Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Nidal, Land of Shadows

-Hive brute (CR 8 NE aberration), another hive creature

-Joyful thing (CR 6 LE outsider)
-Suffragan kyton (CR 5 LE outsider), creature with spiked chains for arms and no lower body

More kytons and hive beasts are always fun.

But I feel some surprise to see the Joyful Thing listed as an outsider. I though they were just mortals who were tortured beyond the limits of sanity by the Kuthites and got hung up in bags in their temples to aid the ambiance?

Well yeah, apparently you get ascended to outsider status when you under go that Joymaking ritual .-.

So this book is so full of content you could probably run multiple books in Nidal with this book alone ._.;

Finally got my hands on it. Read it literally cover to cover in a day. This is almost <i>perfect</i>. Now I just need those two planar books and I can really start working on my campaign!

Also, most of the art is absolutely gorgeous (I say mostly just because of the few rather disturbing ones, which are still amazingly well done). And oh my god, the <i>map</i>. A while ago, I made a shoddy map edit to add Crosspine and the Uskheart and Karpad to a Nidal map, but this has almost everything! It's really only missing Karpad, and a few minor obscure things, like the dueling liches and the umbral dragon in the mountains (names are escaping me at the moment). But all in all, this is amazing.

Random thoughts;

There is a lot of Occult Adventures stuff in here. Multiple mesmerists and mediums, for instance. That's kind of neat.

After the Qadira book, this may be my second favorite of the regional sourcebooks, and that's surprising to me, since I like Qadira a lot more than Nidal!

Tons of stuff going on, and I like the expanded backstory on the horselords of old, and the somewhat lip-service nature of the faith of Zon-Kuthon outside of the long shadow of Pangolais.

As for races, I really enjoyed the expanded information on the caligni, particularly the kind of sad attempts they are undergoing to create a culture from fragments of lore about Azlanti practices, and that the 'fetchlings' have their own name for their race, and consider fetchling to be insulting. That's some neat development.

I'm really happy this book is getting a positive reception. It was the first time I'd written any out-and-out gaming materials, and I wasn't altogether sure we'd hit the brief. But hey, looks like it came out all right after all. :)

I thought Lyz did a really amazing job with the adventure locations, btw. Lots and lots of neat game ideas nested into each of those.

Pardon me, but I need to fanboy for a moment.

I absolutely love what I'm reading in the book. I'm forcing myself to go slowly and not devour it all in a single sitting. I'm hopeful we'll see more Nidal in the future, either in the form of another novel (Nightglass and Nightblade were excellent!) or in the form of additional lore material in a Pathfinder 2 supplement.

Okay, enough flailing.

Thank you for writing this for us, Ms. Merciel! And thank you to Erik Mona for confirming it was in the pipe after I kept pestering him. The wait was worth it.

Echoing Zhern, Liane and Lyz kicked ass!

*daydreams about possible 3rd Night book*

Echoing Zhern, Liane and Lyz kicked ass!

*daydreams about possible 3rd Night book*

Mines still on the slow boat. :(

Getting fidgety!

Rysky wrote:

Echoing Zhern, Liane and Lyz kicked ass!

*daydreams about possible 3rd Night book*

Mines still on the slow boat. :(

Getting fidgety!

*offers hugs*

I'm really happy this book is getting a positive reception. It was the first time I'd written any out-and-out gaming materials, and I wasn't altogether sure we'd hit the brief. But hey, looks like it came out all right after all. :)

I thought Lyz did a really amazing job with the adventure locations, btw. Lots and lots of neat game ideas nested into each of those.

I hardly post on here anymore, but I wanted to step in and say that this is my favorite CS book since Qadira. It's so well thought out and easily could've been twice as long and still kept me as interested. I read it cover-to-cover in a single, eager sitting.

Excellent work, Liane and co. Truly excellent.

Quality book! Thank you very much for the great work. This does a fantastic job of fleshing out what it's like in Nidal, and how things have persisted this long. The distinctions between rural and urban life were especially useful.

This was a fantastic book. Congratulations to all the authors. I wouldn’t have changed anything. The campaign setting books have really been great of late.

We need more books written by Liane (and Lyz - the adventure sites were universally brilliant).

any new dragon type in this book ?

This was a fantastic book. Congratulations to all the authors. I wouldn’t have changed anything. The campaign setting books have really been great of late.

We need more books written by Liane (and Lyz - the adventure sites were universally brilliant).

I second this.

any new dragon type in this book ?

Nope.

Finally got my hands on it. Read it literally cover to cover in a day. This is almost <i>perfect</i>. Now I just need those two planar books and I can really start working on my campaign!

Also, most of the art is absolutely gorgeous (I say mostly just because of the few rather disturbing ones, which are still amazingly well done). And oh my god, the <i>map</i>. A while ago, I made a shoddy map edit to add Crosspine and the Uskheart and Karpad to a Nidal map, but this has almost everything! It's really only missing Karpad, and a few minor obscure things, like the dueling liches and the umbral dragon in the mountains (names are escaping me at the moment). But all in all, this is amazing.

I just want to double-check because I'm start to prep The Midnight Mirror. This book doesn't have anything on Karpad?

I just want to double-check because I'm start to prep The Midnight Mirror. This book doesn't have anything on Karpad?

A search of the PDF for Karpad yielded 0 results.

Fair enough, thanks.

absolutely loved the Smokeshade and the Hive Critter.

200 posts of "ooh can't wait!" followed by a dozen posts actually discussing the book. Of which about half are "IS THERE A NEW KYTON?!?" followed by "AW YEAH KYTON!". Then silence.

Okay, snark aside, I'm intrigued by this, but am not sure I want to drop $16 on a .pdf. So far this thread isn't giving much guidance, and the reviews are pretty vague, too. Does anyone want to discuss it in a little more detail? Like, what's the fluff-crunch ratio like? Just how high is the squick factor? Presumably it's in the standard Campaign Setting format, basically a gazetteer full of adventure hooks; did anything in particular stand out? Could you run low level characters here?

Also, RPGs have a very problematic track record with S&M related issues; there's a strong tendency to collapse into parody. I could relate a dozen examples, but the one that stands out in memory is the "Nipple Clamps of Exquisite Pain" item from the 3e Book of Vile Darkness, back around 2006 or so. Does this avoid the Nipple Clamps problem; and if so, how does it pull this off?

Thanks much in advance,

Doug M.

I definitely recommend the book. It's been a little while since I've gone over it, but it does an excellent job of fleshing out the practicalities of living in a nation that's been ruled by immortal servants of an evil god of pain and torture for thousands of years. It makes distinctions between how people act in the highly-supervised urban areas vs. in rural communities. How do crops work in an area that receives very little sunlight? It addresses communities of fetchlings, as well as how they're viewed, covers the major political players and factions, and goes into why people would choose to live in Nidal.

There's not much crunch that I can recall (certainly nothing like archetypes), no parody, and I don't think there was anything all that squicky.