User:Oznogon/PaizoCon 2024 Adventure Path Retrospective panel transcript
This page contains spoilers for the following products: events related to Godsrain and War of Immortals.
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Good morning, everybody. It's 10 a.m. here on the West Coast. Is everybody ready to talk about Adventure Paths?
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- All right.
JAMES JACOBS: So I got my coffee.
Intro
ADAM DAIGLE: Welcome to the Adventure Path Retrospective panel. Today, we're gonna talk about Adventure Paths, what they are, how they're made, things that we've learned along the way of making them monthly for over 200-plus months. And first, let's get to know everybody here.
I'm Adam Daigle, I'm Director of Game Development, and I lead the Narrative Team making some of the best adventures in the business. I'm going to go to James.
JAMES JACOBS: I'm James Jacobs, I'm the Creative Director for the Narrative Team for Pathfinder.
JOHN COMPTON: I'm John Compton, I'm a Senior Developer working on the Adventure Paths, so I've worked on Starfinder and Organized Play as well.
WILLIAM FISCHER: And I'm Bill Fischer, I am a new-ish Developer here at Paizo on the Narrative Team.
ADAM DAIGLE: All right, so what are Adventure Paths? One thing is that they started way back in something prior to even Pathfinder existing, and I'm gonna get one of our longest standing members of the team to give a little bit of a throwback recap on that.
JAMES JACOBS: Throwback, yeah, we started doing Adventure Paths really back in Dungeon magazine when Paizo was initially spun off to publish the official D&D magazines and other magazines for Wizards of the Coast.
I came into Paizo a year later after they founded the company and we're already doing Adventure Path content, just started doing Adventure Paths when I started. In fact, my first day, we were in a panic mode because we had to ship the third volume of "Shackled City" and the cover wasn't in yet, and it was like three or four days away, so that came in like right down at the line. So that was a fun introduction to the hectic schedules of the magazine publication world.
But yeah, so Dungeon started doing, was actually kind of struggling at the time. It was trying to do different things to get people interested in more compelling adventures, et cetera, and the Adventure Path really was like the secret weapon. People started buying every volume that had an Adventure Path in it with the first one, "Shackled City."
And we would hear over and over again at conventions, it was like, "Hey, do you buy Dungeon magazine?" 'Cause people would say like, "I love adventures." They say, "Yeah, but I only buy the ones with the Adventure Paths, and I'm more often than not." So by the time we finished with, the original one, "Shackled City," it was very much like the first author writes one, and then they give it that turnover to the next author, they read it and write it the next one. So it was sort of a build-as-you-go storyline.
And when Erik Mona took over the magazine as the publishing editor-in-chief, he and I worked on "Age of Worms" and outlined that whole thing all at once so that we had everything ready to go, knew the whole thing that was going on, were able to give all that information to the authors and get them working immediately. And the idea was to publish one in every volume, every issue.
ADAM DAIGLE: Saying the read-one, pass-it-on, the design-as-you-go thing terrifies me every time you tell that story. I can't imagine us trying to even do anything similar to that these days.
JAMES JACOBS: It was, I mean, we didn't know where we were going. I mean, there were weird side effects, like the natural climax of the storyline happened with two adventures to go, with the city of Cauldron exploding in a volcano.
(Spoilers, it's been over 20 years or so, or 20 years or so, so I think it's probably okay.)
Anyway, so yeah, that was slightly the start of that.
The term Adventure Path kind of predates even the issues of the magazines. Like I think when third edition first launched with "Wizard of the Coast," they were talking about, "We need a series of modules, standalone adventures, that you could play back to back to back, but they wouldn't be connected, but you could do that if you wanted." Like you played "Sunless Citadel," you could go on to "Forge of Fury," and if you finished that one, you could go on to "Speaker of the Dream." I think it was, all the way up to level 20.
But that was even less organized as an adventure path, even though it was sort of behind in the design room and all that, called an Adventure Path. I mean, it was never publicly really referred to that as much.
And I think it was a combination of Chris Youngs(?) and Chris Perkins, who were working together really strongly on Dungeon at that time, decided, let's just do a full campaign in Dungeon. They'd done like a five-part storyline before in second edition D&D, I believe it was, set in the mountain realms, and it was pretty popular.
So it's like, well, let's just do an entire campaign. But I've always loved that sort of mode of play where you're doing an entire storyline from the first level all the way up to as high as you can go. And it's the type of gameplay that I'd always run when I was a kid, doing campaigns. A lot of those have been like Rise of the Runelords and Curse of the Crimson Throne have turned into Pathfinder adventure paths.
But again, I was from the inside at Dungeon at that point as someone creating them, and I never, I really didn't get to have fun with the customer, like the anticipation of what's going next.
But Bill, I hear that you did have sort of an inside track of that.
WILLIAM FISCHER: Yeah, I was a subscriber to Dungeon. I remember when the Adventure Paths started, and I was definitely, like I got all the Dungeon magazines, but I was definitely one of those people that really was excited about the idea of an Adventure Path, and those were my favorite issues.
And there had been adventures, Dungeon adventures that were like sequels, but they hadn't been planned from the start, like you were saying. It was never an intentional story. So that was really exciting and really kind of an innovative thing to see. So yeah, that was very exciting.
ADAM DAIGLE: Yeah, I had a similar path to Bill. I was a Dungeon subscriber whenever the magazines went away, and got the email of like, "Do you want to roll your subscription over to this brand new Pathfinder thing?" And I was like, "Well, these Paizo folks have been doing a pretty good job. Let's see what they got." And been at it ever since.
Also, I want to let everyone know that we're gonna be doing a Q&A here at the end. So get your questions in the chat. We've got somebody collecting them for us. Also, there is a post-panel discussion channel on the Discord that a few of us will be hanging out in after this as well.
How APs are made
So now that we've covered a little bit of the history of it, let's talk about Adventure Paths and how they get made. One of the biggest challenges is that they are a monthly product, but it takes far longer than a month to actually produce one of these things. So we have to stay on top of things. If we run into problems, we've got to scramble to fix them so we can hit that every single month deadline.
So John, do you want to talk a little bit about that?
JOHN COMPTON: Sure. And I mean, when it comes to how are they made, I guess the first thing I can say is we send out an outline now. We don't just pass one manuscript to the next author. I think this is my first time hearing about that part.
Yeah, so basically behind the scenes, we as the narrative team, there's a little subsection of us for the Adventure Path planning. And we'll sort of gather, jeez, like 18 months in advance of when an AP is likely to be coming out, sometimes more. And we'll start to pitch around ideas of what are some of the Adventure Path possibilities that we might do.
And that can be a time when you know you can, some of us will bring out like four, six, 12 of our various little like Adventure Path idea babies. And then we watch as the team very constructively says, "I don't think half of these will ever see the light of day." But it's an important part of the brainstorming and pitch process.
And a part of that is also like, what's going on in our setting? What is coming out in our hardcover line? What is happening in order to play? Things like that. So we can start to build some connections as well.
We can look for some strategic possibilities, goals to meet, things like that. "So, hey, there's a War of Immortals coming up." We start talking about what sorts of things could we do to play with that rule set, that event. What do we want our narrative team to be contributing, changing, or like during that time?
That all gets turned into saying, "Okay, well, the next slot is going to be you, John, you're going to be doing a three-part AP. You really like that idea." Make an outline. And then there's a large outline process.
So to make a detailed summary of, here's all the background information. Here's every resource that authors should be having access to. Here are the important tonal changes that we are trying to take into account for this thing.
So for example, like, Triumph of the Tusk had a page and a half of, what have orcs been? What are orcs now? What do we want orcs to be like? What themes are we playing with and not playing with in the course of this Adventure Path in order to meet those thematic goals? Things like that.
But then there's a very detailed summary of like how every single one of the volumes is supposed to go and how that plays into the bigger whole, what all the background articles are. It's a very detailed document. And if I think about like some of the ones I've done, a three-part or three-volume adventure path ends up being like a 50-page Word document.
So how's their production changed over time? It's probably just a matter of like adding in more detail, more tools for some of our authors. A lot of our Adventure Path outlines have kind of a copy-pasted thing that gets put from outline to outline of like, five pages of author advice, recommendations, do's and don'ts, be sure to use sorts of stuff. And a bunch of that has come from us learning over the course of the past almost 20 years or so.
And so it's like, oh, we wanna make sure that that thing doesn't happen again. Let's put some advice in, some very gentle advice that doesn't involve us throwing anybody under a bus, but let's head this off before it happens again.
One of the big things that has changed though over the course of creating Adventure Paths, especially over the past decade or so, is Paizo has also done a lot of experimentation with author communication and tools for that. And it varies by the developer and sometimes it varies by the timeline. Sometimes timelines get compressed a little bit, we have to really push forward. There's not quite as much time for creating like Discord chats or the like to throw around ideas we just need to get straight into the text. But we, I mean, Discord has been kind of the go-to for us for a while now, but we've probably experimented with about five other programs to get authors talking to each other.
So it's not just the outline helping to coordinate those adventures, but the authors themselves doing it. And the one little anecdote I can say very briefly to that is one of the early experiments in that was Ruins of Azlant. I was joking around with Thurston Hillman, who was one of the authors on that.
And we got to talking about the Apparatus of Kwalish, or the apparatus of the crab. And I may have helped to hype up the idea of, collect one piece of your grand submarine per adventure volume, that a whole bunch of the authors got really excited about and then took it all to Adam. They're like, "You wanna do this thing?" He's like, "I don't think you can do that."
And then they scuffled back and we're very sad. And we've been sad ever since.
ADAM DAIGLE: I actually was a bad, that was a bad call on my part. I absolutely should have allowed the bizarre, put it, build-your-own-apparatus system in there. I was just terrified that I'd be able to actually adapt that kind of change so late in the game.
JOHN COMPTON: And only nine years later or so did we get Mechageddeon! 
and finally realized that's the thing.
But the last part that I'll bring up is that when we're doing these APs, we're also looking toward what the end state is.
Are we aiming to, like Hell's Rebels, overthrow local government? Are we looking to change the map in some way? Are we looking to remove one of the NPCs? Are we setting up some bigger organization for us to play with in the future? Stuff like that.
The storylines' implied endings not only help us to create our outlines, but they also have been this consideration that we didn't even have to consider up until about six years ago. Because every adventure path, with little exceptions, were independent of each other. And their ramifications were ways that you could change your Golarion, your Lost Omens setting.
But once we did Second Edition, we had to kind of consider, how do we want to move the timeline up? And that involved saying, okay, we're going to presume that this is the end state of this AP, this is how this AP ended, so that we can modify our setting and grow our setting.
And now as part of the AP outline process, we're also considering those changes a lot more than we did before. And not quite to the same extent of like, hey, what if we have to do another timeline snap forward? But what would the idea be if we had to apply this change to Golarion, what it looked like?
ADAM DAIGLE: So yeah, speaking of like how things have evolved, we've also learned a few things over the years. One that I can definitely speak to involves a few things. It involves the change from six-part Adventure Paths down to three that allows us to tell more stories, but also some of the pitfalls that you could run into with that.
Like one of the things like being able to tell more than two stories a year is something that we really enjoy about having three-parters. But when we had six and we set each of those in the same location with Hell's Rebels and Hell's Vengeance, that was an entire year of Cheliax. So anybody who wasn't really that into Cheliax were basically kind of like left out for an entire year of our adventures. And that's not something we wanna run into again.
But we also run into some other problems with trying to incorporate mechanics in where we're trying to do like a day and date release of an adventure that uses a hardcover rule system. Sometimes it's hard to get those rules implemented as early as possible. We saw a little bit of that with Wrath of the Righteous. James, do you wanna talk a little bit about that?
JAMES JACOBS: Yeah, the tricky thing that-
ADAM DAIGLE: Or even edition changes, because we've done that with Council of Thieves and we learned some things from that that we applied to Age of Ashes.
JAMES JACOBS: One extra thing before I get to there. With Hell's Rebels and Hell's Vengeance, we had this idea of like, let's do two Adventure Paths in the same region overlapping in time at the same time. And that was tricky too because we were setting this up for a situation where one of our Adventure Paths had to be the one where the player characters fail because one of them had to be the final state of where everything was going.
So we had to. Rob McCreary and I had a lot of complicated meetings on figuring out like, all right, well, my Hell's Rebels takes place in Kintargo, Ravounel area. It's only contained in that area and it doesn't really do anything else. And then your adventure, Hell's Vengeance, that covers the rest of Cheliax and we just don't cross the wires there. And by doing that, we managed to pull it off in a way I think that makes both of those adventures feel like they're individual triumphs for good guys and bad guys.
The tricky thing with Wrath of the Righteous was that when we start creating an Adventure Path, it's a six-part thing back in the day involving over six authors. You got the six adventure authors, you got all the people working the back-matter stuff. And it's about 600 pages of content, which is about twice as much as what we would generally do in a hardcover rulebook.
And even though it comes out over the course of six months, it's so interconnected and everything, we have to start so much earlier than the rulebook side of things. And so by the time we were outlining Wrath of the Righteous and assigning it to authors, the mythic rules didn't exist yet. They were still things that we were talking about, like here's how we're doing. We had to basically have people start writing them at the same time. And so we would have to do things.
This happens with the edition changes too. The edition takes a long time to do, but they're not, we can't wait until those rules are set in stone to start writing an Adventure Path. So what we will do in those things is we will have our authors write those things using the rules that are currently available and tell them like, well, in this one, we're kind of going for this really over the top, high-level content.
So just make that story, do what you want it to do. Don't worry too much about making the encounters work because those rules don't exist for you to make those encounters work yet. And then during development, what we'll do is we'll take the rules as they currently exist often in like, maybe just have had their first editing pass at the start of an Adventure Path. And by the end, maybe we have final, fully corrected printer proofs to work with. And we develop those new rules into things as they go.
And it's a really, really complicated process that as we've seen with Wrath of the Righteous and the Adventure Paths that launched the editions, Council of Thieves and Age of Ashes, they're a little rough around the edges, but they may be a little rough around the edges, but they all came out on time. We never skipped a month, which is a disaster if you're trying to do a monthly release schedule.
I mean, some of them came really close and overlapped a little point. Like when we had like, there were things outside of our control, like disasters that happened in the world or strikes in like shipping container industries and stuff like that. Things that get stuck in customs now and then for whatever reason. I don't think we've ever had a cargo ship sink with all of our stuff on it. But I think that may have happened at one point with some other company I remember reading about.
But anyway, so there's a lot of things that can happen along the way. But one of the more recent things is with the six-volume Adventure Paths, they're just too long.
Bill, you've basically come right in at the sort of when we're making the big switch over to that, do you have anything inside into that from like a boots-on-the-ground perspective?
WILLIAM FISCHER: Yeah, I think that that's one of the best decisions that Paizo has made with the Adventure Paths. 'Cause not that they're necessarily too long, but I think today a group that plays two hours a couple of times a month is a lot more common than a group that plays four-, six-, eight-hour marathons every week. And so a three-part Adventure Path is much more manageable and digestible and can still be a year-long campaign. But you're not necessarily dedicating the next two years of your being in group to finishing this AP.
And then it also gives us a chance to try new things, like Adam was saying. Like if we wanna have an AP set in Alkenstar and if somebody's not interested in Alkenstar, they're not out of luck for the next six months. You know, and it gives us a chance to tell different stories to like a six-month, a six-book Adventure Path. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have this world-spanning, save-the-world adventure, but it certainly pushes you in that direction.
And a three-part AP can be, you know, just save the village or, you know, we're just gonna be fighting the thieves guild in this city. So, and it doesn't mean that we can't do different length Adventure Paths too, like Season of Ghosts or, you know, a six-part Adventure Path sometime down the line, but having that flexibility is a great idea, I think.
New APs
ADAM DAIGLE: All right, so we've talked a little bit about the history and how it's made. Let's jump all the way to the forward and talk about things, our recent APs that are out. And we've also got a special announcement of what's on the way.
Wardens of Wildwood
So starting off, let's go to one of our more current ones and talk to John about Wardens of Wildwood.
JOHN COMPTON: Yeah, so Wardens of Wildwood, I believe the first two volumes of this three-part AP are out. It is a level 5 to basically 13 Adventure Path. And one of the things that I have experienced in the course of not just kind of folklore, but also just adventure design is kind of a reinforcement of like Grimm's Fairy Tales, notion of like the woods are dangerous. You go to the forest in order to roll for initiative.
And that kind of translates over to nature as well in general. And I wanted to do an Adventure Path that not only got to play on kind of like some druid and leshy and ranger tropes, but also was one where the forest is actually now your friend. You are kind of the potentially big, bad, boogie people of the Verduran Forest as you defend it from encroaching civilization, but also an internal threat that plays around with the druids of the Wildwood Lodge.
So just in a nutshell, Taldor and to an extent Andoran have a big old treaty with the Verduran Forest up. We get to harvest some trees, but not all of them. We will otherwise protect you. And the Verduran Forest inhabitants say, "Ugh, fine." And there has been growing resentment about that, especially from some of the like most purest of the inhabitants. So what are arboreals going to say? What's the equivalent of a treebeard going to say about, "We're only going to harvest 5 percent of your kin per year." And there's that growing resentment.
So in the course of this adventure path, you're going to be primarily in the Verduran Forest, although there is a redirect a little bit later on that takes you to another awesome wooded location. And you're uncovering a bunch of its cool history. One of the really important NPCs who shaped the area and regional history. And yeah, and you get to be druids, rangers, anything you want from Howl of the Wild. This is totally an AP where if all of you want to play awakened animals, you'll fit in just fine. So yeah, it should be a great time.
Again, I think the first two volumes are already out there. One is on this way.
ADAM DAIGLE: Then following Wardens of Wildwood is Curtain Call. Let's have James talk a little bit about that.
JAMES JACOBS: Yeah, Curtain Call is a high-level Adventure Path. Going forward, I'm hoping that we're going to be offering a lot more high-level Adventure Paths so that folks can have something to do after they finish one of the lower-level ones. And Curtain Call is the elevator pitch of that one is the Adventure Path where your player characters produce and put on an opera.
And so it's got a lot of whimsical stuff in there, a lot of comedy and just sort of lightheartedness going on. The idea is that your player characters have played something from 1st to 10th level. It might be Abomination Vaults. It might be a campaign you built on your own. Might be the first several volumes of something like Hell's Rebels and then you stop halfway through.
But then once Curtain Call starts, your group is approached by a famous director who says, "I want to make your adventures into an opera that we're going to show it in the Kintargo Opera House. You want to help me put it on?" And so it's shaped very strongly by what adventures you went on before, like how you build the sets in this opera, what sort of characters you cast in it, what sort of special effects you need, whether it's a comedy or a tragedy or just a special effects-laden extravaganza.
And that opera-building element plays out through all three parts of this high-level Adventure Path. The first part, which is called Stage Fright, written by Richard Pett. You are basically sort of auditioning to become part of this opera and getting things off the ground and getting to know the director.
And the second part, called Singer, Stalker, Skinsaw Man written by Kendra Leigh Speedling, that's the one where you're doing all the preamble, where you're hiring composers, auditioning actors, getting special effects ready, building sets and all that stuff, getting the rehearsal started, handling scandals when they inevitably pop up. Hiring a world-famous actor who would be perfect for the main villain, but they've vanished. They've gone into retirement. Nobody knows where they are, so you gotta track them down.
And then the third one, called Bring the House Down, Bring Down the House—one of those two compositions—written by Sen.H.H.S. That's the one where you do Hell Month, which is the last month before you do your premiere, and you've got to do everything just for Hell Month. This is all the last-minute disasters that happen. And then you put your opera on during that last volume.
There's more going on in this one, of course. There's a lot of underhanded conspiracies and things like that, conflicts with other groups that may or may not want your characters to succeed or not. Your previous villain that you fought against, maybe that they survived. Maybe they might be still after you. And there's a certain event that happens at some point during this campaign called Godsrain. At a certain point, Gorum is killed by Achaekek, which is something that we revealed earlier on in this PaizoCon, and while that doesn't happen on screen in this adventure—but that happens in a standalone adventure, Prey for Death—the repercussions of that very much change the tone of what's going on here.
It's sort of the idea is like, what happens if, well, I don't want to spoil too much. It's always tricky not spoiling Adventure Pass too much, but the show must go on is basically the idea. Even if the world is changing fundamentally around you and you're high level, and you've probably attracted the attention of one or more gods in your adventures.
And this whole thing mixes that up. So this is less about how Gorum dying changes things, but it's more about like the gods themselves are reacting to this and your high-level characters get kind of swept up in a lot of that. But at the same point, you're putting on an opera. So you're not going to just step aside and let some troublemaking deity mess with you. You got to take advantage of things and make it all happen, make Mark a mess(?). Make your investors not come after you because you lost a lot of money.
JOHN COMPTON: I mean, the two things I'll say to that is, yeah, it's a high-level adventure and your investors are clearly a threat. Even though you might be level 16.
JAMES JACOBS: Oh yeah, they're a lot lower level, but yeah, they're the ones that were paying for this.
JOHN COMPTON: And the other thing is you mentioned like, now is your opera a comedy, a tragedy? It's like knowing all of the adventuring parties I've ever been a part of as a player, it's both.
JAMES JACOBS: Well, yeah, I mean, that's when you do something like Evil Dead or Tucker and Dale versus Evil. You can have comedy and horror and it's good combo.
Triumph of the Tusk
ADAM DAIGLE: So at the end of Curtain Call with things being kind of thrown into chaos after deific implications, there's a little bit of that in Triumph of the Tusk. Correct, John?
JOHN COMPTON: Yeah, yeah. Triumph of the Tusk is a level 3‒11, three-part Adventure Path. And rather than playing with the absolute immediate aftermath of Gorum's demise and Godsrain, it's instead taking place a couple of months later. So there's already been some turnover and a lot of the developments that we have are really impacting the pantheon of Belkzen. And that is opening up some really interesting changes, plot devices, narrative elements that are happening that are coming to a head around the time of the Flood Truce.
Belkzen basically is like, hey, look, we have about nine months of the year where we run around, we do the orcs, it's pretty dry and badlands-y in Belkzen. But for about three months or so, there's a whole bunch of seasonal rain, meltwater, stuff like that, that floods a large part of the nation. And that's the Flood Truce. It's where basically most fighting is taboo. It's a time to meet up and have a good time.
And Belkzen's current leader, Ardax the White-Hair, is really gung-ho about opening up Belkzen's door to the wider world. Trying to do the equivalent of getting in for an investment or tourism industry or whatever. He's not quite literally that, but that idea. And so he's holding this thing called the Torrent Moot, which is inviting all these world leaders to check out Belkzen, see it when it's at its most beautiful and green, so he can be inspired to tell everybody, you know.
And most world leaders get these invitations and say, "That's Belkzen, that's dangerous. Hey you, third tier ambassador, go for us and report back and tell us if it's worthwhile. And if you die, you're expendable."
Hey, you're third level, third-tier ambassadors as the PC, so it's up to you to determine and to speak to the player's guide, what organizations or countries or interests do you represent as you are sent to, again, being a fresh-out-of-college-level diplomat being sent to some Olympic-style event and hoping, knowing that you have a 20% chance of dying in the process.
But over the course of it, even though you were honored guests initially, you're gonna find yourself getting more and more autonomy and respect within Belkzen as the narrative goes on. So expect to be coddled a little bit at the beginning, but you'll be part of that main narrative by the end. So really excited to explore our culture in a wide variety of ways. Kind of excited to shake up Belkzen's song,(?) both in the divine and in the worldly realms.
ADAM DAIGLE: Awesome, so Triumph of the Tusk runs October, November, and December of 2024. And then starting January of 2025, James has another AP on the docket.
JAMES JACOBS: Yeah.
Spore War
ADAM DAIGLE: James, it's time to announce your new baby.
JAMES JACOBS: Yay, so I'm sitting here watching John have fun making the dwarf Adventure Path, the orc Adventure Path, and I felt jealous. So--
JOHN COMPTON: And the trees Adventure Path.
JAMES JACOBS: Oh yeah, the tree's adventure path. But that's true, I guess the leshy Adventure Path, I don't know.
Anyway, starting in January of 2025, we're going to be doing another high-level Adventure Path, and this is the one where you play elves, or people who are allied with the elves, elves with Kyonin in particular. This Adventure Path is called Spore War. And this is the one where you might kill Treerazer, or Treerazer might kill you. And by you, I mean your player characters, maybe.
This is a high-level adventure path, and it starts out with Queen Telendia is looking at this trouble-brewing in the middle of her neighboring Lake Encarthan. At the center is the Isle of Terror, where Tar-Baphon is brooding and causing trouble, and he's already made one attempt to attack the world, and he got defeated, but now he's just angry.
And there's this element of he might start up something, especially now that we're in this post-War of Immortals era, where war is spreading and things are happening. So Queen Telendia calls upon your 11th-level characters to lead a summit in the town of Greengold, and all of the nations of the Lake Encarthan region, all surrounding them, each send a representative to this meeting, and you have to work with them to build a multi-part alliance to ensure that if Tar-Baphon breaks out, everybody around him living on those nations, Ustalav, and the ruins of Lastwall, and Molthune and Nirmathas, and Druma, and Razmiran, all of you will band together to protect each other from this.
And in the meantime, if other things pop up, you'll help each other, and basically, it's like a United Nations, sort of, of the Lake Encarthan region. You've got things like these other elements that pop up during War of Immortals that are making all these nations extra worried and nervous, and everything's going well until a certain demon lord named Treerazer decides everybody's distracted and things are going weird.
Now's a good chance to do my thing, and there is a disaster that happens, and all of a sudden Kyonin is attacked by Tanglebriar, and the Spore War begins, and so this is the Adventure Path where elves and demons fight each other, and you, as high-level characters, are called upon by the queen of Kyonin to basically do an ever-increasing, ever over-the-top adventures to stop Treerazer from causing all of this problem.
It's not one where you're leading armies or anything like that. Your character's kind of behind the scenes doing the big deal stuff, like doing flurries(?) into the Tanglebriar and eventually confronting Treerazer himself.
So it's a three-part adventure path. It's not a mythic adventure path, but it's, I guess, mythic-adjacent. It's super high-octane. There's gonna be a lot of high-power stuff like that. People who've read Bestiary and Monster Core know that Treerazer is level 25, and that is beyond an extreme encounter, even for 20th-level characters, so there's gonna have to be something that happens where you get extra advantages over this level 25 creature that you are going to inevitably face.
Anyway, so again, it's a three-part adventure. The first one is called Whispers in the Dirt. That one's written by Jason Bulmahn, first Adventure Path he's written since, I think, Second Darkness, so getting him back into the flow is a lot of fun.
The second one is one I'm writing. It's called Secret of Deathstalk Tower, which, to me, is kind of fun because that is the first adventure that I ever put Treerazer in back in 1990, so I have my kind of homemade janky version of this adventure from 1989 that I tried referencing, and I've learned a lot in the last, what, 40, 30 years, let's just say. But it's fun to get Deathstalk Tower out in print.
And then the last volume is The Voice in the Blight, and that's written by Rigby Bendele. And I'm currently in the process of, I'm just starting their adventure developing as soon as PaizoCon is over, so hopefully people will get a kick out of the Adventure Path where you get to kill or get killed by Treerazer.
JOHN COMPTON: And just a follow-up question for you, James, that I can also answer a little bit. You said, "This is the elves versus demons AP," and mentioned the orc AP, the tree AP, the dwarf AP. Do I have to play an elf?
JAMES JACOBS: You don't have to play an elf in this Adventure Path, but this is the best chance for you to play an elf in Adventure Path because this is the story about Kyonin versus Treerazer, and if you are an elf, you're gonna have a pre-invested element in that conflict. If you're not playing an elf, you're gonna wanna play a character that is allied and wants to see the elven nation prosper.
There's certainly, any ancestry will work in here, even something that you might normally, you could play a fungus leshy, and that will open up some interesting possibilities when you are going into a nation where you, as a fungus leshy, you might have to fight some really horrible, awful fungus leshies who may be working for Treerazer.
So it's definitely, as with all of these Adventure Paths, you don't have to be a specific type of character, but as we do more and more of them, it's fun to explore stories that take an assumption that you are allied with the orcs, or you are invested in protecting the Verduran Forest, or you are a mercurial wannabe actor who wants to get their big break.
JOHN COMPTON: Yeah, and just one other unrelated thing I'm seeing in chat, people asking if we had announced the Triumph of the Belks, or the Triumph of the Tusk ones. Just as a quick catch up, Resurrection Flood is the first one by Brian Duckwitz. Then we have Hoof, Cinder, and Storm, co-written by David Schwartz and Shay Snow.
And then we have Destroyer's Doom, written by Kendra Leigh Speedling.
Q&A
ADAM DAIGLE: All right, so that brings us up to current and a little dip into the future. I think at this point, I'm gonna switch over and start getting to some of your questions that you had in chat. And the first one I'm gonna pick up is, what APs have you all played yourselves?
And I'm gonna throw this one to Bill first, because we haven't heard from him in the last 10 minutes. Put you on the spot.
WILLIAM FISCHER: Well, I am usually the GM for my group. So like, I don't think there's an AP that I haven't Frankenstein-monstered something out of, you know, like my group has been to Cauldron, and we use stuff from Savage Tide for when we were doing our, you know, our pirate campaign, or, you know, our island campaign. And like, they've been to, what is the, the dam in Rise of the Runelords? Skull?
JAMES JACOBS: Skull Crossing.
WILLIAM FISCHER: Skull Crossing, yep, so like, and they found that the starship in Iron Gods. So like, I've used so much out of every AP, like at least a map or a, you know, a dungeon, or, you know, use one of the books and morph it that way.
ADAM DAIGLE: So like, that's really how I interact with APs, so. And for myself, I ran Rise of the Runelords for my group back in Texas before I moved out here. Ended up playing in Council of Thieves, where my homeless busker bard ended up becoming the mayor of Westcrown. And then once we were at the office, we had Skull and Shackles and a Mummy's Mask campaign that both of those never finished.
JAMES JACOBS: TPKs!
ADAM DAIGLE: Yep. All right, what about you, John?
JOHN COMPTON: I have played the entirety of Legacy of Fire, Kingmaker, Council of Thieves, and Mummy's Mask. And then I've been a part of several never-finisheds, of Wrath of the Righteous several times over. Man, I wanna say a couple other ones. But the never finished are certainly one of the things that, one of many voices that helped to shape the move towards three-part APs, it was six-part APs. Who even can anymore?
ADAM DAIGLE: All right, James, you got any? I know you've been behind the screen making a lot of these, but.
JAMES JACOBS: The latest one that I actually played in was not a Paizo adventure path. It was Legendary Planet's, Legendary Planet adventure path that Jason Nelson ran. And that one had been going on for like five plus years as a First Edition Pathfinder mythic adventure. We just finished, that was my first in-person game since before the pandemic started. So that was a lot of fun, playing the final session of that a couple of Saturdays ago.
I've played, like Adam was saying, Mummy's Mask and Kingmaker and a couple others. Rob McCreary has started and ended up TPKing us or getting distracted and starting a new one. He's good at that.
I think the last one that I ran for people after it was published was probably Serpent's Skull. But a lot of the Adventure Paths, I like building Adventure Paths and kind of like Bill, you were saying, like taking bits and pieces of other stories and building them together.
And a lot of those over the years, I turned into outlines and had become actual adventure paths like Rise of the Runelords, Curse of the Crimson Skull—Serpent's Skull, Curse of the Crimson Throne—Serpent's Skull, most recently, of course, Seven Dooms for Sandpoint, which was an Adventure Path I ran for a lot of the folks here at Paizo. It was the first Pathfinder RPG game, I think ever, campaign ever played 'cause we started as a playtest for the Pathfinder RPG system.
So yeah, it's definitely something that you wanna, you wanna, if you're gonna be doing an Adventure Path job, playing Adventure Paths is kind of a job requirement.
ADAM DAIGLE: All right, the next question I'm gonna pick up here is, how do you make cohesive APs when each part is written by a different author?
JAMES JACOBS: You wanna grab that?
JOHN COMPTON: Part of our job as developers is to, in the course of developing or dev editing, basically, is to take whatever manuscripts were provided and not only clean them up and enhance them, but also stitch them together. So chapter to chapter, but also if I'm developing part two, I am making sure that it's connecting properly to the first volume and I'm making sure that it's setting up for exactly where the third volume is gonna pick up.
I'm looking to what the various NPCs are that were mentioned in volume one and seeing if, hey, maybe I need to revise one of the scenes in the second volume to give that NPC some more stage time. So that way we can have some more long-standing characters that the PCs are making contact with and interacting with.
So that is, a lot of it is on the developer, but part of those Discord sort of temporary communities that we build for our authors sometimes can also be a way for them to say, hey, I'm author of volume two, I really want to have a quirky academic show up, is one of those showing up in either of your volumes, speaking to the other authors. And one of them might say, oh, I was thinking, I was doing my NPC list for this influence party, but I can totally include quirky academic. What do you need them to do?
ADAM DAIGLE: All right, this one's kind of long. How much do existing player options impact choices for AP settings versus, or slash plot versus having to introduce player options directly in the AP?
I'm thinking of underwater or extraplanar adventures, adventures working with a socially oppositional organization like inside Rahadoum, or with the Red Mantis assassins or Hellknights.
JAMES JACOBS: It's less of an issue in Second Edition, frankly, than First Edition, because in Second Edition, the rules for your player characters are so contained and separate from the rules we use to create NPCs in storylines and stuff like that.
So in a large part, as long as the new character options are always aimed in the same direction of supporting the stories that we want to tell in Pathfinder, the stories we want to tell as adventures automatically build opportunities for those characters, which is one of the incredible strengths for a Second Edition that makes it so much more fun for me personally, to create storylines for.
There are certain situations where specific adventures that we might want to do do require more specific player options. Like we couldn't do Outlaws of Alkenstar before we had Guns & Gears out, because we needed opportunities for player characters to be gunslingers or inventors in the Adventure Path where you want to play gunslingers or inventors.
The mythic rules coming up are another good example. If you want to do something where you really go over the top and do a mythic storyline, we need those rules first. And then once those are out, what we generally want to do is let those rules come out so that we, as the writers and designers of the Adventure Paths are more familiar with them and how they work.
So, and it goes the other direction too. Like sometimes we will do a storyline that requires some new rules and that can spawn rulebooks. And that's basically what happened with Iron Gods back in the day. I wanted to do the Adventure Path where you go fight robots and get laser guns. So I wrote the Technology Guide and got all of that together basically to get Iron Gods off the ground. And that turned into Starfinder.
JOHN COMPTON: And also our backmatter articles in our Adventure Paths are another way of doing that sport. Especially the first volume can be a big one for saying, "Hey, we're doing this Rahadoum adventure path," let's say, and volume one, the back of it might have a hidden priest archetype or something like that. So we give the GM a lot of tools, but sometimes we also try to provide those tools directly into our APs so that the players can easily pick them up and incorporate them.
ADAM DAIGLE: Yeah, the one time that I ran into this for sure was for Ruins of Azlant, 'cause I knew that, I knew that I wanted at least one volume that was almost entirely underwater, but then I wanted to, I guess, dip their toe into the water starting at low level and going up.
So at the time Mark Seifter was on the design team and so I got him to design a whole lot of player options that would allow for, well, basically to keep PCs from just dying automatically in the second book the first time that they're forced to be underwater for longer than a minute.
All right, where should I take the next question? (mouse clicking)
JAMES JACOBS: I can do one real quick that I saw pop up.
- Do it.
JAMES JACOBS: Someone, it's not an Adventure Path question, but someone asked about, will we ever see Dead God's Hand? Which is a standalone adventure we announced way back written by Erik Mona.
Yes, you will see it. It's been hit with delays and shenanigans and OGL kerfuffles and stuff like that, over and over and over again. It's something that I'm really passionate about getting out into print. Erik is really passionate about getting out. You will see it, won't be in 2024 though, but stay tuned.
ADAM DAIGLE: All right, this one's short, but it'll let us get through all of us before we need to start closing things up.
So what's your favorite individual AP volume? And I'm going to put James on the spot first to give me, Bill, and John time to think.
JAMES JACOBS: The tricky thing for me is that it's hard for me to pick my favorite kid, I guess, you know, but it's also a case of like, if I pick this adventure written by this author, then every other author who's written a great adventure feels left out.
So my only solution for this sort of thing is to pick an adventure that I wrote so that it sounds self-serving. I think the one I'm the most proud of is Burnt Offerings. That's the one that started the Pathfinder Adventure Path that started a lot of Golarion up. It won an ENnie for best adventure of the year. It got turned into a play from an art school, a high school down in Portland. It's become an audio drama.
Yeah, it's the one that I'm the most proud of, Burnt Offerings. It created the whole goblin things with working off of Wayne's really inspiring design for them. Goblin song. Yeah, the first Vancaskerkin. Ameiko Kaijitsu. All sorts of things. Shalelu.
People have asked what happened to Shalelu. This is sort of a spoiler, but she shows up in Spore War at a certain point. So there's gonna be a return to Shalelu's presence in the world during the elf Adventure Path, which kind of makes sense.
ADAM DAIGLE: I'll go ahead and throw it to John now.
JOHN COMPTON: Kind of in the same vein as James. I think I'll probably just choose one that I ended up writing.
It's hard for me to really shake the pleasure that I had in working on Pathfinder 131, Reaper's Right Hand, the fifth volume of the War for the Crown Adventure Path, because it follows the way that I end up writing a lot of the APs where I think that the first chapter is gonna be really short. It ends up being really long because I filled it with art history.
The second chapter is the one that I really, really, really like going in and continue really liking. And that volume takes you to a strange place with a whole bunch of urban sandboxing, which is one of my favorite types of adventures to work on. And then finally a dungeon crawl that was part of the outline that I find I have not one third of my word count left, but more like 10% of my word count left by the time that I'm finished with chapters one, two, and have to really rush to put it all together, but still make it fun.
ADAM DAIGLE: Right, Bill.
WILLIAM FISCHER: Well, I will pick a favorite. So I think my favorite just individual adventure is the first book in Gatewalkers, Seventh Arch. It's just, I just remember reading it, not really knowing what I was gonna get into and just be like, what is happening? And what is this thing?
And to me, that's a really great feeling to have, to be surprised by something so many years on after reading so many Adventure Paths, to be surprised and delighted by something that was entirely new.
And so I haven't played it, but it's on my bucket list of things is just to play that book just as its own campaign, sort of flesh it out a little bit and play it. So it's so weird and different and new. So that's my favorite one.
ADAM DAIGLE: My pick is at least chosen similarly to Bill's processes. I'm gonna say Pathfinder 71, Rasputin Must Die!, just because it was an ambitious leap to see if it would even land if people would like it or not. And I think it did. I think it landed well.
Also Rob and I put a ton of work into making sure the history was on point, creating weapons from that period of Russian history and pulling them into Pathfinder, trying to make the mechanics work out right, playing fast and loose with a little bit of history to make a real-world person connected to Baba Yaga and all of that.
It was a lot of fun and it was a lot of uncertainty of knowing if it would be received well. And I think that we did a pretty damn good job of that.
JAMES JACOBS: One of the fun anecdotes I have for that one is we would back in the old days, we'd have like brainstorming, like what are we gonna do next year? What adventures are we gonna do? What stories are we gonna do?
And I forget how it started. We were talking about like, let's maybe do something with Baba Yaga because this year is the one that we've programmed into the lore. She's coming back this year. So if we don't do the Baba Yaga story this year, we lose our chance. And we didn't know what story we wanted to do.
ADAM DAIGLE: We lose our chance for a hundred years.
JAMES JACOBS: Yeah. We didn't know what the plot we wanted to do was, but then I forget who it was. It might've been me. It might've been Erik. It might've been Rob. Somebody came up with a title, Rasputin Must Die! And the entire kind of room of all of us kind of went quiet.
It's like, we have to make an adventure called Rasputin Must Die! I don't know, put Rasputin on the cover doing his pose. How do we do this? Is it responsible to bring in a real-world person, et cetera.
Yeah. That was, I think the only time an adventure path was kind of gelled around a single title, of a single volume.
Outro
ADAM DAIGLE: All right. So we're getting close to time. That's gonna be the last of the questions.
However, like I said, at the beginning of this, there is a post-panel discussion channel here on the Discord that most of us are gonna be visiting right after this. I think a few of us have some other entanglements.
So yeah, stop by there and we'll continue this conversation in chat. But we're gonna wrap this up and make space for the next group that's gonna be in here. And so we'll go around and let folks know where to find us if they want to find us, starting with James.
JAMES JACOBS: I'm a social media hermit. I can be found on the Paizo message boards, the Pathfinder Reddit forum, and here at Paizo. So get your questions in now. I have an AMA thread over on Discord.
ADAM DAIGLE: Right, Bill.
WILLIAM FISCHER: Same thing. I'm not a social media hermit, but Paizo message boards is a great place to find me.
ADAM DAIGLE: Right, John.
JOHN COMPTON: I hang out on a fair number of the fan servers for Pathfinder RPG to an extent on Starfinder RPG, particularly in the Golarion lore channel for Pathfinder RPG.
And of course you'll find me all weekend on the Paizo events server.
ADAM DAIGLE: And my answer is here. I've got the AMA and then otherwise you can find me @Daigle on a lot of the social media sites, although I don't check it that terribly often.
But thank you everybody for joining us here to talk about Adventure Paths. It's been a fun hour and I know that if left unbridled, we would go for multiple more hours, but that's it. That's all you get for now.
Oh, James.
JAMES JACOBS: Make sure to tune in this evening to watch a bunch of us play Pathfinder. We're going to be playing—can I tell us what, can I, I guess we revealed, we made John run us a 20th-level adventure.
ADAM DAIGLE: Shenanigans.
JOHN COMPTON: Yes, lots of shenanigans.
ADAM DAIGLE: All right, thanks everybody. We'll see you all around this weekend. Have a great PaizoCon.