Pathfinder Adventure Path Changes - They're Quarterly Now

 

I bought a lot of Adventure Path books during Pathfinder's 1st edition. A quick count says I have at least 10 complete AP's, plus the various supporting themed books and map packs and possibly card decks if I really liked one ... it's a lot of material at 70+ books. They started out at $20 for a 96 page full-color softcover adventure with some supporting material. Typically there were six books in each series taking Pathfinder characters from level 1 to somewhere in the teens, possibly all the way to 20. These were released monthly and if you subscribed you got the PDF for free which was a nice touch as not everyone did (or does) that.

One thing that I think is often overlooked is that by doing this Paizo established that a company could sell adventures regularly and consistently - which was not something we really saw much before and for the last 25 years has been stated to be a non-viable type of product for a larger RPG company. They showed everyone it could be done.

Good things about the AP approach:

• You got a nicely presented adventure with locations, maps, NPCs, a new monster or two, and some information on the part of the campaign world (Golarion) where it was set. That's a pretty decent package.
• The 6-part format meant that the adventures were connected and - ideally - focused on a larger situation than you might find in a one-off adventure. The format also meant that you had a guaranteed long campaign if you wanted to stay with it.
•  Making it a known monthly effort also meant that you knew there was a new episode coming and eventually a completely new path a few months down the road if you didn't like the current one. They were very good about describing each one well in advance, at the very least something like " a big pirate adventure set in X part of Golarion", or "an AP where advanced technology shows up along with robots and a crashed spaceship", or " an adventure set in an Egypt-like land with pyramids and mummies."
• They also put out a free Players Guide for each one early on describing some of the big concepts and how different races and classes and alignments would fit it - or how they might not fit in particularly well. This was a big help in getting players lined up for a new campaign.

Not as good things about the APs:

• Seeing a description about a new AP gets the DM excited. Part 1 comes out and looks good so you start a campaign. However you haven't seen parts 2-5 yet and so it's hard to lay any groundwork for the future, bring in or emphasize certain NPCs or organizations, or local features. I mean, it's my game so if I want the local druid circle to be a factor then I can do that regardless but it's still usually better to know the big picture before you start. In that case you end up waiting six months for the whole thing to come out and you may or may not be ready to run a new campaign at that time.
• To get these things done on schedule different authors wrote each part. Sometimes one would write two parts, like #1 and #4, but even if they did there could be dissonance between parts, seeming misunderstandings about the overall focus of the thing, plot points and NPCs disappearing completely along the way, and just a lack of coherence in some cases. A good DM can fix a lot of this, but many of them did need some work to really tighten them up.
• The fixed nature of the "six parts per AP" sometimes meant we got filler. Not every adventure needs this many pages ... but it's going to get 500+ pages regardless because that's how it works. I think the thieves' guild oriented one ended up around 11th-12th level while Wrath of the Righteous was trying to pack in a 1-20 run across other planes and including a bunch of Mythic stuff along the way. Not every concept was a great fit for this format.
• If you don't like the concept then you get to wait six months for the next one. This was not always a bad thing as it was extremely unlikely you were going to be able to complete one of these in a six month window - so they start to stack up on the shelf.

Now I did like them most of the time so I have quite the pile on the shelf and I will probably end up adapting several of them to PF2E or some other game like Savage Worlds. I haven't bought one since the first one that came out for second edition. "Age of Ashes". The reason I stopped was because I wanted to do my own thing with the new system. I did, and then we stopped playing and have yet to hit it again in any serious way. 

In the interim they went to a new approach of 3-segment adventure paths. I believe this began with Starfinder and then was carried over to Pathfinder. This made a fair amount of sense to me as it lets you do more different things. They mostly covered levels 1-10 with some covering 11-20 and a few doing odd level ranges like 5-14. I think most people liked it as you still had big adventures covering the entire Pathfinder level range but you could change them up more easily. it also gives a DM some fun in connecting different paths and laying some groundwork and rumors about what else is going on that the players could decide to pursue. So this seems like a good move.

Last month though they announced another change to the format: Instead of monthly, they are going to quarterly releases that will cover material comparable to 3 monthly releases in the old format and instead of softcover they will be hardbacks. 

Now that's a big change and the primary concern online seems to be cost as instead of 3x$30 purchases a month apart it's going to be a single $80 purchase every three months. I get that it's a bigger chunk at once but it is technically less overall and it's a nice sturdy 256 page hardback. it seems pretty reasonable to me and this feels like less of a change than the prior one - this is just a change on format, the original switch to 3-book APs was a real change in approach. Additionally they have been publishing hardback collections of many of their more recent APs and those seem to sell well so why not just make them "hardback collections" from the start?

This also addresses a lot of my negatives from above, starting with having the whole AP on hand from the start. Considering it's what WOTC and a lot of 3rd party publishers do for 5E adventures, why not give it a try? 

I may have to look into these again now. Not sure about "Hellbreakers" yet but I will be looking them over.

And if you're interested in a description of all of the adventure paths someone has put together a pretty serious breakdown of all of them here. 

Checking in on Warhammer+ with Kill Lupercal

 It's been awhile since I mentioned Warhammer+. GW's subscription service that includes a TVshow/animation app and a separate set of game tool type apps. Frankly, not much has changed. There are a few more animations than there were in 2022 - but not that many. In 2022 I noted there were 10 episodes of Hammer and Bolter, for example. That's their traditional animation series about various random topics. Some of them are really good. Now, 3 1/2 years later there are 16. Not exactly prolific there are they? There are some more lore shows - available for free on many YouTube channels these days, even if not "official" GW takes. The games have all moved to new editions since launch and the apps were suitably revised. So ... sure. It's fine.

The big new thing recently was "Kill Lupercal", a CGI animated "series" - all of 3 episodes - which was hyped up as this an awesome new production. Set near the end of the Horus Heresy it's all about a titan battle group that heads out in less than optimal condition and ends up on a mission to take out the Warmaster Horus Lupercal. The concept is fine and the animation looks good. The problem is the execution.

The whole thing is made up of three 15 minute segments:

• Part 1 is the extremely drawn-out build up of the titan being repaired and various discussions of it's condition and what can be fixed and the Mechanicus doing Mechanicus things ... it's a bunch of standing around and talking and it takes half of the episode before out titan actually walks. They get out of the hanger, shoot up some traitor marines, and then at the end they encounter a lone mysterious titan. That's it, that's 1/3 of our story done.
• Part 2 is a discussion with the mystery titan, getting the other tians in the group introduced and lined up, and then everyone heads off to kill Horus. There is a fight with some superheavy tanks and then more discussion about what they should do.
• Part 3 finally gets to the point of the exercise and we get a real fight against traitor titans and the resolution of the whole Horus thing. This one is pretty good.

This show is analogous to Warhammer+ as a whole: too little too slowly and often focused on the wrong things. 

While the individual shows are better about this, the multi-episode series tend to plod along, especially at the beginning. I'm usually a fan of the gearing-up sequence in a movie or show but there are limits. They also need to realize that most of the people paying for this service are already invested in the 40K universe - they're not newbies. You don't need to explain what sisters of battle, or titans, or for goodness sake Space Marines are - we know. We want to see them doing stuff, not a lore-dump about what they are supposed to be doing. Some of this stuff feels like a cutscene intro to a videogame we're never going to play - let's get to the point, especially if we're going to have less than an hour to work through this story! We don't need minutes and minutes of characters standing around talking about auspex readings and how bad things are and what the Emperor would want  - it's 40k! How about we have those conversations while we're jumping into the action?

Besides the shows being slow, their rate of production is terribly slow.  Under the "Animations" banner on the site there are 12 entries:

• Astartes existed before this was a thing so it doesn't really count as a W+ production
• Angels of Death was their first CGI series and is still the best. Extra points for Blood Angels. It's from 2021.
• Hammer and Bolter was also a year 1 effort and has actually added some new episodes over the years - not many, but some.
• The Exodite is another 3-part CGI series that takes a while to get going and runs 30-something minutes total. Again it looks good but there just isn't that much there. Points for being Tau vs. Eldar and Imperials. It's from 2022.
• Interrogator is a 9-part series using traditional animation that has 15-20 minute episodes and ends up being around an hour and a half total. It's black and white too and a pretty serious dive into the grim dark civilian life of 40K. It's decent and it's from 2022.
• Blacktalon is a 6-part series using traditional animation set in the Age of Sigmar worlds. There are 20+ minute episodes and so you get an actual story here. It's from 2023.
• Pariah Nexus is a 3-part CGI series from 2023 and is one of the better offerings. It ends up being a little over an hour of story.
• Iron Within is a 30-minute CGI one-shot with guard and dark eldar and chaos marines that's more buildup than action. I think it's supposed to be more "horror" than action but ... we all know what the dark eldar are about, and we all know what chaos marines are about so you're not going to surprise anyone with the various bad things that happen. Even the title spoils what could have been one interesting wrinkle. I was disappointed with this one. It's from 2023.
• Broken Lance is a 30-minute CGI one-shot about a knight household. Once it gets going it's not bad. It's from 2024.
• The Enemy Without is a 5-minute glorified CGI trailer about the deathwatch and I'm not even sure what the point of it really is. It does at least get right to the action, so there is that. This one is from 2024.
• The Tithes is a 3-part CGI series from 2024 that totals up to about an hour. There is some interesting variety here.
• Then Kill Lupercal is the lone entry from 2025

So the output has not been great. Nor has it been consistent with formats and story lengths jumping all over the place. Some of this stuff is interesting and even good but there is just not that much of it. Someone could subscribe for a month and watch everything without breaking a sweat.

I really like this one

The rest of the offerings are battle reports, painting guides, lore videos, and pretty much the kind of thing you can find all over YouTube and the rest of the internet. I would not pay a subscription fee for these.

I suspect that most people pay a sub here for the 40K and AoS apps - those are actually handy and useful for building an army and playing some games and encourage one to maintain it. There are alternatives there as well.

There is an annual miniature that's free to subscribers and those are usually pretty cool and this is the only way to get them. Not sure I would pay just for that but it's one benefit to sticking with it.

Also very cool

For now I will be continuing my own subscription here, despite my problems with the service. I do use the apps, I do like some of the shows, and I keep hoping it will get better. We will see.