Pathfinder Adventure: Claws of the Tyrant

Announced for April! Product images and descriptions are not final and are subject to change. :)

This sounds like an interesting way to explore a particular area or story.

looks awesome. love the idea.

HOLD ON A MINUTE. Is Seldeg still Geb's spymaster?

If yes, I am about to be VERY HAPPY.

If he's a turncoat, I will have to skip the first chapter and rewrite the last so that Agents of Geb take him down with righteous fury in the name of the Ghost King!

Huzzah!

How many levels does each adventure encompass?

I'm hyperventilating and crying here, if the two mentioned goddesses are Arazni and Iomedae I might pass out from excitment

Tar-Baphon floating ghost head in corner makes me giggle x'D

HOLD ON A MINUTE. Is Seldeg still Geb's spymaster?

If yes, I am about to be VERY HAPPY.

If he's a turncoat, I will have to skip the first chapter and rewrite the last so that Agents of Geb take him down with righteous fury in the name of the Ghost King!

:) By the way, friend, did you happen to read a certain Pathfinder Comic titled

Folks who were wondering "wouldn't a 128 hardcover standalone adventure step on the toes of an Adventure Path?" can now observe one of several ways in which they wouldn't.

Being able to present an anthology of thematically linked shorter adventures that aren't meant to be things that the same PCs play through is one of the concepts I'm excited to explore in the standalone adventure line. But that might just be me pining for the old days of Dungeon Magazine...

For my birthday even!

Huzzah!

Hopefully y'all survive this one. >:)

Very interested in this adventure. Are their opportunities for level-ups in each of the three plots? 1st to 7th is a big leap, and I'm still pretty new to the system.

Very interested in this adventure. Are their opportunities for level-ups in each of the three plots? 1st to 7th is a big leap, and I'm still pretty new to the system.

Seeing as how most adventures cover 3-4 levels, and the wording of the text here, the players will not level up their characters until the end of the adventure.

This anthology approach sounds awesome.

Very interested in this adventure. Are their opportunities for level-ups in each of the three plots? 1st to 7th is a big leap, and I'm still pretty new to the system.

No; these are individual adventures and you're not meant/expected to play the same PCs in each one. Think of them as three separate adventures that just happen to be published in one book, rather than three separate books.

(It's possible one of them might have a level-up in it, now that I think on it, though... but it's still not intended to be linked to the others by the same PCs.)

Krasiph wrote:

Very interested in this adventure. Are their opportunities for level-ups in each of the three plots? 1st to 7th is a big leap, and I'm still pretty new to the system.

Seeing as how most adventures cover 3-4 levels, and the wording of the text here, the players will not level up their characters until the end of the adventure.

Correct, and these individual adventures are shorter than those we published before as single book adventures, and are of different lengths.

As we potentially do more of these... we might include a longer adventure as part of an anthology that covers 2 or even 3 levels of play (and thus contain fewer adventures overall between the covers), and we might also include much shorter ones that don't have enough content on their own to fill an entire level (and contain more adventures overall between the covers).

Books like this are super interesting to me, because this fills a niche that Dungeon Magazine once did, where adventures of different level bands could be plucked out by a GM to be used as part of their own campaign.

Reminds me of the D&D anthology books they have done where there are several shorter adventures linked by a theme, although most of them from memory were updating back catalogue stories to 5e.

Interesting idea and will bei nteresting to see what other stories are coming.

So, I'm pretty hyped for this one. One of the things I really liked for 3.5e/1e was the sheer number of short adventures available in Dungeon Magazine and the short modules produced by WotC and Paizo. It allowed me to easily built a sandbox by dropping leads/rumors/wanted posters to half a dozen short adventures as rumors in the local tavern/guildhall and letting my players decide which way they wanted to go. I've been using Society scenarios, but they're typically a little short for what I'm looking for. Here's to hoping many more of these are made.

Excited for this book, since I am currently running a conversion to 2e of Tyrant's Grasp and we could play this right after.

I guess I really don’t get the concept. Why have the adventures linked, but not be targeted at the same characters? It seems like a strange way to present a narrative and feels like an ersatz yet abbreviated AP... As for any comparisons to Dungeon about the only thing I see is that they are wildly different in level and vary in length. Dungeon adventures often ran the gamut of campaign settings, length, tone, level and obviously, theme.

Think of it as telling parts of a story from different perspectives to get a richer look at the whole event. This kind of narrative can be found in novels and films (or even comics) where there is more than one point of view or as a way to show a variety of experiences or reactions to a singular event.

I guess I really don’t get the concept. Why have the adventures linked, but not be targeted at the same characters? It seems like a strange way to present a narrative and feels like an ersatz yet abbreviated AP... As for any comparisons to Dungeon about the only thing I see is that they are wildly different in level and vary in length. Dungeon adventures often ran the gamut of campaign settings, length, tone, level and obviously, theme.

I think the idea is that they're not presenting a narrative, but several independent (though admittedly related) narratives which can be dropped in wherever convenient for a particular group (much like Dungeon adventures).

At least that's my hope. :-)

Wait, so we start as heroes in the first adventure, then we play as the villains in the second adventure, then back to heroes?

Heck yeah, that sounds awesome!

Is this suitable for mythic rules?

Is this suitable for mythic rules?

None of the adventure currently released or announced use the mythic rules. If you want to use them, you'll have to change these 3 adventures A LOT.

And after seeing/hearing about how deeply this changes all the paradigms, It was a very good decision.

very nice!!

Will the Knights of Last Wall archetypes be updated to the remaster here?

Will there be a flip map for claws of the tyrant?

No, there's not an associated Flip-Mat for Claws of the Tyrant.

For a while, we were doing a Flip-Mat that was associated with each standalone adventure, but they didn't do as well as a general location Flip-Mat so we stopped doing those for every adventure. We may still in the future do these Flip-Mat/adventure pairings.

Looking forward to this, and kind of hoping that Gravelands Survivor will be marked repeatable for PFS...

HOLD ON A MINUTE. Is Seldeg still Geb's spymaster?

If yes, I am about to be VERY HAPPY.

If he's a turncoat, I will have to skip the first chapter and rewrite the last so that Agents of Geb take him down with righteous fury in the name of the Ghost King!

This one might be tough to run depending on how my players resolve the last book in Blood Lords...

We just decided that as a group, next year we want to give Tyrant's Grasp converted for 2nd edition a try. Claws of the Tyrant is definitely something to watch.

Oh yesss. Time to finally dust off my sadly disused Lastwall book! Still looking forward to a Gravelands Adventure Path, but in the meantime perhaps the anthology will do...

Will there be a Foundry VTT product for this?

What happened to my Seldig?

Just got from the Twitch Paizo stream...

I dont know which I want to play first, this or Shades of Blood lol! Assuming they both get FVTT modules.

Very excited!

So am I understanding correctly that the first story is for low level good characters.

The second story is however taking place for individuals presumably, other than the first set. And notably, this group of characters is motivated to battle for the Unholy side of things, as the protagonists in the story are what most of the world would consider Antagonists.

And then the story resets, and for the last chapter it is for high level holy characters trying to end the GraveKnights entirely.

So this would be an official adventure where some of the players are expected to play out presumably 'unholy' aligned characters. (we don't call it evil any longer, and the reason driving their motivations could be varied, but it sounds like they are at a minimum trying to destroy a 'Holy' stronghold. So on the Unholy side, even if not strictly sanctified unholy.

This adventure's an anthology of three adventures that are thematically linked but are NOT intended to be played by the same characters. The closest analogy to something Paizo has done before, I guess, would be Dungeon Magazine, which offered 3 adventures (one low level, one mid level, and one high level), but with a much tighter theme for the three than most Dungeon Magazines ever did.

We can for sure and SHOULD still use the word "evil" to describe "Evil PC" adventures though, and that's a better term to use than "unholy" since the word "unholy" carries specific rules baggage with it that would significantly limit the PC build options.

Yeah, good and evil aren't gone, they're just not game mechanics anymore.

This adventure's an anthology of three adventures that are thematically linked but are NOT intended to be played by the same characters. The closest analogy to something Paizo has done before, I guess, would be Dungeon Magazine, which offered 3 adventures (one low level, one mid level, and one high level), but with a much tighter theme for the three than most Dungeon Magazines ever did.

If this does well, then I hope that the team considers doing this more often. I miss Dungeon.

James Jacobs wrote:

This adventure's an anthology of three adventures that are thematically linked but are NOT intended to be played by the same characters. The closest analogy to something Paizo has done before, I guess, would be Dungeon Magazine, which offered 3 adventures (one low level, one mid level, and one high level), but with a much tighter theme for the three than most Dungeon Magazines ever did.

If this does well, then I hope that the team considers doing this more often. I miss Dungeon.

The inverse of that is: "I hope folks like this, because I've been wanting to do this sort of standalone Adventure since I sent Dungeon #150 off to the printers." ;-P

I like this idea. Part of the reason I subscribe to the Adventures Line but not the AP line is because I like having these as "drag and drop" adventures ready to fill story gaps in a homebrew campaign or to help as a template to learn better adventure design for a home campaign.

I like this idea. Part of the reason I subscribe to the Adventures Line but not the AP line is because I like having these as "drag and drop" adventures ready to fill story gaps in a homebrew campaign or to help as a template to learn better adventure design for a home campaign.

I still use my old dungeon magazines for this on occasion, since it's so easy to build encounters for 2nd edition...use the maps, characters and ideas from the magazine and quickly build encounters that fit the theme. I spoke in this thread before but I would love to see more linked adventures in this theme, and I really hope this one is successful.

I'm a big fan of the anthology format. I used that format for Troubles in Otari and then Vanessa (who got this one started) used it here in a more dynamic way than we did in Troubles. I like anthologies for all the reasons mentioned here like being able to slot it into ongoing campaigns or to pick up a quick one shot, but one of my favorite parts about this anthology in particular is that it tells parts of the story from different perspectives in a way that I think a straightforward adventure wouldn't be able to do as well.

As long as readers and players keep enjoying these anthologies, I plan on making them more frequently.

Will the Knights of Last Wall archetypes be updated to the remaster here?

Bump, bump

I'm a big fan of the anthology format. I used that format for Troubles in Otari and then Vanessa (who got this one started) used it here in a more dynamic way than we did in Troubles. I like anthologies for all the reasons mentioned here like being able to slot it into ongoing campaigns or to pick up a quick one shot, but one of my favorite parts about this anthology in particular is that it tells parts of the story from different perspectives in a way that I think a straightforward adventure wouldn't be able to do as well.

As long as readers and players keep enjoying these anthologies, I plan on making them more frequently.

HUZZAH! HUZZAH! HUZZAH!

Huzzah!

my players are a few sessions from finishing bloodlords and are super excited about this