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Hey, can someone update the image (or the text if that's the error) and also comment on the reddit post? The time for the keynote IS NOT CORRECT. The text of this post says AM. The image says PM. One has to be wrong (unless you're casting plane shift, perhaps). I am assuming that you're not scheduling this for 1AM Eastern time ;-)
Going forward, please continue to inform us when you run into this issue Hi and thanks for responding. I just want to ask one small thing for the inevitable post-mortem that will happen after this is resolved: please look into what happened to email that went to customer.service@paizo.com. I know that I've been sending periodic emails to that address since Dec 13 about this issue (including screenshots, partial workarounds, etc.) and if those were not making it to the technical folks, that's a real problem that is perhaps more worrisome than the technical issue itself. I do this sort of thing for a living, so I know that now is not the time to be asking anyone to look into that, and I also know that I'll likely never hear back about it. I just want to make sure that it's something people in the company are aware of.
The internal server error is, unfortunately, an ongoing issue. There's a thread in the Website Feedback forum with some suggestions of workarounds while our tech team looks into it! Thanks for the info!
Yep. That's how I've been getting my stuff since this started. Thanks again! I can currently do anything but buy new stuff.
I'm still perplexed that, after Swine Flu and Avian Flu, the flu that seems to have come from bats isn't called the Bat Flu. Hi Set, I didn't see a response to this, and it's important so let me take a shot. Swine Flu and Avian Flu are informal names given to diseases which were first seen to jump to humans from those animals. As Nature discussed in its November 2020 article, "Coronaviruses closely related to the pandemic virus discovered in Japan and Cambodia," there are known strains of coronavirus in bats that are closely related to SARS-Cov-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans). However, there has never been any conclusive evidence that bats were the immediate vector for this disease jumping to humans. It was an early hypothesis due to the number of wild bats sold at markets in Wuhan, but was never conclusively confirmed. That being said, this disease is caused by a coronavirus, not the influenza virus, so even if a conclusive link were found, it would be inaccurate to call it "bat flu" because it's not a flu (short for influenza). So on two different counts, "bat flu," would be incorrect. COVID-19 is short for "Coronavirus disease, 2019" and that's pretty descriptive of what this disease is and what we know about it.
I want to follow up on this issue because, while I'm not SURE that my problems are related, they sound similar. I can access my downloads just fine... IF I go directly to the digital content section. However, if I log in to the site through the main page, I get an internal server error (with a cute little ratfolk engineer). This has been going on for at least a month, and seems to be account-specific (if I clear cookies, the problem goes away, only to return as soon as I log in). The main site is all I can't load. Everything else (these forums, digital content, account management, etc.) all seem to work fine. I've emailed support about this and included screenshots, but never got a reply (I followed up a couple of times also with no replies). I've tried to log in with both a current version of Chrome and Microsoft's Edge. Same result. I have no addons or other mods that affect both browsers.
I'm working on a way to map out the families of Golarion's languages. So far, what I have is this: If you want to save a copy of the original drawing to edit yourself, here it is.
*Stats from the 3rd Ed Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting Hardcover D&D 3rd ed post-20 levels can't reasonably be compared to Pathfinder post-20 levels. Pathfinder explicitly dropped all of those rules (and I think the OGL actually has some clause related to not including class levels beyond 20, but I was unable to find it in a quick read). At best, it's pretty obvious that Pathfinder 1e post-20 CRs are intended as more or less linear increases in power over 20 (e.g. a level 20 party should feel that a CR 22 creature poses a "hard" challenge while a CR 23 creature is an "epic" encounter. This was the point of introducing Mythic levels: CRs only increase in a relatively linear way (though numerical power is not linear) and that's not how stories of gods and beings from beyond typically scale. It makes a lot more sense to ask: what has a given character been shown to do? What sorts of stories in Golarion feature similar power-levels? And then map them that way. For example, a being capable of creating an army of the dead the size of a nation would be comparable to the Whispering Tyrant while a being that can create an entire nation by lifting land out of the sea and sculpting it into a city-state would be comparable to Aroden. But if you're just a wizard, capable of throwing around really big fireballs and making powerful magical weapons, then you're probably more Razmir-calibre.
The information for 1st edition dragons works fine for those guidelines of what unique abilities might kick in at what age category. This might be a place where the internal sense at Paizo is contaminated by the familiarity with the system(s). For the vast majority of people trying to use the rules, I imagine that the lack of age categories on dragons is an insurmountable hurdle without some fixed rules for how to augment creatures, and that doesn't land for another ... what, year? six months? Is there a release date for the GMG? Even for experienced players, it can be incredibly hard to get balance right, which is exactly why you want experts crafting the specifics. Now, I understand the space limitations and the advantage of saving that space. I'm just suggesting that you shouldn't be surprised that that leaves a lot of players who aren't constantly working in the internals of the system without many options, and that makes them frustrated.
Well, for the most part, you already have this content. While the servers are being slammed, you can continue to use the PRD: http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/ And for the content that isn't there (setting, etc.) ... well, yeah, you're right. It's almost certainly going to end up just getting torrented into the ground. :-/ It strikes me as odd, really. I mean Paizo knew exactly how popular Humble Book bundles for popular things like Star Wars have been in the past, and they could have just stress-tested their infrastructure with those parameters in mind. I can't help but think that the $400,000 raised so far would have been even more if their servers were up to the task... But I've also been there as a sysadmin, and I don't envy them trying to run some hokey, probably Adobe nightmare as a large-scale production service. It's probably not amenable to just throwing Amazon Web Services at it and letting it scale as much as it needs. :-(
encounter info: I used Fargo Vitterande as a template for an encounter I had in a home-brew game, this week. It was really fun! It happend on the road instead of on a ship. Fargo's analog was a half-elven female who the party trusted, but had been hired to "try" to kill them. Her approach was mostly Fargo's. She isolated the healer by luring him across a river that had access via a fallen log. She then blew up the log using the wand of lightning bolts and began attacking the party. Sadly, I botched the encounter by forgetting about damage resistance entirely, but the result would simply have been delayed. Our combat monster tore her apart and once the healer returned, much healing was dispensed... It did make a nice spells-per-day sink before the more powerful duo of assassins (based on the Black Sisters from Kingmaker) attacked, that night, though!
I was very disapointed in this book. There wasn't any of the things I was looking for Dhampirs in this one except the vampire bloodlines. No racial feats for dhampirs that granted them things like bat/wolf forms, gasious form(Su-1 round increments per level), spider climb(Lv11), Fast Healing 1 (lv9), etc. I really wish that this book line would have alternate racial traits as well that you could swap out like Advanced players Guide and Advanced Race Guide does. But... those are all things that you can build trivially. A dhampir sorcerer with the undead bloodline would have access to everything you describe. Wanting it all crammed into one racial template just feels like munchkining to me. Heck, you really only need this book for flavor. Everything else it could possibly do is almost certain to be easily achieved using the existing rules. One note: fast healing isn't really pertinent to the classic vampire tropes (which, I think, makes more sense as a source for swords and sorcery fantasy vampires). Damage resistance is much more along the lines of what was described in legends and lore associated with vampires. Only in modern, TV/film vampires have we started to see the "closing wound" sort of healing, and that's mostly a result of the fact that having your "heroic" vampire character running around being an action hero archetype in form-fitting latex doesn't work so well if they know that any damage that gets through will "leave a mark" (props to Joss Whedon's decision to leave Paul Rubins' arm gone).
I'm concerned that this is a misstep (though a great AP, I'm sure, given Paizo's usual standards). The Hobbit comes out in two parts starting in December. Having an adventure path come out right around that time that reminds players of Pathfinder's Tolkienesque roots would be wise. A Five Kings Mountains themed adventure would have, perhaps, gathered more new subscribers than a second tour of the wintery parts of Golarion in less than two years (since the middle part of Jade Regent was a trek over the top of the world). Five Kings Mountains has everything that someone exploring tabletop roleplaying for the first time is likely to want: dwarves, proximity to orcs and elves and humans, underground communities and a wealth of lore that is, thus far, not terribly well explored in Paizo's offerings. I'm assuming it's too late to turn the ship 'round, but perhaps you could keep this in mind for the second half of next year?
In a recent thread we discovered from F. Wesley Schneider that Paizo is working on an upcoming line of Prawnfinder books, starting with the Prawnfinder Adventure Path. I'm excited by this turn, and thought a thread for speculation on upcoming books might benefit the community (and I wouldn't be further derailing the thread about excellent artwork). Let me get the ball rolling: Prawniary 1 From Prawn to Wereprawn to Prawnmen to Half-Prawn to Prawnfolk, a bestiary full of all things prawn! Shell & Tail: Ultimate Exoquipment The last word in every adventurer's carapace-related needs! Player Companion: Blood of Prawns With parentage hailing from the Celestial realm of the 7 Prawny Seas, these adventurers have a bit of a tail to tell... Prawnfinder Campaign Setting: The Obari Ocean You won't be able to tell your home campaign from a clam bake when it comes from the rich spawning grounds of the Obari Ocean! The first Campaign Setting book to devote an entire chapter to the tides and currents of Golarion!
Humans in the Inner Sea tend to be literate, and literate humans tend to communicate their knowledge via books. Even those who are likely able to develop their natural gifts of magic toward sorcery are more often than not likely to becomes wizards by trade/training in the Inner Sea. In other, less literate and more primitive human cultures, sorcerers are likely more common because information is likely conveyed in a more personal way, rather than by books. Either way, I would expect both classes to exist in all areas to some extent, and SOME high level casters of each type, but I wouldn't expect the balance to be even everywhere... not by a long shot.
I think Golarion as a setting does well using "common" in a generic way to describe the sort of "most common trade gestalt of the inner sea". It's not that there aren't plenty of places where no one speaks "common," nor that there aren't plenty of places where the local "common" isn't the same as the Inner Sea. Saying that you don't like the whole "common" thing is kind of like saying you don't like the whole "English" thing in our world. I can go to places in Quebec, Louisiana, New Mexico or Puerto Rico where, if people do speak English, they won't necessarily be willing to speak it to me... The same thing probably occurs in plenty of parts of Varisia, Cheliax, Qadira and others... But where trade goes, common languages tend to develop, especially in regions where insular religions aren't the primary vector of education, and since religion is more a matter of alignment (in the generic sense, not the game mechanic sense) in the Inner Sea, a more fluid communication is more likely.
Hmm... I'm not sold. It sounds, to me, like the goal of this creature is to pose a challenge to a PC that's been amped up to the point that they are as much out of the league of a normal PC as a normal PC is to an NPC-class character. I generally get this, but it has several problems: * It divides the organized play world into mythic and non-mythic, which dilutes the player base in areas where there are limited numbers of games. * It's only one additional tier, so now you have NPC, PC and MPC. Why not have PC[0] (NPC), PC[1] (traditional PC), PC[2] ("mythic") and so on, in a modular way? * It's not clear to me that this interacts well to alternate systems of "character development currencies" such as gold (and thus gear), PA and feat-based add-ons such as Leadership. * It brings the status and benefit of Adventure Paths into question. Do people who want to play Mythic have to avoid APs? Do people who don't want Mythic have to avoid APs? Are APs padded out with lots of "to apply Mythic to this encounter..." rules? * Similar question to above with respect to Bestiaries * It feels as if every well-known NPC in Golarion would need to be written up as Mythic in order to make sense. No one source book has ever been a requisite for EVERY major NPC except for the Core Rulebook (though, granted APG is certainly common). All of these points could be addressed, but I'd still be uneasy about the impact on the community. I'll wait and see and hope to be pleasantly surprised...
It's pretty crazy how well Kickstarters have been doing, although they're still at like a 50% success rate. I think people may have missed the point of what I was identifying. Of the currently extant Kickstarters that have "pathfinder" in their description, one looks like it might not make it. I didn't list a LOT of previous (successful and unsuccessful) projects because there isn't time for me to transcribe all that data while I eat lunch. There were at least 5-6 pages of them! But it really does look like, at least right now, Pathfinder projects have a very strong likelihood of being funded; much more so than the average. Hence my song quote. I think there's a ground-swell of enthusiasm that I lay at the competent feet of Jason Bulmahn most specifically (because he has yet to produce a book that doesn't absolutely captivate me), but all of the amazing folks at Paizo for having not just created a compelling d20-based system and setting, but for having the organization, discipline and industry savvy to get to market and attract people to their game. To answer my own question about what Kickstarter means for Pathfinder, let me speculate a bit: I think Paizo should seriously consider taking some small number of books per year and putting them up as Kickstarters. Personally, I think the best candidates would be: hardcover adventure path reprints (with stretch goal bonuses like follow-on adventures); bonus adventure paths and perhaps Golarion-based setting gazetteers like Dragon Empires (with stretch goal bonuses like more content, hardcover, adventures, etc).
To quote from a song, "there's something happening here... what it is, ain't exactly clear." I just did a search on Kickstarter for "pathfinder". Results: Red Dragon Inn - 117% funded, 4 days to go
Other projects of note that didn't come up on the first page: Rappan Athuk megadungeon - almost 1000% funded at nearly $250k
All told, there's well over a million dollars worth of money that gamers have pledged to Pathfinder-related Kickstarters. Edit: it strikes me that the joke was too distracting from the topic. Removed. But I'd love to hear speculation (humorous and not) on what Kickstarter will mean to Pathfinder in the future...
Looks like Paizo is helping out (or at least lending their name) with a sequel to The Gamers: Dorkness Rising called The Gamers: Hands of Fate. This is great news! I loved Dorkness Rising! It was definitely exactly what a gamer movie should be like. The kickstarter is here (75% funded, 10 days to go): http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zombieorpheus/the-gamers-hands-of-fate To quote: "For years, fans asked us if we would consider using the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game in the next Gamers film. We heard you! Paizo has not only cleared us to use their awesome gaming system, but will be co-sponsoring The Gamers Live at Gen Con Indy, assisting us with distribution, and letting us steal Sean Reynolds for the following tie-in project." ... I'm just pleased as punch, and can't wait for my copy!
In my games, I've always treated the "one step rule" for clerics as an exception. The vast majority of clerics are the same alignment as their deity, since that's the whole point of being a cleric. I have to disagree, here. Golarion has an advantage over the real world, in that communing with your deity in order to get clarification on the ground-rules (if you're high enough level) is possible, but most clerics of a deity are going to be focused on some aspect of that deity that "speaks" to them. For example, a cleric of Desna might by particularly focused on Desna's dream aspect. This might have only the loosest bearing on the character's alignment. In general I picture most clerics being so devoted to their view of their deity that they have trouble relating to the world with a consistent "alignment" and that might make them more prone to simply emulate their deity, I don't think it's the rare exception that will do otherwise.
I should be clear that in Golarion the Qlippoth and Dark Tapestry have no direct connection as written, however, both being closely related to Lovecraftian horror, it is my own assumption that there is a tacit connection, which is why I draw a dotted line from Skum to the Dark Tapestry through the Qlippoth (more specifically, the ex-Qlippoth demon lord Dagon and some of his demon and Qlippoth associates) in my own campaign.
Read the short novel The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H. P. Lovecraft and I think you'll see how Paizo has been using the Skum in Golarion...
Mind Flayers make perfectly decent homebrew Lovecraftian villains. If your campaign has a decent body of water in proximity, you might also want to consider Skum and perhaps my own campaign's half-Skum, half Qlippoth-Spawn Tiefling:
In South Korea, there's this guy. His name is Jung and he works for LG and lives in Seoul. He wonders if the tech world is Seoul-centric. After all, he uses a cell phone that his company made (and competes against another cell phone brand from just down the street); every cool new startup he's heard of is here in the valley; he works on a desktop that was made by Samsung, which is just down the street. So, clearly the center of the tech universe is Silicon Valley. Oops, that was supposed to be "... heard of is here in South Korea;..." and "... clearly the center of the tech universe is South Korea." Obviously, I cut-and-paste the paragraph and then forgot to edit part of it.
So, for an alternate perspective on this, let me get all real-worldy on you: There's this guy. His name is Ralph. He works for Google and lives in Silicon Valley. He wonders if the tech world is silicon-valley-centric. After all, he uses a cell phone that runs his company's operating system (and competes against another cell phone brand from just down the street); every cool new startup he's heard of is here in the valley; he works on a desktop that was made by HP, which is just down the street. So, clearly the center of the tech universe is Silicon Valley. In South Korea, there's this guy. His name is Jung and he works for LG and lives in Seoul. He wonders if the tech world is Seoul-centric. After all, he uses a cell phone that his company made (and competes against another cell phone brand from just down the street); every cool new startup he's heard of is here in the valley; he works on a desktop that was made by Samsung, which is just down the street. So, clearly the center of the tech universe is Silicon Valley. They're both right, of course. The interesting thing to ask is: what's the equivalent of the Silicon Valley resident who thinks about where his phone's OS was made, but gives no thought to where the phone's hardware was made? I'll note that there are many deities and powerful outsiders in Golarion's pantheon who are called out as being particularly strange and alien. Perhaps they are the core deities on other worlds? Are the central gods of some alien, aquatic world Gozreh (who alternates between all 10 genders) and Dagon (whose mastery over the Abyss is only rarely challenged by obscure land-dwelling demons of strange and alien origin)?
Hmm... no responses as yet. Should I read that as a lack of interest in this project? I've been holding off putting more time into it until I get a sense of how interested people are. I'll need some of this, as the climax of my current campaign is in Absalom, but there's no reason to follow through with lots of extra detail if no one is going to use it.
I'm starting a side project that's part of my Golarion-based campaign, "On Golarion's Roads" called "Nano-Gazetteers". These are short documents which chronicle small locations like a specific street or hill, and try to give as in-depth an account as possible of what goes on there. My focus is on maintaining continuity with existing source materials, while fleshing out as much detail as possible. The first such document is still a work in progress, but I thought I'd share it as I get started and see what people think. Would you use a reference like this in your campaign? Work in Progress: Nano-Gazetteer: North Stair to Misery Row, Absalom
My take is that the kobolds aren't actually attacking. They're arranged around the edge of our point of view because they've been shoved along the cave toward the exit by an expanding wall of a cube of force. The adventurers are trying to figure out what's going on. The dwarf is saying: "Either mime is the new bard among kobolds, or things are about to get unpleasant..."
It would be hard to overstate how much I dont want to see a new version of pathfinder yet. Thankfully paizo staff has repeatedly said that discussions about 2.0 arent even on the table yet. Heres hoping htey stay away for a long while. Why does a version number scare you? I'd probably buy an updated Core and maybe the APG, but that's about it. I'd keep the vast majority of the books I already have, and continue to subscribe to whatever's new. Pathfinder simply cannot produce an incompatible edition at this point. The nature of the Adventure Paths and Pathfinder Society is just too cumulative and their community is built too strongly on the resentment of an entire shelfload of books being invalidated by WotC. However, that has nothing to do with producing a new edition of the rules, only with their compatibility. APG introduced lots of rules updates and no one seemed to get upset. How much could you improve on Pathfinder without invalidating the existing rules?
So you think the best time to alienate customers by requiring them to purchase a whole new set of expensive books is when your biggest competitor is alienating theirs as well? Bad, bad idea.I agree with this statement. Also, making movements simply because a competitor is making movements also displays a lack of confidence in one's own product. You should keep a watchful eye, sure, however, you don't need to release a whole new version just because they do. Ok, so you've read the replies but not my OP? That seems odd... Anyway, no breaking of compatibility is required. Just because D&D has broken compatibility at every edition mark doesn't imply that Pathfinder needs to. I've outlined several ways that could be approached and still add value. I'd love to see some responses to what I actually wrote if it's all the same...
Now that you-know-who is preparing for a marketing blitz around 5th edition, I think it's time for Pathfinder 2nd ed. Mostly, I think this would be a good way to capitalize on a larger marketing budget, but I could see some real value coming out of it. Some things I think would be required: 1) Everything is backward compatible: Pathfinder has too much source material to just invalidate it all. 2) Focus on extracting common elements. For example, unify all the Wis casters into a single class with existing variations like Oracle being specific builds of the generic base. 3) Generic treasure rules are key. Make magic items a sort of character that you can build from a set of basic attributes modified by additional features. 4) Create a richer system of specialization for skills 5) Bring psionics and firearms into the core (maybe coordinate with an Adventure Path that does the same for Golarion?) 6) Demote what doesn't work well from the core, out into a new APG and move what works best from the existing APG into core. 7) Make a "as Characters" book as part of the basic set of rules books which collects all of the playable races.
Who cares really who makes 5e as long as it is good? Paizo make great products that make me happy, as soon as Paizo makes bad products that make me unhappy I'll stop buying from them. No malice against Paizo will ever be generated. Same goes for WotC, make something I want and BINGO, I buy stuff. I won't be buying WotC games without stopping and considering the move very, very carefully. This is not because I hate WotC. It's also not because I don't think their products are good (I don't like 4e all that much, but I've played it, and it's no worse than 2nd ed, IMHO) No, I just don't trust WotC. I spent hundreds of dollars on a shelf full of 3e and 3.5e books. I built a campaign around the Dungeon Adventure Paths. What did WotC do? They yanked Paizo's license for Dungeon and invalidated that entire shelf of books. Sure, I could still use them, but few gamers have an interest in joining a game based on unsupported rules, and that definitely extends to my local gaming group. Steve Jackson Games did roughly the same thing with GURPS, but compatibility was maintained enough between editions that I could at least use all of my old books as source material and hack up the stats with only small amounts of pain. I should have learned my lesson with WotC when they declared all of my M:tG cards illegal for tournament play, back in the early 1990s.
I just submitted feedback to Amazon.com, and I suggest that others do the same. Here's where you can submit: and here's what I said:
Side note: Congrats to Paizo for Pathfinder being so astoundingly popular on Amazon. Wizards and White Wolf products don't even appear in the side-bars for gift ideas and most wished for, and on the first page of 20 best sellers, 6 of them are Paizo products (#1 is a mis-categorized electronic game, so really Paizo occupies slots #s 1 and 2). Nice work, everybody!
I'm having a hard time in my game with inn names. My party is currently in Korvosa, and I'm using the source book on Korvosa, which has a number of inn names. Every one of which results in 2-4 minutes of pause in my game while everyone laughs. Names like "Sticky Mermaid" come across as kind of silly to my gamers, who are all adults, mind you. So, I'm thinking of working out my own inn names for future cities that they travel to (the campaign is a sort of Wizard of Oz riff with the party traveling across most of the northern inner sea). Anyone have any thoughts for useful names or systems for coming up with them? Some ideas I've had: Traveler's Inn (they won't all have a clever name, after all)
Any of those that you would think wouldn't work? Any that you'd use instead? Let me know.
So Ultimate Equipment doesn't contain new magic and mundane items? Just reprints, rule updates and tables?There will be plenty of new nonmagical and magical equipment in the book. It's not "half the stuff you've seen before, half random magic item tables." Because that would suck. Would it? If it collected every item from the PFS modules, public modules, APs, Companions, Settings books and everything else outside of Core, APG and *ahem* Armory, then I think I'd buy it. I object when a book reprints discrete items that I could have gone out and gotten (if, for example, the Inner Sea book had just re-published the writeups for nations that had appeared in the APs). But when you're talking about such small bits of material, sprinkled liberally through dozens of books... then there's a lot of value in collecting them together. I'd say the same goes for NPCs. I'd love to see a collection like the one that appears in JR#1, but for all of the AP books, modules and PFS modules.
I'm trying something experimental, and we'll see if my players bite. I'm putting adventure session summaries up after each game on Google Docs and then inviting all of the players to comment using the new "discussion" feature, giving their in-character perspective. I'll publish the results at some point on www.ajs.com/pathfinder once we get a feel for how it does.
From the circular arcs of the coastlines to the West and North East, it looks like Golarion was hit by a much larger object than the Starstone a lot longer back in its history. There are a number of reasons that this might be the case. An impact of the magnitude you're talking about is one possibility (Earth is believed to have had such an impact which may have created the Pacific basin and/or Pangaea, while ejecting matter that would eventually coalesce into our moon. However, there are other possibilities. First off, we don't know what projection's being used, so this could be a very misleading map. Also keep in mind that the active presence of deities makes the shape of the world likely more fluid than that of Earth. Was it an impact? Was it two gods (or obscenely powerful mortals) fighting that created a pressure wave, driving the continents apart? Also, we don't know the geology of Golarion. On Earth, we have one primary upwelling rift, several hot-spots and several subduction zones along with a smattering of smaller versions of all of the above. Golarion might have a couple of large upwelling rifts that are fairly short compared to our mid-Atlantic one. This could easily produce the two oceans on either side of the central land-mass along with the bowed shape of the two outer continental land-masses.
Wandslinger (Wizard) I think some of the above comments aren't quite justified. The "front-loading" problem is, I think, fairly minor, given what class features are being replaced. For example, I could just as easily say that Wizards are too front-loaded, and list all of the abilities that are replaced by this archetype. However, I'm definitely with Sean K. Reynolds, here. There is too much about this that doesn't quite hold together. I'd love to see a gunslinger-like character. Wands might be the right way to go (or guns, since they aren't outside of Pathfinder's purview), but this just isn't it. Definite points for trying, Joshua!
I have to take some exception to this. Essentially what this boils down to, is you're going to give a thumbs-down to any non-combat-oriented character. While I'd agree that this character archetype would not be ideal for your typical adventure path or published module, it's an excellent roleplaying option, and I could see it fitting in brilliantly to any roleplaying-heavy game. In fact, I'll probably point my players here for that very reason. Would I point a new gamer here? Probably not. RP-heavy characters should be carefully selected by players that know what they're getting into, but I think it's worth evaluating an archetype in the spirit in which it was clearly intended.
Interesting ideas everyone, please keep them coming. OK, here's one for you (but on a more general topic): The Paizo blog has lots of amusing little (and sometimes large) articles. It will now have new rules tidbits. The site hosts an annual contest of user-submitted material that runs throughout the year. You have a section for original fiction. There's a ton of great art. You have several products that you regularly want to get the word out about in a line which is at least one of the most popular pen-and-paper RPGs in the world, and by one measure, THE most popular. All of this leads me back to an idea which I'm sure has been voiced before: You have all of the content that would traditionally make up and justify publishing a physical magazine. Now, I actually don't think that's a good idea on the face of it. There are a lot of reasons, but the core reason is the simplest: the era of the magazine is past (Kobold seems to have a small but core following, which is great, but I'm not sure how sustainable or scalable that model is these days). That said, a bi-monthly or quarterly book with articles, columns, sneak-peaks, fiction, rules, and Q&A would be one I'd subscribe to in a heartbeat (I just had to drop Setting because the cost was too variable, so this would really hit the spot). The key difference between the magazine model and the book subscription model is the reliance on advertising, and if there's very little or no advertising in the Paizo / Pathfinder Bi-Monthly Door Stop, then you don't have to worry about where your next meal is coming from as long as you have subscribers. Call it a magazine if you wish, but then the Adventure Paths are a magazine too, and they're doing just fine it seems. A side note, and I know that those who have been around for the "long haul" will know where this is going: incorporate stuff from the store blog too. That makes it less about Pathfinder and more about gaming, which expands your potential audience.
The free PDF was established to convince people to maintain their subscriptions rather than cherry-picking the products that they wanted. So the only way to get the free PDF is to be a subscriber when that products ships. It seems to me that you should have a middle-of-the-road option. For example, come up with a bundle price for book+PDF that costs more than just the book, but less than the book and the PDF separately. Even getting the PDF for a sharp discount like 20% of the stand-alone price would still encourage subscription. Just a thought, but then I'm the guy who just had to cancel this sub because it was costing too much, so I have an inherent bias ;-)
Rumor has it this will be available for Pathfinder Society play. I'm looking forward to more information about that! See today's Paizo blog post, "How About Some Pathfinder Society for the Holidays?," for details. To quote: It's a longer adventure and doesn't conform to many of the standards of Pathfinder Society scenarios, and thus requires additional rules to supplement its play for PFS credit. We've put together a free PDF document that includes these additional rules and the module's Chronicle, which will be available on the module's product page by the end of the week.
An unarmed combat magus And while we're at it, a Spellstrike Monk archetype wouldn't be bad, though it would require some careful balance work. In fact, I'd love to see a bunch of the class feature of the APG and UM base classes used to create archetypes for all of the core classes. Can you imagine the Holy Hand Grenade Paladin (Paladin + Alchemist Bomb); Exotic Bloodmaster (Summoners who use the blood of summoned creatures to gain special abilities -- Summoner + Alchemist Mutagen); Wild Combat Master (A teacher from a barbarian tribe -- Barbarian + Cavalier's Tactician and Challenge with slower Rage progression); Interrogation Expert (Rogue with many of the class features of an Inquistor with slower Sneak Attack progression);... there are lots of fun ways to combine these.
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