Pathfinder 2nd Edition in 2020 So Far

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We're seven months in to the wholesale release and conversion of my gaming gangs to Pathfinder 2nd edition....I had expected to have at least one regular night of Pathfinder 2E going forward if everyone liked it, but instead every game night (one weekly saturday group and two rotating Wednesday groups) have gone full Pathfinder. For my purposes this is fine....and after seven months the Saturday group has crept to 11th level and we all feel we might reach level 20. I have taken careful effort to plot out material to insure they they achieve this goal, and the Pathfinder leveling mechanic, which is flat and contains no larger hills that must be overcome to advance as it did in prior editions, insures that somewhere around 18-25 sessions or so the entire party (or those who survive) should all make level 20.

Clever design, that....I know that as far back as D&D 3.0 there was a design notion that the average group played for 1 year, maybe 2, and that the leveling/XP should pace for campaigns that lasted this long, but the reality proved to be less stable than the spherical cow teams that WotC used to design the game at that time, with most groups getting exhausted by the complexities of high level mechanics around level 10-12. Even today, D&D 5th edition, which I feel has an advantage of easier play at high level while suffering from a dearth of high level content for the GM still requires a bit of an XP slog to advance....less than prior editions, yet more onerous than contemporary gamers care for. Or any gamers, really.

Pathfinder 2nd Edition, by flattening the progression to just 1,000 XP/level, has created a reward mechanic which lets the GM easily pace the game at a consistent speed with regards to leveling, which is cool. I've experimented a bit, and found that 2-3 sessions per level is quite comfortable, but a stoic and determined GM could pace it out to four or more sessions using the RAW and could even for a gonzo "13th Age" approach and do a "20 sessions, 20 levels" kind of campaign if they wanted to. PF2E can handle it.

In terms of game campaigns I have done the following:

Oman'Hakat and the Lands of Osinre and Harkuum:  I have spent most of my effort in a campaign setting of new design which I call "Oman'Hakat," the Final Realm. It's a strange bedfellow to my most venerable setting, Ages of Lingusia, and one of the overarching plots is how the two worlds connect (and why). The setting is aimed at a land of archaic kingdoms and a budding empire, with a period of deep religious upheaval and fear of prophecies spelling doom for the world. A major part of the mystery is dispelling the fiction from the truth of the game's own history and folklore.

I started this campaign in D&D 5E in the months leading up to Pathfinder 2E's release, setting the 5E games in the Osinre region of the world (based on Egyptian thematics), with the joke being that the distant, ominous empire of Harkuum would be to staging ground for Pathfinder 2E games. So far this is exactly what has happened, though when we do finally revisit Osinre it will also be in Pathfinder 2E. Either way....with any luck I'll start posting some of the massive amount of content on this setting I've worked out on the blog soon for general and free consumption.

Ages of Lingusia: I have revisited the Age of Strife era in my oldest campaign once more in one of the every-other-week campaigns, focusing on a gritty, dirty corner of the world about ex-soldiers seeking to recover from the traumas of a war which the were on the winning side of, but at great cost. It's proving to be very fun, and I love that Pathfinder 2E's more visceral approach to fantasy with a clearer level of risk and grit makes for an excellent fit in the world I originally created for AD&D 1E.

A Brief Return to Enzada: My exotic campaign I devised specifically for use with Pathfinder when it came out, designed to invoke all sorts of anti-tropes for fantasy, played out in a quiet revisitation over a few months before I decided I just wasn't feeling the impetus to see where things went and we migrated to Lingusia. Still, it's nice to explore old setting now and again.

Chirak: I haven't yet done anything with Realms of Chirak for Pathfinder 2nd, though the temptation grows by the day. I am biding my time, waiting for that moment of inspiration to spark; I ran a lot of games in Chirak over the last decade, and the venerable setting has earned a break. I am tempted to keep it with D&D 5E, too; I put a lot of work into upgrading it to that edition, after all. But D&D 5E just doesn't feel right now that I've been playing Pathfinder 2E so much.....still, I may go back and revisit, see how I feel about it with some actual play at some point. But no rush; Chirak's many lands still need a break.

Anyway, with one group going from level 1 to 11, another group creeping along from 11 o 13, and a third starting at 5th and migrating up from there (plus one campaign that ran from 1st to 5th now retired), we're already gotten in a ton of Pathfinder gaming with no end in sight. I am really looking forward to the release of the Gamemastery Guide 2nd edition next week, a much needed tome for GMs which I am keen to explore. I'll provide more info once I have my copy next week!

Cthulhu Dark Ages 3rd Edition is Live

Just got notice, but the PDF for Cthulhu Dark Ages 3rd edition is now available over on Chaosium.com here! Great news, easily one of my favorite eras of Call of Cthulhu, and a valuable resource for any historical medieval gaming buff as well (if you don't mind some mythos in the mix). I just downloaded my copy and it's a gorgeous full color book with a great deal of attention put to it, I can already tell. I will try to formulate a more proper review soon.

Dark Ages Cthulhu has been out of print for a while now, after the CoC 7E Kickstarter edition which was essentially put out to pasture shortly after the Chaosium shake-up, the reason being the book that was released did not meet Chaosium's standards as they should be. For a great example of what those standards are (and why they make a difference) you should check this one out!

TFT Decks of Destiny - More Versatile than just for TFT

A few weeks ago my Decks of Destiny mega boxed set arrived, a second monstrous package to add to my Fantasy Trip Legacy Edition boxed set from last year's Kickstarter. Decks of Destiny contains a lot of stuff.....if you're not familiar with it, here's the web site (here). Yes, a lot of stuff.

Well, the odds I'll run The Fantasy Trip anytime soon while Pathfinder 2nd Edition has a death grip on all of my gaming groups is slim to none, but I've already been using the Outdoor Encounter Cards for months with Pathfinder to spruce up overland travel, so why not some of the Decks of Destiny?

Decks of Destiny has content pretty specific to TFT: orc and octopus encounter cards (it's a TFT thing, trust me), character sheet cards for all sorts of stuff, an excellent monster deck, and lots of hex encounters. There are also some square sized card decks for treasures and rumors. Of this content, you can get the most use out of the following:

Hex Cards and more Mega Hex Tiles- the hex cards let you build labyrinths easily, and moving to a hex based map for Pathfinder is trivial (and even solves some incongruity with grid movement), and the mega hexes work great with Pathfinder figure flats or minis.

Treasure Cards - the two treasure card decks provide plenty of easily converted content to Pathfinder 2nd edition, and add a lot of new stuff to help flesh out the slightly sparse treasures in the Pathfinder 2E Core book. I've been using them on the fly with no issues.

Rumor Cards - aside from occasional references to the default TFT setting, these rumor cards may prove very handy in generating random and exotic rumors you can use as is, or assume are filthy lies.

Okay, all that aside, most of the Decks of Destiny work best with The Fantasy Trip, and it honestly really, really makes me want to run TFT just as soon as I can convince my regulars to let even one of our ongoing game nights switch to a different system. Until then, I can at least get some use out of the set with ongoing games!

Side note....Hey Paizo, you should do some products like this for Pathfinder! The recent card decks you have produced (and the upcoming Bestiary Cards) are awesome....but treasure decks, encounter decks and other cool GM resources would be amazing.

Ruben Fro's Mixed Reality Media

Ruben Fro has some amazing stuff which I was introduced to....check out these videos, which blend actual 360 recordings with a Unity Engine "point cloud" to produce visually bizarre and interesting results:





Much more to be found here!

Swords & Wizardry Boxed Set on Kickstarter!

Not just any old Swords & Wizardry edition....it looks like Frog God Games is offering up a four-volume boxed set edition of S&W Complete, with some extras such as a GM screen, monster book and stretch goals. S&W Complete snagged me as my preferred retroclone OSR edition of D&D a long time ago, and the look of this boxed set is too cool to pass up, so count me in!

Kickstarter Page Here!

Rage 2 - The Review

Rage 2 came out to a mixed bag of reviews, and I decided to hold off on getting it until it was on sale (which wasn't too much longer after its original release date). I snagged a copy around the same time I upgraded by laptop, and immediately ran in to some odd game-stopping bugs, odd ones in which the game would work fine then would simply stop loading. The fixes in the forums suggested digging in to the ini files to fix it, which could work....for a little while. So I gave up and waited a few months.

Recently for no reason I could discern other than "I was in the mood" I reloaded Rage 2 on my main rig and dived in. 25 odd hours later I finished the main campaign, which was basically about as satisfying as you might expect any id game ending to be; at the 27 hour mark I'd had enough time to decide the DLC missions weren't interesting enough for me to care.

Anyway....here's what I posted on Steam's review page for posterity:

PROS
--Open Sandbox world is fun to explore; good FPS controls and seamless vehicle controls make for a good time (Note: sandbox world is good for about 20 hours; starts to feel repetitive after that point)

--The core storyline is interesting (not earth shattering, just interesting) and lots of good voice acting (DLC less interesting though)

--The graphics are great, and the game feels very "ID" to me (it feels even more like a spiritual successor to Quake 4 to me than to Rage 1)

--Stuff that was good about the Rage universe from the first game influences and sharpens in this much expanded world

CONS
--The open sandbox world has a lot of "go here, find X objects" quests that are hard to escape if you get bored of them since its the fastest way to get the resources to level up; for my take, I'm fine with these but wish the game's assets were more diverse (why does everyone in the wasteland use pink cover containers to store their cash and feltrite, for example? Couldn't the devs have mixed it up a bit? There's like dozens of other container graphics in the game that are non-interactible! We won;t get confused, seriously...)

--There's a RMT shop filled with overpriced skins and the DLC. In a single player game, yeah. On the plus side the DLC missions are typical "ID DLC" type stuff, but the downside is they aren't very interesting and I just can't bring myself to care to care to complete them.

--Despite the overall storyline, not much beyond finding tablets and phones with story bits on them to flesh out the rest of the world (missing RPG style story elements, essentially); the game aims for a big, expansive world....but this kind of world needs the Fallout treatment, and it's really sorely absent here.

--The game has difficulty grades by location and mission; doesn't always advertise the difficulty of some missions until you're there; too easy and you roflstomp them, too hard and you get murderated endlessly.

NEUTRAL
--The DLC expansions are in the RMT shop and can set you back about $30, but they are the only things you will want to buy from there if you like the base game.

--The game had some weird bugs early on but it appears to be patched to a functional state now.

--You may get tired of "pink chalk color" while playing this game.

--The DLC is very optional, and best only if you desperately find yourself craving more after the main campaign ends (in other words, don't buy it like I did before finishing the main game).

OVERALL

--Solid A for fans of ID shooters and open world games, or fans of post-apoc settings to explore who enjoy the single player experience. DLC is a C- though.

--If you're missing one or more of those requisites then this may or may not appeal to you as much. For me, worth it. Especially if you can find it for $20 on sale.

OSR - Gateway Games?

Today I handed over a copy of Survive This!, For Coin & Blood and an extra copy of Savage Worlds Deluxe Edition along with a mess of spare dice to some local friends of my son. Most of the kids where we live are around 10-13 years old, and my son is only 8, but at least one of them likes reading (I handed him a bunch of comic books to help with his reading skills), likes games, and is trying hard to learn to draw....it's hard not to want to encourage this, especially in an area such as where we live (Albuquerque) where the baseline for education and the economy is so miserable.

Anyway, hopefully his mom doesn't object, but maybe it will give the whole gang something interesting to play soon! They were already hooked on Survive This! after a short time....

The Mandalorian Season 2 this Fall

Thank the Force, but The Mandalorian will be back this fall according to a recent announcement (news bit here).

Tiny post! That was all....just excited to know that the best Star Wars since the original trilogy is set for a return.

2020 Gaming Plans

My tabletop gaming plans for 2020 are very consistent: keep gaming, as much as possible, on the two nights I have free to do it. My strategy toward this end remains simple: keep focused on the game systems that let me maximize my prep to play time, and cater best to my GM style of gaming. So far that means I can safely expect to play more Pathdinder 2nd Edition and Cypher System; indeed, these two games alone encompass almost everything I need in gaming right now for my above outlined requisites. There are other games I would like to try out soon though! These include:

Forbidden Lands - this boxed set which is really just a box to hold two enormous leatherette bound Player and GM guidebooks is an amazing product. It has old school design and a strong focus on exploratory hexcrawl-styled gameplay, with plenty of tools to evolve the story as you go. It's a product so good that even if I can't get my players to try it as a system, I will appropriate its GM content for use in another game.

Alien RPG - this came out in December so I've had no time in 2019 to play it, but for 2020 I would like to run a short campaign at minimum to try it out. I am very much hoping it does what I've always wanted an Alien RPG to do.

Starfinder - I would like to get back to this at some point, especially now that I am looking at the system through "PF2E lenses" which allows Starfinder to make more sense to me.

Cyberpunk Red - I have to be honest....I am not aware of any new games coming out in 2020 that are tempting me right now, other than the hoped for release of the Cyberpunk Red full product. My attempt to secure a print copy of the Introductory Cyberpunk Red has met with continuous failure, but I am very much counting on securing a copy of the final product. 90% of my gaming in college was split between Cyberpunk 2020 and AD&D 2nd edition, so there's a compelling interest for me to get this.

Savage Worlds Adventure Edition - while still being the same game, the new "SWADE" edition of Savage Worlds manages to fix so many little bits and bobs that it's sort of impossible not to love. It fixes things you never knew were broken, but once the fix is seen it cannot be unseen, and I am really eager to play Savage Worlds again, and soon. My only worry is it will take a long time for new updated genre books to arrive.

Outside of the above I keep a small stash of "ready to play" RPGs handy for pick up games, filler sessions, or "we need a break" moments. This bundle includes Traveller (and Cepheus Light by proxy), Swords & Wizardry Complete, White Star and of course Savage Worlds. One game missing from my collection I keep kicking myself about (since I sold it on EBay) was Beyond the Wall, a game which did such a great job of making B/X D&D into something literary and mysterious that I must order new copies again soon, especially now that my son is getting old enough to grokk this stuff properly.

In the end....it is entirely possibly 99.5% of my game time this year is spent with Pathfinder 2nd edition, but I am the GM; my word is law! I just need to put the time and effort into one of these other games to make it happen.

Deathbat's 2020 Predictions!

Here we go: my predictions for 2020. I'll make a single list this time, on the top ten things I want to suggest will happen this year:

10. Wizards of the Coast will announce a "Player's Handbook 2"

It might not be called PH2, but I think we're due for one of these, especially now that Eberron is in the mix. If they don't produce a PH2, then I will fall to my backup pediction: a Spelljammer sourcebook.

9. Paizo will announce playtesting on a 2nd edition of Starfinder

Starfinder is a PF1.5 system, and it shows. It has more in common with the new Pathfinder 2E, but enough left overs from PF1E to make compatibility an issue. Now that they've refined their key design with PF2E, Starfinder could really benefit from such an update. I expect I'll be wrong on this, but my secondary prediction is: a more comprehensive PF2E to Starfinder conversion document will be released at some point.

8. Playstation 5 will be the early contender for Console Winner

This prediction is based on the fact that Xbox and Microsoft appear to be moving toward a focus on "any device will play our games," which dilutes their exlusive content, and their Xbox consoles seem to be focused on being more digital than ever, with a big push toward the Xbox Live services and games on demand. There's a market for this, but I think when it comes to consoles that exclusives can really count, ad Nintendo and Sony are well aware. If I can play Gears of Wars and Halo titles on PC, why do I need an Xbox? Answer: I don't.

7. We still won't see a BRP book or Mythic Iceland in 2020

I think Chaosium's current crew is just not interested in BRP as a brand in the way the older fans think of it, and as such I think they are shifting focus to new IPs such as Rivers of London and that RPG about kitsune. Will this work for them? Time will tell, but it's probably not a bad idea to branch out and experiment a bit in this era of RPGs.

6. D101 Games Will Produce OpenQuest 3rd Edition

OpenQuest 3rd Edition was in the works last year according to Newt Newport's posts, and while it didn't come out (that I am aware of), I have high hopes we will see the 10th anniversary edition show up this year. I sincerely hope it arrives; I consider OpenQuest and Mythras the "heart of BRP" now that Chaosium has realigned its focus with a more setting-specific style of game approach.

5. New Flying Buffalo product in 2020

With the tragic loss of Rick Loomis it looks like Steve Crompton and co. are stepping up to take over, and I am very hopeful they will carry the torch for FLying Buffalo. I expect (hope) to see some new stuff this year as a result, maybe even a Kickstarter or two. Fingers crossed!

4. A Real SF RPG Based on D20/5th Edition

The market is rife with experiments right now, but what we need is either WotC or a proper licensed 3rd party to step up to plate and dominate this sector with a fully functional, properly realized SF RPG powered by the 5th edition sytem. It can happen! Someone prove me right here.

3. A New (possibly Kickstarted) Edition of GURPS in some form

I don't actually believe this will happen; think of this more as wishful thinking. But hear me out: SJGames has seen that there's enough niche interest in GURPS to support Dungeon Fantasy RPG. They've gotten quite good at Kickstarters. Their site shows both Campaigns and Characters books for 4E going out of stock. Maybe its because they plan to do a Kickstarted revamp sometime soon? Hey, it could happen!

2. That Aliens video game will get announced for next gen consoles

I bet we will actually, finally hear about an actual Alien video game, pitched as a possible sequel of sorts to Isolation, for a 2020 or 2021 release date on the next gen consoles. Gotta happen this time!

1. Switch Pro Announced in 2020

Nintendo moves to its own beat, but I bet they will finally announce the hinted/teased existence of the planned Switch Pro edition next year, though it may only be an announcement with a 2021 release date. We shall see!

Bonus: FAR FETCHED PREDICTION: WotC announces a 5.5 rerelease of D&D core books, or announces plans for 6th edition to release in 2021.

I don't think it will happen, but with 5E now hitting 7 years its getting around the time these sorts of things happen. WotC could in theory release updated editions with minor revisions that remain fully backwards compatible; that would be smart and cool; but I think 2020 is the earliest we could start making these sorts of predictions and have any degree of potential success. We shall see!