Vaultlines Adventure Path

[BobTheArchmage]

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.

[Jacob W. Michaels]

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).

[James Jacobs]

SOOON

[Maya Coleman]

Just today! Our first announcement was in our Paizo Live Stream this afternoon. Thanks for joining us, Bob!

[BobTheArchmage]

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!

[Perpdepog]

Oooooooh, exciting! Does that mean we'll be seeing a Darklands-focused book to include player ancestries too? One can hope.

[vyshan]

I assume we are going to be getting information on the Cavern Elves? I assume that the drow cities are gone?

[James Jacobs]

vyshan wrote:

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.

[Curmudgeonly]

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?

[James Jacobs]

Curmudgeonly wrote:

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.

[The Raven Black]

Sekmin FTW !!!

[glass]

James Jacobs wrote:

vyshan wrote:

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.

Are they actually gone gone, in the sense that former drow cities are now not!drow cities. Or are they just not mentioned?

[Archpaladin Zousha]

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.

[Riggler]

So essentially Lizzid People have replaced the Drow.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Riggler wrote:

So essentially Lizzid People have replaced the Drow.

SNEK people, there's a difference! :P

[James Jacobs]

glass wrote:

James Jacobs wrote:

vyshan wrote:

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.

Are they actually gone gone, in the sense that former drow cities are now not!drow cities. Or are they just not mentioned?

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.

[James Jacobs]

Riggler wrote:

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.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

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!

[Sarcedor]

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

[James Jacobs]

Sarcedor wrote:

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.

[glass]

James Jacobs wrote:

glass wrote:

]Are they actually gone gone, in the sense that former drow cities are now not!drow cities. Or are they just not mentioned?

We can't/won't talk about drow going forward in the game so they're indeed gone gone.

You could not mention them by just not mentioning them - that would not have been what I meant by "gone gone". What I was asking was whether you were going to do that, or deliberately overwrite them. From the rest of your reply (and the Archpaladin's), it seems like you are doing the latter.

[Cori Marie]

Its hard to just not mention something that was a huge part of the Darklands setting without just abandoning the whole thing.

[BobTheArchmage]

James Jacobs wrote:

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.

Wait, are neothelids OGL? I thought they were Paizo originals that were the Golarion equivelant of Mind Flayers.

James Jacobs wrote:

The drow were a perfect storm of all of the above NOT applying.

Ain't that the truth. And as someone who like the Drown and utilize them a lot (but also like the invention of the new Ayndilar as a form of non-evil Darklands elf), I imagine it's gonna be a bit of a headache having to try and marry any new drow-less Darklands lore with the reality of my own home table. Like I imagine given how Zirnakaynin is mentioned of being a haunted city ruin, it might end up being used for a future adventure, which will clash with it already being established as the drow capitol. But those are my worries and problems to solve, not Paizo's.

[TheTownsend]

BobTheArchmage wrote:

James Jacobs wrote:

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.

Wait, are neothelids OGL? I thought they were Paizo originals that were the Golarion equivelant of Mind Flayers.

Neothelids are in OGL lore under the same name and design as an aberrant state of the Mind Flayer lifecycle -- a tadpole that consumed its brood and grew to enormous size rather than being implanted in a humanoid host. Pathfinder lore revamped them as an independent species of aberration loosely tied to the Cthulhu mythos and created the Seugathi as a servitor race. I guess that specific IP wasn't as litigiously protected as the Mind Flayers proper, thus putting them in the same gray area as Drow and Ropers and the like, but now a lot more of that has to go.

[James Jacobs]

glass wrote:

James Jacobs wrote:

glass wrote:

]Are they actually gone gone, in the sense that former drow cities are now not!drow cities. Or are they just not mentioned?

We can't/won't talk about drow going forward in the game so they're indeed gone gone.

You could not mention them by just not mentioning them - that would not have been what I meant by "gone gone". What I was asking was whether you were going to do that, or deliberately overwrite them. From the rest of your reply (and the Archpaladin's), it seems like you are doing the latter.

We're doing the latter. This is one of the only OGL to Remastered hard-reset overwrites we're doing, but we haven't had the chance to do it yet. Saying nothing would have made it feel like we forgot them, but more importantly, saying nothing would increasingly risk assumptions by employees, license holders, and more that they were still there and that nothing changed. Saying nothing wasn't a luxury I felt we had in this case.

[James Jacobs]

TheTownsend wrote:

BobTheArchmage wrote:

James Jacobs wrote:

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.

Wait, are neothelids OGL? I thought they were Paizo originals that were the Golarion equivelant of Mind Flayers.

Neothelids are in OGL lore under the same name and design as an aberrant state of the Mind Flayer lifecycle -- a tadpole that consumed its brood and grew to enormous size rather than being implanted in a humanoid host. Pathfinder lore revamped them as an independent species of aberration loosely tied to the Cthulhu mythos and created the Seugathi as a servitor race. I guess that specific IP wasn't as litigiously protected as the Mind Flayers proper, thus putting them in the same gray area as Drow and Ropers and the like, but now a lot more of that has to go.

Yup.

This happened because of a weird loophole/choice that WotC made. While they kept the mind flayers out of the OGL, they put neothelids into the Psionics Handbook, and when they released the contents of that book as open content, that meant that we could use the neothelid in Golarion. We just had to give them a different flavor. This is also how we ended up with access to intellect devourers and others (the brain collector, ANOTHER mind-flayer replacement, but this one originally from the Expert set rules introduced via the adventure "Castle Amber", crept into the OGL via the Epic-Level Handbook).

Ropers were always in the OGL, like drow, but unlike drow, ropers were never a cornerstone of an entire Darklands region. So them being replaced in the game's environment is a lot easier–this one IS a case where we just don't talk about ropers anymore, and when the time comes to do an encounter where in the OGL days we would have used a roper, we instead use a gogiteth or something else.

[BobTheArchmage]

So I got a question that isn't neccessarily specific to Vaultlines, but about the Adventure Path releases as whole, but I figured I'd use the Vaultlines listing as an example.

So I can see from the store page that Sen H.H.S., Jacob W. Michaels, and Andrew White are listed as the authors of the AP. I assume these are the three people who, if the APs were still being written as 3 separate boosk, would handle one book each. What I do not see anywhere in the listing is a mention of who it is that is the Adventure Path's "director" or "developer" or whatever the position is called. The one who is in charge of the AP as a whole and making sure the different parts meld together. I am not sure if that position has ever been listed in the store listing for AP products, but if not I am curious to know who specifically is in charge of Vaultlines.

I hope that question makes sense.

[James Jacobs]

We traditionally only put authors on a book's cover or author byline... even though in some cases, the book's lead developer does end up writing a portion of things and is the one who builds the overall plot and is the "director" of the show, as it were. Those credits live on the table of contents inside the book.

"Development Lead" is the credit you're looking for, by the way. For Vaultlines, that role is filled by Bill Fischer.

[Grumpus]

Not to sidetrack even further (but related to the Darklands) who wrote the adventure portion of the PF1 module Cradle of Night? It lists 4 authors in the credits. (Jacobs, Schneider, Spicer, Vaughan)

[James Jacobs]

Grumpus wrote:

Not to sidetrack even further (but related to the Darklands) who wrote the adventure portion of the PF1 module Cradle of Night? It lists 4 authors in the credits. (Jacobs, Schneider, Spicer, Vaughan)

All four of us split the writing duties on that one as a result of a scheduling nightmare. I don't recall who wrote what parts off the top of my head.

[Arcaian]

glass wrote:

James Jacobs wrote:

glass wrote:

]Are they actually gone gone, in the sense that former drow cities are now not!drow cities. Or are they just not mentioned?

We can't/won't talk about drow going forward in the game so they're indeed gone gone.

You could not mention them by just not mentioning them - that would not have been what I meant by "gone gone". What I was asking was whether you were going to do that, or deliberately overwrite them. From the rest of your reply (and the Archpaladin's), it seems like you are doing the latter.

This would just be de-facto barring most Darklands content from the game; the Vaults of Orv are so distant and mythological that it'd be very hard to go to, so Nar-Voth would be the only place left you'd ever be able to go. Trying to write content in Sekamina without mentioning the Drow would be like writing about North America without mentioning the US.

[ornathopter]

Since the cover has the Xiomorns, I hope there's some story about the Plane of Earth and Ayrzul (I mean, it's fine if they don't, there's so much to fit into the story, I just really want Plane of Earth stuff in an AP sometime.)

[vyshan]

Arcaian wrote:

glass wrote:

James Jacobs wrote:

glass wrote:

]Are they actually gone gone, in the sense that former drow cities are now not!drow cities. Or are they just not mentioned?

We can't/won't talk about drow going forward in the game so they're indeed gone gone.

You could not mention them by just not mentioning them - that would not have been what I meant by "gone gone". What I was asking was whether you were going to do that, or deliberately overwrite them. From the rest of your reply (and the Archpaladin's), it seems like you are doing the latter.

This would just be de-facto barring most Darklands content from the game; the Vaults of Orv are so distant and mythological that it'd be very hard to go to, so Nar-Voth would be the only place left you'd ever be able to go. Trying to write content in Sekamina without mentioning the Drow would be like writing about North America without mentioning the US.

Their will probably be a lot of retcons about the drow when this gets dropped.

[glass]

Arcaian wrote:

You could not mention them by just not mentioning them - that would not have been what I meant by "gone gone".

This would just be de-facto barring most Darklands content from the game

I wasn't going to comment again because, while I don't like Paizo's decision on this, I have to respect that it is their business (literally and figuratively). But I'm sorry, his is hogwash.

The darklands is much bigger than north America, being under essentially the entire world. More fundamentally, it is also three-dimensional in a way that surface continents are not - it would be trivial to avoid showing the drow cities on future maps without overwriting them by simply shifting the cutlines they are taken at by a few 10s of metres (100s at the most).

[The Raven Black]

glass wrote:

Arcaian wrote:

glass wrote:

You could not mention them by just not mentioning them - that would not have been what I meant by "gone gone".

This would just be de-facto barring most Darklands content from the game

I wasn't going to comment again because, while I don't like Paizo's decision on this, I have to respect that it is their business (literally and figuratively). But I'm sorry, his is hogwash.

The darklands is much bigger than north America, being under essentially the entire world. More fundamentally, it is also three-dimensional in a way that surface continents are not - it would be trivial to avoid showing the drow cities on future maps without overwriting them by simply shifting the cutlines they are taken at by a few 10s of metres (100s at the most).

I think that would end up making the Darklands much more complicated than the 3 levels we have in the setting.

[glass]

The Raven Black wrote:

I think that would end up making the Darklands much more complicated than the 3 levels we have in the setting.

It's already much more complicated than that (and more complicated than can be comprehensively represented). That's a good thing, because it means there is practically unlimted space for both Paizo and individual GMs to add whatever they want to. That was kinda my point.

[TheTownsend]

The point of the Darklands is not its bigness, but the "Points of Light" of civilization, however corrupt, dotting it. If it's just a bunch of caves with occasional mindless monsters, it's functionally an oversized dungeon.

They can't just "not talk about" a major faction claiming huge swaths of territory every single time they draw a map or describe the ecology. Exploring the interconnectedness of the region is the point of exploring it. If the Drow are unimportant enough to everything else around them that it's remotely possible to describe the area in depth while just leaving them unstated, they might as well be gone anyway. Could a new reader picking up a gazeteer of the Darklands for the first time really be satisfied with description of Hryngar raiding and Sekmin territorial disputes against as "Unknown enemy" that we can say absolutely nothing about even though they're supposedly a massive and ostentatious presence in the region Wink Wink Nudge Nudge? The whole point of the Remaster is for Pathfinder to firmly be its own IP, not a sly reference to something that came before.

Now, the beauty of games like this is individual GMs already have licence to add "whatever they want to"! If you want to run a game prominently featuring the Drow, perhaps drawing from the wealth of descriptions published in 1e and Legacy 2e, you are free and encouraged to do so! Hell, draw up stats for Mind Flayers if you feel like it, the folks at Paizo neither can nor would stop you!

But they've gotta cover their own asses here, and they would rather present something cohesive unto itself within those restrictions than dance in circles trying to maintain a reference to something else.

[Arcaian]

glass wrote:

Arcaian wrote:

This would just be de-facto barring most Darklands content from the game

I wasn't going to comment again because, while I don't like Paizo's decision on this, I have to respect that it is their business (literally and figuratively). But I'm sorry, his is hogwash.

The darklands is much bigger than north America, being under essentially the entire world. More fundamentally, it is also three-dimensional in a way that surface continents are not - it would be trivial to avoid showing the drow cities on future maps without overwriting them by simply shifting the cutlines they are taken at by a few 10s of metres (100s at the most).

Yeah, but the darklands under the entire world isn't very relevant if 90%+ of content is set in Avistan or northern Garund. For the Darklands under this region, we know that there's a large series of tunnels and caves (Nar-Voth) which then leads to Sekamina, which is where basically all the classical Darklands stuff is, and is canonically where there's space for big civilizations in the darklands that isn't down deep in the almost-unknowable Vaults of Orv. Canonically, before the drow retcon, the drow controlled every single canon settlement in Sekamina with the exception of one serpentfolk city, one hryngar city, and one ghoul city. The drow controlled the entire region of Sekamina under Avistan, with the exception of a small region around the hryngar city underneath southern Andoran, and a small region around the serpentfolk city underneath northern Varisia, both of which are affected heavily by Drow politics.

If you said that we'd just not visit the areas of the Darklands where the drow are, so they don't need to be retconned, you would be unable to engage with the Sekamina parts of the Darklands (i.e, the bits that are classically the Darklands) under the following metaregions:
- Old Cheliax
- Most of the Shining Kingdoms (maybe not taldor)
- the Eye of Dread
- the Broken Lands
- the Saga Lands

Which is to say, you would be barring a very significant chunk of the Darklands content from the game, because if not the majority of adventures take place in these regions, it's pretty damn close.

[The Raven Black]

Arcaian wrote:

a small region around the serpentfolk city underneath northern Varisia

Just realized that Varisia and Valusia sound suspiciously similar.

[James Jacobs]

The Raven Black wrote:

Arcaian wrote:

a small region around the serpentfolk city underneath northern Varisia

Just realized that Varisia and Valusia sound suspiciously similar.

As the inventor of the word Varisia and a long-time fan of Robert E. Howard, I can confirm this is a coincidence...

...but also can confirm that every writer has their own method and inspiration and technique for making up names, and that process is invariably shaped and influenced by that writer's favorite writers, so Varisia and Valusia being similar sounding doesn't surprise me, even though I never made that connection until I read this post.

[glass]

*Fails Will save*

Arcaian wrote:

Yeah, but the darklands under the entire world isn't very relevant if 90%+ of content is set in Avistan or northern Garund.

The Darklands just under Avistan and northern Garund is stil enormous.

Arcaian wrote:

Canonically, before the drow retcon, the drow controlled every single canon settlement in Sekamina with the exception of one serpentfolk city, one hryngar city, and one ghoul city.

According to PathfinderWiki, that's twelve settlments. That could be off by multiple orders of magnitude, and it would still be a negligible compared with the unexplored space in Sekamina.

Arcaian wrote:

If you said that we'd just not visit the areas of the Darklands where the drow are, so they don't need to be retconned, you would be unable to engage with the Sekamina parts of the Darklands (i.e, the bits that are classically the Darklands) under the following metaregions

Nonsense. There is space for unfathomably more tunnels/caves/settlements/points of interest under each one of those areas than ever could be described, let along already has been.

Think how much stuff is on the surface of Avistan, how much has been described, and of how they still have not detailed everything.

Then consider that Sekamina is three-dimensional in a way that the surface world is not, and 6 km deep. So it has vastly more space for stuff, despite having considerably less stuff already described. Admittedly, a lot of that volume is solid stone, but that works for us as much as it works against us - a pair of settlements could be 100 m apart in the Darklands, and each might not even know the other exists.

Continental scale maps do not show everything, even if they are on the same level. And Sekamina could easily have 12 or 24 separate continent-scale maps just under one continent.

Obviously, Paizo have made their decision. I while I might not like it, they may have good reasons (I think Mr Jacobs mentioned concern about drow being missed in freelancer submissions). But "there is no space to do otherwise" is not a good a reason, because it is simply wrong.

[Arcaian]

glass wrote:

Think how much stuff is on the surface of Avistan, how much has been described, and of how they still have not detailed everything.

And yet, if Paizo published a book describing the previously-unmentioned halfling empire that dominates much of central Cheliax, it'd still be in significant conflict with existing lore. Opening up Into the Darklands, their description of Sekamina says:

Into the Darklands, pg 31 wrote:

The drow empire spans much of central Avistan, from Varisia east to Razmiran and from the Worldwound south to the northernmost reaches of Andoran. Theirs is easily the largest empire in all the Darklands

It also says:

Into the Darklands, pg 31 wrote:

Of the three realms of the Darklands, Sekamina is the most civilized, the most explored by the darksider nations. Here are not the vast uncharted tertiary tunnels of Nar-Voth, nor the mysterious and ancient and unknowable vaults of Orv. Between the svirfneblin, the ghouls, and the drow alone, Sekamina is a vast region dense in places with cities, towns, and well-traveled trade routes. The wilderness still exists in Sekamina, but the greater danger comes from the numerous nations of the region—nations who rarely get along well for long.

Sekamina isn't an unexplored area, it isn't filled with a wide variety of locations unknown to the inhabitants to add in more stuff without touching the Drow. This is our most complete description of this part of the setting, and it makes it very clear that Sekamina is explored, settled, and controlled by nations in the same sort of way that the surface world is, and that the Drow are the largest of these in the whole Darklands. You absolutely could add new locations and places here, but it'd be the same as expanding on already-established regions of the surface world; if a new settlement within Taldor isn't controlled by Taldor, the settlement's story has to revolve around that fact, and it also has to be minor enough that the major setting overviews haven't mentioned it. They control the entirety of Sekamina from Varisia to the Worldwound to the River Kingdoms to the northern bits of Andoran. You would have to condemn all that region to never being discussed again in canon material if you wanted to keep the Drow canon in the setting. You can't just make up facts like "you could have 24 separate continent-scale maps under Avistan to represent Sekamina [and so the Drow don't control all of this area]" when that is in direct conflict with the setting material that you are trying to keep canon.

It'd also be difficult - possible, but messy - to maintain much of the rest of the canon Sekamina information without referencing the Drow. They're by far the dominant force in the region - it'd be like trying to write an article on Isger without mentioning Cheliax. You can communicate a great deal about the internal aspects of the nation, but at some point it will become relevant that there's a much larger imperial force very close by that wants to expand and control the nation.

Sekamina is also only 6000 feet deep, not 6000 metres (more like ~1800 metres), and many of the canon depictions of these locations have massive open caverns that would take up a very significant chunk of this width.

[vyshan]

I am going to assume that all the drow stuff is just going to be retconned away.

[Arcaian]

vyshan wrote:

I am going to assume that all the drow stuff is just going to be retconned away.

It has already been made canon that all pre-existing mentions of drow came from lies spread by the first couple of PFS agents who discovered the serpentfolk empire underneath Avistan, and - worried about what may happen if the truth got out - fabricated the story of the drow. All drow settlements have been retconned to actually have been serpfentolk settlements the whole time, with the exception of the Drow capital, which is abandoned but has basically been quarantined off by the serpentfok, who are clearly scared of something about the settlement/its history. We've got a bit of information on the post-Remaster Darklands in the final volume of Sky King's Tomb!

[Davor Firetusk]

Given how prominent the one Pathfinder was in particular they really ought to bring her back on screen to answer for her actions since it is effectively a complete heel turn

[TheTownsend]

What's a little glaring misinformation between friends?

(If I were her, I'd be less worried about the Pathfinder Society than Kyonin, given she effectively invented a bunch of conspiracy theories about them. This retcon effectively makes the Lantern Bearers into a Men In Black myth.)

[James Jacobs]

Davor Firetusk wrote:

Given how prominent the one Pathfinder was in particular they really ought to bring her back on screen to answer for her actions since it is effectively a complete heel turn

Frankly, that whole article was a panic write.

Spoiler:

When we DO get around at some point talking about the remasterd Darklands and what's going on in the drow vacuum, we'll hopefully not only have a LOT more space to discuss things, but also have the advantage of both:

1) Having had years to think things through before publishing something ASAP because who knows if we'll even be able to sell any of our OGL backstock in the future?

2) Not operating under the shadow of "If the OGL goes away and we have to do something extensive like pulp all of our backstock and can we even survive that?"

As we all know, the OGL crisis ended up being a proverbial tempest in a tea pot, and the end result was very workable and bearable and reasonable, but at the time this all was happening we were very much in CRISIS MODE in trying to get things that were shipping out that month (or even that week). For a short time, I was pretty sure Pathfinder #200 was going to have to be cancelled, for example, because it was SO reliant on OGL content, as a result of it being so deep-dive-mode into nostalgia. The publication of the "This is the state of the Darklands" article in the then-about-to-go-to-print volume of Sky King's Tomb was a "if we don't do this and things go bad, we might be screwed" decision.

It felt then and feels now pretty gross and awful to have had to throw Koriah under the proverbial bus in order to provide some in-world context for this all. I'd love to retcon THAT retcon if possible.

That all said, even though we now live in a world years removed from that panic, the decision stands that we've moved away from OGL content, and the Darklands, as one of the most heavily OGL reliant regions we've got in Golarion AND one of the least discussed in the lore books and adventures means that it's been in this weird sort of limbo for far longer than I've felt comfortable with.

Vaultlines will be our first chance to start recontextualizing things here in a more responsible way with more than 5 pages of last-minute scramble-writing to cover it all.

BUT to manage expectations, Vaultlines is an Adventure Path first and is NOT a Darklands lore book. This means that it'll cover what it needs to cover, and will set things up for future content to expand things, but it's not going to answer everything. We'll do our best, though!

[BobTheArchmage]

James Jacobs wrote:

BUT to manage expectations, Vaultlines is an Adventure Path first and is NOT a Darklands lore book. This means that it'll cover what it needs to cover, and will set things up for future content to expand things, but it's not going to answer everything. We'll do our best, though!

Here's hoping for a Lost Omens: Darklands in the not too distant future. Especially since (from what was said on the livestream at least) Vaultlines will traverse all three of the Darklands layers. Now obviously as an AP Vaultlines won't have room to detail everything in those layers, but as someone who loves to paint outside the lines it would be nice to know more about what's going on in the world around. Regardless, I am very excited for this adventure path to come out. Between this and Bastion of Blasphemies I feel spoiled for choice this year!

[Lord_Krachah]

As far as I understand, Vaultlines is supposed to start at level 11. Will there be a recommendation – like with Bastion of Blasphemies – for what to play beforehand?

[James Jacobs]

Lord_Krachah wrote:

As far as I understand, Vaultlines is supposed to start at level 11. Will there be a recommendation – like with Bastion of Blasphemies – for what to play beforehand?

Unlike Bastion of Blasphemies, Vaultlines is not built to have a "built in" on ramp. Any 1st to 10th Adventure Path would work in theory, but there isn't one that's an obvious choice. Standard mode for higher level Adventure Paths, really.

And honestly, the idea that you have to play a PC from 1st to 10th level before you can play a higher level Adventure Path kinda does no favors to us publishing more high level adventure paths. It takes a long time to play through 10 levels of content, and we do want to keep publishing higher level stuff, so normalizing the idea of starting a new PC at higher than 1st level is perhaps a good goal here?

Not to poo-poo the idea of playing a PC from 1st to 20th—that is BY FAR my preferred method to do things, but... yeah. That takes time!