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A few days ago, I came across a Melville quote from Moby Dick, and now I want the AP that has this as the end quote in the worst way: "It's not down on any map; true places never are." If this turns out to be the one for Strength of Thousands that would be quite the synchronicity.
The One About the Rehabilitation of the Elves: The PCs spend a lot of time in Kyonin, and the elves are not terrible. Might also involve a return to Celwynvian perhaps by way of Arsmeril, where the PCs are envoys helping the elves navigate being part of Xin-Edasseril. Or maybe they help overthrow Belimarius. Possibly one of the adventures is set in Jinin.
The One About How Evil Always Destroys/Turns On Itself: The PCs sometimes blunder into conflict between two evil factions (like Lamashtu vs. Pazuzu, for instance). Other times, they are unknowingly manipulated by an evil patron into defeating some other evil. One adventure would be Red Harvest or Yojimbo, basically. I like how this theme is done in the original Dragonlance trilogy, so this might be a good AP for a draconic ally in humanoid disguise. At least one villain, perhaps the ultimate foe, is a nihilistic daemon cultist. It might be nice to redeem a hellknight somewhere in this one too.
The One About the Guild: The PCs become major movers and shakers in a business or industry. Somewhat like Extinction Curse and somewhat like Council of Thieves. Might be good for a return to Osirion or Qadira.
The One About the Harrow: Every adventure title is also a Harrow card, one from each suit. The party starts in Galduria and works as agents of the Harrowed Society on various missions in Varisia and beyond. Perhaps far beyond. I'd like The Demon's Lantern to involve a heist on the Abyss, and The Eclipse to be either a metaphorical event where the PCs help one power supersede another or literal and on a timer. The Big Sky might involve a trip to the Spire of Lemriss.
The One About Keeping the Secret: The PCs are servants of Sivanah charged with keeping secrets secret.
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Also, tangentially related to the purpose of the thread, I'm interested in more villains like Barzillai Thrune from Hell's Rebels. I loved playing him so much, I've even come up with fake national anthems for his "Infinite Imperial Empire of New Barzillai" once he renamed Kintargo after himself (I had him do that because it made me laugh and my players seemed to like it).
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These sound disturbingly close to Earth . . . sure Barzillai didn't go to a workshop retreat here?
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Had another thought for themes to see in an AP: Making the wild scary. Animals (including those that used to be classed as Vermin) don't get enough respect. But I don't have enough experience looking through 2nd Edition to know whether it lends itself better to this than 1st Edition (for which the main ways I can think of making Animals/Vermin scary is to make Swarms or Troops of them).
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Had another thought for themes to see in an AP: Making the wild scary. Animals (including those that used to be classed as Vermin) don't get enough respect. But I don't have enough experience looking through 2nd Edition to know whether it lends itself better to this than 1st Edition (for which the main ways I can think of making Animals/Vermin scary is to make Swarms or Troops of them).
Between swarms and dinosaurs, extinction curse has some nasty animal encounters. But if we can get a Kaiju that is a mutant chicken swarm, then I am in.
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Had another thought for themes to see in an AP: Making the wild scary. Animals (including those that used to be classed as Vermin) don't get enough respect. But I don't have enough experience looking through 2nd Edition to know whether it lends itself better to this than 1st Edition (for which the main ways I can think of making Animals/Vermin scary is to make Swarms or Troops of them).
swarms are easily lethal unless the party has a narrow selection of useful counters. fun for DMs, not fun for PCs
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Had another thought for themes to see in an AP: Making the wild scary. Animals (including those that used to be classed as Vermin) don't get enough respect. But I don't have enough experience looking through 2nd Edition to know whether it lends itself better to this than 1st Edition (for which the main ways I can think of making Animals/Vermin scary is to make Swarms or Troops of them).
I would be stunned if Quest for the Frozen Flame didn’t give us this.
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A Brevoy civil war arc would be too similar to War for the Crown IMO.
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Not necessarily -- at least from the public blurbs (I haven't gone through the AP nor had the chance to follow a PbP), it seems that War for the Crown has a lot of intrigue for an extended period (although it gets to hot war eventually), whereas judging from the tensions that have existed between the geographically distinct parts of Brevoy (Issia and Rostland), a Civil War in Brevoy could become a hot war very quickly, and intrigue would be pushed into the domain of spies.
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Too late to edit last post: started new thread about making Animals (and Vermin) scary to avoid derailing this thread.
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I vaguely recall a post by a Paizo employee saying that nobody at the company really cares enough about Brevoy to make an entire AP there. Doesn't help that it's essentially just Westeros, afaik. The most exciting thing to be written about that place is the Choral section in Legends.
Maybe an adventure, but that could probably be set anywhere cooler.
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I vaguely recall a post by a Paizo employee saying that nobody at the company really cares enough about Brevoy to make an entire AP there. Doesn't help that it's essentially just Westeros, afaik. The most exciting thing to be written about that place is the Choral section in Legends.
Maybe an adventure, but that could probably be set anywhere cooler.
the only thing i find interesting about Brevoy is Skywatch. But I do think that Skywatch is pretty awesome.
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I would love to see a "stuck in the first world"(or another plane) adventure.
Ooh, how about an AP where the various elemental plains are colliding and spilling into the material plane via rifts between dimensions?
Book 1 could be dealing with the fallout of a portal opening in the material plain (similar to the winter bubble in book 1 of Reign of Winter). Books 2 > 5 could be visiting each of the four elemental plains to interact with the denizens and fight thematic monsters, leading to confrontation with big bad/culmination of campaign in book 6, whatever form that takes.
Who rules the elemental plains? Is there a good reason they would be at each other's throats? Perhaps an unseen third party is setting them against one another for their own nefarious ends...?
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Or a sequel to Mummy's Mask that opens in Absalom, after various Ossirian relics are being displayed in a museum. Another death pulse could animate all the different things on display throughout the museum, trapping the guests inside with the hostile exhibits. PCs part of group who pillaged tomb and removed relics from Ossiria, they are cursed and must return relics to be free of curse.
Book 2, travelling from Absalom to Ossiria, harassed by cult along the way.
Book 3, return to ruins of fallen sky pyramid, half buried in desert, to return relics and end curse.
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The obvious plot for an elemental planar AP would be about freeing one of the three good elemental lords who are still bound. I’d love to see that.
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I don't think that would be workable. All of the good Elemental Lords are free now, at least according to 2E's Bestiary, p. 146.
(I stole that reference from the Elemental Lord Pathfinder wiki article, and it is true.)Helping the goodly Elemental Lords in a campaign against their evil rivals could be AP-worthy though, I'd think. On the most extreme end the four evil lords could be imprisoned in artifacts similar to the ones the good ones were imprisoned in.
When were they freed? I know the Pathfinder Society got one of them out, but I don’t know that that changed.
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I'm not actually sure either. I thought the same thing; one of the lords had been freed, but the others hadn't been yet. It could be one of those bits of lore that was updated and altered between editions, like Inevitables being Aeons the whole time, but if anyone has any concrete citations of when that happened that'd be great.
From a narrative standpoint it does kind of make sense. Freeing one Elemental Lord is a suitably epic and interesting storyline, but doing so again is retreading the same narrative ground, and would be less fun to play through three more times. (Possibly once, if the other three were freed at the same time, but still.)
With the lords all free now, that grants Paizo or anyone using Pathfinder Infinity the ability to explore proper elemental war storylines if they should want to.
I noticed the freedom bit in a Bestiary 1 sidebar. Scroll down past the first reply to see James Jacobs confirm that the remaining three are free.
Creative Director
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Yup. Not all stories get told in adventure format (the revolution and formation of Vidrian is another good example), and considering we'd already told one story about one of them being freed, I didn't feel that repeating that story again was a great idea. There's certainly more stories to tell about the elemental demigods, both good or evil, and we COULD still do other adventures that explore how the other three were freed, but at this point, if I personally were to run/develop an elemental themed adventure or adventure path, I'd rather do a new story than re-tread that one.
Certainly the repercussions of those elementals getting back into the mix after being imprisoned for so long could be interesting to explore, for example.
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Huh. That feels like a weird one to do off-screen, but alright.
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Huh. That feels like a weird one to do off-screen, but alright.
Again, it's mostly because doing that storyline again would be repetitive, and would potentially cheapen the PFS experience by doing so. We often have to make decisions about what we want to do on screen and what we can't. The Galt revolution almost ended off-screen, for example, since it'd gone on for so long, but we decided to hold off and do an adventure for that one... but we have more stories to tell than opportunities to tell them as adventures.
And we could still go back and do those stories anyway. The sidebar in the Bestiary hardly spoils much about how it all went down.
It also put those four back in the mix so that players can chose them as patrons, of course, rather than have this weird sort of implication that 'your deity is imprisoned and maybe some day there'll be an adventure about it but it's not this one' situation as well.
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I do think source books are bit confused about whether or not elemental lords are free since it flips depending on book currently.
But yeah here is another theme I wanna actually see:
Hordes.
...Yes, that is more game mechanics than story theme ;P But I do kinda want AP built more around facing huge number of weak enemies at same time rather than usual "oki big monster dude time" Giving them mook destroying classes more things to do xD
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Yup. Not all stories get told in adventure format (the revolution and formation of Vidrian is another good example), and considering we'd already told one story about one of them being freed, I didn't feel that repeating that story again was a great idea. There's certainly more stories to tell about the elemental demigods, both good or evil, and we COULD still do other adventures that explore how the other three were freed, but at this point, if I personally were to run/develop an elemental themed adventure or adventure path, I'd rather do a new story than re-tread that one.
Certainly the repercussions of those elementals getting back into the mix after being imprisoned for so long could be interesting to explore, for example.
This is strange because Gods and Magic p. 80 contradicts the statement in the Bestiary and I believe Luis has previously said that the Bestiary is incorrect and in need of errata. Given your position as creative director, I'm assuming they are free? To be clear, I'm not trying to call anyone out or pit anyone against anyone else. I can imagine running a world as large as Golarion and coordinating across everyone at Paizo is no small task. I'm just curious as to the current state of the Elemental Lords.
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Maybe someone will release a product through Pathfinder Infinite to scratch our elemental itch. :D
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This is strange because Gods and Magic p. 80 contradicts the statement in the Bestiary and I believe Luis has previously said that the Bestiary is incorrect and in need of errata. Given your position as creative director, I'm assuming they are free? To be clear, I'm not trying to call anyone out or pit anyone against anyone else. I can imagine running a world as large as Golarion and coordinating across everyone at Paizo is no small task. I'm just curious as to the current state of the Elemental Lords.Yup. Not all stories get told in adventure format (the revolution and formation of Vidrian is another good example), and considering we'd already told one story about one of them being freed, I didn't feel that repeating that story again was a great idea. There's certainly more stories to tell about the elemental demigods, both good or evil, and we COULD still do other adventures that explore how the other three were freed, but at this point, if I personally were to run/develop an elemental themed adventure or adventure path, I'd rather do a new story than re-tread that one.
Certainly the repercussions of those elementals getting back into the mix after being imprisoned for so long could be interesting to explore, for example.
I guess we aren't sure what way we're going then. I'll be as surprised as the rest of us then, I suppose, once we do whatever's next for these things.
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I would say not everyone who is into pathfinder does society play, so saving at least one of them for an adventure(be it module or adventure path) would be nice for those who are interested in that storyline. That being said I understand if retelling similar stories isn't interesting for the writers and/or the potential of having them all be released is greater then telling a story where they are contained.
Which one did the Pathfinder society free on screen? I wonder if there's a room for another "strongly elemental themed" AP that works up to freeing an Elemental Lord.
Like we've done a strongly Earth-oriented AP (Ironfang Invasion) and a strongly Water-oriented AP (Ruins of Azlant) but I don't think we've had an Air themed one yet.
And now that Stasian-tech airships are canon, I kind of want one where we fly a magic dirigible around.
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Which one did the Pathfinder society free on screen? I wonder if there's a room for another "strongly elemental themed" AP that works up to freeing an Elemental Lord.
Like we've done a strongly Earth-oriented AP (Ironfang Invasion) and a strongly Water-oriented AP (Ruins of Azlant) but I don't think we've had an Air themed one yet.
And now that Stasian-tech airships are canon, I kind of want one where we fly a magic dirigible around.
Ranginori, goodly lord of air, was freed by the Society in-play.
Ranginori, goodly lord of air, was freed by the Society in-play.Which one did the Pathfinder society free on screen? I wonder if there's a room for another "strongly elemental themed" AP that works up to freeing an Elemental Lord.
Like we've done a strongly Earth-oriented AP (Ironfang Invasion) and a strongly Water-oriented AP (Ruins of Azlant) but I don't think we've had an Air themed one yet.
And now that Stasian-tech airships are canon, I kind of want one where we fly a magic dirigible around.
Same advebture also had artwork for them which was pretty sweet. Was done in 8-25 Unleashing the Untouchable
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If we were to do a heavily Air themed adventure path I'd really love to see the Shory stuff get some focus. Maybe stealing an Aeromantic Infandibulum from Kho or even that still flying city in Mythic Realms that I forget the name of.
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If we were to do a heavily Air themed adventure path I'd really love to see the Shory stuff get some focus. Maybe stealing an Aeromantic Infandibulum from Kho or even that still flying city in Mythic Realms that I forget the name of.
To say nothing of the fact that Guns & Gears introduced Eihlona, who seem to be a Shory successor state in Southern Garund.
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A sky captain AP would make me a very happy boy. Just putting that out there.
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Both Fists and Strength have featured airships, compared to zero airships across the entirety of the PF1 AP catalogue, so this seems possible. Fingers crossed!!!
Paizo, make this happen, plz. Skies of Arcadia FTW!
Sky Pirates and a jaunt to the Plane of Air, maybe? Perhaps a spiritual successor to Skull and Shackles?
Skull and Sky...?
I would buy that. :D
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Age of Ashes had the subtheme of "renovate and trick out the abandoned keep" so something similar where your base is an airship would be awesome, particularly now that we have rules for cannons and the like.
Where in Golarion would airships be commonly found?
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Where in Golarion would airships be commonly found?
Commonly? Nowhere.
Guns & Gears establishes two operating in Ustalav, and I’m willing to bet the country of Eihlona (mentioned upthread) has them. Strength of Thousands shows us one built by a Magaambya member, and another I can’t really get into without spoilers. They definitely exist, but are rare and new.
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Where in Golarion would airships be commonly found?
The Shory, who were once the dominant power in the Mwangi Expanse had flying cities. Those all crashed a long, long time ago in the canon, but that would be the ideal place to find one which might be salvageable.
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In that vein, after Mummy's Mask, there is a large group of pyramids that were constructed with Aeromantic Infandibulums laying around. Most of them crashed and the Sky Pharaoh's master control unit probably didn't fair too well, but the technology is there in probably the most complete form currently available.Where in Golarion would airships be commonly found?The Shory, who were once the dominant power in the Mwangi Expanse had flying cities. Those all crashed a long, long time ago in the canon, but that would be the ideal place to find one which might be salvageable.
Now you are making me pull out my copy of 'Pyramid of the Sky Phraoah'... and you are correct. Canonically,
Also, the interior art in this issue is super on point. Good stuff.
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Huh. That feels like a weird one to do off-screen, but alright.Again, it's mostly because doing that storyline again would be repetitive, and would potentially cheapen the PFS experience by doing so. We often have to make decisions about what we want to do on screen and what we can't. The Galt revolution almost ended off-screen, for example, since it'd gone on for so long, but we decided to hold off and do an adventure for that one... but we have more stories to tell than opportunities to tell them as adventures.
And we could still go back and do those stories anyway. The sidebar in the Bestiary hardly spoils much about how it all went down.
It also put those four back in the mix so that players can chose them as patrons, of course, rather than have this weird sort of implication that 'your deity is imprisoned and maybe some day there'll be an adventure about it but it's not this one' situation as well.
I agree with keftiu. I'd also say that it would not feel as repetitive as it would to redo an AP theme because PFS season 8 had adventures that weren't really tied to the Ranginori plot, and the adventures that were are not necessarily all played by the same characters. I tend to think both of these things just make the PFS stuff less distinctive. Also, the liberate an elemental lord plot would be a good one to go extraplanar in 2e.
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I vaguely recall a post by a Paizo employee saying that nobody at the company really cares enough about Brevoy to make an entire AP there. Doesn't help that it's essentially just Westeros, afaik. The most exciting thing to be written about that place is the Choral section in Legends.
Maybe an adventure, but that could probably be set anywhere cooler.
Far upthread, I pitched a return to Brevoy as The One About the Divorce. It might work as a three part high-level AP, though the trend seems to be to make two low-level three-parters, since the low level stuff tends to sell better.
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An AP with an adventure that's The One About the Chess Set: The cover illustration harkens back to the Edgar Rice Burroughs Chessmen of Mars and many AD&D 1e adventures, plus maybe the James Bond movie with the live-action chess game. The cover illustration has Amiri (N), Lem (K), Kyra (B), and Merisiel (disguised as a pawn about to promote). Might work better as a module set in Druma.
The One About the Nagas. They're an underrated creature type, and a series of adventures where the PCs travel as servants or people caught up in the intrigues of nagas could be cool. Perhaps one adventure involves escorting some naga pilgrim to Savisura, and another visits Nagajor. Maybe the patron is a naga who worships Desna who wants to travel. This would be a bit like Age of Ashes, but with more stealth, subtlety, and intrigue.