User:Oznogon/PaizoCon 2024 keynote stream transcript
ERIK MONA: The keynote address, the very kickoff event of PaizoCon Online 2024. And I am your host, Erik Mona. I am the publisher and chief creative officer at Paizo, and I will be welcoming you and saying sayonara at the end after we have gone through a presentation from many, many members of the Paizo staff coming in to talk about the stuff that they work on, the stuff that's about to come out, the stuff that just came out, and stuff no one outside Paizo has ever even heard of before.
So strap in and get ready because we have got some exciting stuff to talk about today.
But before we get into the keynote, I do want to give just a quick overview of some of the great stuff that's going on at PaizoCon. We have online panels and games and streams. You can check out the whole shebang at https://paizo.com/paizocon. That'll be where you go to check out how to get involved with the PaizoCon Discord, where we've got members of the staff doing AMAs right now, and other Paizo fans from all over the world gathering to talk about their games, get mustered for actual games that are running on virtual tabletops all over the place.
Speaking of all over the place, this year we have some live PaizoCons. You may be at one watching this right now. So thank you to all of our partner conventions in meet space all around the world. A special shout out to KublaCon, who has got a big PaizoCon activity going on right now. We're thrilled to be working with them. Great convention. Up until now, you've had to choose because it's always on the same weekend. You go to KublaCon, you go to PaizoCon. If you're in the San Francisco area, you can do both. You don't have to choose. You can have everything.
Speaking of having everything, we have panels, we have live plays, we have all kinds of stuff going on on https://twitch.tv/officialpaizo. You probably know that because you're probably watching that right now. Or maybe you're watching an archived version of this on YouTube and it's too late. You missed it. Or maybe you saw it and you want to do it again. Great. Paizo is online all weekend, all over the place. https://paizo.com/paizocon on the Paizo official events discord at cons all over the world on twitch and virtual tabletops.
It's a cavalcade of Pathfinder and Starfinder excitement all weekend long.
We also want to celebrate by cutting you guys in on some cool deals. There is a discount code at paizo.com all weekend long and that code is PaizoCon24. (ed: it is not) Should be pretty easy to remember. PaizoCon24. Or PAIZOCON2024. Can I remember it? I don't know. PAIZOCON2024. Type that in and it'll unlock some cool discounts on stuff like the sketch covers for Pathfinder Player Core and Pathfinder GM Core. 120 day retailer exclusive. We've got a few left over. 120 days have passed. We'll get them to you at a discount.
We'll also get you some WizKids Pathfinder Battles miniatures. Those are on sale with the discount code. Paizo's board games like Goblin Firework Fight and Elemental Stones. Oh my gosh, what a discount.
We also have backlist Starfinder products, backlist Pathfinder accessories. There are hundreds and hundreds of products that are unlocked with a discount code of PAIZOCON2024 on https://paizo.com.
We also have partner sales. So we've got sales going on with our partners at WizKids. DriveThruRPG's got a sale on. Roll20's got a sale on. And of course everything on the Pathfinder and Starfinder Infinite websites over on DriveThru. Those are running discounts as well all weekend long.
It almost seems like the whole planet is engaged in PaizoCon Online 2024 and I couldn't be more excited. We've had so many new fans and players come to check out Pathfinder especially in the last year. We welcome you all. We hope that you are enjoying your time and you find a welcoming home here at Paizo and especially this weekend at PaizoCon.
I want to mention also that this year PaizoCon is partnering with a great charity called Take This that focuses on mental health in gaming. And we've got a number of special Pathfinder Society and Starfinder Society 
boons that we're offering up in a charity auction exclusively this weekend. So you can check that out, get something special for your character and do something special for the gaming community.
Once again, your master key to everything going on this weekend at PaizoCon is https://paizo.com/paizocon.
So with those preliminaries out of the way, let's talk a little bit about what's going to be happening over the next hour, hour and a half or so. And that is the annual PaizoCon keynote address. You're watching it right now. All you need to do is keep sitting there and listening and oh my gosh, it's happening right in front of you.
And what it is, is a parade of the folks who work on Pathfinder and Starfinder every day and we are going to come on and in groups talk about the stuff that excites us. The stuff that we're working on, the stuff that's come out, the stuff that's about to come out. And there are even some pretty significant reveals coming your way in the next hour about stuff no one even knows about. There's probably people at Paizo who don't even know about some of this stuff and they're, everyone's going to be blown away.
I hope because we've got some really cool stuff we want to share with you. We're going to start today with the Starfinder team. Well, bring them in. They're going to talk about the exciting new Starfinder adventure path, Mechageddon! This will be the grand finale Starfinder First Edition adventure path coming out very, very soon. And we've got the creative staff here to give you the lowdown on everything you need to know about Mechageddon!
After that, we'll talk about Starfinder's next major journey, which is Starfinder Second Edition. We're already running pre-playtest field tests that you can get on https://paizo.com. That's been a tremendous response. We're bringing Starfinder Second Edition in line with Pathfinder Second Edition's very popular rule set. So great things like the three action economy, degrees of success. All of those things are coming to Starfinder after being developed and become more popular over the last few years with Pathfinder Second Edition. Now they're going into the future with Starfinder.
There's tons of details about that that the Starfinder team is bursting at the seams to tell you all about. So we'll welcome them in. They'll give that whole presentation. It's going to be really rad.
Then in comes the Pathfinder design team. And holy moly, do they have some cool stuff to reveal. We are on the precipice of the release of Player Core 2. That will be the final of the four remaster books that we kicked into production during that whole.
I don't know if you heard about it, but there was a kerfuffle about the Open Game License about a year ago. And our team has been working like demons to try to get rid of some of that old legacy content that wasn't kind of stinking up the place and to really make Pathfinder its own, and to make small refinements on the Second Edition rule set.
Now that we've had it out for a few years, the response has been tremendous and there are some really exciting things coming in Player Core 2. And the Pathfinder design team is super stoked to pull back the curtain and tell you all about it.
We'll also go into a little additional detail about the current book, the belle of the ball, the Howl of the Wild. This book is in the process of coming out right now. It's got tons of new ancestries, tons of new rules for the wilderness and creatures and monsters. It's a rad book and the team has a lot to say about it and I can't wait to hear what they have to say.
And then the team will go even further into the future and discuss a book from 2025, and that book is Battlecry! It's got all kinds of stuff about combat, about war, about mass scale battles. It's going to be rad.
And the key of that book are two character classes that are currently in playtest, the commander and the guardian. And the team working on Battlecry! is super excited to come and talk about the development process for those classes.
What else is maybe in store for that book? Lots to discuss, lots to reveal on the Pathfinder rules front. But Pathfinder is not just rules, y'all. Pathfinder is also the Lost Omens campaign setting, and we are right in the middle of one of the biggest expansions of Lost Omens lore that we have done since the birth of the setting way back in 2007.
I'm talking, of course, about Tian Xia. Our Tian Xia World Guide was released recently, and it is a fascinating look at the continent on the other side of the planet from Avistan and Garund, the bullseye of the Lost Omens campaign setting at the beginning. But the Lost Omens campaign setting is a whole planet, and it is high time that we bring the continent of Tian Xia to you all updated. It is Asian fantasy at its finest. We are super excited about it.
You've seen the World Guide. I hope; it just came out. But now you'll get to see all about the denizens, the inhabitants, the ancestries, the cultures, the traditions all in the Tian Xia Character Guide. And we've got the team here during the keynote to talk a little bit more about that. Could not be more excited about Tian Xia.
Also, holy moly, and I mean that literally, holy moly, there's a War of Immortals brewing, y'all. The gods are going to war, and one of them is dead. We just revealed it's Gorum, the god of war. Oh my god, there's a war after the death of the god of war.
It's going to be amazing. It's going to cross over a ton of Pathfinder releases, including Adventure Paths like Curtain Call or like Triumph of the Tusk. It's going to touch upon adventures like Prey for Death. It even is going to co-release with a novel called Godsrain by a very popular Pathfinder Tales novelist, Liane Merciel, great friend of Paizo, former PaizoCon guest of honor.
We're thrilled to be working with Liane on a new Paizo novel, the first novel from Pathfinder in almost a decade, and it is going to give you a ringside seat to all of the tumult and excitement of the war of immortals. And that War of Immortals is going to spill down the blood of the god of war across the entire planet, and it will unlock special mythic powers in key folks who interact with it. And that uncorks a whole new level of high octane play for Pathfinder, and the team is here to tell you all about War of Immortals, a huge event in the second half of 2024, something we've been working on since before the Remaster. And we're just super thrilled that it's finally coming out. We cannot wait to tell you all about War of Immortals.
Then after that, we've got the organized play team to come in, talk to you about Pathfinder Society, Starfinder Society, how you can get involved in an evolving shared campaign with players and GMs all across the world at conventions, in game stores, in your homes, online, everywhere you play, you can play in Pathfinder and Starfinder Society. We've got exciting new initiatives launching for both of those campaigns. The staff that works on it every day is here today in the keynote to tell you all about what is coming down the road.
That's not all. I urge you, stick around, because after that, we have a big, big announcement, like a big announcement. There's a big thing coming that we haven't talked about at all until right now. So stick through this my friends, enjoy the presentation, and await a big announcement, and then I'll come back at the end, and we'll say farewell.
But for now, pop them out and do, get relaxed, and get ready for PaizoCon Online 2024 keynote address, starting with the Starfinder team right now.
THURSTON HILLMAN: Well, thank you, Eric. Hello. Hi, everyone. How are you? Well, you don't get to ask that there. We're pre-recording this. So hi, everyone. My name is Thurston Hillman. I'm the Managing Creative Director for Starfinder. And with me today is...
JENNY JARZABSKI: Jenny Jarzabski, Senior Developer for Starfinder. Hello, everyone.
THURSTON HILLMAN: And we are here to talk about upcoming and actually just released products for the Starfinder brand. So starting us off, Jenny, you, you maybe have a project you want to talk a little bit about? Just a little?
JENNY JARZABSKI: Just a little bit. I'd love to talk about this project. So for a while now, you've all been hearing a lot of hype about Mechageddon!, an upcoming and now fully out and available for sale on https://paizo.com and at your friendly local gaming store.
The grand finale for Starfinder First Edition, Mechageddon! is a 184-page epic adventure path for levels 3–18 that use the mech rules from Starfinder Tech Revolution . When you play Mechageddon!, you'll be leveling up two characters, your hero and your own mech, which could be one of several examples provided in the mech catalog or your very own custom machine.
We're going to talk a lot more about Mechageddon! and do a deep dive along with the adventure authors this coming Sunday at 4 p.m. here at paizo.com live (https://www.twitch.tv/officialpaizo). So you can also go on https://paizo.com and watch the trailer, download the free Player's Guide to learn more about creating an adventurer or a hero suitable for Mechageddon! and a mech too, of course, and also play through some free encounters on our blog. All of that is available on paizo.com as well as the book on sale.
But yeah, we're super excited to start talking more about that because that is kind of us sending off Starfinder First Edition with a big bang and just something we've been working on for a long time.
You can see this great art that we have here. This is not the cover. Cover is super awesome. And you can see that plastered all over paizo.com. But here you can see this wonderful art from inside the book that I just really wanted to show off and there's tons more of it as well.
THURSTON HILLMAN: Yeah, it is a great read. It is a great adventure. It goes to the highest levels we've done before. Jenny, is it true that there are mechs that can transform into starships in this?
JENNY JARZABSKI: It's true.
THURSTON HILLMAN: Is it true that there are mechs that maybe are possessed by demons?
JENNY JARZABSKI: It's true.
THURSTON HILLMAN: Is it true that there is a mech dating simulator in this? Oh, maybe not. Okay.
JENNY JARZABSKI: Maybe not. But there are some interesting GM tools that you can use in this game, so if you thought that sounded cool, you might not be as far off the mark as you think. So you should really check out Mechageddon!
THURSTON HILLMAN: Yeah, check it out. It's out. It's lovely hardback adventure path. All of our adventures going forward are going to be in this lovely hardback format so look forward to more of these.
JENNY JARZABSKI: Absolutely.
THURSTON HILLMAN: But now I think we have to hand it off to ourselves.
JENNY JARZABSKI: Hello again, everyone. We're here to talk more about our transition into the Starfinder Second Edition. As we've referenced before, our team's been working really hard on the second edition playtest rules. We're getting ready to ship those out to you and have those ready this coming August, which is so exciting. And we'll have a lot more announcements at Gen Con on that line.
But we are going to be delving into the playtest and second edition a little bit more at PaizoCon Online this year. We're going to have a few panels. Right now you should be able to see the playtest rulebook cover art by our own Kent Hamilton here.
THURSTON HILLMAN: So good. It's so good.
JENNY JARZABSKI: Oh my god, isn't it? Like it's gorgeous.
THURSTON HILLMAN: It's great when we get to steal our concept artists to do cover art for us. It's like double dipping.
JENNY JARZABSKI: It really is it's it's an extra treat that we only get every so often. And this book is just full of really cool spreads like this one that you can see with our skittermander Prisma here.
THURSTON HILLMAN: Playable skittermanders, and this is really, this is a huge, this is a huge deal for us we're changing up the layout of how some of these pages looks from say what you've maybe used to in like Pathfinder presentations of ancestries. This is all by our own art director, Kyle Hunter, who did a really good job with these. Here you can see Prisma could maybe if you like enhance, you can find some, some stats for playable skittermanders, all of that and more is going to be available in the Playtest Core Rulebook, which is, yeah, 264-page softback book that we will be releasing at Gen Con this year so this summer. And along with that we will also be having some some other products, but we'll also be releasing the PDF for the Playtest Rulebook for free online. That's just because the Starfinder Playtest Rulebook is going to require the Pathfinder Player Core and Pathfinder GM Core the recently remastered books.
That's because we wanted to cram as much new stuff into the book as we could, so that we could get as much testing without basically printing rules that you might then own three times we're trying to get all the new rules in here test out the system, so that for next year 2025 we will be releasing all new Prime Core Rulebooks for a second edition Starfinder but really we're looking forward to the Playtest period that's coming up right now.
JENNY JARZABSKI: Absolutely, and if you want to know more about that maybe get some more spoilers and like sneak peeks into the Playtest you should stick around for the panel right after this keynote. We'll be back with the whole Starfinder team and we'll be talking a little bit more and showing off some more spreads and art, little goodies for you.
THURSTON HILLMAN: Oh, one sec, Nostrilamus is telling me something. Oh, I think Nostrilamus wants us to talk about adventures, something we haven't quite talked a lot about yet. Along with our Playtest Core Rulebook, we will be releasing some Playtest adventures. These are going to be 64-page softback adventures to go with the Playtest.
The first one, written by Paizo's own Jenny Jarzabzki, who's right here with me. The first one is going to be A Cosmic Birthday and that is meant for a 1st-level party. You're going to see the cover right here for it. Sort of a comic book style, it looks gorgeous. Very, very excited for for the content of this. Do you want to tell people a bit more about this module Jenny? Yeah, you wrote it.
JENNY JARZABSKI: Yeah, just I just wrote it, and Mike Kimmel on the Starfinder team did an excellent job of developing it and making it the best it could be. Other than having this truly excellent art that is just you know the gal and enbys day out on the battlefield. A cosmic birthday does something really cool, which is exploring a major setting event that starts out Starfinder Second Edition with a bang.
Specifically, that is us exploding planet Aucturn and hatching something completely new and never seen before from the planet. And in this adventure, and yes this is a slight spoiler but it occurs at the very beginning, you experience this cataclysmic event as it happens on Absalom Station . You and your party get to survive this event. You make a lot of friends and allies and unlikely places and weather the storm in a cozy but downtrodden little neighborhood called Little Akiton , get a little time getting cozy with the locals I think you'll
have fun there. But in the end of course you have to save Absalom Station from further disaster. I won't spoil any more for you because it does get pretty weird.
But yeah, if you're interested in being there when Starfinder as a setting changes forever—the play test the second edition, get it?
THURSTON HILLMAN: I see what you did there.
JENNY JARZABSKI: Yeah, I see what we did there. If you get if you want to be in on that then and experience that for yourself as a character, please play this adventure. We had a lot of fun I had fun writing it, Mike and I did a lot of work, trying to polish it make it better and really just create an experience that hopefully will be good for you even after the Playtest, like just a really good story to play through that will get you in and have that connection to Starfinder's lore. But also just, yeah, play it for cool cosmic horror and creepy monsters, play it to go poke around in these extraplanar weird flickering tunnels down in Absalom Station and meet all these kooky locals and find your own place in in the neighborhood. So yeah, please check it out. We'll have more about that in the panel too.
THURSTON HILLMAN: Yeah, but that's not our only adventure is it.
JENNY JARZABSKI: God no, we have plenty more.
THURSTON HILLMAN: What else do we have coming up?
JENNY JARZABSKI: Well, somebody else who's here wrote another adventure. Empires Devoured , a little bit of a higher-level romp, and it was written by our own managing creative director Thurston Hillman.
THURSTON HILLMAN: Hello. Also look at this cover, let's look at this cover together. I am so happy with this cover art. Astute Starfinder fans may recognize some of the NPCs on the cover here these are two NPCs who've had some prominence throughout our Drift Crisis event and Ports of Call in First Edition. But now, Empires Devoured much, much like Cosmic Birthday before it, this is an adventure that's going to be a setting event. It's really going to put the players and their characters into the throes of a major setting event.
This is a higher-level adventure, this one's going to start at 10th level. This is intended for us to do some playtesting of a bit of higher-level content get us a bit of a bird's eye view at some of that some of that higher-level elements of the game.
And this is going to set the scene for something that's going to be very prominent in Second Edition, a war between the Azlanti Star Empire and the Veskarium , and we're going to see the first salvos of that being fired in this adventure.
Really, there's too many spoilers to go into right now. We'll be talking a little bit about it in our in our subsequent panels, but this adventure is going to release in October, so two months after the Gen Con release window with Cosmic Birthday and the Core Rulebook. This will be the third of our physical products that we're releasing for the Playtest period.
And much like Cosmic Birthday one thing we do want to say about the modules that we are doing here is we're trying to take a little bit of a back step from doing stress testing. You're not going to see like wave encounters are really like hardcore stress testing of certain types of mechanics, like the fight-until-you-die type things. We have a system with the Pathfinder Second Edition engine that we know works, what we're testing are the components in there.
So really we want these adventures to feel like the types of adventures that you're used to from us here at Paizo, you know, really strong narrative, entirely new art, everything really just focusing on the setting events but being evergreen. So we really hope that these are going to be modules you're going to want to come back to and play even as the new edition starts off. So those are all going to be released.
You know in that that window, but along with that we have another little little fun thing to talk about actually I've got a copy of it here, but but you're going to see it on your screens.
It's second contact oh boy look at this this is a Free RPG Day product, Second Contact . So this is going to be a mini alien Bestiary-type book that's going to have all sorts of cool critters in it, all sorts of unique alien monsters and whatnot to throw into your campaigns. If you want ferrofluid ooze s or glass serpe—(ed: muted)—or laser wolves as I hit the mute button in my own excitement!
JENNY JARZABSKI: Aw, a little glitch gremlin got involved.
THURSTON HILLMAN: Actually, I was, I was on the glitch Gremlin page.
I'm showing art secretly here because I've got one of these copies already. Second Contact is going to be a perfect accessory for you to have for your games of Starfinder and your playtesting games of Starfinder Second Edition.
And heck, if you're a Pathfinder player, there's even rules for playable squox companion in there, so have fun with that. And that is one thing we also really want to stress with all these rules is that everything we're, we're releasing here is fully compatible with Pathfinder Second Edition and vice versa, that all of your Pathfinder Second Edition content is just going to work in Starfinder Second Edition and this brave new era of compatibility. We're excited to talk more about it in our panels, we're excited to talk more about it in the future.
You're also going to be seeing at Gen Con us releasing Playtest adventures. These are going to be a new style of adventure designed around two-hour playtime periods we'll be releasing those as PDFs we'll be talking a little bit more about those in the panel after this as well. There's a lot coming up.
Let's open up the floodgates Gen Con is where you can hear from us next about all of this and that is where we are going to be revealing the master plan and showing off a lot of what is to come for Starfinder and we're also excited about this Playtest and this transition.
Jenny, anything else you want to add before we hand it over to our next panelists?
JENNY JARZABSKI: Yeah, just to say you hit the nail on the head there. But all you first edition fans, join us Saturday at noon tomorrow. We're going to have a panel that talks a bit more about the transition from first edition to the play test, and we might have a look at some special unreleased content just for you so come see us for that.
THURSTON HILLMAN: And of course we want you on board with the play test here so come and come for mecha get in on Sunday and we'll talk more about that but other than that, that's it, I think we can hand it off.
Nostrilamus says that the Pathfinder rules folks have some things to tell you about so we're going to listen to Nostrilamus and hand it on over to them.
JENNY JARZABSKI: Thank you, Nostrilamus! Bye everyone!
JASON BULMAHN: Hi there, everybody! I'm Jason Bulmahn, director of game design at Paizo, and today I'm here to talk to you about the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Remaster Project.
You know, early last year we had a bit of a challenge with the Open Game License, as some of you may have heard. And as a result we decided to move away from that license and move to our own license, the ORC license, a license that allows us to keep Pathfinder fresh and new for years to come.
With that came a number of challenges. We needed to re-release the core of the game, and many of those books are on your shelf already right now. This time last year we were just talking about them as a dream of what was about to come. Now they're almost all out. The Pathfinder Player Core, GM Core[[, and Monster Core are probably all sitting on your shelf right now. But if you haven't picked them up you can get all of those at https://paizo.com right now. You can get the hardcover, the PDF, the leatherette special edition, and the pocket editions. All of those are out right now except for the Monster Core Pocket, which is coming out soon.
We also produced special Wayne Reynolds sketch covers. These are exclusive to retail, but only for a limited time. As of right now the Player Core and GM Core sketch cover versions are available at https://paizo.com.
But that's not all we've been doing over the past year. We have other books coming out as well. We're super excited to talk about them. We're going to be talking about Howl of the Wild, which just came out. You're going to hear about that a little bit later on in this keynote. Our next upcoming rulebook is Player Core 2, which rounds out a number of the core options for the game. This kind of completes the whole symphony of Remaster books. It's scheduled to release August 1, and you'll hear more about that here in just a second.
But before I toss it over to Logan to chat about it, I want to show off a little bit from this book. I'm going to show off an image from this book. This book is jam-packed with truly amazing new art.
This piece right here features Korakai and Seoni taking on some fire elementals. I'm really excited for some of the changes especially to the various classes in this book. The oracle in particular got some fascinating changes. I'm wondering if poor Korakai here is suffering from the new first-bound(?) condition. You'll hear more about that later. That's just a little tease from me. That really might slow him down. So I guess you'll just have to wait to find out more about that.
But next up, I'm going to toss it over to Logan to talk more about Player Core 2. And then he's going to toss it to Mike Sayre a little bit later to talk about War of Immortals and the Battlecry! playtest. Logan, take it away.
LOGAN BONNER: Alright, thank you Jason. Yeah, I'm going to talk a little bit about Player Core 2 here. This is a very exciting book because we did so much work in putting all this remaster together. And we're really looking forward to people very soon getting to see the complete picture, get all their player options. This is kind of the big player option book. If you played before the remaster, this is pretty similar to Advanced Player's Guide.
You're going to get a little bit more of everything. Ancestries, classes, archetypes, feats, spells, magic items. That's going to round out your options for your characters, remaster some stuff in some really cool and fun ways.
And first off, I want to talk a little bit about the ancestries, which will appear on screen magically. These ancestries are the remaining Ancestries that originally appeared in Core Rulebook, Advanced Player's Guide, and the Lost Omens Character Guide.
And one little extra, which is the tripkee, who originally appeared in The Mwangi Expanse book from the Lost Omens line under the name "grippli". And this is updated, more frogger-y.
All these ancestries are actually revised and expanded. If you saw the treatment that the Player Core ancestries got, this is pretty similar. You're going to get all kinds of cool stuff kind of all compiled in one place.
And it's not just ancestries. We also have new versatile heritages in this book. You're going to see the dhampir, who are going to give you all your vampiric goodies. The duskwalker that was from Advanced Player's Guide, and check out this image of the heritage selection: you'll also see the dragonblood, which is a brand-new heritage.
Luis Loza, who's kind of our resident dragon master for the Remastered dragons, oversaw the creation of this versatile heritage.
We're going to have a lot more to say about them in the Pathfinder Remaster Project panel that is going to happen Saturday at 1 p.m. But I'm just going to say right now that one of the cool things about the dragonblood heritage is that it's really flexible. Whatever dragon stuff you want, you can put in your character. Anything you don't want to have, you don't have to have. So it really covers just a really wide swath of different dragon style characters. You can choose how dragon-y they look, whether they can breathe fire, whether they can fly. There's a bunch of cool dragon options and you get to mix it exactly with the ingredients you want.
Now you might be thinking, there's a big chunk of this game that I'm really excited about. And I'm waiting for him to shut up about these ancestries and talk about the classes.
So there are eight classes in Player Core 2. They are the alchemist, the barbarian, the champion, investigator, monk, oracle, sorcerer, and swashbuckler. And we have a nice lovely picture of those right here as well.
When the Remaster came out, we did put up some errata that made a lot of classes playable with the Remaster rules. That was kind of focused on giving you the tools you need to keep playing your existing characters right away. But you'll find in Player Core 2 there's a lot more revision. We had a lot more time to kind of look into them, issue some improvements, restructure them, and really improve how they express their themes, how they play at the table. Everything was on the table when we were doing this process. We made some pretty major changes with some of them that I think people are really going to love.
The biggest ones to get changes were the alchemist, the champion, and as Jason hinted about a little bit ago, the oracle. Every class got some cool changes though. And once again, we'll talk a little more about those in the Remaster Project panel and give you some really good spoilers about those.
If you're interested in Player Core 2 already, you can go to https://paizo.com and order all those editions, the same slate that Jason was talking about, or go to your local store if you want that sketch cover. We really recommend that you talk to your store in advance and ask them to order one for you to make sure that you get it when the book releases.
So once again, that panel is going to be Saturday at 1 p.m. Pacific time, and we're going to give you all that information. And Jason's not the only one who gets to give you a little treat and a little teaser because I'm going to tell you at that panel, we're also going to be announcing an unannounced book that's going to be coming up and give you a few details on that. So be there if you want all that information.
Now I'm going to throw it over to Michael Sayre, who's going to tell you a little bit about some other stuff that's going on right now in the rulebook sphere.
MICHAEL SAYRE: Thanks, everybody. Hey, I am Michael Sayre, and as Logan mentioned, I'm here to talk to you a little bit about where we've been and where we're going, specifically as it regards playtests.
Late last year, we did a playtest for War of Immortals, a book you'll be hearing about a little bit later in this keynote, where we playtested the animist and exemplar classes.
Check out this rad art from that book. You should be seeing a picture of the iconic animist, Sammo, and her good buddy, the iconic exemplar, Nahoa, doing battle alongside some orcs against an undead horde, and that speaks to both the ongoing story that we have for War of Immortals and a whole bunch of other little things that you'll get to discover as we go through the course of this event.
That playtest was awesome and amazing. We had all kinds of feedback and participation from you all, so we love you. Thank you so much to all of our playtesters and customers who participated. As a result, you're going to see some cool new expansions, a bunch of new icons for the exemplar, as well as some new animistic practices for the animist, where we completely revamped the subclasses that people weren't super big fans of in the playtest and replaced them with something a lot more flexible and interesting.
The War of Immortals playtest, we thought, was a big record-setting deal. We had some really cool numbers. I'm going to throw one at you. Over 17,000 characters were built in Pathfinder Nexus, the character-building software hosted by our pals at Demiplane. But it got even crazier, because we have a playtest going right now for Pathfinder Battlecry!, an upcoming book.
The one thing that you know about this book that we've shared with you so far is that it contains the commander and guardian classes. Those classes have been blowing it up. We have already set record numbers of downloads. You all busted through the ceiling that was set with the original Pathfinder beta over the entire course of that original playtest that set the stage for everything this company would be.
In four days, Battlecry! surpassed those numbers by the tens of thousands.
So you all are apparently real excited about these classes, and we've been really excited to hear everything that you have to say about them. As a result, we have made this one of the longest-running playtests we've ever run outside of a full edition playtest. It's going all the way through June 21, and we want you to get in, get playing, and tell us how they act at the table.
One of the exciting things about this long-running playtest is that right now at PaizoCon, there are all kinds of organized play games going, and you have the ability to try out the commander and guardian live and in action, and then tell us how they do. So make sure that you've gotten that time at the table, you've done the fun things, you've seen everything that we have to offer and everything that there is to do, and then go to https://paizo.com/pathfinderplaytest, access our survey, and tell us what you thought, what you thought we could do better, what you loved, what you didn't love. And in about a year and some change, next Gen Con, you'll get to see how we interpreted all that data and how we took the things that you loved and made them even better, and how we took the things that you hate and made them kind of disappear and go away, hopefully.
All right, that's all I've got to tell you. Like I said, we're going to pick up more about War of Immortals later in the keynote here, so this won't be the last time you see my smiling face, but for now, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to toss the mic to my good friend James Case and his partner, Simone, so they can tell you about some other cool projects that we're working on.
JAMES CASE: Hi, everyone. I'm James Case, Senior Designer at Paizo, working on the Rules and Lore team, and I'm here with you all today to talk about Howl of the Wild, and joining me here is...
SIMONE D. SALLÉ: Hi, I'm Simone. I'm one of the senior editors here at Paizo, and I was one of the edit leads and one of the authors on Howl of the Wild.
JAMES CASE: Yeah, so Howl of the Wild is, which has just come out a couple days ago, is our newest book, and following many of our previous books, like how Book of the Dead focused on the undead or how Rage of Elements had a lot of elementals in it, Howl of the Wild is our big book all about animals, beasts, and the natural world.
It's a little bit of a scientific journal. It's a little bit of an adventure story. It's got a little bit of everything. Simone, what can you tell us about kind of the story of this book?
SIMONE D. SALLÉ: Yeah, so of course we have a lot of statblocks in here for you all. We've also kind of framed the book through the lens of an iruxi, or lizardfolk, naturalist named Baranthet.
He is exploring the world on a scientific expedition in search of the legendary Wardens of the Wild, which are supposedly mythological creatures that he grew up hearing tales about as a child. He puts together an eclectic crew and gets a fantastic airship and heads out across Golarion.
So we really wanted to kind of infuse all of the statblocks and data that you're getting with some of his childlike wonder as he's making new discoveries and bringing you along for the ride.
JAMES CASE: And you can see some of this on this lovely cover here by Wayne Reynolds. You can see Baranthet hanging on for dear life to the side of the airship Zoetrope, along with Charikleia, who is the research scribe for the expedition, and Telero, who's the scout.
And you may notice that Charikleia is a minotaur and Telero is a centaur. Howl of the Wild has a number of monsters in it, but it also comes with six brand-new ancestries. These are the minotaurs, which are big and strong; centaurs, which are swift; the athamarus, which are a fish-like people who have coral eels, that sort of thing; merfolk, who have all manner of magical abilities, from siren songs to controlling the waves and water; awakened animals, which lets you play as really kind of almost anything from tiny to large size, and a number of body plans; and last are surkis, a totally new ancestry of this book, who are an insect-like people who feast on magic and who have just kind of come up from the earth through the surface.
So each member of the crew in this book represents one of these ancestries. So, you know, you're not just getting to see kind of what their abilities are, but you're also getting to know them through the lens of this sort of found family we are on Golarion with.
Simone, do you have any of the crew members who you kind of like to – I know, Baranthet, that's kind of your –
SIMONE D. SALLÉ: Our son.
JAMES CASE: Our son, yeah. What about the crew?
SIMONE D. SALLÉ: Gosh, I definitely cannot pick a favorite. Everyone did a really fantastic job.
One of the things that I like a lot about it is, like you were saying, James, not just the kind of intro to the ancestries, but the specific individuals as well. We talk about them, we introduce them in the beginning, but you're going to see like little bits of writing and personalization from them throughout, including in the bestiary section of the book.
So you'll be reading about one monster and you'll see that Grefu, the athamaru chef on board the Zoetrope, suggests if you happen to defeat one of these monsters, perhaps steaming it and eating it with lemon.
So I definitely don't have a favorite crew member. I think they're all terrific. I know we've had several people express their love for Dr. Pom, the awakened badger, but they're really all favorites.
JAMES CASE: We can see an image of Baranthet and Dr. Pom and Charikleia here. This is, I think, the opener to the monster section, and we can see Baranthet getting into a little bit of trouble here.
So this book has a lot of creatures in it. We have both expansions on classic monsters, minotaurs, hydras, that sort of thing, as well as a bunch of totally new ones. I know one monster that I really like in this book is the concert frog. It's kind of a big frog inspired by the real-life mouth-brooding frogs, and it has just three little froglets that sit in its mouth and sing songs that can buff its allies with various effects.
As well as the hardhead mole, which is a small little mole that hangs around in gnome burrows, and its head lights up with fun lights when it's hit. It does have resistance to bludgeoning, so it's not getting hurt, but it's a fun little pet.
SIMONE D. SALLÉ: I wanted to highlight a couple of creatures that we have in here very quickly. One that PCs will either love or hate is the gold-eating marp. We also have the gem-eating or -carrying Taldan cave squirrel, and then we have the PC-eating mammoth land star, which is 8 to 12 feet in diameter and is a relentless land predator, but this is the one that Grefu suggests eating with lemons, so it might be worth encountering.
JAMES CASE: And of course, in addition to monsters, there's all sorts of other options for your PCs inspired by them. We have everything from archetypes around using claws or wings to attack, to some new witch patrons I know that Simone worked on that give you a bit of that power of the wild, or even new gear you can make.
So if you find a thunderbird nest and maybe scavenge some of its feathers, you can make the storm herald, which is a fan that has some lightning powers, that sort of thing.
So this is a really fun book, it's full of all this wonder into the natural world. Really, we hope that kind of the love that us and a bunch of the authors have for just all of the wacky things animals can do in our real world, carry over when you add in that Pathfinder magic to it.
The book is out now, you can go check it out, and let us know what your favorite animal is.
But for that I'm going to pass the baton to my coworker, me, next to talk about Tian Xia. So have a good con, everybody.
Thank you me for introducing me. Welcome to this panel, let's talk about Tian Xia. I'm James Case, Senior Designer on the Pathfinder Rules and Lore team, and I was the design lead for the Tian Xia project alongside my colleague Eleanor.
ELEANOR FERRON: Hello, I'm Eleanor Ferron, I am a senior developer and I was the development lead for the Tian Xia World Guide and the Tian Xia Character Guide.
JAMES CASE: So, the Tian Xia project is something that Eleanor and I have both been very excited about for many years now. This is our big look into Asian fantasy and folklore and mythology. And unlike a couple of the region books we've done so far, we have two books on the docket now one is the Tian Xia World Guide, which just came out in April, and the other is the Tian Xia Character Guide, which comes out this August.
The World Guide is our big lore and setting book, and the Character Guide will be our player options book. So Eleanor, do you want to start us off talking about the World Guide?
ELEANOR FERRON: Sure! The World Guide is a lot like the Pathfinder World Guide, or for those of you who are older fans The Inner Sea World Guide, but it is for the continent of Tian Xia which is inspired by Asian culture. And if you want to get a good look at all the countries that appeared in the Dragon Empires Gazetteer'' back in Pathfinder First Edition, or if you're just interested in Asian fantasy in general, you can check it out.
And one of the biggest cities that we have showing up in this book is Goka, which a lot of you might remember from the Ruby Phoenix, Fists of the Ruby Phoenix Adventure Path. And those of you who have played through it may know that some things happened in Goka as a result of that. And this book is an update on how that all resolved and came out.
And it's also a good cosmopolitan view of Tian Xia as a whole because much like big cities in the real world, lots of people want to go there if you want to be anyone. So you can find horse riders from Hangul or very attractive Korean men who sing in boy bands, or pottery makers from Hwanggot.
JAMES CASE: We have really like, we had such a large author pool for the Tian Xia World Guide and for the Character Guide as well and really kind of from all walks of, you know, all walks of life from people with different specialties whether that's something academic, whether that's some like cultural knowledge, or even people who speak a lot of languages, who contributed to kind of naming everything in ways that are very kind of fun takes on mythology but also have a good Pathfinder spin.
We unfortunately can't go through every region here, just because it's such a large continent, but Goka is a really good snapshot into this kind of cosmopolitan view, you know, of Tian Xia. It's rebuilding and it has stuff from all over, you know, you have sparkle tea served in kopi-tiams next to arcades where students, maybe spend their time playing Alley Bashers instead of maybe studying for their tests, it's a good look at everything.
And of course this book also comes with a look into the various deities and monsters that you have in Tian Xia. On the deity side, you know, Tian Xia has its own pantheon. Some of them are gods from the Inner Sea that maybe take on a slightly different form in Tian Xia, like Pharasma is depicted in a kind of judge of the dead sense or Desna maybe just depicted as a giant moth.
But we also have some new deities, I personally really like Mugura and Nrithu, the gods of lovers and rivals who are always in competition. Do you have any deities you particularly like?
ELEANOR FERRON: Lady Jingxi is there, who I think a lot of people like and sympathize with, because her husband sucks. But she's also got her own specific thing about the beauty of transient moments. But also her husband sucks, and a lot of people I think sympathize with that.
Lady Jingxi is the husband of our tempestuous storm deity Hei Feng, so those two characters are always fun when they get together.
And of course, you know, once you've had a chance to look through the World Guide—it's out, you know—and it has a number of nations, a number of deities, inspiration for characters, you know, maybe you'll want to make a character of your own that comes from Tian Xia, or might have lived there or might be somebody from faraway who's visiting for the first time there's really any way to approach it.
JAMES CASE: And for that we have the upcoming Character Guide, which we'll be talking about a lot this weekend, which comes out in August.
The Character Guide has a lot of new player options in it from new backgrounds. I personally like the professional letter writer background, I think that's a fun one.
But one of the big things coming is again six more ancestries. We're publishing a lot of ancestries this year at Paizo. And we'll be talking a little bit about where you can see some information on them on some of them later, but one I think we want to talk about right now is the wayang. So, Eleanor, what are the wayangs?
ELEANOR FERRON: They're based on this type of real life Javanese and Southeast Asian shadow puppetry, and unsurprisingly the wayang in our setting are from the Plane of Shadow, the Netherworld.
They had some problems because the velstracs came into the Netherworld and the velstracs aren't good neighbors. So they decided to check out this other place they saw that was full of shadows. But it turns out that was just Golarion after Earthfall, when the meteor kicked up all the smog and ash and everything.
Eventually the skies cleared up and the wayangs are like, oh well, this sucks now, but they decided to stick around and help people because they believed that everyone should be free of really sucky things like velstracs or anything like that. And, you know, Zon-Kuthon and the velstracs also present on Golarion, so they want to sort of prevent that in every plane of existence, not just their own.
And they're very interesting. They sort of take on roles kind of in the same way that shadow puppets do, like they can do specific dances or channel that kind of...(?)
JAMES CASE: It was really cool to go back into, so the wayangs came from first edition. We have some ancestries that are totally new in this edition as well, but the Wayangs are one of our returning first edition ancestries and it was really cool to go in and give them a lot of very specific feats using that, you know, more robust Second Edition architecture.
They have something called Dance of the Jester. You'll see this recurring theme in their abilities where they use specific dances to affect the shadow of themselves or their enemies. The Dance of the Jester lets them control their enemy's shadow, which means that they can puppet their enemies around by dancing. It's a fun one.
They also have a number of abilities revolving around the pusaka, which is a sort of ancestral heirloom that has a spirit in it, and it has magical abilities of various kinds that the wayangs can uniquely activate, leading up to one of their capstones called Sever the Dreaming Shadow, which cuts the opponent's shadow away and turns it into a shadow spawn that tries to run away. As long as it's doing that, the opponent is in a dreamless slumber, so good fun stuff there.
We also have a number of expansions of existing ancestries, whether that's a new heritage for poppets that draws upon tsukumogami, whether that is some of the new sprite heritages coming out.
We also, of course, have some new player options, archetypes, and that sort of thing. Eleanor, there's one we're going to talk about today.
ELEANOR FERRON: We've mentioned hybrid magus studies, but we also have an archetype known as the familiar master. It's the familiar stage,(?) but you can connect it into the familiar master archetype as well.
And this draws on a lot of magical traditions in East Asia, where these people would summon up powerful spirits and have them do their bidding, and that was sort of how they did their magic or something, assuming you didn't screw it up and your familiar would eat you.(?)
Well, the archetype doesn't let your familiar eat you unless you talk to your GM about it, but it does let you do cool stuff, like I believe you can merge with your familiar to turn into a phoenix or something like that.
JAMES CASE: I really like this art here, it seems very Onmyōdō inspired. This really leans into the magical side of the familiar being a magical beast. You have abilities, like this one here is called Seal of the Golden Dragon. It lets the familiar wrap itself around you and share resistances to protect you. You also have things like lightning rings, where the familiar turns into lightning armillary and goes around you and adds electricity damage onto things. And as Eleanor says, you can also use blazing conflagration to turn into a giant phoenix with it.
We also have some new specific familiars and animal companions kind of coming with this in this book. I know there are some papercraft familiars that I think go with this theme very well, and there's other some other stuff like the, what was the crab, Eleanor?
ELEANOR FERRON: The durian(?) crab that rolls up into a ball and you can kick it at people and it will bounce off them.
JAMES CASE: We will have a panel talking about all things Tian Xia later this weekend, during which we will focus a little bit more on the archetypes instead of the ancestries, and you might ask, well, why aren't we going to talk about the ancestries? And that is because you can see them in action for yourself.
The world guide(?), Stellaluna will be having a special stream of the Mountain of Sea and Sky Pathfinder Society scenario, a Tian Xia scenario. This Saturday, May 25, at 6 pm Pacific, https://twitch.tv/stellaluna for Asian-American Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
It is out now, and you can pre-order the Character Guide. So this is a great time of year to be looking into some things, all things Asian heritage and culture, so if you're interested we highly recommend you check them out, come back, check out that stream, and you will definitely see some fun to ensure(?) Character Guide options and action.
Other than that, I think next we're going to talk about the War of Immortals, so I'll pass things to my colleagues to talk about what it's like to kill a god.
MICHAEL SAYRE: Okay, I am Mike Sayre and I am here to talk to you all about War of Immortals. This is a key book that is part of a mass of interlocking events that we've worked with a number of partners, both within and without the company. On here today with me are my esteemed companions in this endeavor Mark Moreland, Luis Loza, James Jacobs, and John Compton.
Let's roll in here, though, and assuming that my artomancy has worked correctly right about now you should be seeing the cover of War of Immortals.
What you are seeing here is the two new iconics, Sammo and Nahoa, the animist and exemplar respectively, in a pitched battle against Szuriel, the Apocalypse Rider of War. This is an event that actually takes place during the hardcover rulebook War of Immortals at about the midpoint of the book.
So let me back it up a little bit by telling you what this book is. War of Immortals is an expansive rulebook introducing two new classes, several new class archetypes, a slate of mythic rules which I will talk about in just a moment, as well as some awesome new mythic monsters.
This book is set in the background of the War of Immortals, an actual in-world era that starts with an event called the Godsrain—trigger artomancy, you should see Gorum dying, blood raining down from his severed armor and a bunch of people down below screaming in terror. If you're not seeing that, picture it in your minds.
This event is actually precipitating both literally and figuratively for our iconics. As Nahoa, the exemplar, is battling a demon bird in the sky, he is struck by some of this raining blood which infuses him with both his deific powers as an exemplar and also a calling.
What's a calling, you say? Well, I mentioned that we're going to be talking about mythic rules, and that is the foundation of those rules that you will find in this book. Every character gains a calling, and mythic rules work something like the free archetype rules. If you're familiar with those, you'll find these pretty easy to deploy. At some point, early on in your story typically, the characters will come in contact with an event that imbues them with mythic power and a calling.
Some of these callings are going to actually speak really well to all different kinds of characters, two that I thought were particularly interesting given that we also have the Battlecry! playtest going on right now with the guardian and commander classes, are the guardians calling and the sages calling. Somewhat coincidentally, but not that coincidentally, these two callings will work really well with characters who either want to guard their allies or leverage their knowledge to increase their own power and go forward and affect the gameplay world directly.
Mythic rules use these mythic callings to lead into mythic feats that sit on a free archetype framework and one of the identifying things that they give you is the ability to use abilities at mythic proficiency. This is a proficiency beyond legendary that allows you to add a spectacularly huge number to certain thematic rolls and tell the GM, "Well, I'm going to do that. I'm going to do it really, really well."
As you gain in power, you'll get to higher levels and you will unlock a mythic destiny. These mythic destinies give you a cool, new, deeply flavorful set of abilities. We've talked a little bit about a couple of them before.
The one that I decided I was going to tease today was the prophesied monarch. This is for a character who wants to be something like King Arthur or some other legendary ruler who is going to gather their knights around them and take off into the world and build a legend for themselves, changing everything they touch along the way. A prophesied monarch might not necessarily be just a guy with some knights, though. We talk a little bit about how this could also be a pirate captain with their loyal crew or other various configurations thereof.
So you will get to experience these rules and learn a little bit more about them as we go forward, but that's kind of the basic foundation that War of Immortals presents for you to work from as you learn a little bit more about this game and this new subsystem we've introduced.
What are mythic rules without mythic threats, though? That's an excellent question. I'm so glad I asked it. Let me tell you a little bit more about that.
We introduce mythic monsters in the latter portion of this book. These are monsters that are exceptionally unusual and powerful threats with abilities that go entirely outside of what you might expect in big and flashy ways that will require mythic heroes to refute them. We did not change the level scaling of the game with these mythic rules, but an 11th-level mythic monster will end up winning a fight against an 11th-level non-mythic monster pretty much every time because the abilities and the options they have just go outside of the math framework into the game and into some cool and wild things.
For example, one of my favorite mythic monsters is the Immortal Trickster. He is an ancient entity who associates with ravens, coyotes, and foxes and things. One of his abilities is that when he would die, he actually just swaps places with any other fox, raven, or coyote in a 100-mile radius around him, so he's really hard to pin down and actually finish off if you get into a fight with him.
And that's the kind of wild and crazy stuff that you will have to learn how to overcome leveraging your mythic abilities as you go through the game. So this is an awesome new set of tools. It was created by a wonderful set of people. In particular, I want to call out my fellow cover authors on this project, James Case and Liane Merciel.
James Case wrote the exemplar class and some other cool tools that you'll find in here. Liane Merciel also made some cool contributions, like the mythic kaiju, a gira(?), who you can actually fight—something we have not let you do against a kaiju before in the game up to this point. And she wrote the story that frames this entire book, but that's not the only thing she wrote, so I'm going to go ahead and toss the mic over to my companion Mark Moreland so he can tell you what else Liane has been up to as we've worked on this project.
Hi, I'm Mark Moreland. I am Director of Brand Strategy at Paizo, and for the last, let's call it five, six years, I've really been the champion for fiction on the Pathfinder side and Starfinder as well. But we don't have anything to announce about Starfinder fiction... today.
Anyway, so we haven't done any novels for about six years, when our deal with our partnership with Tor was not renewed, and we've had people asking for fiction from us for a long time. So among the best authors to have written Pathfinder tales fiction for us, a decade ago, was Liane Merciel.
When I learned that Michael and the rules team had tapped Liane to write story for such a huge event, given that Jim Butler, Paizo's president, tasked me and Erik Mona with putting a Pathfinder novel on the schedule for 2024, I sort of knew that we had to have Liane continue the story in novel form that she started in the War of Immortals hardcover.
Now to be clear, the novel that she's written for us takes place in the larger War of Immortals framework event, but it does not require you to have read War of Immortals and vice versa. Her novel is called Godsrain.
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The cover of that novel is behind me here. You can see our iconic cleric Kyra and her wife, the iconic rogue Merisiel, here fighting a big old monster.
Well, that monster is Verex-That-Was. Verex-That-Was is a new Spawn of Rovagug who basically came to power around the same time that all of this Godsrain stuff was happening. Verex is a name you might recognize as being an orc god. Well, Verex isn't an orc god anymore. That's Verex now. And among the other threats that our iconic heroes, as well as Amiri, the iconic barbarian, and Ezren the iconic wizard are going to have to deal with is this new Spawn of Rovagug.
And a god dying and raining Godsstuff down upon the world sure would upset the balance of power. And if there were a god that happened to be imprisoned in the middle of the planet and a piece of that Godsstuff happened to hit a weak spot in that prison, boy, it sure would be convenient for him to try and escape.
And luckily, several of the members of the iconic adventuring party—I'm not going to say who—do receive mythic power, one from the Godsrain and one from someone else. And they have to use that basically prevent the end of the world.
This is a change of pace from what we used to do with the novels, which were to have the authors create their own characters and tell relatively small-scale stories that didn't change the status quo of the setting when they were done. That was done in part so that players of the game never felt like their game, or their actions, were being counteracted or superseded by a work of fiction that they took no part in.
But a lot of the feedback we heard was that people wanted the setting to change as a result of the actions of the stories they were reading. This large-scale event where gods are already dying, that's not happening because there's a novel presented the op,(?) but the perfect opportunity for us to tell large-scale stories where if you don't read the novel, it's your game, still makes sense if you're playing in the larger continuity of the setting. But if you want more context for what's it like getting hit by a god spark, or what what's it like to witness a god dying, you can get that perspective from Godsrain.
Godsrain will be coming out in November. It will be accompanied by two prequel or prologue ebooks in September and October, those are the collected Godsrain Prophecies by Erin Roberts, which will contain new material that did not appear on the Paizo blog, as well as Before the Godsrain, which is a collection of existing as well as new material featuring the four iconics in the book that will allow new readers to familiarize themselves with their past exploits in the setting.
In the lead-up to the Godsrain novel itself—Godsrain is about 300 pages—we're just shipping the advanced reader copies to reviewers. They've probably already gone out by the time this video will go live. So, let's hope that it does. And it's, if I say so myself, I think Liane's best work, and so fans of her past stuff are really going to love it. I think new people, new readers are going to find it both exciting and a good jumping-on point to the setting of Pathfinder at the War of Immortals event, and to Pathfinder fiction in general. So, be sure to check that out in November.
You can pre-order it now on https://paizo.com, and it will be available in hardcover, in ebook, as well as audiobook, and the pre-order options for those digital versions will be coming down the road, so be sure to check that out.
I'm now going to pass it to James, who has some things to say about some adventures or some stories in which your characters can be the protagonists, instead of the iconic characters.
JAMES JACOBS: Hey there, PaizoCon, I'm James Jacobs. I'm the Narrative Creative Director for Pathfinder and I'm coming to you live from a really tall chair outside of the town of Sandpoint. We've got a lot of fun adventures coming out this year.
Seven Dooms for Sandpoint is already out, we're in the middle of the Wardens of Wildwood adventure path, but we're here to talk about adventures that are still coming out and how they tie in specifically to the War of Immortals storyline. And it's always tricky to talk about adventures without spoiling things, so I'm going to try to keep things pretty, pretty spoiler free, but there'll be a little bit of that in here I'll try to keep them as minimal as possible.
First of all, our standalone adventure line going forward is now going to be always a 128-page hardcover adventure. So we're going to have a lot of room to tell all sorts of really fun standalone stories, things that focus on like big events, or, you know, events in an adventuring career or maybe even do some sort of anthologies, some other types of experiments that we can't really do as well in an adventure path format.
And for example, our first standalone adventure coming out later this year is an adventure called Prey for Death. Here's a cover of this upcoming adventure, by Vanessa Hoskins.
This is a good example of something we probably wouldn't do that often in an adventure path, because in this adventure, your characters are going to play evil characters, you're going to be playing Red Mantis assassins to be specific. And you are getting caught up in sort of a conspiracy, a set of things are going on, involving the Red Mantis assassins, and you've got to navigate all of the stuff going on.
And it's for pretty high-level characters. You'll end up at the end of this I think 18th level, so it'll start at about 14th level, I think it is. There's been a lot of stuff going on. But in this adventure, you're going to be going through different parts of the world on these missions. While it is for evil characters, it's not one that you're going to be reveling in being mustache-whirling vile people, but you know, you're assassins being hired to go kill someone.
So one of the things that's really exciting about this adventure that I'm about to, I'm kind of nervous about saying this, but we're just going to rip the Band-Aid off. We've mentioned before, when we said that Gorum is the god that dies and kicks off the events of Godsrain and War of Immortals. Well, that happens on-screen in this adventure.
I'm not going to say where, I'm not going to say how or what happens, but if you play through this adventure, your player characters are going to witness this event that kicks off the entire storyline to follow. Sorry if that's a spoiler for some of you, but trust me, there's a lot more going on in this adventure than just that.
So that's Prey for Death. We'll have more to talk about our standalone adventure lines as the year goes on, we'll maybe talk a little bit about it later on in PaizoCon and different panels as well. But in the meantime, now that we know Gorum dies on-screen in Prey for Death, we can move on to the Adventure Path line.
The next Adventure Path we're starting in the middle of the year, around Gen Con I believe, is Curtain Call. We got, I think, the first cover of that here for you to check out. Curtain Call is a high-level Adventure Path, starts at 11th level, goes all the way up to 20th level.
And the idea of Curtain Call is sort of different than what we've done for a lot of our Adventure Paths. I kind of joked around that this is the closest we've come to an Adventure Path where you can almost finish the entire thing without ever rolling for initiative.
There are honestly a lot of fights in here, but the idea of Curtain Call is that you are a group of adventurers who play through something from 1st to 10th leve, maybe it's Abomination Vaults, maybe it's some other campaign that you built on your own, but whatever it was, you have established your characters as being heroes of the region. And a famous director hears about this and approaches your group and says, "Hey, you know what would be pretty fun? If we made an opera based on your adventures with you helping to write it, to produce it, maybe start, maybe not, but just help me get it off the ground and get it going."
So this is the Adventure Path where your player characters put on, produce, and show an opera in the town of Kintargo. And again, this is a three-part Adventure Path that starts at 11th level. The first volume is Stage Fright, written by a fan favorite, Richard Pett, who has been writing adventures for us since the very second volume back in Rise of the Runelords.
The second adventure written is Singer, Stalker, Skinsaw Man, that's written by Kendra Leigh Speedling. That's an adventure that is probably the longest of the four because it covers four levels. Then it wraps up in Bring the House Down written by Sen.H.H.S.
Now, while you're putting on this opera, there's going to be a lot of whimsy and fun times and stuff like that because, you know, going off to do theatrical productions, there's all sorts of shenanigans you get into so that'll happen for sure. There's also going to be some serious times going on here. And some of that is, of course, this Godsrain, War of Immortals thing we've been talking about.
When Curtain Call starts, none of that has happened yet. So you're going along in your adventure and at some point during this 10-part Adventure Path, Godsrain happens. Gorum dies. Things go crazy. Things get wild. And how that impacts your ongoing quest to just put on a fun little opera is a big part of what this story is exploring.
And so the whole Gorum element isn't going to be front and center in this adventure. It's more about how those events impact the world, how those events impact other gods out who maybe aren't killed, but some other weird things start happening. And it's going to be something that we're going to keep doing as we go forward.
War of Immortals is a bigger event than one adventure or one novel or one rule book can contain. We're going to continue doing these sorts of things, exploring the ramifications of this whole event in several books going forward and including several adventures.
And speaking of that, let me kick it over to John Compton, who will have more information to talk about what's coming after Curtain Call and how Godsrain is impacting other parts of the world. Take it away, John!
JOHN COMPTON: Hi folks, I'm John Compton, Senior Developer at Paizo. I work on the AP line and specifically I want to talk to you a bit about one of the Adventure Paths that's coming up, specifically right after Curtain Call. We're going to be doing Triumph of the Tusk. This is a very orc-forward adventure path. It takes place entirely in Belkzen and deals a whole bunch with the ramifications of the Godsrain and War of Immortals, but unlike the adventures that James just talked about, rather than this being something where you're going along, you're doing your orc thing or orc friend thing and suddenly BOOM! Godsrain! This is more of an aftermath sort of moment.
So a couple weeks, a couple months earlier, the Godsrain happened, the War of Immortals has really been at its peak, and now Belkzen is dealing with some of the fallout. This is pretty relevant because the War of Immortals, kind of sad if only Gorum were going to die, but we have a lot of god death, a lot of god maiming, all that good stuff.
So, nice pantheon you got there, Belkzen. Be a shame if half of it were to get completely bonked over the head and/or replaced with some other characters. And that may or may not be exactly what just happened. So Belkzen is going through a lot of soul searching, sometimes literally, as they figure out what exactly is it that this means for us now that roughly half of our pantheon has exploded in some illustrious fashion.
But also we have a couple other things happening. Like, you may know that Grask Uldeth was this orc visionary who was in control of Belkzen about a five year scope or so, and was kind of starting to open it up.
He died! He died horribly. Fun Trenton(?) Belkzen, apparently. And his successor, Ardax the White-Hair, has stepped in in this Lost Omens era of campaign setting production we have, and has kind of continued that policy. And he's trying his best to open up Belkzen to the wider world and say, "It's open for business! Come here!" Vacation destination, who even knows?
But he's trying to make it into something more, and he's doing that by inviting dignitaries from all across Avistan and the setting as we know it. Unfortunately, most people are not exactly excited to go to Belkzen, no matter how nice they claim orcs are these days. So instead they're sending you, the PCs.
The PCs are basically minor dignitaries or fortune seekers who are representing various foreign interests and saying like, "You're the sacrificial lambs, you go forth, tell us if Belkzen's nice, or send back your body, who knows?" And so one of the themes that you're going to see in this adventure pack of three volumes is that you start off being a little coddled, a little protected, because you are a valuable commodity to Ardax the White-Hair. Your continued survival and happiness is important to his political ambitions.
But as you go through the adventure path, you're going to find that more and more autonomy, responsibility, and just exciting action-packed possibility is thrown your way as you take greater and greater lead in things. So when I was sending this adventure outline out to the authors, it came with a preamble that had three different headings. Orcs, orcs, orcs. And so basically those three headers are like, "Hey orcs, this is an orc-forward adventure path, let's go have some fun."
Orcs, wait a second, aren't those like the guys that we kind of roll initiative whenever we encounter them? Aren't there like decades upon decades of tabletop RPG tradition of fighting anything that has green skin? Well, we kind of turned that up a little bit with goblins, so why not orcs as well? We're going to be showing off all the camaraderie, competition, philosophy, and physicality of orc culture. We're also going to be showing off, tomorrow, a bit of concept art that we've done internally in order to really revisit and explore orc culture and visuals.
And this is, let's remember that Belkzen in First Edition was presented as a very chaotic, evil-oriented location. You're going to find that it's a little bit less unholy these days, but even so, this is an adventure path that does accommodate a wide range of moral compasses. So if you want to be playing heroes, fantastic. If you want to play a little bit more edgy and violent, that's also fine. We have adventure paths for that.
So just to kind of summarize a little bit, you've got the Flood Truce, which is when all the rains come in, all the orcs are supposed to be kind of peaceful, you're there as part of this grand safari of diplomacy. It's an adventure. Who's going to hit the fan? It's all a matter of what kind of poo that is and what happens after the fact.
And that is going to involve a whole bunch of stuff that might be tied into, for example, the Gravelands to the south. The complete destruction of a big part of the pantheon. So when you combine undead with a, "oh no, we don't have as many gods looking out for us" sort of storyline, there are countless things that could be happening as a result.
But really, a lot of this story wouldn't be possible without those orc pantheon changes, and we're going to be highlighting a lot of the current and future orc pantheon changes in one of our upcoming books, Divine Mysteries, which is going to be presented in just a moment by Luis Loza.
But before I sign off, I want to let people know that tomorrow at 10 am, James Jacobs and I, as well as a couple colleagues, are going to be on an Adventure Path panel where we'll be showing off that concept art and announcing the first AP of 2025.
One other thing before I send things over to Luis, I also want to make sure that I'm letting people know about what these titles and authors are. We have first The Resurrection Flood by Brian Duckwitz, we have Cuff, Cinder, and Storm(?) by David Schwartz and Shay Snow, and then finally we have Destroyers' Doom(?) by Kendra Leigh Speedling. This is an adventure path that will take you from levels 3 to 11.
LUIS LOZA: Thanks, John. Hi, everyone, I'm Luis Loza, Creative Director for the rules and lore side of Pathfinder things. As John mentioned, there's some changes coming to the orc pantheon, if you want to learn a little bit more about what's going on with that, I think you could check out, probably this wonderful book here, Divine Mysteries.
This is the front cover of Divine Mysteries featuring our new core god stepping into that empty slot that, you know, just kind of unfortunately got opened up recently. That's Arazni hanging out with Yivali, the little nosoi psychopomp who wrote this whole book, wrote, you know, in setting, is being presented as a writing by her.
But this book is our update to everything gods-related. If you had a favorite god in Second Edition so far, this book will get you up to date on what they're doing, or at the very least get you their updated Remastered stat block, and be the kind of central source for all things divine going forward from here. So, if you liked our previous take on this kind of thing, like Lost Omens Gods & Magic, this book covers all of the core deities that were presented there plus, you know, newly placed Arazni with expanded lore entries, Remastered entries, a lot of lore information and cool artwork and extra little tidbits here and there for you.
So, updates a lot of the other gods that we mentioned like Apsu and Kazutal, Nocticula, Zyphus, those are gods that we've had in the past before, but it also presents a lot of new deities in this book, some never before seen like Atrogine, the god of curiosity, manifestation, familiars, and witches, or Genzaeri, the god of battlefields, modernization, negotiation, and tactics, or even something a little chill or something like Izuyaku, the god of balance, strength, health, and hot springs.
There's a lot to be seen here, and there's been a lot of categories of gods, a lot of shakeups and stuff, so we wanted to go back and also look at some of the groupings of gods that we've had in the past. Things like our demon lords and empyreal lords, monitor demigods, those are all presented here again. A lot of these ranks are expanded to include more gods than we presented originally in gods and magic.
There's also new categories of gods that we haven't discussed in Second Edition quite yet, like our Azlanti gods, or the sahkil tormentors, those guys are always fun. And you know, just to kind of complement those, there's the Coatl Tribunal, who are actually working against the workings of [[s. If you know that story, good on you, fun little lore tidbit.
But there's a lot more to explore here, there's lots of interesting things like pantheons, there are new pantheons in here. There is a new grouping of gods, similar to a pantheon that we call a covenant, that allows for new sources of power that you'll learn more about in the future. But it also allows for things like the Esoteric Order of the Palatine Eye to receive divine power in some way. Pretty interesting stuff.
There's a lot of new mechanics as well in this book, if you're someone who loves playing your cleric or champion, there's going to be options for you here. There's also options for anyone who doesn't have divine power innately, if you are a rogue or a fighter, you have new abilities that you can look forward to here.
Of course, there's always new spells, we've updated our domains, any domain that showed up in Second Edition so far has been updated to Remastered rules and it's all collected under this tome. There's new archetypes, like the Razmiran priest archetype, if you want divine power from Razmir, the living god, who grants all of your glory and sacrifices to him.
There's lots to be seen in this book, it's 328 pages at this point, and it's just jam-packed with lots of material. It'll be your resource for a lot of great gods, great mechanics, and a lot of new insights into what makes things divine.
It is Divine Mysteries, after all, and there's lots to be seen here and yet to be explored. I know there's a couple of mysteries that you might want to check out, like figuring out what's up with Abadar's brother, or what Torag has to do with this whole orc pantheon thing. There's just a lot of secrets to be found here, so I recommend checking this out. This comes out later this year in November.
If you want to learn more about the details in this book you can check out the panel in just a few hours, the Godsrain Death and Renewal panel, where I'll be sharing a little bit more, sharing some artwork in a few more details and a few more teasers. That's at 1 pm Pacific later today, but I think that's all the Godsrain stuff we had for you today.
For now we're going to hand it off to Organized Play and see what's coming in the future, what's coming up here in 2024. For those of you who aren't familiar with Organized Play, Pathfinder and Starfinder Society are our two Organized Play programs. Each month we release a new single session adventures that tie into a larger year-long storyline. Organize Play is really great if you're looking for a campaign with a flexible schedule, you're looking to meet other gamers in your community or at conventions, or if you're just looking for standalone one-shot adventures for your home group.
And today I am joined by a couple of our lead developers who are going to tell us a little bit about what's coming up this year.
First of all, I'm joined by Jessica Catalan. Jessica, would you like to introduce yourself to the people?
JESSICA CATALAN: Hello everyone, I'm Jessica Catalan, Senior Developer at Paizo and Head of the Starfinder Society.
LUIS LOZA: Fantastic. So Jessica, the big story for Organized Play I think at PaizoCon is that we are launching year seven of Starfinder Society in just a few hours. People are going to get their first chance to play the brand new introductory adventures for the year. So can you tell us a little bit about what's coming up this year and what the storyline is about?
JESSICA CATALAN: Yeah, so join us with PaizoCon as we launch the brand new season of the Starfinder Society that is the Year of Era's End . This is a big, exciting season for us as it's the last season of the Starfinder Society that will be using Starfinder First Edition rules.
Next year we'll be launching right into Starfinder Second Edition. That means that we are aiming for the stars, we are wrapping up a lot of ongoing storylines, we're visiting fan favorite locations and characters, and we're showcasing big galaxy-changing events that will give you a bit of a sneak peek into the future of Starfinder.
Our metaplot is launching also right now at PaizoCon, as our new First Speaker Sarmak leads an expedition to an ancient city of the first ones on Avalon (?).
You can get in on those games right now. You know I hear also that Zo! is in a bit of legal trouble so you can lend a hand with that one too, it's great fun.
And finally you can play the brand new interactive special that is #6-99, The End Awakens , this weekend. Join the Starfinders on a routine planetary survey when the Swarm } suddenly awakens from hibernation. I wish all of you the best of luck in escaping the planet alive when The End Awakens.
LUIS LOZA: That all sounds fantastic. I'm so excited for the storylines that are coming this season but of course also we have the Starfinder Playtest releasing in just a couple of months, and I hear that there are a couple of Playtest scenarios coming as well. Can you tell us anything about those?
JESSICA CATALAN: Well, I can tell you that they sure do exist, but if you want to hear more I invite you to tune into the PaizoCon Organized Play panel to learn more about them we'll talk about it.
LUIS LOZA: All right, well, I guess the people will just have to come back later to learn about those. Thank you so much, Jessica. I'm also joined today by Shay Snow. Shay, would you like to introduce yourself to the people who might not know you?
SHAY SNOW: Yeah, hi I'm Shay, I am a developer at Paizo and I am part of the developers that do Pathfinder Society.
Yes, so we have a couple of new scenarios releasing this year at PaizoCon, of course, but we also announced recently our upcoming year six which is going to launch at Gen Con in just a couple of months at the beginning of August.
LUIS LOZA: Can you tell us a little bit about what's coming here in year six? What's the big banner this year?
SHAY SNOW: Year six is the Year of Immortal Influence. This year we have this new up and coming socialite in Absalom, her name is Hestia Embersplitter, and she seems to be up to something that the Pathfinder Society is not playing with. But she has some very powerful allies, and it's kind of up to the Pathfinders in order to see what she's up to and give put a big stop to her plans. So, as for more information on that I mean, you'll just have to play the season.
LUIS LOZA: That all sounds very good. I'm very excited. I think this is also our first season that we're releasing fully under the Remaster rules, is that correct?
SHAY SNOW: That is correct. Everything is now fully up to date with Remaster rule set and everything.
LUIS LOZA: Fantastic. Super exciting. And it sounds like at least based on the season title "Immortal Influence", that sounds like it might maybe have some connection to the ongoing War of Immortals storyline we just heard so much about. Can you tell us anything about how the Godsrain or the War of Immortals might affect this season?
SHAY SNOW: Oh, yeah, I'm getting a little bit of selective amnesia so I don't think I'll remember in time, but I will probably remember just about for the upcoming Organized Play panel.
LUIS LOZA: Alright then, keep your secrets. Seems like I'm not getting anything more out of either for our developers, so I have to invite you all to come back to our Organized Play panel later today, 2 pm Pacific time. I'll be back with Shay and Jessica as well as Josh Foster to talk about everything upcoming in Organized Play, and maybe I'll be able to nail them down and actually get some answers out of them.
After that, our games here online begin at 4 pm Pacific time, our first block of games, and they run all the way through the end of Monday. So please come on out and join us for some Organized Play. Now we'll go ahead and pass it over to Andrew to talk more about digital adventure support products.
ANDREW WHITE: Hi, I'm Andrew White. I'm the digital products lead at Paizo, which means I'm working on partnerships with digital tool creators, content creators, virtual tabletops, all the kinds of stuff that you can use to enjoy all your Pathfinder and Starfinder playing needs with your friends and your family without ever having to interact with another human being or ever seeing the sky. It's fantastic. There's no better time than the present right now to be able to do all those things.
And of course as convenient as all that is for people whose schedules don't allow for regular sessions, or your friends live in other states or even other countries, it's becoming more and more convenient for people to integrate laptops or other digital devices into their tabletop play. A lot of these tools are just as convenient for looking up rules on the fly or managing dice rolls or even creating cool visual backdrops and stuff for people to enjoy while they're all sitting around the table. Makes everything that much easier.
We're talking about toolsets like Demiplane to create Pathfinder Nexus for us. We've got Hero Lab, we've got character creators on Hero Lab, Demiplane, Archives of Nethys of course which has provided a free resource for rules content for many years for us now. Thousands of pages of rule content, die rollers content, character builders, all sorts of cool stuff like that.
Obviously virtual tabletops like Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, they offer a ton of premium content for both editions of Pathfinder and Starfinder. Rule books, accessories, adventures, adventure paths, all that stuff.
We've got a whole bunch of independent creators producing Pathfinder and Starfinder content and online tools and a bunch of those people have their own channels right here at PaizoCon, in the event Discord, where you can attend demos and panels and see what they're up to even participate in some content creation. We've got a lot of cool events put on our schedule there.
And of course, you've got all the stuff that we've been producing for Foundry Virtual Tabletop, another one of our partners, with our good friends at Metamorphic Studios, and all of that content is available exclusively on https://paizo.com. A whole bunch of that is discounted right now.
So if you've been seeing all of our amazing adventure path conversions and actual plays and screenshots and thinking, I want to try some of that, but you haven't actually taken the plunge yet, Foundry Virtual Tabletop is also having their annual anniversary sale right now. So you can hop over there, buy a license, and then use the money that you saved to buy some of our top tier first party Foundry Virtual Tabletop content.
Talking stuff like we have nine full adventure paths right now. We've got some standalone modules like Rusthenge, Beginner Box, we've got the Bestiary token pack, we've got the Harrow deck.
We've got starting with Seven Dooms for Sandpoint, we've even got original music from Michael Ghelfi Studios, one of the premium producers of virtual, just virtual tabletop, this tabletop RPG music. Seven Dooms for Sandpoint now has its own original soundtrack, and we are planning on producing more of those in addition to some other musical content to go with some of our other stuff.
And now it seems like a good time to mention some of the other things that we're going to be working on and releasing over the next year or so. Number one, we're going to be producing a full module conversion of Prey for Death, the standalone Red Mantis assassin module, which is going to be coming out in July.
We're also going to be producing a brand-new token set package of tokens with all the monsters from the Monster Core book, including both the ones that appeared in the Bestiary earlier and all the brand-new art that's exclusive to Monster Core. But all of these tokens are going to be supporting Foundry version 12's dynamic token frame engine, which allows you to automatically, allows the system developers to automatically apply effects to those tokens to represent conditions or when they take damage or when they receive healing and stuff like that, just dynamically on the token itself. So even if you have already have the existing Bestiary token pack.
All of this stuff is going to be brand new, and it's going to be super cool. I'm really looking forward to seeing that. The biggest release obviously upcoming is going to be the Starfinder Playtest, which is going to be coming out in August to coincide with the actual release of the Playtest itself. That is going to be built specifically to complement the Starfinder Second Edition system that's being built for Foundry by the volunteer development team right now.
And that's going to include both of the big Playtest adventures, those being A Cosmic Birthday and Empires Devoured. And it's also going to support the org play scenarios Shards of the Glass Planet and It Came from the Vast . And then later in September, it's also going to be updated with the third scenario, Wheel of Monsters .
I already mentioned that there's going to be more music coming out from Michael Ghelfi Studios to coincide with our future adventure paths, and again, possibly some other stuff that they're working on. They have been delving for a back catalog for inspiration and seem really excited about digging out some stuff out of the archives and producing music for content that you may be playing that's been in our back catalog for a while. They will, among other people, they will be appearing on our virtual tabletop panel later on Saturday.
We will be getting a segment where we talk to the composers from Michael Ghelfi Studios, as well as the lead developers on the Seven Dooms for Sandpoint and the Wardens of Wildwood Adventure Path, James Jacobs and John Compton, to talk about inspirations and how they tie music to content and just generally how that whole process works. And we will also be getting some visits from the system developers, the Pathfinder Second Edition system developers for Foundry Virtual Tabletop, where they can talk about some of the stuff they're working on for Pathfinder, as well as some of the stuff that's coming up for the new Starfinder system. And that should be super exciting too.
So yeah, that's, we've got a lot of stuff on the docket right now, and really looking forward to sharing some of it with you later on in the con, so enjoy yourself. I'm going to pass this off to Mark Moreland and Jon Morgantini to talk about community and licensing stuff.
(ed: Muted)
MARK MORELAND: ... about our licensing and community partners. John?
JON MORGANTINI: Part of the title and everything.
MARK MORELAND: Yeah. Why don't you go ahead and talk a little bit about our community members and those, those communities that we that we want to want to highlight.
JON MORGANTINI: Absolutely. So Paizo and 'Finders of all types would not be the same without the people who enjoy our games and who converse with us online and have that discourse with us.
I especially want to highlight the volunteers of the various forums and Discord and Reddit, and all of those places where you're actively engaged in that conversation. It is because of people like you that we get hyped to create these products in the first place and why we get so excited to share them with you, because we are all reaction people and we love to see the reaction online, and the outpouring of just general goodwill towards us has been amazing.
2023 was a bit of a year, but we pulled through it, and we're going to be, we've got some really great stuff coming up. There's going to be lots of partners and stuff that we're going to be talking about for this upcoming weekend, and I don't know there's a few things coming up that you just might want to pay attention to over the next eight months or so, for no reason whatsoever.
MARK MORELAND: Yeah, I specifically want to call out those volunteers who are working on officially partnered communities that we have the volunteers working on archives of nethus keeping that up to date. Those working on the Foundry content team. You know, those are volunteer groups, those are passionate members of the community just like yourselves, who have decided to put their time into making the community better and working on tools, which are, you know, officially licensed to Paizo. And we couldn't be more grateful for your work, so to you volunteers, keep up the great work, we really appreciate it. Paizo, Pathfinder, Starfinder would not be what they are without you.
Yeah, that's, that's what that's what I've got.
There is one other community that I think we should definitely mention, and that is the Pathfinder Infinite and Starfinder Infinite content creation community, which is run by our partners at DriveThruRPG. Those marketplaces allow for fans, GMs, content creators, basically anyone who is playing Pathfinder or Starfinder to create their own Pathfinder and Starfinder content using Paizo's IP, not just the rules which anyone can use under that work or the OGL, but to use the our settings, to use our characters, to expand on those stories and narratives that that are otherwise inaccessible to third-party publishers.
And this allows you to create those things we give you tools and other things to use for for those creations, and then to sell them on that marketplace, so that you can get you know some compensation for the hard work you're putting into it. It's a thriving community. it's been around for about three and a half years now. I think. Math, what's math, who knows, I'm a words person. Anyway, and it continues to grow. The Infinite Masters are a group of the most active and best-selling content creators on the platform, and they continue to really act as cheerleaders in general of that community, and really setting a great example.
So you can find those on https://pathfinderinfinite.com or https://starfinderinfinite.com, and I believe they've got a special PaizoCon bundle running during the show. Be sure to check that out. That's a great way for you to get a lot of content for a very low price, and that that money will go back to those actual creators who have who've added more character options and adventures and rules stuff to the Pathfinder and Starfinder settings.
JON MORGANTINI: Speaking of the partners and the communities that we're going to see here at PaizoCon specifically this weekend. I want to call out a couple of them. So BCOM is going to be having a panel on Sunday to talk about their new game that's coming out. You might see a familiar beard on that particular panel if you pay close attention. I'm very excited to chat with them about what's going to be going on with Pathfinder Abomination Vaults, which I'm super thrilled with.
And WizKids is going to be having a paint-along, and they are going to be teaching you how to do a step-by-step of any mini, really, and I'm very excited to watch that as well because I do not have the patience to paint minis. I applaud all of you who do because that's definitely not my thing.
So there's just a ton of partners that are going to be featured and have their own things, so make sure you come and hang out with us in the Discords and check out the panels, and there's gonna be all kinds of places for you to reach out, interact, ask questions and engage with them this weekend, we hope you have a lot of fun.
MARK MORELAND: I think that's about all that we have at this point we don't have any large announcements to make on behalf of our licenses or communities, a lot of them are potentially going to use the platform they'll have this weekend. When they are running their own panels or on their own Discords to make those announcements.
And we, as John said, encourage you to go and participate in those. Paizo, or Pathfinder and Starfinder, are more than just Paizo, and we really value our partners and want you to check out their stuff as well because you know you just might like it.
And, yeah. So, with that, thank you for listening to this portion. I'm going to pass it now to close things off, back to our publisher and Chief Creative Officer, Erik Mona.
JASON BULMAHN: Hold on, hold on, hold on, just wait a minute. There's one more thing we have to talk about.
A few months back, we launched a project over at BackerKit that invited you to follow us on that page to learn more about a new exciting board game from us at Paizo. Today, I am happy to announce that this fall, we will be launching Pathfinder Quest, a cooperative adventure board game for one to four players.
This game is something that Paizo games' lead designer Joe Pasini and I have been working on for quite a while now. So I'm going to turn it over to him to give you an idea of what this game is all about.
JOE PASINI: Thanks, Jason. In Pathfinder Quest, you and up to three friends are going to embark on an epic campaign through a series of fast-paced adventures, where the choices you make will ultimately determine the fate of Darkmoon Vale. Like in Pathfinder, you're going to choose an ancestry and a class to create your own unique character, and you'll grow in power after each adventure. Throughout the game, you'll be presented with choices and rolling a few six-sided dice, both in combat and during exploration, and your choices will have immediate and long term impact, making every campaign of Pathfinder Quest unique.
JASON BULMAHN: We cannot wait to bring this game to you later this year through BackerKit. Pathfinder Quest includes miniatures, dice, hundreds of cards, dozens of map tiles, an adventure book, a challenge book, and a few other surprises as well.
If you follow us at this QR code (ed: none displayed) and sign up to receive news and alerts about the campaign before it launches, we will even include a special Pathfinder Quest metal coin with your pledge.
So sign up today, we'll be taking talking a lot more about this game in the coming months, as we get closer to the launch of the crowdfunding campaign. We are so excited to share this epic quest with you.
And with that, I'll now turn it back to Eric to give his closing remark.
ERIK MONA: Whoa, Pathfinder Quest. Wow, Jason, thank you. That is going to be amazing. Be sure that you go to https://paizo.me/PathfinderQuest — case sensitive, capital P, capital Q — and you will be alerted the moment that campaign goes live. It's gonna be a live one. It is very exciting. I have seen some of the design for this game and it is going to be a real cracker. I hope you like it as much as we do and I trust that you will think it's cool, because it is cool. So anyway, https://paizo.me/PathfinderQuest will get you on the list to be alerted to jump onto that opportunity as soon as possible.
On behalf of everyone here in the keynote, and everyone working behind the scenes tirelessly, like Paizo events staff, Paizo website staff, Paizo customer service, and functionally the folks will be sending out all of that discounted stuff in the warehouse. We all thank you for your interest in your support of Paizo.
We love that you're discovering Pathfinder and Starfinder, or if you've been here all along, it's welcome home week here at PaizoCon Online, and we're thrilled to see you once again.
Check out the entire schedule of events on https://paizo.com/paizocon. Don't forget that promo code for paizo.com, PAIZOCON2024, and stay tuned for much longer in-depth dives into some of the stuff we just heard, about some of the stuff that we haven't had time to talk about in the keynote. The staff is here on Twitch all weekend long, and we cannot wait to talk with you about the things that excite us about Pathfinder and Starfinder.
Welcome to PaizoCon 2024, we are thrilled to have you. Always roll high. Try not to let your characters die. Have a great PaizoCon. We're thrilled to have you here.
Bye, everybody.