I understand that there will be a second Remastered Players Core eventually coming out. Does anyone know when? How about the monster books other than the first, will they get the Remastered treatment as well?
I understand that there will be a second Remastered Players Core eventually coming out. Does anyone know when?
The product pages for Player Core 2 (linked above) and Monster Core should list the release date.
How about the monster books other than the first, will they get the Remastered treatment as well?
Bestiary 2 and 3 have not been announced to be Remastered. They should get an errata pass at some point to update the terminology and such. But it probably won't be new books with a new name that have to be bought separately. There will almost certainly be a Bestiary 4, 5, 6... though they may also follow the Remastered naming convention of Monster Core 2, 3, 4...
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Per yesterday's preview, the Monster Core is less a straight conversion of Bestiary 1 and more of a Greatest Hits collection designed to provide a good starting point for new GMs to build campaigns. A Monster Core 2 (or something similar) is a near certainy at some point, but it will likely pick from Bestiary 2, Bestiary 3, Book of the Dead, Adventures, PF1 content, and brand new stuff, as opposed to a straight update of a single book. But paizo has quite a backlog after the all hands on deck situation that led to the remaster, so I wouldn't expect it for a while unless there was already an unannounced Monster book in production they can retool.
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It was mentioned at some point (possibly a con panel) that Bestiary 2 & 3 are likely to get remastered but that the pace at which they would be focused on would be much slower.
So, there has been a tentative plan to remaster Bestiary 2 & 3. But no official plan has been announced. My guess is we might see a Monster Core 2 & 3 in 2025 and 2026.
Bestiary 2 will need quite a bit of remastering as there are several OGL monsters in there. Bestiary 3 is much lighter on OGL monsters so that one will hopefully be less work for the staff.
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Awesome sounds like I made the right decision a couple of weeks ago to switch to Pathfinder. I'm loving the Player Core and GM Core so far and am switching my D&D files over to Pathfinder. I have to wait on my random encounter tables to some degree until the Monster Core arrives.
As I posted in another thread: "It is the year 2525, and Pathfinder Bestiary #257 has just hit your FLGS". :-)
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The next expected releases are:
Monster Core: March
Tian Xia World Guide: April
Howl of the Wild: May
Player Core 2: July
Tian Xia Character Guide: Aug
War of the Immortals: "October or Winter"Note I pulled these from different places on Paizo's website, so no promises as to accuracy. I also did not scan for APs.
It is kinda crazy that there isn't a single place to see all announced products. I mean there is this, but it doesn't show the further out releases.
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Honestly remastering too many old monsters will give Paizo diminishing returns. People can still use all the old monsters. Monster Core just needs to cover the staples that actually show up in adventures.
Does anyone know if adventures or modules have started using remastered monsters? I'm curious if we have seen any remastered fiends or ghosts get published. I think I know what to expect from their weaknesses and resistances but am not 100% sure.
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Honestly remastering too many old monsters will give Paizo diminishing returns. People can still use all the old monsters. Monster Core just needs to cover the staples that actually show up in adventures.
Does anyone know if adventures or modules have started using remastered monsters? I'm curious if we have seen any remastered fiends or ghosts get published. I think I know what to expect from their weaknesses and resistances but am not 100% sure.
Pathfinder #201 will be the first remastered adventure. Everything up to #200 will be OGL. We haven't yet announced the name of the next standalone adventure, but it's a remastered adventure and is done and will be coming out later this year.
Pathfinder #201 will be the first remastered adventure. Everything up to #200 will be OGL. We haven't yet announced the name of the next standalone adventure, but it's a remastered adventure and is done and will be coming out later this year.Honestly remastering too many old monsters will give Paizo diminishing returns. People can still use all the old monsters. Monster Core just needs to cover the staples that actually show up in adventures.
Does anyone know if adventures or modules have started using remastered monsters? I'm curious if we have seen any remastered fiends or ghosts get published. I think I know what to expect from their weaknesses and resistances but am not 100% sure.
I'm surprised y'all are waiting that long. Can I ask why?
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I'm surprised y'all are waiting that long. Can I ask why?
At a guess, lead time.
If I we're to guess. Keeping all of an adventure path under the same "version" would be something desirable for the sake of consistency. And so even if some of an adventure path had been started before remaster stuff was finalized then it would probably be best to keep it all ogl. Plus #201 is a fresh start so to speak as its after a big milestone number.
I'm surprised y'all are waiting that long. Can I ask why?Pathfinder #201 will be the first remastered adventure. Everything up to #200 will be OGL. We haven't yet announced the name of the next standalone adventure, but it's a remastered adventure and is done and will be coming out later this year.Honestly remastering too many old monsters will give Paizo diminishing returns. People can still use all the old monsters. Monster Core just needs to cover the staples that actually show up in adventures.
Does anyone know if adventures or modules have started using remastered monsters? I'm curious if we have seen any remastered fiends or ghosts get published. I think I know what to expect from their weaknesses and resistances but am not 100% sure.
maybe they are releasing it after player core 2? There may be player core two related things that they incorporated into the adventure?
If I we're to guess. Keeping all of an adventure path under the same "version" would be something desirable for the sake of consistency. And so even if some of an adventure path had been started before remaster stuff was finalized then it would probably be best to keep it all ogl. Plus #201 is a fresh start so to speak as its after a big milestone number.
Yeah, though I wonder why Seven Dooms for Sandpoint want the first OGL one since it's a new adventure and also a nice round #200. Maybe a time issue, maybe adventures aren't as high a priority because they won't need to be Remastered for PFS eventually anyway? (unlike Rage of Elements, which was quickly Remastered)
maybe they are releasing it after player core 2? There may be player core two related things that they incorporated into the adventure?I'm surprised y'all are waiting that long. Can I ask why?Pathfinder #201 will be the first remastered adventure. Everything up to #200 will be OGL. We haven't yet announced the name of the next standalone adventure, but it's a remastered adventure and is done and will be coming out later this year.Honestly remastering too many old monsters will give Paizo diminishing returns. People can still use all the old monsters. Monster Core just needs to cover the staples that actually show up in adventures.
Does anyone know if adventures or modules have started using remastered monsters? I'm curious if we have seen any remastered fiends or ghosts get published. I think I know what to expect from their weaknesses and resistances but am not 100% sure.
I don't think that tracks. I'm pretty sure Paizo is continuing to release modules and adventures at their normal pace instead of waiting for Player Core 2. They just aren't releasing them remastered even though Rage of the Elements was six months ago.
I think the more likely answer is I underestimated exactly how far in advance APs are finalized before release.
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I'm surprised y'all are waiting that long. Can I ask why?Pathfinder #201 will be the first remastered adventure. Everything up to #200 will be OGL. We haven't yet announced the name of the next standalone adventure, but it's a remastered adventure and is done and will be coming out later this year.Honestly remastering too many old monsters will give Paizo diminishing returns. People can still use all the old monsters. Monster Core just needs to cover the staples that actually show up in adventures.
Does anyone know if adventures or modules have started using remastered monsters? I'm curious if we have seen any remastered fiends or ghosts get published. I think I know what to expect from their weaknesses and resistances but am not 100% sure.
Because we had no choice.
For adventure writing, rules for how players work are kind of incidental—what we really need for that are rules for treasure, for subsystems, and most of all for monsters. That content simply wasn't available to us in-house in a finalized state. Furthermore, the adventures that were in process (particularly Seven Dooms for Sandpoint) were so dependent on some OGL content that it would have been easier to simply scrap the adventure and do something else entirely from scratch if they were to be remastered adventures... but even then we wouldn't be able to complete those until the monster rules were available.
You'll note that Monster Core comes out at about the same time we switch over to remastered adventures. That's not a coincidence. That's the earliest we were able to publish remastered content that contains monster stat blocks, be they the big baseline book or an adventure.
TL;DR: We waited that long because we were forced to due to the laws of time and space.
Pathfinder #201 will be the first remastered adventure. Everything up to #200 will be OGL. We haven't yet announced the name of the next standalone adventure, but it's a remastered adventure and is done and will be coming out later this year.
Really? But Hellknight Hill, the first adventure path book written using Second Edition, was published on August 1, 2019, the same day Second Edition Core Rulebook was published. Player Core and GM Core were published on November 15, 2023, yet the adventure path books and Lost Omens setting books published after that still use pre-Remaster rules?
By the way, I heard that there will be the settlement stat block for Sandpoint in Seven Dooms for Sandpoint. Since it is written using pre-Remaster rules, can I assume that the settlement stat block in that book would be different from the one that will be written using Pathfinder Remaster rules?
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If I we're to guess. Keeping all of an adventure path under the same "version" would be something desirable for the sake of consistency. And so even if some of an adventure path had been started before remaster stuff was finalized then it would probably be best to keep it all ogl. Plus #201 is a fresh start so to speak as its after a big milestone number.Yeah, though I wonder why Seven Dooms for Sandpoint want the first OGL one since it's a new adventure and also a nice round #200. Maybe a time issue, maybe adventures aren't as high a priority because they won't need to be Remastered for PFS eventually anyway? (unlike Rage of Elements, which was quickly Remastered)
Spoilered to hide a wall of text:
That decision then went on to inspire a lot of other choices for Season of Ghosts, including my idea to have each volume feature a different month, to use a different four-act storytelling arc, and so on.
When the OGL crisis hit last January, Season of Ghosts volume 1 was just then starting development. All four assignments were written and in and waiting for work... and were written using the OGL 2nd edition rules.
When the OGL crisis hit, I had just turned over the final text for Pathfinder #200 literally a few days before, and for the bulk of January, I was worried that 200 would have to be cancelled and forever unpublished, because a lot of its content leans very hard into OGL elements that would have been frustrating or impossible to fix, given the timeline we were looking at, but also would have made the adventure, as a sequel to an OGL adventure, have some really unpleasant disconnects with established lore and content that would have been very tough to work around. Not saying I couldn't have done it, but it would have been awful and depressing and frustrating to the point I was ready to say nevermind and give back the money I'd been paid to write it. Fortunately (and as all of us at Paizo believed then and believe today) WotC realized that the OGL can't be revoked, and they abandoned their plan to cancel it.
But we had already decided to go full steam ahead with the remaster project, so as to future proof against this thing happening again (remember, it'd happened to us twice before in different ways, first with losing the magazine licenses, then a year later with the edition change abandoning the OGL entirely).
At the same time the Design Team was scrambling to future-proof Rage of Elements to make it non-OGL, we did the same for the adventures that were in development at that point. I revised Rusthenge (which included us having to spend more money to get a new cover that had a different monster that wasn't a rust monster featured on the cover... a change that I personally feel makes Rusthenge's cover better, for the record!) to adjust as much of its OGL content as possible, while others (led by John) scrambled to do the same for Sky King's Tomb, which had even MORE OGL content in there. I wrote the "This is the current Darklands" article for that adventure path, which meant having to relocate an already developed article into that Adventure Path's player's guide. They had to do a LOT of surgury to change OGL stuff, the biggest of which was the durgear situation. At the same time as all of that, I was doing the same for Season of Ghosts, which fortunately had very little OGL content in there ... but it still had some stuff.
By the time we were able and ready to actually start the work developing Seven Dooms for Sandpoint, the dust had settled. The OGL would be safe, and in theory we could have continued to publish OGL content forever (as we'd correctly believed up to the day before the whole thing blew up last January), but we didn't want to at that point. The remasterd/ORC future was our only future.
That meant decided where and when to switch over our adventures. Work had already been going on for Rusthenge, Sky King's Tomb, and Season of Ghosts, so flipping those over to remastered would have been both disruptive and in some cases impossible due to printer windows... and we knew by then we wouldn't have monster stats or subsystems or magic items to play with anyway, since those products were on the same parallel production schedule as the remastered project.
And since Seven Dooms for Sandpoint was a pretty number to make a division line on, and more to the point since converting it to be a remastered project would have been VERY difficult (I can get into those reasons in a few months if folks are interested once the adventure is out), we decided in the end to make the switch in April for our adventures.
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My guess it is much easier to synch that all up so that yo uh can release it at the start of an Editions lifespan compared to the frantic and fast paced changes involved with the remaster.
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Really? But Hellknight Hill, the first adventure path book written using Second Edition, was published on August 1, 2019, the same day Second Edition Core Rulebook was published.
And August 1, 2019 is also the same day that PF2 Bestiary was released.
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Pathfinder #201 will be the first remastered adventure. Everything up to #200 will be OGL. We haven't yet announced the name of the next standalone adventure, but it's a remastered adventure and is done and will be coming out later this year.
Really? But Hellknight Hill, the first adventure path book written using Second Edition, was published on August 1, 2019, the same day Second Edition Core Rulebook was published. Player Core and GM Core were published on November 15, 2023, yet the adventure path books and Lost Omens setting books published after that still use pre-Remaster rules?
Writing an adventure, much less an Adventure Path, for a set of rules that don't exist is frustrating and fraught, and results in products that, in time, are widely regarded as not as good as they could have been. This happened with Age of Ashes, and it also happened with Council of Thieves (when we transitioned from 3.5 SRD rules to Pathfinder RPG rules).
But more to the point, we STARTED the process for that knowing what we were getting into, and built into the schedule opportunities and resources for the developers of the adventures to be involved with the new rules and to be familiar with them. Those adventures were written using 1st edition rules, but developed using the 2nd edition playtest rules (which by that point we in Paizo had a few years of time to be experienced with), and then at the last minute before they went to the printer we polished that up as best we could with the final rules.
For this situation... none of that happened. The OGL debacle disrupted everything in a single day, and came from an outside source we had little control over. The decision to switch editions was one we made, and we took years before revealing that to the public to build up our skill with things and to schedule things and to make decisions and get everything going. That process for the OGL situation was compressed to a matter of days rather than years.
That's a pretty huge difference, especially when it's also got the specter of potential legal action involved if we don't comply with the changes.
Put another way... the shift internally at Paizo from 1st to 2nd edition was us planning for a change years in advance (like building infrastructure to deal with an asteroid that's gonna hit us years in the future), while the shift internally from OGL to Remastered was us having to make those changes as the result of an event (like dealing with a volcanic eruption in a town where no volcano previously existed).
In game terms, it's the difference between downtime and a reaction. Pretty big difference.
By the way, I heard that there will be the settlement stat block for Sandpoint in Seven Dooms for Sandpoint. Since it is written using pre-Remaster rules, can I assume that the settlement stat block in that book would be different from the one that will be written using Pathfinder Remaster rules?
The only difference between 2E settlement stat blocks and Remastered stat blocks is that the remastered ones don't have alignment abbreviations as a trait or as part of the NPCs. You can see this by comparing page 135 of the 2nd edition Gamemastery Guide and page 171 of the GM Core side by side. The stat block for Sandpoint published in #200 will be 100% usable in Remastered games because the rules are the same, with the exception of there not being alignment abbreviations.
In fact, you can create characters using the remastered rules and play them in Seven Dooms for Sandpoint (or any other 2nd edition adventure) perfectly well. Your GM will need to be familiar with or have access to 2nd edition books for monster stats and rules for spells and magic items to run a 2nd edition adventure using remastered rules, but that just means having a few extra books on the table or a few extra windows open on the screen.
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Really? But Hellknight Hill, the first adventure path book written using Second Edition, was published on August 1, 2019, the same day Second Edition Core Rulebook was published.And August 1, 2019 is also the same day that PF2 Bestiary was released.
Also a luxury a publishing company enjoys when they make their own decisions and can schedule time and resources to make that happen years in advance, rather than having to react to that and make those decisions in a way that disrupts the currently in production schedule for the year as little as possible, and that affords you the chance to schedule time off from work in the future to take the time to make the climb.
It's easier to climb up a mountain when you train for it for years than if you're abducted from your home, brought to a mountain, and then told to get to the top while simultaneously making sure you still do all the other things you'd promised to do while tackling the new climb.
EDIT: OH and to make that mountain climb analogy even more representative... some of the mountain climbing gear that everyone uses will now potentially get you sued if you use it on your mountain climb, so even before you get started on that climb's deadline, you have to make sure your tools are legal and that the ones you can't use get new tools invented to replace them! :P
EDIT: OH and to make that mountain climb analogy even more representative... some of the mountain climbing gear that everyone uses will now potentially get you sued if you use it on your mountain climb, so even before you get started on that climb's deadline, you have to make sure your tools are legal and that the ones you can't use get new tools invented to replace them! :PYou gotta be careful there. Few are as litigious as Thaddeus H. Piton.
I would warn against using a Phillips screwdriver.
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In game terms, it's the difference between downtime and a reaction. Pretty big difference.
Awesome metaphore.
Thank you for all the hard work you all did on this and that you showed us with these posts.
It is not easy for us to see it from the outside but it's definitely there.
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I always appreciate looks behind the scenes, James. So, yeah, I'd love to hear about how difficult it would have been to re-write Seven Dooms for Sandpoint into a Remastered adventure in a few months. :)
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Really? But Hellknight Hill, the first adventure path book written using Second Edition, was published on August 1, 2019, the same day Second Edition Core Rulebook was published.And August 1, 2019 is also the same day that PF2 Bestiary was released.Also a luxury a publishing company enjoys when they make their own decisions and can schedule time and resources to make that happen years in advance, rather than having to react to that and make those decisions in a way that disrupts the currently in production schedule for the year as little as possible, and that affords you the chance to schedule time off from work in the future to take the time to make the climb.
It's easier to climb up a mountain when you train for it for years than if you're abducted from your home, brought to a mountain, and then told to get to the top while simultaneously making sure you still do all the other things you'd promised to do while tackling the new climb.
EDIT: OH and to make that mountain climb analogy even more representative... some of the mountain climbing gear that everyone uses will now potentially get you sued if you use it on your mountain climb, so even before you get started on that climb's deadline, you have to make sure your tools are legal and that the ones you can't use get new tools invented to replace them! :P
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It is kinda crazy that there isn't a single place to see all announced products. I mean there is this, but it doesn't show the further out releases.
Companies tend to not publish release dates very far out. Too much can change, and buyers are often 'thankless' about it (remembering the delays, forgetting the on-times, leading to a skewed negative view of the company). So again, don't take my list as authoritative. I would be surprised if some of those dates didn't get pushed right. I would be amazed if none of them did.
I get that. The thing is, I'm not saying they should share more information than they do -- merely that it would be nice if there were a single place to see everything that they do decide to share.
As it stands, you have to look at the release schedule page, individual product listings as they are posted (and if there is an easy way to see these, I've not figured it out), the blog, and sometimes Twitch streams.