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Does anyone know when/where this Adventure Path was announced? Just saw it on the store page. Seems to be a lvl11-20 Darklands AP so I'm very excited to know more about it, as I expect my Sky King's Tomb campaign to wrap up this year.
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I don't believe it's been announced other than that.
My guess (and it's ONLY a guess) is it will be on tonight's Paizo livestream (Wednesday, February 25, 2026, at 4 p.m. PST).
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Thank you Jacob for the guess, it turned out to indeed be correct! For anyone else that might be curious but didn't catch it, I jotted down some information about what was said about Vaultlines.
Number one is that it is the first adventure Paizo has written that takes place in the entirety of Darklands (as in, it visits all 3 layers). And the entire adventure takes place in the Darklands. It starts below ground and stays below ground.
The adventure assumes the PCs will be Darklands natives, but it could also be linked to some previous lvl1-10 adventures like Abomination Vaults or Sky King's Tomb. The adventure starts at lvl11, so if the APs don't end with the PCs hitting lvl11 GMs might need to bridge the gap there.
They also showed one new fleshwarp monster, a humanoid with two big, muscley armored hands and one giant hand for a head (but tiny tiny legs).
I am very much looking forward to November. I assume my Sky King's Tomb campaign will be wrapped up by then, so might ask if they want to continue on with Vaultlines.
EDIT: Thank you for hosting, Maya!
I assume we are going to be getting information on the Cavern Elves? I assume that the drow cities are gone?
Creative Director
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I assume we are going to be getting information on the Cavern Elves? I assume that the drow cities are gone?
We'll have more to say about what's going on in the Darklands later in the year once we get closer to this one's release—there will be another Paizo Live stream to talk about it I suspect.
That said, drow are one of the things we left behind when we transitioned to the remastered rules, so they're not a part of Vaultlines.
You had previously mentioned in a stream that you had interest in revisiting / updating Second Darkness.
Will this book cover any of that or is it a wholly separate story?
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You had previously mentioned in a stream that you had interest in revisiting / updating Second Darkness.
Will this book cover any of that or is it a wholly separate story?
Vaultlines, other than being set in the Darklands, has nothing to do with revisiting or updating Second Darkness at all. It's a brand new different story.
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The only replacement has been that any cities that were previously stated to be "drow" cities are now sekmin cities, with the exception of Zirnakaynin, where even the sekmin don't know WTF is going on and frankly they don't WANT to know.
But this is because the drow were fabricated by Koriah Azmeren as a way to cover up the extent of sekmin territory in the Darklands, rather than the drow having existed and now not existing.
The azrinarans of Starfinder don't exist yet in Pathfinder, as they split off from normal elves during The Gap, which takes place long after any events Pathfinder might cover, so the only way an azrinaran would appear in Golarion is through time-travel shenanigans.
So essentially Lizzid People have replaced the Drow.
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Are they actually gone gone, in the sense that former drow cities are now not!drow cities. Or are they just not mentioned?I assume we are going to be getting information on the Cavern Elves? I assume that the drow cities are gone?That said, drow are one of the things we left behind when we transitioned to the remastered rules, so they're not a part of Vaultlines.
We can't/won't talk about drow going forward in the game so they're indeed gone gone. We haven't yet had a solid chance to do a deep dive on the Darklands in a remastered product—the closest being Sky King's Tomb and that was AT THE MOMENT IT ALL HAD TO CHANGE so we were very limited in how we could do stuff there. Hence the 11th hour insertion I wrote about the Darklands in that Adventure Path, meant to try to contextualize a very OGL-reliant (perhaps the MOST OGL-reliant) region of our setting in a new era where we weren't using the OGL, at a time where it looked like anything OGL had to potentially be recalled and destroyed. Fortunately, that's not how it played out and things ended up being a lot less dire!
Vaultlines is the first point where we've been able to get a fully Darklands-themed product onto the schedule for various reasons (on the rules, lore, AND adventure side of things), and so it's going to start tackling those answers. You'll have to wait until later this year to see what sections we tackle and how we do it—it won't be EVERYTHING, but it'll be a start.
Drow are gone. The Darklands and its maps and locations are not. That means hat the drow-associated regions have to change, and that's a big order that can't be adequately covered in a 6 page article written in the most fraught situation that triggered the need for said article. I'm hopeful we'll get to do lots more Darklands stuff in the future after Vault lines, but we have nothing yet to announce there. Folks continuing to let us know (not just me, who has been pushing for us to do more Darklands stuff since before Pathifnder was an RPG in the first place, but ALL of Paizo) and strong sales/reviews for Vaultlines are two solid ways to help make a future where we do more Darklands stuff a reality.
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So essentially Lizzid People have replaced the Drow.
This is huge oversimplification that's a result of us having to scramble to contextualize a very OGL-dependent region of the setting in a short article (see my post just above for more details). We'll have more to say in Vaultlines and HOPEFULLY in products in the years to come beyond that.
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What I'm personally wondering is what part of the Darklands we're starting in! We know the PCs are narratively assumed to be Darklands natives, but the culture and temperament of those natives could be very different depending on whether they're under Varisia or the Mwangi Expanse or the Realm of the Mammoth Lords or the Isle of Kortos!
Good to here that the regions and the like are still gonna be there, like of course Ilvarandin can't have intellect devourers anymore but maybe they get replaced by someyhing else. I quite like the Darklands as they have societies very alien to the rest of Golarion like those pyshic pirate people that were a ray of hope underground and you can always explore them further like "what are the Darklands of Tian Xia, of Vudra, of Casmaron..." so very exciting stuff
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Good to here that the regions and the like are still gonna be there, like of course Ilvarandin can't have intellect devourers anymore but maybe they get replaced by someyhing else. I quite like the Darklands as they have societies very alien to the rest of Golarion like those pyshic pirate people that were a ray of hope underground and you can always explore them further like "what are the Darklands of Tian Xia, of Vudra, of Casmaron..." so very exciting stuff
Ilvarandin is still there and unchanged. No intellect devourers, but they've been replaced by corpse riders, aka Xoarians. This is a case where the switch from OGL to Remaster went very smoothly, because we've spent the past decades giving our version of "intellect devourers" their own uniquely Pathfinder vibes, so it was easy to rename them and adjust the art a little and presto!
The neothelids of Denebrum also need to get replaced—but there we've got seugathis and it's easy to replace them with GIANT seugathis.
Other stuff, like duergar, we replaced with hryngar and leaned in more to the Droskar elements (a deity we created for the setting).
And other elements are creatures either drawn from public domain sources (deros, morlocks, serpent folk, Lovecraftian stuff) or things wholly invented by us (munavris, urdefhans, vault-builders/vault-keepers), and thus aren't a part of the OGL umbrella at all.
The drow were a perfect storm of all of the above NOT applying.