User:Oznogon/PaizoCon 2024 Pathfinder Project Remaster panel

JON MORGANTINI: Hello, PaizoCon. I am Jon Morgantini, your social media and community manager. I am here with some of our illustrious staff for the Remaster panel. Small, no big deal. Why don't I kick it to them to introduce themselves and then we'll get started with what you're actually here for.

LOGAN BONNER: Hi, everybody. I'm Logan Bonner. I'm the Pathfinder lead designer. So I mostly oversee the rulebooks line and kind of the broader rules of the game.

Up next, James.

JAMES CASE: Hi, everyone. I'm James Case. I'm the senior designer on the rules and lore team. So I work on a number of things related to the design and the setting and the hardcovers we have coming out.

And I'm going to pass things to Josh.

JOSHUA BIRDSONG Hi, I'm Josh. I'm a designer for Pathfinder. I help write the rules and make the monsters and make all the cool fun stuff you get to play with.

I'm going to pass it on to Luis.

LUIS LOZA: Hi, I'm Luis. I'm creative director for rules and lore side of things here on Pathfinder, which means I get to tell everyone, no, we can't do that or yes, we should definitely, I don't know, bring back the champion, I guess. Yeah, that's what I get to do here.

>> All right. So we do have a lot of stuff to talk about today. I figured just to let everyone in the chat know what kind of the plan is today, we're going to talk about recent books.

We're going to talk about Player Core 2. We're announcing a new book, and then we will absolutely be answering your questions as much as we can in the chat. So start posting them now.

We've got someone who's going to scoop those up for us. But I guess the first question, how do you even Remaster? What is even Remaster? How does that process start? What does it look like? What is involved? Because you know, that's a small segment of this whole thing.

>> When a company loves intellectual property very much...

So there was an event that happened and we decided to switch away from the Open Gaming License and kind of rebuild some of the game setting and rules to reflect that change. And that process meant we could also clean up some things, refresh some things that were kind of old-school D&D-isms as we released a whole new set of very cool Remastered books.

So it was kind of a tangle that also gave us an opportunity to refresh everything, clean up some things, use what we've learned over the years that the Second Edition game has been going. And we put out Player Core, GM Core, Monster Core, and then Player Core 2 is the remaining kind of core book, so to speak.

And we've also got some other books that are not kind of in that core line, but have been adjusted for the Remaster process. The first of those was Rage of Elements that was kind of late in the process, but we had just enough time to kind of fix it up for the Remastered version as we were doing that.

Player Core 2 is kind of the last updates book before we kind of go primarily to a kind of standard brand new books, for the most part, schedule. And I think we have an image that kind of exemplifies the Remaster process, if we can show that one to folks.

This is an image that is going to be in Player Core 2. So it both exemplifies Fumbus's approach to things and the kind of mad dash that we did to remaster everything to get those books out last year.

So first, as John said, we're going to talk a little bit about some of the recent books that we have put out. One of those is Monster Core that just came out fairly recently. That one is kind of replacing the Bestiary. Mostly it is OGL removal changes, kind of updating to the ORC license, but there's also some new additions to the game in there. There's a lot of fun monsters in there.

And the other one is Howl of the Wild, which I'm going to turn it over to James Case to talk a little bit about.

JAMES CASE: Sure. Good one. So Howl of the Wild is one of our new very creature-focused books, just like how we had Book of the Dead focused on undead and Rage of Elements had a lot of elementals in it.

Howl of the Wild is our big look at all things animals, magical beasts, all that kind of fun stuff. So when you look at Howl of the Wild, you're going to see this glimpse into nature, animals, and kind of all the wondrous things we can find there. This is a big book with a little bit of something for everybody.

In addition to a large bestiary of monsters, we also have six brand-new ancestries. I think we have a picture here that kind of gets the spirit of adventure across and also shows them all off in the book.

We have the minotaurs, which are big and strong. We have the centaurs. We have athamarus, who are like a fish-like amphibious people who use coral and cave eels. We have merfolk, who have all manner of magical water abilities, awakened animals for you to play out pretty much any animal you want, whether that's tiny or large. And last, we have surkis, which are a completely new subterranean insect ancestry that you can kind of evolve in whatever direction you want.

So this is a completely new span of things updated to second edition and really pushes the ancestry design out in new places. Aquatic ancestries, large ancestries, you name it.

It's also framed as an adventure novel. We have our narrator, Baranthet. He is an iruxi, or a lizardfolk, explorer who's going out around Golarion to find these four mythical animals known as the Wardens of the Wild that he remembers from a bedtime story.

Along with the crew, every one of those ancestries is represented by a member of the crew, whether that is the athamaru cook, Grefu, I like him a lot. He has a cleaver. He's always talking about how to cook up whatever monsters they seem to be running away from, which is very relatable. To people like the surki mechanic, who's very accident prone.

So you'll really get to see them over the course of the book. They show up in all the art. Because they're explorers, they have notes on some of the animals. You'll see a lot of scientific notation kind of illustrations that really give a new look into some of these classic animals.

We have things like hydras, and new variants of them. One can eat starmetal, the other grows illusory ghost heads to confuse people when its heads are cut off.

And then of course, this is also a big book for players as well. In addition to the ancestries, we also have new archetypes, whether that's something like the winged warrior, where you can use your wings in combat, fling feathers off of them, sonic strafe, that sort of thing. As well as things like new witch patrons for a little bit more natural inspired magic, whether that's the devour of decay based on scavengers and fungus, or the ripple in the deep for all of your sea witch fantasies.

So it's just come out this last week. It's good, if you like adventure novels, if you like all the cool things animals can do here in our real world, I'm sure this is something that will bring all of that to your table.

Yeah, and this is one of the books that was kind of already in process when we needed to do the Remaster all of a sudden. So this one has kind of been waiting in the wings, sorry for the pun, for quite a while. As well, the new book that we're announcing later in this panel also falls into that camp.

And so there's a few books like that where it's like, well, we're going to hit pause on these, unfortunately, and then come back to them later. But that did mean we got to make sure they all fit with all the new tech from the remaster, some of which we will be talking about very shortly.

Indeed. The other kind of big book that we've said a fair amount about is War of Immortals, which is part of the kind of War of Immortals event and the Godsrain. And I'm going to throw it over to Luis to talk a little bit about that.

LUIS LOZA: For sure. Thanks.

Yeah, War of Immortals. You might have heard of it. You might have heard of this whole Godsrain thing and Gorum and all that. And if not, that's fine, but you will not stop hearing about it as time goes on.

War of Immortals is our big rulebook for later this year.

... (technical difficulties. "Luis has been assassinated. Oh, no. Oh, no. He was one of the gods all along.) ...

LUIS LOZA: It features two new classes, animist and exemplar, and also the ability to make mythic characters. That allows us and you at your table to tell more grandiose, legendary, mythical stories with your characters.

There's new character options that come with that. There's going to be a variety of class archetypes, additional things you can latch onto your characters as part of your mythic play style, including mythic destinies, which you gain at higher levels to kind of represent the amazing feats that you're capable of.

And of course, mythic monsters has a whole kind of breakdown of how it changes the setting. This whole access to mythic power, the Godsrain, what it all means for the setting is going to be represented in terms of, hey, what does this mean for Cheliax? What does this mean for Varisia? So on and so forth. So there's a lot to look forward into that book. We've already talked about it, though.

If you are just joining us today for PaizoCon, you missed our panel yesterday about the Godsrain, where Mike Sayre, the lead on that book, gave you so many more details than I could ever tell you in this panel, because we have a lot of things we need to talk about. So check out the video on demand for that, or if you're watching this on YouTube later, go find the Godsrain panel for that and learn so much more about it. But I'd say look forward to it.

There's a lot of exciting things that come with it, and it's really just going to change the game into just a much more elevated, really mythical place at that point.

And just one quick mention of another thing that's ongoing. We have announced the Battlecry! book, but haven't revealed a whole lot of information about it. But we do have a playtest that's going right now, if you want to try out a couple of other classes.

Actually, Josh, do you want to tell us a little bit about that, just real quick?

JOSHUA BIRDSONG: Yeah. We have two really exciting classes that we are playtesting currently, the guardian, which is a non-magical, defensible work character. And we also have the commander, who is going to be issuing out extra additional free actions and reactions to your allies, can do more in combat, get into cool positions, and have awesome tactics in the midst of battle. So go give those a test and give us some feedback, we'd greatly appreciate it.

>> Yeah. The playtests have been very popular so far, we've seen a lot of good feedback, people are very excited to get those playing.

So let's get to the meat of the panel, Player Core 2. People might have been waiting for a couple of things in here, so I will let you choose what you're going to spoil, if spoiling anything, but let's give the people a rundown of Player Core 2, what it does, what you wanted to do with it, did you accomplish that, all that kind of, you know, "sell the book for me, please," says MarketingCon.

>> Yeah, well, this is, if you had played before the Remaster, the first thing you're going to notice is that anything that wasn't in Core Rulebook or Advanced Player's Guide in Player Core is going to appear in Player Core 2.

So it has eight classes in it, it has a whole bunch of ancestries and heritages, all those archetypes, spells and items, a bunch of cool new stuff also that wasn't in there before. If you hadn't played before the Remaster, you're going to find that this is really the book that fleshes out the player experience, gives you a whole bunch more player options. "Player" is right in the name, that's the main focus of this book.

And it has all the new classes that appear, it's going to have items that fit those classes, it's going to have new spells that go really well with those classes, new rituals, a whole bunch of things like that.

So I think the first thing, we're going to take it kind of in book order, we're going to talk about ancestries first. And this is going to have anything that didn't appear in Player Core, if it was in the Advanced Player's Guide, Lost Omens World Guide, or also the tripkee you can see right there is appearing originally from Mwangi Expanse.

You look at that beautiful lineup of ancestries, the catfolk, hobgoblin, kholo (formerly known as the gnoll), kobold, lizardfolk, ratfolk, tengu, tripkee (which was formerly known as the grippli). They're all going to have like an expansion of their feats and some cool new stuff for them, but I wanted to talk about a couple in particular.

Luis, do you want to tell us a little bit about the kobold and what changes we might see for that ancestry?

LUIS LOZA: Yeah, they're great, they're great little guys. You might remember as kobolds as these little reptilian people who hang out with dragons a lot. And that's still true, but it turns out there's a lot more to them now.

Rather than have them all beholden to this great dragon that we worship or live with or they're our boss or whatever, they kind of gravitate towards sources of magic and sources of great power. So like we did with the dragons in Monster Core, we have kind of mapped the kobolds to magical traditions: arcane, divine, primal, and occult.

And you don't have to map to these traditions, but a lot of what the new lore for kobolds is they find someone powerful, like a dryad out in a grove, or they find an elemental, a fire elemental that maybe has found a residence in a volcano, or maybe a dragon. Dragons are also big, powerful magical creatures. And when they grow up, these kobolds will sometimes draw in power from these magical sources.

Eggs might sometimes be intentionally placed in places where there's great magical focuses and a ley line or something and draw upon magical energy. And that changes kobolds and kind of affects how they grow up and what kind of abilities they have.

So we have some heritages that represent these kind of connections to magic. Some of these, like the dragonscale kobold, are more kind of your traditional thing, or the elementheart kobold kind of draw on the power of the different elemental planes. But if you want this kind of like a kobold who lives in a cave, we also have that kind of thing too. You can kind of mix and match how little or how much you want on that stuff.

But there's still generally the kobolds that you're used to playing with and seeing in the past, it's just a lot of the draconic stuff that was kind of inherent to kobolds back in the APG and then kind of removed and set aside to the dragonblood versatile heritage, which we'll talk about in a little bit here. It kind of takes that concept that was there with the draconic part and just expands it to kind of have more character-theming options.

But the one thing I can definitely assure you is that if you're a kobold, you can still take the Cringe feat.

Another one I want to talk a little bit about, well have James talk a little bit about, is the tengu.

JAMES CASE: Yeah, so the tengu are one of our ancestries that came up in the APG originally. They're one that we have an iconic for, Korakai, the iconic oracle, which we'll be talking about a bit later too. And really the tengu is one of those that has gotten a small but noticeable glow up in the Remastering process.

You know, when we have, in Howl of the Wild, some people may notice that you can play as an awakened animal that can get flight very early, and some of you who have looked at our errata may have seen a couple of changes there. And we've kind of taken some of these ancestries where flight is strongly associated with our concept, and we've made this a little easier to get to.

So you'll see things like the tengu's soaring form ability coming on a little bit earlier in their career, and just making it a thing that if you really want to play into that fantasy of being part of the sky or of another ancestry that kind of goes along with that, you'll get those a lot earlier.

And also as with many of our other ancestries that are based on folklore, you know, we've just put out the Tian Xia World Guide and we'll have the Character Guide later in the year. So we've gone through and we've kind of taken some of the more folkloric feats that may have come out in something like the Ancestry Guide and we've just, such as their fan feats, and moved them forward into this book along with updating the art, kind of, so it's a little more the same across all of our projects and a little more folkloric, but also very Pathfinder.

>> Yeah. All right. We also have, in addition to the ancestries, we have some versatile heritages and I think we have a nice lineup of those as well. You can see the awesome art for those.

There's the dhampir, the dragonblood, and the duskwalker. The dhampir and duskwalker originally appeared in Advanced Player's Guide. But who is this new person here in the middle? The dragonblood.

If only somebody could be here and do a whole lot about dragons and can tell us a little more about those. Where might one find someone? Oh, wait.

LUIS LOZA: Yeah. Dragons. I love them. They're great. And wouldn't you know it, a lot of people want to play someone that has an association with dragons, but not everyone wants to play sorcerer with the dragon bloodline. Sometimes you want to be a big tough fighter that also can breathe fire. And that's what dragonblood is all about.

Dragonblood is a heritage that represents some kind of connection to dragons, the way that nephilim is representing connections to celestials or fiends, stuff like that. And that means you can adjust a slider on how dragon-y you are. You might look like a full upright walking dragon that happens to be medium-sized, or you might just be someone that happens to have horns and a tail.

It's up to you how you want to do that, but ultimately every dragonblood character is someone who is tied to a magical tradition, the way our dragons are as well. You have four lineages that you can choose from that represent your connection to one of those four traditions, and each of these lineages grant you training in an associated skill. So if you're arcane-blooded, arcane connection, you gain training in arcana, plus you get an extra perk as well with each of those.

But the dragonblood characters, since they're versatile heritages, can map onto any ancestry. If you want to make your kobold more dragon-y, great, you can do that, but you can also be a dragonblooded dwarf, or elf, or human, or whatever you want to be, and gain a lot of access to a lot of cool stuff.

Obvious things come with a big breath attack based on your draconic exemplar, who is your connection to dragons. Is it an adamantine dragon, or is it a diabolic dragon, or whatever will determine the kind of damage you do with your breath attack.

A lot of the stuff that you're kind of familiar with from feats in the past are now all kind of collected here under the dragonblood. We also have the ability to grow claws, or a tail attack, and things like that, have hide, your scales will create armor for yourself that you just always have on. And then as you grow in power and your connection to your dragonblood grows stronger, you can of course gain access to things like scent, eventually you can fly if you want to do that, or even at the highest levels transform into a dragon. You can transform into the adamantine dragon, or whatever it might be.

So it's there for people who want as little or as much dragon flavor as they want. Really excited for people to really check this out, because I think it's something that people have been wanting for a long time.

I think one of the things you'll see with choosing how much you want is if you saw the piece of art we just showed, and you'd also seen another piece of art that was previously revealed, you'll see they look very different. We also went with the versatile heritage for them, so that you can really make them as dragon-y looking or not dragon-y looking as you want, because there's a lot of different depictions of dragon-y people in fiction, so we want to leave it really loose and open for folks.

All right, I think that's it for Player Core 2, right? Nothing else to talk about?

>> Yeah, no, nothing else that people want to know about at all. Maybe we can cut this early.

>> Oh wait, there's classes in the book, aren't there? I forgot the eight classes that occupy most of the book. I think we might actually have an image of those classes that we can show to folks.

There are eight classes, as mentioned. You'll see here the alchemist, the barbarian, the champion, the investigator, the monk, the oracle, the sorcerer, and the swashbuckler. A couple of these originally appeared in the Core Rulebook, and when we were kind of deciding which classes to put in Player Core and which ones we wanted to put in Player Core 2, there were a couple of them that we pushed forward and kind of fortunately gave us the extra time to kind of work over them and kind of do some extra changes to them.

For instance, one of the reasons we pushed the alchemist to Player Core 2, one was to have more time, and the other was so that we'd have room for all the alchemical items that we knew we couldn't fit in Player Core. So this way, all your alchemical items and your alchemist class are in the same book, which we knew was going to be really important for people for playability to have all that in one place.

So I think I'll talk about the alchemist for a little bit here. This is a class that has a lot of chatter behind it, with people finding various things they were dissatisfied about with the class. So it's a pretty heavy revision to the alchemist, probably at least in the running for the biggest revision that appears in this book or appears in all the Remastered classes across Player Core 1 and 2.

The original alchemist had a lot of ways in which it worked, but the playstyle was not that appealing to most people. There were a few people who really liked the options they had with it, but a lot of other folks wanted something that was a little easier to play. So now the alchemist has two different kind of pools. They still have a bunch of items they can create at the start of the day, but they no longer have to kind of decide how to balance the items they make at the start of the day versus the ones they make during battle and exploration with quick alchemy.

Instead, they have a pool of versatile vials, which kind of take the place of your reagents, and they are things you can turn into alchemical items really quickly, and also, during exploration, you can replenish them.

So we wanted a way that the alchemist can kind of keep doing alchemy all day and had kind of like a little more of a stable base for them. So that is going to kind of be your main ability.

The versatile vials can also be used on their own. You can just throw a versatile vial like an acid bomb, basically. It's a little different, but each research field also has its own specific way it can use them.

So like the toxicologist can make a poison, and the chirugeon can make a healing item, and there's kind of like a special limitation on there, so you don't have infinite healing, basically. But those kind of special uses are going to mean that your research field is kind of useful all the time.

Those are kind of the big changes that change kind of the whole structure of the class and how they're going to play. We think people are going to be excited for those and look forward to you getting the final version of that. But we've also kind of taken a swing at some of the other parts of the class.

We simplified and reworked the additive trait, so it's a little more straightforward and easy to use.

Like I said, with the chirugeon, we built a keyword for temporary healing items. This is kind of somewhat similar to how the chirugeon's last revision worked, where there's kind of a cooldown if you're getting this healing, so that you don't have infinite healing, but you still have a lot of flexible healing. You just can't heal one person infinitely.

We also created some new feats and some new fun stuff. One of the things we wanted to lean into was a little bit more flexibility for the different research fields. The feat I want to talk about is called Mutant Physique. This gives you an extra benefit with a bestial juggernaut or quicksilver mutagen, but it's all in one feat.

Rather than saying, "Okay, I'm just going to do bestial mutagen. That's the only item I care about, I'm going to go all the way into that," this one means that you might want to have reasons to swap between those feats, and you get an extra benefit that way. It kind of feels a little bit more like you are that freewheeling alchemist making a whole wide variety of items, so that you experiment rather than having a set play style all the time by necessity.

>> I think that covers the alchemist, and I suspect we might end up with some questions on the class in the Q&A, but we'll wait until then.

Now we'll go on to the next class, which is the barbarian. Josh, how about you take it away?

JOSHUA BIRDSONG: The barbarian! The barbarian's great. We all love the barbarian. The barbarian was already in a pretty good place to begin with.

It mostly just dealt with some quality of life changes, things that are going to make it more barbarian to play with the barbarian.

You know what really stinks? When you're a barbarian and you get knocked out right at the beginning of combat, you get back up, and now you can't do any of your abilities for the whole combat. It's not as fun.

We gave the barbarian the ability to rage multiple times in combat. The only caveat is you can only gain the temporary HP once in a combat. So you can still get to re-rage, reactivate your abilities to all have the rage trait. It's going to be a good time. Lots of anger everywhere. More anger, right? Stick around the cover.(?)

We also made it a little bit less taxing to enter a rage at the start of the fight, which is just going to be a nice quality of life for barbarians. I don't think barbarians are going to have too much issue with any of that.

The fury instinct, we felt like that was just missing a little bit of umph. So we gave it some extra love. It's going to get a small boost to damage at all levels. And it also has a new exclusive feat.

So now the fury barbarian, even though it's the more generic barbarian, is going to have some more options to make it a little bit more unique than the other barbarians, which we thought was going to be a nice, fun thing to do.

And before, that's all I have to say, I don't have to spoil a feat. Do I? I probably should spoil a little bit. Okay.

Well, the only thing that can make a barbarian more barbarian-y is if they were played a little bit riskier. I don't think barbarians are risky enough. So we added the feat called Desperate Wrath.

So when you're at low HP, you do what all people at low HP want to do. You flee to the back and hide, right? That's what barbarians do?

No.

No.

A Desperate Wrath allows you to drop your defenses even further to give yourself a massive boost to accuracy. So once you're at low HP, you can go even more rage-y and sacrifice more defenses for more damage, because that's what barbarians want to do. They want to get in there, they want to put it all on the line, and they want to hit something really hard and then probably fall back down.

It's okay, because you can get rage again when you get back up.

This death debuff is too strong. It feels like it stops the opponent from doing anything, they can't take any actions. Who needs defenses when your enemies are unconscious?

>> You know, Josh, the other thing I love doing as a barbarian is sitting still at the start of the fight while the fighter Sudden Charges. I like to just stand there and take an action to rage.

JOSHUA BIRDSONG: Yeah, yeah.

>> Do I still get to do that at the start of the fight?

JOSHUA BIRDSONG: You can't do that anymore. Instead, we actually made rage a three-action activity in the beginning of the fight. We gave all barbarians the ability to rage as a free action whenever they roll initiative. So it's going to be a nice quality of life so you can immediately get into the action.

You don't have to sit there and wait, you don't have to channel your anger. It's like, oh, wait, fighting's starting? Let me meditate some rage real quick. No meditating on rage.

>> All right, I'm going to take the reins back to talk about another class that got a pretty big rework. I think everybody knew this one was going to get a big rework because it's the champion. The champion played a lot with alignment, which is something that we removed in the Remaster.

So the champion, you still choose a deity. You can choose a sanctification, as described in Player Core, sanctification lets you commit to holy or unholy. Not every cause requires you to choose a sanctification, but some are exclusives. So for example, the grandeur cause is restricted to holy only.

Oh, the grandeur is a new cause, don't worry about it.

And unholy has the iniquity cause. But something like justice, a lot of deities might have ideas of how justice works, so it is no longer restricted to a certain sanctification.

We also took the 15-foot range for your reaction and defined a champion's aura. So you have a 15-foot aura and a lot of abilities tie into that.

There are a lot of things that Soft(?) did, but we went back in and said, "Okay, let's just say you have this aura so we can link other abilities into it a little more cleanly." You're also still going to choose a devotion spell that is based on your deity's font, but there's also a new option.

If you really want to go defensive, there's the shields of the spirit devotion spell, which any champion can take, which is going to be really fun for those folks who want to do that kind of defensive champion path.

There's also a change to the divine ally. We replaced that with something called blessing of the devoted. Its theme is a little broader rather than having the defined divine ally story. So this is a little more like you get to pick the story for your champion and how they're getting this blessing.

Steve(?) moved out of the blessings and is now a set of feats, kind of similar to how other classes do animal companions and mounts. But there is the blessed swiftness blessing that is going to work very well if you do have a mount. This means that you now have to spend feats to have a mount, but you can also get a mount at first level because the starting feat is first level. So that'll be nice for people who wanted to just primarily play a mounted character that don't have to wait anymore.

This is what I want to prepare folks for because the champion did lose some stuff because for space reasons, we were adding a bunch more kind of general options that kind of appeal to a broad swath of champions.

And so we pulled the litanies and oaths out of the class. We are trying to find a new home for those, right? So a book that they'll fit well in. Can I say something about that?

>> Yes.

>> The oaths made it into Divine Mysteries. So you'll be able to get those pretty much right away.

>> Nice.

>> A little wait.

>> It won't be too long.

>> All right. Well, there you have it folks. You won't have to wait too long.

>> Yeah, I think that is all I want to say about the champion at this time. I feel like that's a pretty good amount of information though.

And then I'm going to throw it to myself to talk about the investigator. The investigator, I'm just going to cover really quickly because we didn't change it a whole lot. There was some cleanup to kind of make some of the gameplay of it a little more easy to understand for folks. So that's like cleaning up the wording of Pursue a Lead and that sort of thing.

It's going to work a little more like how recall knowledge got changed in Player Core. If you're familiar with that, you'll see some of that kind of tech propagated over to the investigator.

The other big change is to Devise a Stratagem because it is great when you devise a stratagem and you figure out that you do or don't want to attack. That part is nice, but it feels like you don't have a backup plan if you don't want to attack. So now if you do use devise a stratagem and you don't want to attack, it's going to let you choose an attack stratagem or a skill stratagem. So if you want to not use that die to attack, now you can get a benefit to a skill check later that round.

So this way, you know, you're kind of assessing how things are going to go and you're making a plan in one of two ways instead of kind of just saying, well, no, that would be a waste of time. I'm not going to do that.

There's also, the methodology has got a few changes. The alchemical science has changed to be more like the new alchemist, and pointed question now has an extra in-combat benefit. So I think that'll make that a little more versatile and more fun for folks.

There's also some new feats, including one for each mythology methodology that's going to come on at 12th level.

So for example, the forensic medicine one gives you an ability that can let you impose clumsy or stupefied with your your medical knowledge. Some some quick surgery.

>> All right. Next up, Luis, tell us a little bit about the monk.

LUIS LOZA: Well, monks already achieved perfection and didn't need to change at all.

But if you want to go further beyond that, I think we can talk a little bit about the few smaller changes.

It turns out monk was in a really good spot and didn't need too much. We did a few quality of life changes.

What comes to mind is, expert strikes that you got a 5th level now innately give you your crit specialization with your unarmed attacks in the brawling group, so you don't have to take a feat for that kind of thing.

There's also some thematic changes. We were used to refer to ki points and ki spells and stuff like that, which are now being referred to as qi spells, which you might have seen a little preview about that in our errata last week.

And we, of course, brought stuff together. We brought in the cobra stance and stumbling stance from the APG. Another one that comes to mind is a monastic weaponry. Now applies to weapons you get from your ancestry feats. You know, if you're an elf and want to do stuff with the curved blade, take a look at that. The monk will be able to do some fun stuff with that.

And of course we're also adding new stuff. Like the fused stance feat at 16th level, which, you know, you take it when you have multiple stances. You combine them into this brand new stance that you name yourself And while in this stance you gain the benefits of both of them, get access to different attacks, and of course you just have to follow the different restrictions and requirements for all of that.

But it lets you mix and match things and really kind of make the monk your own and then make your own unique style in a really fun and interesting way.

But that's really all we really have to say about monk. I foresee that James has some thoughts on some other classes.

JAMES CASE: Yes. Yeah.

So Logan mentioned earlier that one of the classes that saw a lot of changes is the alchemist. Another one that saw a pretty high degree of change is the oracle.

The oracle is a really cool idea. You know, you have this conduit to divine power that's not on any one deity. And they have this curse mechanic where they have to kind of have power at a price.

But you know, we've seen a lot that this similar to some other classes made it kind of hard to get that power in your hands all the time.

You know, oracles used to have a curse that could be either very complicated with many different effects or it could be relatively unintrusive, like the tempest curse that happened every time you cast a focus spell.

And so we've done quite a lot to oracle basically to make them a simpler class that gets the power into your hands if you want it. But if you still want those highly disruptive curse effects, you can take them later and you can sort of opt into them.

So all oracles now have something called the curse-bound condition. This is a unique condition that only oracles can be affected by.

So your curse-bound condition, like a lot of other conditions, can be curse-bound 1, 2, 3, or 4. Earlier in your oracular career, you can't handle as much power. That's kind of, you know, how it was in the APG and they gain access to these further levels of curse-bound later. And every time you use an ability that has the curse-bound trait, it will cause your curse to tick up a little bit.

These abilities are not focus spells anymore. In oracle's focus spells before, their revelation spells, they weren't especially much stronger than really a normal focus spell. So we've left those. They're still very cool and unique. But we've moved this sort of like big power ability into these curse-bound feats.

Every oracle will get one based on their mystery at first level and there's ones you can take later if you want to get more. So this is everything from using something like reach spell or widen spell as a free action. You know, you don't have to spend the action, but instead you take a little bit of a hit to your curse to getting a glimpse into your enemy's weakness. Those are some things you get at first level.

To some of the later ones, like Trial by Skyfire or Roll the Bones of Fate that are unique to certain mysteries and cause, they tend to cause like big effects for not a lot of action costs, but instead your curse is going to tick up.

And so your curses will be things much less like in a way that's not so much randomizing your entire return the way that your ancestors, ancestral meddling used to do, but there are things like you might be clumsy based on your curse-bound. Or you might have scaling of vulnerability to magic that if you have the powers of battle come through, they're very good at physical threats, not very good against magical ones. So that's the kind of thing that will go up.

We've also made some quality of life changes, you know, some oracles, it was very easy to get thematically useful spells that felt related to them for some like flames or tempest. There's not a lot of those natural energy spells on the divine list. So we've gone through and all oracle mysteries now give you twice as many domains. So we added two domains to every oracle and they all give you a list of related spells similar to a deity. So you can have things like you have spells like thunder strike or hydraulic torrent on tempest, you don't have to take a feat like Divine Access to get them.

And last but not least, we definitely put a bunch more oracular flavor into a lot of the feats. We really wanted to feel like things are coming from beyond you or you're foreseeing things. One of my favorites that we added is something called Epiphany at the Crossroads, which you can use only while you are dying and unconscious. It gives you a near death vision that gives you the benefits of augury and then it gives you a big heal and then you can stand up for free. So it's those near-death visions come to you and then give you guidance for the rest of the feat, and you'll see those throughout.

So basically, if you want to play an oracle and have that chance of divine power, you can do that if you want to take those highly complicating feats that really change your game state. You can still take things like Thousand Visions that makes you able to see things close to you but conceals things further away, and you can take them on any mystery now.

So yeah, a lot of changes to oracles.

Let's do the lightning round for these last two classes so we make sure we have a little Q&A time.

>> Not as many changes to sorcerer. The sorcerer is a very simple caster class, they're very fun, they get this sort of passive magic all the time, they cast magic inherently. So many of the changes were just bringing things up to line with the remaster.

The elemental gives you six elements, fitting what we did with Rage of Elements, the dragon bloodline is reworked to fit our new concept of dragons, and the main thing we did for sorcerer is we just gave them more blood magic effects.

So you used to get one blood magic, a passive ability that happens when you cast your spells based on your bloodline at first level, and if you like that you can get more of them as you level up. So you have things like Propelling Sorcery where when you cast a spell you can just boost a little bit with magic around or you can push people.

So we've added these kind of fun, passive, very easy to grasp things so the sorcerer is still one of our easy, go to it simple, blow things up casters.

All right, Josh, tell us a little bit about the swashbuckler.

JOSHUA BIRDSONG: Oh man, the swashbuckler is so cool, okay.

The swashbuckler got a little bit of a remaster, but it also got an expansion. The swashbuckler is about I think a page bigger than it was in the other book, at least. It has so many new feats.

It has a new trait called Bravado. The thing about the swashbuckler, the biggest I would say pet peeve with it is when you're fighting a really big thing and they have a really high fortitude save or a really high reflex save and you just can't get any of your panache actions to go off, you can't get panache the entire fight and it's just like, oh man, I didn't get to do any cool swashbuckler things. So we added the Bravado trait to a lot of their abilities to make it a little bit easier for them to gain panache.

They have lots of different ways to access it throughout a fight. You should be able to get panache in every single fight now relatively consistently and if you don't, you can personally message me and complain about it. I expect no complaints. They got a bunch of new toys. I got the watch, post them boots(?) to prep for this. It was a lot of fun.

And they got one of the new toys I want to tell you about, is, do you ever find yourself in a nice honorable duel with someone, we're showing off to the side and they're like, you should air(?) at you and that's not cool at all. I hate it when that happens. Don't you hate it when that happens?

Yes. Of course you do. It's the worst.

Let me tell you, they got a feat called Switcheroo where when this happens to you, you can just (?) with one easy trick.

So what place is it with your opponent you're fighting and boom, they're getting hit by an arrow now. How honorable a swashbuckler are you?

>> All right. Yes, it was a great time.

So real quick, we're going to talk very briefly about the rest of the book. We've got a nice image from one of the chapter openers to show you, but I'm going to kind of very quickly talk about this.

The rest of the book is full of archetypes and feats. The archetypes are mostly the ones that were originally Advanced Player's Guide, but we have brought in the wrestler and we've cut a few that were very OGL-themed.

The snarecrafter is in here and is now the primary way to get snares. There's a special exception that the snarecrafter gets that is ranger related. So the ranger is still better at snares than the other classes.

And there's a bunch of cool items and all the alchemical items you need and a bunch of spells.

All right. That's enough of that.

All right.

Last thing.

Let's talk about the new book.

We are announcing a new book that is called NPC Core. This book, we've got a nice mock up of the cover here, I believe, is a GM-focused book that is kind of similar to a Monster Core or a Bestiary, except that it is full of NPCs.

So it's mostly humans with all kinds of... If you saw the NPC gallery that was in Gamemastery Guide, pre-Remaster, this is kind of similar in structure. There's a whole bunch of villains, a whole bunch of thieves, a whole bunch of seafarers. And so you'll get a whole bunch of thematic NPCs for all those categories.

The other really cool things in this book, we want a little more variety and fun in there to put into your games, is that it has sections for all the different ancestries. So you'll get some very orc-specific orc NPCs, some very elven elf PCs.

There's also a fun section of just like cool things to drop into your game that are themed to all these different types of NPCs in each section. So you might get something like a random bounty board for some of these or some names for dwarf NPCs, that sort of thing.

Does anybody want to talk a little bit? I think I see Josh might have a little bit of stuff to say about NPC core.

JOSHUA BIRDSONG: NPC core is so cool. When you think, how many NPCs could there possibly be in here? There are so many NPCs in this book. It is mind numbing if you're working on it, only a little bit.

But it was so exciting to make all these, because this is like, it's populating the world with people. It's not just like Tom Bombadil over there or whatever. It's like, oh, this is a fisherman, and the fisherman has these stats. And this is like, it's great, it actually gives reference to how to use all the people in the world.

And it makes it like, it's so cool. And there's like lots of enemies in there you could use. But there's also like nobility. There's commoners. There's beggars. There's all sorts of people you can throw into your world and make it feel more alive. It's fantastic.

Yeah, and this is a book that had started before the Remaster. And when the Remaster hit, we decided to take the Gamemastery Guide NPCs and put them in here too, so everything's in one place.

So that's a kind of a drop in the bucket compared to the whole book. But you are going to have all those are going to be back in the game once NPC core comes out. And like I said, this is a GM-focused book, not really player content in here. This is going to be a wonderful tool for GMs, though.

Okay, John, do you think we can squeeze in a small number of questions for a Q&A before we call it here?

>> I think we can probably grab a few of the questions and get those off to you.

>> All right. I got a couple that I feel like we can ask.

>> Go for it.

>> Absolutely.

>> The first one, because I know people want to know more about PC2 is, hey, what's one of your favorite new things in PC2 that we haven't talked about yet?

I'll go for some of us to give you guys time to talk. I'm excited just for bringing some of the spells forward that you haven't seen quite yet, but you've been missing. Like vomit swarm is coming back. Web is coming back. I guess I have a theme there.

Synesthesia coming, all these great things that you can do to other people and can have happen to you are coming back in PC2, and I'm excited for some of these spells but also some of the newer stuff that you're going to be seeing that, well, I'm too busy thinking about vomit swarm.

I'll mention kind of a category of things, which is the focused items. Focused is a category that gives you an extra focus point that we've had since Core Rulebook, but this has focused items for all the classes that didn't already have them. So there's a nice batch of those in the player core too.

>> For me, I am legitimately hyped for the swashbuckler. One thing I didn't mention before is that they have a new style called the rascal. I would tell you what kind of skill they use, but doing that would ruin the experience for you. It would just be thievery.

I'm just excited for the general expansion and rework of a lot of things. That's both in taking the kind of ancestors and putting things together, getting to see some of the things like edicts and anathemas for some of the ancestors that can really help guide your roleplay.

We have a bunch of cool new art in the book as well of the iconics getting up to new shenanigans. It's always good fun.

>> All right, I think we have time for one more question because we want to make sure that everyone has a chance to answer. So I'm going to pick an easy one, and I will note that there is a Discord area for you to ask your questions. So if you don't get it answered here, go to Discord, ask the questions, it'll be fine.

Which of the classes were you most excited to see people's reaction to? Because people have been obviously ever since we announced the Remaster, people have been clamoring for the different classes. Which one were you most excited to finally be like, "Here, we have done what you asked. Please go forth and play."

LOGAN BONNER: I'm going to answer the champion for that one because I think there's a lot of changes we didn't necessarily have to make to make it function, but are going to be really exciting and make it a more high-octane, exciting class to play.

>> I'm going to say witch. I think that was one that was cool to both work up and also get a lot more spooky flavor into. That's definitely my favorite to work on.

JOSHUA BIRDSONG: I know you all think I'm going to say swashbuckler, but I already know everyone's reaction to that, they're going to love it, it's going to be great.

I'm going to say alchemist. I'm so excited to see people's reactions to the alchemist change, I'm very excited about it.

LUIS LOZA: I'm in agreement with Logan about the champion, in part because of the way sanctification works now, it decouples morality to a degree for a lot of champions, in really interesting ways, talking about how a different god might have a perspective of what justice might be in their eyes compared to someone else, and the clashes that can come of that.

It's really interesting to me, there's a lot of interesting potential for characters and stories that come with that, and champions are cool.

>> That's a good point, Luis, I think it took the laws of robotics approach, it was one of the most on-rails classes, and now it's just much more edict-based, it's much more broad, and I think there's a lot more role-playing potential with the new champion.

>> Alright, well thank you everybody for joining us for the remaster panel, this was very exciting, I know there were a lot of people who were super excited to see this. So I will pass the horn to everybody on the panel one more time, if you want to be perceived on the socials, where can people perceive you on the socials? Any more?

LOGAN BONNER: I don't know, I'm not on Twitter much anymore I'm afraid, I am @LoganBonner on there, if you want to message me I'll maybe see it eventually. But you can catch me on the Discord in my AMA and in the post-seminar chat.

>> Same, I will just put my stuff in the Discord, I will be there all weekend.

JOSHUA BIRDSONG: Uh, yeah, I am on most places at some version of the word "improphet", with an "im" not an "in".

I occasionally am on the site formerly known as Twitter, not very often though, but yeah, feel free to message me with things. I will do my best.

Yeah, if you ever get into a fight and you don't get panache's new (?), you can personally message me. You can do that, man.

You look for @JasonBulmahn. You got it, right there.

LUIS LOZA: Yeah, hi, I'll be also hanging around the Discord server for PaizoCon all weekend, hop up in the AMA, and anywhere, anytime else you can go to https://luisloza.com and there are links to things I'm usually doing.

JON MORGANTINI: Alright, and I am Loremaster Jon on all the things and I, like everybody else, will be hanging out in the Discord, I've got an AMA channel and I will be flitting about as your friendly local community manager.

This has been super fun. We are out and see everybody on the internets.