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Are the Shadow Beasts still running around in Westcrown after dark or has the city somehow shaken that curse?
AFAIK, they're still a "feature" of Westcrown that we became familiar with during the Council of Thieves AP, but I figured I'd ask because I haven't seen any updates on the phenomena in any of the Lost Omens books. I also don't keep up with the stuff happening if the PFS scenarios, so if something happened in one of those, I have missed it.
If Westcrown is still cursed with the Shadow Beasts, has there been any progress on getting to the bottom of why they keep coming or what/who keeps calling them there?
Personally, I think the Kuthites are behind it, but I don't know that for sure.
Any updates would be appreciated.
Thanks.
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Are the Shadow Beasts still running around in Westcrown after dark or has the city somehow shaken that curse?
AFAIK, they're still a "feature" of Westcrown that we became familiar with during the Council of Thieves AP, but I figured I'd ask because I haven't seen any updates on the phenomena in any of the Lost Omens books. I also don't keep up with the stuff happening if the PFS scenarios, so if something happened in one of those, I have missed it.
If Westcrown is still cursed with the Shadow Beasts, has there been any progress on getting to the bottom of why they keep coming or what/who keeps calling them there?
Personally, I think the Kuthites are behind it, but I don't know that for sure.
Any updates would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Creative Director
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| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
PF1e books had habit of pretending aps haven't happened, so only source in 1e that acknowledges shadow beast thing being solved is Hell's Vengeance since final book takes place in westcrown years after council of thieves
That wasn't a "habit" as much as it was a deliberate attempt to not overwrite or make assumptions about how any one adventure or Adventure Path played out. We didn't want to hard-code things into canon that people would take as us invalidating their play experience, but also we wanted to keep our Adventure Paths "evergreen." By not setting implicit start dates or canonizing end dates, you could more or less play most of the Adventure Paths in whatever order you wanted and not have to worry about those events disrupting canon. There were exceptions, of course, like when we did sequel Adventure Paths (like Jade Regent or Return of the Runelords or Shattered Star), and there were some that were specifically coded to a specific in-game event or year (such as Reign of Winter) but for the most part, your group could play them in whatever order you wanted and the rest of our products wouldn't invalidate things. This also makes it easier for new players to join the game, since in theory, you don't need to be "caught up" on the story.
Turns out, that's not how the vast majority of Pathifnder customers interpreted things, and most people assumed that the events of each Adventure Path played out in world in the same order that they were published in. Further, as time went on in 1st edition, we had an increasing number of observations and complaints that the setting felt too static—nothing ever changed. Which wasn't the case, because the idea was that every Adventure Path changes things.
So when we transitioned to 2nd edition, we embraced that perception, and now have our Adventure Paths end up canon in the setting. We still try to shift around locations to minimize the "have to read all this stuff before you can even start a new Adventure Path just to get caught up," and try to time our lore books so that they either set up an upcoming Adventure Path or contextualize its results after it's out.
That's why we never published a "what canonically happened to the shadow beasts" in 1st edition.
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Habit, company policy, same thing when I try to be concise and lose the nuance in progress xD But yeah, I do add that technically the adventurer's guide also mentioned it since it had version of Council of Thieves post the ap, but sadly we haven'ts seen the new phantom thief esque thieves guild (instead of blue collar noble mafia) after that book yet despite it being cool new retooling of the faction
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Habit, company policy, same thing when I try to be concise and lose the nuance in progress xD But yeah, I do add that technically the adventurer's guide also mentioned it since it had version of Council of Thieves post the ap, but sadly we haven'ts seen the new phantom thief esque thieves guild (instead of blue collar noble mafia) after that book yet despite it being cool new retooling of the faction
Nor shall we. At least one of its members cannot exist any longer.
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Habit, company policy, same thing when I try to be concise and lose the nuance in progress xD But yeah, I do add that technically the adventurer's guide also mentioned it since it had version of Council of Thieves post the ap, but sadly we haven'ts seen the new phantom thief esque thieves guild (instead of blue collar noble mafia) after that book yet despite it being cool new retooling of the factionNor shall we. At least one of its members cannot exist any longer.
It won't happen in our group's world, either.
The Antipaladin Hellknight in our group at the end of the Hell's Vengeance AP asked Queen Abrogail II to make him the replacement for the mayor of Westcrown. He certainly will not tolerate any reconstituted Council of Thieves.
Additionally, all that tax money that the former mayor had directed to decorating/upgrading all those opera houses will now go where it was supposed to go, i.e. public works like reviving the "Dead Sector" of town, a.k.a. Rego Cader.
Habit, company policy, same thing when I try to be concise and lose the nuance in progress xD But yeah, I do add that technically the adventurer's guide also mentioned it since it had version of Council of Thieves post the ap, but sadly we haven'ts seen the new phantom thief esque thieves guild (instead of blue collar noble mafia) after that book yet despite it being cool new retooling of the factionNor shall we. At least one of its members cannot exist any longer.
haven't played CoT; who has been erased and why?
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Creative Director
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Habit, company policy, same thing when I try to be concise and lose the nuance in progress xD But yeah, I do add that technically the adventurer's guide also mentioned it since it had version of Council of Thieves post the ap, but sadly we haven'ts seen the new phantom thief esque thieves guild (instead of blue collar noble mafia) after that book yet despite it being cool new retooling of the factionNor shall we. At least one of its members cannot exist any longer.
They can still exist; they'd just have a different ancestry and adjusted backstory.
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Creative Director
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haven't played CoT; who has been erased and why?Habit, company policy, same thing when I try to be concise and lose the nuance in progress xD But yeah, I do add that technically the adventurer's guide also mentioned it since it had version of Council of Thieves post the ap, but sadly we haven'ts seen the new phantom thief esque thieves guild (instead of blue collar noble mafia) after that book yet despite it being cool new retooling of the factionNor shall we. At least one of its members cannot exist any longer.
One of them is a drow, and if we do more with this in the remastered rules, we'll need to chagne that since drow aren't part of the remastered rules.
By and large, ayindilar elves (aka Cavern Elves) are the go-to remastered replacement for individual drow, with the larger Darklands presence of drow being handled by a mix of serpentfolk and other stuff. We haven't yet announced a product that takes a deep dive into exploring this beyond the first short article I wrote for the last Sky King's Tomb volume... but at some point we will.
haven't played CoT; who has been erased and why?Habit, company policy, same thing when I try to be concise and lose the nuance in progress xD But yeah, I do add that technically the adventurer's guide also mentioned it since it had version of Council of Thieves post the ap, but sadly we haven'ts seen the new phantom thief esque thieves guild (instead of blue collar noble mafia) after that book yet despite it being cool new retooling of the factionNor shall we. At least one of its members cannot exist any longer.One of them is a drow, and if we do more with this in the remastered rules, we'll need to chagne that since drow aren't part of the remastered rules.
By and large, ayindilar elves (aka Cavern Elves) are the go-to remastered replacement for individual drow, with the larger Darklands presence of drow being handled by a mix of serpentfolk and other stuff. We haven't yet announced a product that takes a deep dive into exploring this beyond the first short article I wrote for the last Sky King's Tomb volume... but at some point we will.
oooh, right okay yeah. I've been doing the same with Ayindilar and honestly it's such a seamless fix it just -works-. I'm not sure if it's been stated, but do they have the Pathfinder 'drow' light lavender skin tones? I know at the start of 2e there was a push to make them less 'dark skin tone is evil' if I remember right?
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Creative Director
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We haven't yet done much work at all developing the ayindilar, but my preference is for them to have the light lavender skin tones, if only because that lets us keep a lot of the established art as reference without having to start over from scratch. It for sure is because "dark skin is evil" is a trope we wanted to abandon, but to a much lesser extent it was part of us trying to put our own spin on their look in the same way we did with so many other OGL creatures. Of course, when we said goodbye to the OGL, new looks were, in most cases, not enough—we kept things that had changed so significantly in look and lore and rules that, regardless of their original OGL inspiration, were in Pathfinder very much their own independent thing. That never happened for drow, so here we are.
Awesome! Glad to hear it; I love the art for the elves in AV and was hoping to use it as inspo going forward; happy that works for now anyway!