PaizoCon Online 2023 is just underway, and we’re already getting some great tidbits about what exciting content is coming for Pathfinder and Starfinder.
This year PaizoCon is fully online with over 400 game sessions being run 24 hours a day organized through Warhorn (PaizoCon badge required) and seminars, AMAs, and other streams coming at us via Twitch and Discord. (No badge necessary, all free!) You can participate in as much or as little as you want. The whole shebang kicked off with the keynote where we received much of the news of coming products and projects—information we used to get from the PaizoCon Banquet, now, teased in the keynote and then spread amongst seminars throughout the weekend.
Eric Mona, the publisher and chief creative officer at Paizo, started off the stream by welcoming Paizo fans including the “tens of thousands of new players who have checked out the system” throughout this past year.
One of the hottest topics is the Pathfinder Remaster Project. Pathfinder 2e is still a pretty new system, but some recent events (ORC Gaming License anyone?) as well as a desire to create a product that is easier for the newbie have led to a rework of this great gaming system. The remaster will be fully compatible with the existing Pathfinder Second Edition system as the core rules from Second Edition are not being changed. Eric Mona describes the Pathfinder Remaster Project as a new coat of paint to focus more on the Pathfinder elements rather than the legacy elements that they inherited when they made Pathfinder‘s first edition back in 2009. Logan Bonner describes it as a “smoother, tuned up version of the game” with the goal to “provide a fresh entry point into the world of Pathfinder, making the game easier to learn and more enjoyable to play than ever before.”
There will be more sessions on Twitch about the Remaster Project, but Logan Bonner, the lead designer, revealed the covers for the Player Core and GM Core books due for release in November. The Pathfinder Remaster Project is going to result in the intimidatingly large Core Rulebook being broken into these multiple smaller core books, and Wayne Reynolds is again the artist of these cover masterpieces. Again, they said multiple times, and it relieves me to know that while everyone may want to add these better organized and WOTC-OGL-license-divorced versions to their library, they are not necessary purchases. Your old Second Edition books are still fully compatible.
Digital mock-ups of the coming GM Core and Player Core rulebooks. Art by Wayne Reynolds.
The beautiful cover of the Player Core depicts a Diabolic Dragon, which will appear later on in the Monster Core remastered release. The Player Core contains all the original core ancestries, with the addition of the Leshy and the Orc as well as versatile heritages that can customize any ancestry. One such heritage is the Nephilim. As I understand it, Nephilim is essentially a renaming of Tiefling/Aasimar, an example of how the remaster will use different terminology to completely divorce it from the WOTC OGL licensing. The Player Core will have eight classes, with the Witch and Wizard seeing the most revisions. The GM Core, featuring Runelord Xanderghul and a Mirage Dragon, will include information on running the game, building your games, a settings chapter, and ending with treasure and artifacts and relics.
Much more information about the Remaster Project will be released throughout the weekend on Twitch.
Two other hardcover rulebooks were also teased. Rage of Elements, a book “taking players on a tour of the planes and introducing their elemental lords” will be available in early August at GenCon. It will introduce us to the six elemental planes (the plane of wood and metal has apparently “reemerged”). Rage of Elements will also re-introduce the beloved kineticist class reimagined for Pathfinder 2e that can control the elements. The second book is Howl of the Wild, the first book written to the ORC License, mainly focused on creatures, “beasts, animals, and the wild,” this book will present six new ancestries, each one of which is a “little more on the wild side” such as the Minotaur and Centaur. It will also include regional variants of some creatures as well as more spells and archetypes.
We will be getting some dwarven love with the Lost Omens line release of Lost Omens: Highhelm, which releases in June and delves deeply into dwarven culture with skills, feats, ancestries, backgrounds, and mechanics and eight dwarven gods. It serves “double duty,” both as a gazetteer of the sky citadel of Highhelm and having a focus on dwarven culture.
Associated with Lost Omens: Highhelm, they announced the Sky Kings Tomb adventure path. This adventure starts with the characters in Highhelm and will take characters from levels 1 to 10 on a quest for a major piece of dwarven history and will be released starting in August. We will also be revisiting Tien Xia in the following four-part adventure path release, “Season of Ghosts,” taking characters from 1st through 12th levels. The AP takes place over the course of a year in-game with each being volume horror and seasonally themed.
They discussed some crowdfunding projects, including the BKOM Studios Abomination Vaults ARPG, Demiplane’s Pathfinder NEXUS, and the Dynamite Comics Kickstarter (the Pathfinder comics with Jim Zub at the helm got me back into comics!), but some breaking news was that Steve Jackson Games will be releasing Pathfinder: Revolution, an expansion of the hit board game Revolution that puts players “in the rebellion of Korvosa—facing against Queen Ileosa to save the city from her bloody path to immortality.”
Starfinder, Paizo’s science fantasy RPG based in the far future of Pathfinder’s Golarion, also got its due attention in the opening keynote with the presentation of Starfinder Enhanced. This will include enhanced versions of the envoy, solarian, technomancer, and witchwarper, as well as many player options, equipment, spells, and rules. Also announced is the Mechageddon, a hardbound adventure path for levels 3-18 and mechs up to level 17!
PaizoCon 2023 is where Starfinder organized play will start the Year of Fortune’s Fall, and Pathfinder Society will continue their year dealing with the night hag.
Ending the keynote, Eric Mona revealed the upcoming Pathfinder Adventure Path Volume #200, bringing us back to a Pathfinder favorite location originally introduced in Pathfinder Adventure Path #1, Seven Dooms for Sandpoint. Coming out in March 2024, this double-sized standalone adventure for character levels 4th through 9th will be available in hardcover as well as softcover. Seven Dooms for Sandpoint is an adaptation of the original Paizo office campaign—the campaign played at Paizo before Pathfinder first edition was even released, what Paizo staff used to playtest Pathfinder, and most importantly the adventuring home of Ostog the Unslain! Come explore “the Pit” just outside of our beloved Sandpoint. This is just me talking here, but maybe we could get remastered second edition 4th level pre-gens of those original Paizo staff characters!
If you want more information about any of these products, check out the panels throughout the weekend. Interested in some of these great products? Check out the Paizo Blog for a discount code good through PaizoCon Online 2023.
Important PaizoCon Online 2023 Links
- PaizoCon Online 2023 Badge Purchases (Only necessary for online games—signup on Warhorn.)
- Twitch Stream Schedule: Seminars, news—no badge necessary!
- PaizoCon Online Warhorn: The aforementioned game signups
- Link to Paizo Discord server: Meet and talk with others, ask questions, and hang out!
