was almost not enough info and the GM filled in the cracks, this one seems a pile of too much material and the GM will need to weed out bunches of stuff.

We'll see how it plays. That's the thing.

(Warning: I haven't really dived into the PDFs yet, but I did skim a few of them.)

Regarding the advice on awarding treasure for a PF1 game, it appears to be a matter of "look it up in the original PF1 PDFs". But how well will that scale with the added content and potentially higher-levelled characters? Apparently the PCs can end up at character level 20+ if all the encounters are used.

And, as stated above, I haven't had a chance to see how well the Kingdom Management system converts from PF2 to PF1.

Yeah, you're on your own for PF1 treasure. The skill system is a lot more compact in PF2 - there's fewer skills and the numbers don't go as high. There may be a conversion somewhere put out when PF2 came out, but I'd look at skill #s from the PF1 book as a guide and adjust by +/-5. Or, you can do what I do - listen to how the PCs decide to solve a problem and if it's good, a decent roll indicates success and a bad roll indicates failure.

One thing that stood out for me was the traps. I just glanced through the bestiary and I don't think I saw traps in them. So you may be on your own for those.

And yeah, a lot more encounters.

I haven't read through it all (the AP alone is 600+ pages) but from what I've seen I think I can come to some tentative conclusions.

1. The book is overall well done. It seems to follow the computer game fairly closely, which could be a plus or minus. There's a lot of content in there, so I feel confident any GM can mix and match material and still have plenty.

2. The map is problematic. The map is simply a reprint of the original AP map, hidden away in the back of the AP. The map is still not oriented with north and I don't think that they ever resolved the Stolen Lands / Brevoy / Iobaria map conflicts. On the plus side, I like how the Stolen Lands are divided into 20 sections - one for each level - with level appropriate wandering encounters for each.

3. Mivon appears to be completely ignored again (likely because it was more or less ignored in the CRPG). Again, this is a huge wasted opportunity IMHO.

4. There appears to be no Gazetteer at all in the product. I understand that we could use the 10+ year old materials from PF1, (I mean, we could have used the 1e AP in its entirety), but one major point was to flesh out those parts of the original that 10+ years of feedback had laid the groundwork for.

My honest appraisal at this point is that while the AP is well presented and organized, it falls short of the original intent of these hardback second endeavors, which is to not only present the material in a compilation, but also to expand and fill in those portions which were lacking in the original work. Instead, the new material seems to be taken almost exclusively from the CRPG. Where the CRPG filled in the missing parts well, these additions are welcome. But considering the promises throughout the dev cycle, the repeated missed dates for completion and the simple fact that this edition was less about new content and more about converting existing content (namely stat blocks, etc), the end result has to be disappointing to some degree.

I'm half tempted to redraw my map of the Stolen Lands at 6 mi hexes.

Huh. I also have a terrain only version of the map.

The main advantage to my map (aside from looks) is that it's oriented with north upwards, so its aligned correctly with the rest of the Inner Sea.

I was going to pull out pages 8-13 as the "player's guide". It's not a perfect solution, but it'll do for my purposes.

I finished up TG with mythic PCs a couple of months ago. I should probably get around to writing a "lessons learned" thread for the benefit of anyone else who wants to try it (and run TG in general).

In short, I found the premise of the AP to be very exciting, but the execution thereof to be very flawed. These problems were only compounded by the addition of mythic tiers.

For the record, the party of 6 wound up with 5 players at MT 4 at the end and one at MT 9 (for plot reasons). I homebrewed the WT to my own specifications, making him *very* difficult to kill. In the end, there was a Thanos-like moment where the MT9 PC had to slice off the hand of the WT which held the remaining shard. Then he could activate the shard himself and double-detonate it. He learned how to do this because, as a side quest, the PCs learned how to consolidate their individual obols into one PC (the MT 9 PC). Reasonable calculations beforehand suggested to me, as GM, that that was the PCs best chance to survive and win.

Behind the scenes, Absalom and the Starstone were destroyed, the WT's ultimate fate was decided by the Starstone (which encompassed the remnant spirit of Amaznen - Azlanti god of magic). I also used the event to say goodbye to PF1 as a ruleset for our group - we have since switched over to savage worlds. PF was great, but 1.5 hours to go through a round of combat was boring.

Leading up to the final battle, there was very little that the PCs could not handle with 3-4 mythic tiers each, even though they played the whole AP at 2-3 levels below what was recommended. (the PCs were 16th level during the final battle). And yes, most encounters were bumped up 1-2 CR. There were simply too many options available. (Although I flatter myself that I have a particularly good and inventive bunch of players).

In the end, the biggest complaints was not the quality of combat or magic items, but the overall tone of the AP and the nature of the WT's plan. The tone was problematic in that, after about book 3 the horror motif became numbing and tedious (the group almost gave up after book 3). Book 4, in particular, I tossed and replaced with custom content because it was obvious that the PCs would have bypassed most of the book, anyways (really? walk to gallowspire?). I took that opportunity to allow the PCs to learn more about the WT's plan and collect more allies. Which brings me to the second point - the isolation of the PCs. Most of the AP makes it seem like the PCs are working alone against the WT, which is completely nonsensical if the WT is actually as threatening as the AP makes him out to be. Moreover, there was considerable question by both myself and the table as to why the WT would want to take on the entire world at once. In any event, I'll detail my improvement to his plan in another post. Suffice to say that the rudimentary nature of his original plan was *the* major disappointment for the party, and one that needed correction on the fly. Like many movie trilogies, the scattered clues and hints that Paizo put forward in numerous publications beforehand made the railroaded nature of TGs disappointing in the end. Of course, the alternative would have been a much more nuanced campaign that involved considerably more geopolitics and world-spanning. I don't know whether something like that was ever on the table and got pulled due to 2e being developed simultaneously, but it's unfortunate we got what we got.

In the end, you can make it mythic if you want. Your end result will be longer combats, with more OP bad guys and meaningless dungeons. The final battle will be the same regardless whether you keep it canonically in the wasteland or bring it to the starstone cathedral like I did. And, likely, at the end, you and your party will be burned out on the ruleset like we were.

Not really? Paizo isn’t making you use all those options.

Yup. And Paizo is not making me buy their books. Which is why I stopped. But see, they'd like me to buy their books. It helps them to stay in business.

So yeah, your dismissive comment is true... to a point. As is the presumed comment of "If you don't want to buy them, why are you making a fuss and commenting here?" The answer to that is equally simple and obvious (to some). And it is this: By having forums, they are implicitly seeking out reactions to their products and services. If all they get is reactions from people who knee-jerk like everything they produce, that's not really helpful or constructive. And since it's statistically unlikely that they will appeal to everyone with every product, listening only to those who agree with everything they do will only result in a smaller and smaller market base. Which, as I've already pointed out, is detrimental to their continued existence as a company.

Paizo used to innovate, not replicate. I miss those days. *shrug* but i guess I'm just the dismissible minority now.

We live in a world where a statement like this is not only a serious statement, but an all-too commonplace one.

"Plus by connecting your Paizo account with Pathfinder Nexus, you get a significant discount on purchasing books you already own!"

ooh, I get to BUY what I already HAVE? Well, lets see.. I have physical books, I have pdfs of physical books, I have them on Hero Lab, I have them on AoN and now I can have them on Nexus?

You see where people are starting to get a little peeved? Oh, you don't see? Well, see ya.

Whenever people rush to the boards to try and pressure Paizo into action over something, I cannot help be reminded of the lesson Paizo devs told me again and again during PF2s playtest. I'll paraphrase that here:

The message board community represents only a small percentage of Paizo's overall demographic. Moreover, the message board community almost invariably does not represent the feelings of the larger pathfinder/starfinder base.

This was said repeatedly when people on these boards were nearly unanimous in disagreeing with the devs over rules mechanics and direction. Essentially their response was "you aren't important".

I've seen nothing in the months and years since then to dissuade me from that as Paizo's official stance, regardless of my likes and/or personal interactions with individual Paizo staff.

Basically, temper your expectations. In the long run the likeliest outcome is that nothing will happen.

So, running through book 5 and I've noticed along with others that the level names are switched in the Blue Gardens of Tlil. Also, on the map pack, the top 2-4 rows of the map have been cropped out.

The module is more than two years old. I presume Paizo has no interest in fixing either of these errors?

I see that Paizo is moving towards 3 book APs which cover only half the level range. I think this is a great direction to head in, but I also think that this needs to be further subdivided. Let me explain why.

The one long standing criticism about APs (which many of you are already intuitively aware of) is that there is a very difficult transition around the end of book 3 and into book 4. For whatever reason keeping the same plot with the same characters and the same BBEG is really hard to do consistently (basically twice a year). Paizo does it better than most, but even their efforts are problematic at best.
So I like to look back to the old Mystara campaign setting for guidance (really, basic D&D did SO much correctly). The "official campaign" had four distinct stages (pre-Immortals)
1. Karameikos dungeon crawls and later city crawls.
2. The Master of the Desert Nomads invasion and the Known World
3. Norworld, and understand the relationship between the empires of Thaytis and Alphatia.
4. Fighting the immortal Alphaks' plans.

Each one of those things was a campaign in itself, and you could play each one individually. They didn't really wrap into one another, either, which makes sense. It doesn't always have to be one world-ending threat (in part, because you eventually run out of threats). If anything, a single campaign like Tyrant's Grasp or Jade Regent or Strange Aeons taking place over several weeks or months feels unnaturally forced, narratively. Its great marketing, but its terrible storytelling. Think of how much better Tyrant's Grasp would have been if the party started at Level 10 with the destruction of Vigil.

The only exception really is Kingmaker, because there are appropriate natural pauses built into that campaign. Ruins of Azlant has similar, but fewer and shorter pauses.

What is forgotten by people who didn't grow up with 1e AD&D, etc.. is that you're not supposed to be able to jump from level 1-20 over the course of a year (real time or game time). Back in the day, if you gained three levels a year playing at typical frequency, it was considered a fast campaign. And things slowed down even more at higher levels (9th level and higher). I power-leveled my ranger-illusionist in my last AD&D campaign (10th level ranger / 10th level illusionist at the start) and he gained a total of 2 levels, 1 in each class, both of which he was partway to at the start. Plus an additional level from a magic item. That was over 2 years of regular playing and 7 modules. Clearly, we weren't playing the modules to level- we played them because we enjoyed the story.

I think APs need to move to 3 volume sets which cover approximately 6 levels of experience. At the beginning and end of each AP, there should be suggestions to which modules these APs can connect to thematically. Then the players can mix and match themes based on their tastes as well as swap out GMs to avoid GM burnout. When a group gets close to the end of AP 1, the GM for AP 2 can already be prepping their turn. In the end, by making the modules more focused and taking up a lesser percentage of the PCs' career, I think Paizo will win out financially as the sale of older modules and APs will be able to better keep up with newer ones. Having those older works continue to bring in $$$ (especially digitally) helps everyone including the developers who aren't feeling the pressure as much for the current fare to be a "hit".

Don't quote me on this.. but I seem to recall some post where the ETA was effectively the end of 2021.

Specifically, for my campaign. The map will be in the style of my Kingmaker map. But I recognize that others may want to use this and so I'm releasing a more generic map.

I've got a beta version completed and uploaded already. You can find it here: The final map will have things like a scale, a key, national borders, etc... and be in a higher resolution

The scale is 1 hex = 4 miles to a side. I chose the 4 mile unit because its a great distance to use in conjunction with the overland movement rates as everything divides by 4.

I've kept personal additions to a minimum, but there are things which I've had to add and will add. Among them are:

We are about done with book 3.. The party is set to tackle Yosiduin in the next session and Vigil is going to blow up at the same time. This will bequeath the party with their second mythic tier.

Yosiduin will have two mythic tiers and be 15th level. I figure that ought to put him about par with 6 L9 Tier 1 mythic characters.

I've found that I have to up the CR between 3-4 for the party at this point. I'm pretty much rewriting every meaningful encounter now. It's not terrible, hero lab makes it easier. It'll probably jump to a 4-5 CR change after the party reaches Tier 2.

I should also add that my goal is for the party to start Book 6 at Level 20, so I'm deliberately compressing books 1-5 as well as adding additional content.

I will also add that with the party of 6 as L8 Tier 1 mythic characters, I altered the Erstwhile Kilibrant ambush encounter, turning EK into a mesmerist and the two slayers into stalkers. Properly prepared and outfitted with potions, etc.. the three nearly TPKed the party. The paladin and cleric went down in the first round before they could attack.
(The point was to put a little bit of the fear of god into the party again).

I allowed my party to transact (at reduced prices) with the shops in the post-mortem Roslar's Coffer. After all, a version of the town exists there and its real and tangible.

I also let them loot Roslar's Coffer when they got back, but the WT's minions got there first and picked the town pretty clean ahead of time, so there wasn't much.

With respect to Vigil, I told the PCs they could 'go wild' with the shopping when they get there. They effectively spent a day doing just that. (spread out over several). As for them looting the town after the blast. My party won't have the free time to do so, nor are they likely to venture out indiscriminately into a city where pretty much everything from a skeleton to a lich (and all in-between) have just spontaneously risen up. Vigil post-blast should be EXTREMELY dangerous. Have lots of undead ready to discourage random looting.

My party is almost up to the Yosiduin fight. (they just disarmed the Blade Barrier trap).

I decided Ceto needed something more. So I invented a secret society - The Knights of the Splinter. This is the group who thought that Lastwall was cowardly in locking up the Whispering Tyrant and who realize that the only way to defeat him is to get him out of Gallowspire. When they lost that battle, the decided on "the long game". Ceto is the head of this organization today and has reasoned in her mind that Vigil is an acceptable sacrifice to bring about the "final battle".

Of course, this changes the whole Ossuary dungeon, so I redrew it (I thought it was too small already). I added a section for kings and church heads including a few tombs heavily protected with corpses inside (from the very earliest days of Lastwall). And I added a secret section where the Knights of the Splinter meet and where Ceto has been stashing her ill-gotten goods.

One thing I'm thinking of doing is having the river temporarily redirected into the labyrinthine sewers under the city, allowing the populace to cross without boats (my party has saved a bunch more of the city than expected) and collapsing most of the city in its wake.

As the PCs explore under Vigil, I have divided up the sewers into an upper, relatively safe level and a lower, mostly forgotten level. The lower level is where the Seal Breakers dwell.

Along the way, I decided to place an additional encounter to give the sewers more flavor and the party more thematic hints. I set up a nest of otyughs attended by akaname. The otyughs gather because one of them is a plague-bringer otyugh who is afflicted by visions. She is also a devotee of pharasma (quite unusual for an otyugh) though she refers to her as the "lady of corpses". the akaname is also led by a priestess, who also follows Pharasma. The plaguebringer otyugh and the akaname have a symbiotic relationship. The otyughs provide protection for the akaname and the akaname interprets the otyugh visions and provides comfort to the plaguebringer (who is in constant pain).

In our party we had a cleric of Pharasma and she hit it off with the otyughs (about as well as you can expect). I had the plaguebringer recite a prophecy to the party, which went as follows:

A great beast grows under the city
A heart of nothingness; eyes of undeath
The two become one before the cleansing
The eyes rend from the heart, each stab at the other
The sewers destroyed, fire from above
One is enough. A dagger through her heart
The bloodless' revenge upon the bloodless.

Its partly generic, partly tailored to my party.

As an added wrinkle, the area is along the seal-breakers' patrol route, so the otyughs have no love for them. I ended the encounter with an attack on the otyugh complex by one of the seal-breaker patrols.

I'm going to stick my neck out a little here and voice a concern. The last printed thing I think which has been posted to the internet was a brief update at the start of July by Legendary Press which stated the first draft of the AP had been turned over to Paizo at some point previous. The update before that, at the start of April, lent the impression that from Legendary Press' perspective they were almost complete. April link

As of April, from an outsider's perspective, things seemed ok. Skimming back through the PaizoCon Q&A there's a reply by Lisa Stephens which, in retrospect, sounds very cautious about release dates (about 1:07 in) . But I think the impression I got from her response is that it sounds like this is an undertaking that James is doing almost single-handedly? Moreover, it sounds like there's a lot of rewriting going on, and that the subsystems are only being put together now?

So, I think from a backer, and an end-user's perspective, you can understand the confusion and concern going on. We have almost zero insight into the day to day activities at Paizo and I think, for the most part, we assume that things are fine unless we hear otherwise. I don't think any of us mind the increased delay if we have some understanding of where the project stands. These are difficult days, after all. Its just from our end, things looked on track for a Nov-Dec 2020 release date and now that timeline has doubled, at least. Its concerning. And as much as we appreciate the new art, to be honest, I have to concur - we love paizo for it's content, not its pretty pictures.

So if you could speak to these concerns I know I (and probably others) would appreciate the effort, even if the information conveyed is disappointing.

Thanks, and stay safe.

Wow. that's quite the delay!

When it raised it up, the two may have been connected. In the intervening time, erosion may have separated them. Happens in the real world with new islands.

Hi John, et al.

So I downloaded your shapefiles and plugged them into ArcPro with the appropriate projections. I wanted to improve on the coastlines and rivers for my own mapping purposes, but to do that I think I need to know what your initial coordinate system was when you georeferenced the maps. At the very least it would make my task easier.

Ooof I just saw some photos of how the actual paint jobs look and this is now a hard pass.

Paizo really needs to convince wizkids to make as much of these sets available as primed, unpainted minis. Some great sculpts in here, but the paint jobs ruin them. I want to give paizo my money, but I gotta have standards too.

One thing i would love to see is unpainted (or well pre-painted) sculpts of the inner sea pantheon. they could be released as a boxed set, like the iconics.

So has anyone recieved them yet? I was wondering as to the quality of the painting in this set. I'm very much on the fence with this one and something like subpar painting could easily tip the scales one way or the other.

I was going to get the new case (City of Lost Omens), but honestly the price point is a sticking point for me. I've got about half the minis paizo has put out one way or the other and I really like the premiums this time around. That they are no longer incentives makes it harder to justify. I might pick up the premiums off amazon if they are discounted. I also have zero use for the 'dungeon dressing' minis. Just my personal opinion there. But I thought paizo might want the feedback.

What would be nice is if Wizkids released more of their line as unpainted minis. If the paint jobs were spot on every time, I could definitely see investing in the prepaints, but honestly I can do as well myself (and I'm no great minis painter). Maybe their premium line they're hinting at will be better, but honestly i think they're just pricing themselves right out business.

So thank you for the replies - it certainly gave me something to consider. I'm still going to have the ships head east with the party. The simplest and most obvious reason is that direction is downstream and you can make better time. Going west means going towards both the WT and the orcs. Certainly some of the troops could march that way, but the route that makes the most sense for the refugees is to go east to Hammer Rock and then cut across country to Vellumis. Although the provided campaign map doesn't include it, I presume there must be major roads cutting across the cultivated fields of eastern Lastwall.

Update on our campaign (Some of it can be found here.)

Wanting to slow the pace of the AP down and put a little more time between catastrophes, I decided to give the PCs some hints that one of the other seals was located in Darkmoon Vale. They checked up on it, and found it compromised a few years before. (note: there was a lot of complaining as to how Lastwall could let something so important as a great seal fall into such disrepair. And to be honest, a lot of that is justified. More on that later). That ate up a month of our weekly sessions which was great. The party also caused a bit of an international incident and subdued an adult green dragon. Now they're back in Vigil. They learned that Gildias was a major lieutenant of the WT and that he's pretty high CR, which has got them shying away from pursuing him. Moreover, the party went directly to the Lastwall government saying that a seal has been broken and that the city is in danger. (spoiler for that seal - it's a very early Paizo module and in one of the rooms there's a map showing where all 3 of the lesser seals are on Golarion. So if you run that module as is, you give the PCs a huge chunk of information.)

Anyway, the PCs are rather worked up over this. Part of the party is convinced the Shattered Shard is key and want to steal it from Castle Overwatch. Another part of the party thinks the city is already lost and that they should evacuate immediately with or without the local population. The party doesn't really see the point in talking to the locals, so there is a very good chance that the whole Book 3 subplot with the sewers, etc.. will be skipped. lol. Fortunately i haven't added that to roll20 yet. And honestly, I don't see how the PCs doing that or not doing that affects the larger story.

Maybe the PCs work on evacuating exclusively? Maybe they do something else. I've stressed the sandboxy nature of this part of the AP to them and honestly there really is no way they could go wrong (without TPKing). We'll see where they wind up!

So we're playing (I'm GMming) a variant of TG and we're in Last Watch. There's a few things about my party which differ from the set story.

1. The party has 1 mythic tier, a result of the events at Roslar's Coffer.
2. One of the party (the cleric) has some ties in with the Lastwall Government - Precentor's Scouting, to be exact - It's a lower/mid level position. But its high enough that he's been given the task of investigating the rumor of Gildias visiting the city as well as collecting the data from Roslar's Coffer.
3. The party has uncovered the location of one of the other seals - the one in Darkmoon Vale. The party visited the seal and learned it was opened. They also know that the seal to the north was opened due to the events of ReotR.
4. The party also effected local regime change in Falcon's Hollow in Darkmoon Vale. This has caused significant disruption in the flow of darkwood to the Andoran gov't, set up a local resistance movement and caused an international incident.

As a result, the cleric has been pulled off the case and placed on administrative leave. The party has become convinced that the key to this somehow ties into the Shattered Shield of Arnistad. They understand they have no proof of this, but its where they are going. Moreover, they know that Vigil is likely the next target, though they do not know if the WT can destroy another city or how long it takes for the weapon to "recharge" (their words). They've tried to get the authorities to evacuate the city. That didn't work and they were told if they persisted that they would be thrown in jail.

Consequently, the party is coming close to concluding that the only thing they can do now to save the city is to steal the shards themselves and get them out of the city (note, this will not save the city as the WT knows where the shard is and can always drop another one somewhere hidden in the city. That event will still happen). I'm taking a hard look at Book 3 and honestly, what happens in the back half of that book is pretty unimportant to the main plot. So I'm perfectly content to run off the rails at this point. lol.

What i need now is a decent map of Castle Overwatch's interiors. I may be resigned to making one myself (probably by hand - I'm not proficient with CC3 yet) but if there's a user made map out there already, I'm happy to use that instead.

If you've got one, send me a link or post it here, please. The people of Lastwall will thank you.

I'm prepping for Book 3 (we start in a few weeks) and looking ahead at the skeleton of the plot I have a few concerns.

1. My feeling is that hunting down the location of the dyeworks should take an in-game day - that is to say that going through the kidnapping and the burning shouldn't take more than a couple of hours, game time. At that point, my party will likely want to press on and go after the dyeworks ASAP. It'll be a long adventuring day, but it looks like it'll be one day. Which leads me to the question - where do they find time to go back and "Report" to the higher-ups? I think that has to happen later. Though, by this time, they will be aware of the importance of the Shattered Shield. They are just as likely to get distracted by this and head off to Castle Overwatch to investigate that - suggestions on what to do there?

2. By the time the PCs are back on the surface after killing Yosiduin they should be Level 10. What's to stop them from teleporting straight to the ballista bastion (or out of the city entirely)?

3. The Golden Dawnrose is, tbh, too small for all those refugees. I think in my campaign, I'm going to have a small fleet of ships pulling up along the river (not even in the harbor). This fleet will be a trading fleet coming upstream. And while I get the whole idea that the military wants to rally at Castle Everstand, that simply seems like a terrible decision, strategically. (Actually, most of what Lastwall does seems strategically stupid - from the whole Belkzen front to putting Vigil on the wrong side of the river). So I'm having the fleet go east - especially as the senior Lastwall officials left standing aren't from the military. I'll move the castle where Arazni meets the PCs downstream.

I think that's it.

You can find the map here . Comments welcome, particularly on whether I got the old hordelines, etc... correct.

If anyone's interested, I redid the map of Lastwall to add in a lot of the small things that weren't in the AP map. You can find the link here .

A couple notes:

-The border forts on the western edge of Lastwall are alluded to, but never explicitly mentioned.
- The ferry to the NE just seems logical.
- the roads are also logical inferences and are the main roads within the kingdom.
- the purple dashed lines are former Hordelines. Lastwall lost a lot of land.

Enjoy.

When I read the description of the two necromancers in room L7, I was immediately struck by how atypical it was.

these half-elven sisters orchestrate the activities of other lesser cultists in the area. Oradi and Savenna joined the Whispering Way when they turned 18, looking for a drastic way to reject their tradition-bound family. The sisters look nearly identical; each is tall with red hair and freckles. They even prefer to dress similarly, wearing matching robes of bones. One of the pair wears small, round spectacles, which is the only way some of the cultists can tell them apart

To me, this sounded like a couple of rich kids in their early-mid 20s rebelling against mommy and daddy, and I played them up as such - a combination of the stereotypical 'valley girl' and 'greenpeace activist' with more than a touch of emo-goth thrown in. In other words, they were in it because of the excitement and because it was so distasteful. Life in their manor home (I put their homeland on the border of Kyonin) as upper aristocrats was stifling.

They were also a more than a little cruel and crazy. But even though they came off as alternately cunning and ditzy, they weren't stupid. In my campaign, the PCs rested between levels 1 and 2 of the Bastion and overnight VQ discovered that someone ransacked the lower level and set a trap for the PCs upstairs. The PCs cleared the whole floor before they reached the two girls. As such, the girls realized they were completely outclassed and surrendered immediately.

Want to confuse a party? Have the bad guys immediately surrender. The PCs spent an HOUR trying to figure out what to do next. They even used the candle of truth on them. I thought for awhile that the party was going to come to blows over the decision.

The cleric of Iomedae and the paladin have been talking non-stop about killing the prisoners (which I'm keeping track of, as GM - we'll see what happens there) while the Neutral mage is willing to let them go. And the bard is a local so she lost her family in the town and wants to slit their throats. Meanwhile the inquisitor of pharasma is stoic about the whole thing.
As for the two girls? They're pretty certain mom and dad can come and "pick them up at the station" and everything will be ok. Ah, to be young and privileged. lol. Meanwhile, the one with the glasses has taken to swooning at the paladin (who is a tiefling).

As GM I look forward to seeing how this resolves itself.

Does anyone have a map of Roslar's Coffer that doesn't have the annotations on it? I'm looking for something I can give to my PCs for before the fall, in the Boneyards, and after they get out. And if nobody has a map, how did you guys handle them navigating the town?

I drew up a map of the town and a player map of the tomb as they saw it in the boneyard. I can look for it when I get home if that would help.

So I want to share the party's perception of meeting their juju-selves at the end of Book 2.
"Oh, no! It's us! We'd better pull out all the stops!"
(1 round later) Riiight. It's us from like 7 levels ago. No need to deploy the tarrasque.

The party also figured out that it has been 10 days since they "died", and five days since they returned from the Boneyard. They have averaged .7 levels a day.

The candle which burns twice as fast...

Yeah, I've pretty much made up my mind to at least have the opportunity for the reveal. The original question was more concern over whether there was some important plot point hinging on the PCs being unaware it was Arazni until Book 4. Which it appears there wasn't.

Moving on, I've decided to flavor the magic items she gives the PCs at the end of Book 2. I figure she "swiped" some serious undead-killing things from the treasury in Geb. If you think about it, Geb has to have this enormous vault of undead-bane items simply from adventurers trying to overthrow the gov't there.

So far I have a longsword Iomedae herself used early on in the Shining Crusade. It's a scalable item, so it'll reveal more powers as the character grows in level. Its for the party cleric.

If anyone has suggestions (even vague ones) about other appropriately themed items, I'm all ears. I can also post the specs for the longsword here, too.

Also, as far as I'm aware Arazni only really becomes interested in the PCs when they get rid of the fog in Roslar's Coffer (maybe a little bit before that), so she needs to test their loyalty and willingness before she just openly reveals herself.

As pointed out in my original post, Arazni has been observing the PCs before even book 1 (I ran a one-off with the characters, which she took part in, disguised). At this point, she's pretty convinced that the PCs can be trusted.

As for why the PCs are going to Vigil - they're already going to Vigil (or at least to the nearest Crusader castle). One of the PCs is a cleric of Iomedae and already in the Lastwall bureaucracy. The reason to beeline for Vigil is simple - Roslar's Coffer was destroyed by agents of the Whispering Tyrant. This is well known by the PCs before they even meet Arazni.

@Twisted_Fister - cool. Yeah, that's what I was thinking as well. Unless the PCs are completely nutty, they're not going to lead with "Hey, guess who we saw yesterday...". One of the neat things I'm planning is to have a few minutes with each PC alone to "debrief" them once they get to Vigil. Certainly with the Iomedae cleric and the Aroden paladin. That'll be fun.

So we're wrapping up Book 2 in a couple of sessions and I have a choice. The way my party has acted has been extremely good and honest, and anyone watching would definitely get the impression that these are people who can be trusted with secrets.

Which brings me to the Arazni encounter. I'm half thinking that the PCs will guess who she is without her saying and maybe even press her on the answer. And I'm thinking that she might be willing to tell them, based on what little she has observed of them over the first two books (and before).

Before I do that big reveal two books early, I need to think ahead to some of the complications this might bring up, as well as spoilers, changes, etc... What does the group as a whole think of this?

So will some version of these stories be in the upcoming hardcover?