Roleplaying

[icycalm]

This is a very interesting Adventure Path that was announced a couple months back, but I've been waiting to make a thread on it because I have quite a bit to say about it. (TL;DR you can play it immediately; read to the end for details.)

This horror-themed campaign is set in the haunted land of Shenmen and begins just after the small town of Willowshore celebrates the Season of Ghosts—a local festival to appease Shenmen’s many evil ghosts and spirits and ensure safety for the coming year. Yet this year, something’s gone wrong, and the PCs wake to find their hometown of Willowshore has fallen under a sinister curse and been invaded by monsters. In the months to come, the heroes must help the people of Willowshore prepare for winter while working to discover the cause of the curse that’s cut them all off from the rest of the world. Is it the work of a fiend? The machinations of vengeful spirits? Or is it something much, much worse?

First of all, it's set fully in Tian Xia, Pathfinder's Asia, and they have a massive map to go with it. We've never had that region in such detail.



Moreover, they're introducing not one as usual but two sourcebooks to go with it, which makes sense when you consider how different this region is from the Europe-like Inner Sea region.





The other feature they're touting is that all these materials are written overwhelmingly by Asians, but I have already called bullshit on that. Yes, there are many Asian freelancers they've drafted to assist with all this, but the main story and the bulk of the work and of course all the direction are being done by Whites. This is especially blatant in the list of main writers. Check this out. These are the adventure books:

• The Summer that Never Was, by Sen H.H.S.
  
• Let the Leaves Fall, by Joan Hong, with additional articles by Tan Shao Han and Grady Wang
  
• With No Breath to Cry, by Dan Cascone & Eleanor Ferron, with additional articles by Jeremy Blum, Dana Ebert, Joshua Kim, and Michelle Y. Kim
  
• To Bloom below the Web, by Liane Merciel, with additional articles by Jeremy Blum, Joshua Kim, and Michelle Y. Kim

The first book's writer was originally announced as a Taiwanese woman. But if you go to that book's product page now, a couple months later, it says... "Written by: Sen H.H.S. and James Jacobs." So apparently that yellow woman couldn't deliver, and the White Savior had to step in and help her out. So she basically has zero autonomy and I would be very surprised if even 50% of the adventure ended up her work. You can see Paizo using yellows as ornaments here. And it's the same with the third book, written entirely by Whites, and even the fourth book is written by a half-European woman. Only the second book seems to be written entirely by yellows... at least so far. Because I wouldn't be surprised if a White had to step in and save that one too at some point. Ultimately, all these people have no connection to the RPG world. James Jacobs has been in this business for a quarter of a century now, but where did all these yellows pop up from to suddenly helm an entire Pathfinder AP? They sprung from nowhere, they were merely drafted in so Paizo could virtue-signal. So they are of course nowhere near the level of the Whites, so JJ is forced to step in everywhere to make sure they don't tank the project before they go back to brainlessly mashing X in Final Fantasy like their genes are screaming out for them to do.

THAT SAID, I do believe all these yellow freelancers (and we're talking about DOZENS of them spread across the four adventure books and two sourcebooks) will bring some value to the project in the way of folklore etc. that only they can provide, even though all of the art is still done by White people. Huge missed opportunity here to hire Asians for the art, which is one aspect they COULD have knocked out of the park and made entirely unique for Pathfinder and RPGs in general. But it looks like Paizo preferred to stick with their regulars, since they have them on the payroll already, and it's just one Adventure Path after all. It's not like all of Pathfinder will suddenly turn Asian, so it makes no sense to invest too much in bringing in Asian illustrators. So again we see that it's all just virtue-signalling and there won't be any lasting changes.

So Tian Xia is Asia while Minkai (which features in Jade Regent) is China, and Shenmen (which features in this AP) is Japan, more specifically, a horror version of Japan. You can get a sense for the flavor from the following illustration of the region featured in the recent "Book of the Dead" sourcebook:



But most interesting of all is the AP itself. First off, it's a 4-parter, which has never happened in APs before. The First Edition ones are all 6-parters, and the Second Edition ones so far have been either 6-parters or 3-parters, so this will be the first 4-parter. And that's because:

You might notice that this is our first four-part adventure path, for a very good reason! Each of this Adventure Path’s volumes take place over the course of a different season, starting with the rainy summer and ending in the spring. With each season’s passing, the stakes the heroes face escalate, and the revelations in store will shock the townsfolk of Willowshore to the core! Will your group of adventurers be able to save their hometown from a mysterious supernatural horror, or will your hometown simply become the next of Shenmen’s haunted ruins?

So the AP will last a whole year, which again is unusual for APs. Most of them last about 6 months, with a couple of longer exceptions (Skull & Shackles and Strength of Thousands take at least one year, and Kingmaker of course can take a decade or longer). As for levels, it goes from 1st to 12th.

But by far the AP's most interesting aspect, which I left for last, is that it takes place at the very start of the Age of Lost Omens, "a little over a century" before Rise of the Runelords! This is the first time Paizo does a prequel AP, and it has tremendous ramifications for us. It basically means we can play this whenever we want! So if you want a good dose of 4K Foundry and don't mind learning PF2, talk with your teammates when you're nearing the end of your current AP, and pick this one for your next one. It would be especially cool if another team picked Jade Regent, so we can more fully explore Tian Xia next year, but the problem with Jade Regent is that it hasn't been converted for Fantasy Grounds yet, or for any VTT. And though I could convert it myself, it wouldn't be ideal because the PDF images are low res compared to what Paizo provides VTT partners, so the maps and images would be a blurry mess when you zoom in (which btw is what shock therapy's Roll20 Skull & Shackles campaign must look like with his friends as I recently realized. He should consider switching to Fantasy Grounds where the whole thing has finally been converted in full high-res. He could also buy the FG modules and use a 4K screen to take high-res pics of all the images and transfer them to Roll20, if he prefers to keep using that. But Fantasy Grounds already has all the stats in, so I think switching over would save him time in the long run.)

So we'll see what happens with Jade Regent. I am confident Fantasy Grounds will convert it eventually, because they've finished converting 4-5 APs in the last couple of years alone, and there aren't that many more remaining from First Edition to be converted. But it would be especially cool if they converted Jade Regent in the next year and we can run it alongside Season of Ghosts. Assuming of course there's enough interest for both or either of them. At any rate I am putting them on the overworld, and players can make their choices. There will be a LOT of cool stuff to choose from for everyone's next AP, but for whoever wants 4K Foundry, this will be the only one (I recently decided that Kingmaker will be run entirely in TaleSpire, so no 4K Foundry for that one; more news on this coming soon).

Also note that all the APs on the overworld will be marked as Season 1 or Season 2, but this one will be Season 0. Which means we can finish an entire season just by finishing this AP! (which, being a 4-parter, will even take less time than all the other APs we're playing; 33% less time, to be precise).

I had a lot of trouble finding a good music theme for this AP. There's very little Asian-themed epic music—all of it composed by Whites of course. In the end I settled on this:

Season of Ghosts theme: "The Way of the Ghost"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoOpFGuq2Kk



So yes, it's the Ghost of Tsushima soundtrack, and we'll be using all of it in this AP, just like we'll be using the AssCreed Black Flag OST for Skull & Shackles, AssCreed Origins for Mummy's Mask, and Alien: Isolation for Alien RPG etc. These games are garbage compared to the RPGs, and they don't deserve the music, so we're setting things right by doing this. And by the way, on the cover of the Ghost of Tsushima OST there are two people credited, Ilan Eshkeri and Shigeru Umebayashi. But the first guy is the composer and the second is merely the producer. So why is the producer on the cover? This is not normally done. But it is done here so they can put a Japanese on the cover to get a pass from the woke police, while all the creativity here is White (actually, Jewish). I make no apologies for repeatedly highlighting these deceptions: I will NOT allow non-Whites to steal credit for our creativity, and I will pound their fucking faces onto the pavement wherever I notice them trying to do this, or merely accept it without protest when Whites do it for them. Make your own art and culture if you want to enjoy the credit and stop trying to appropriate our own!

Some interesting tidbits from the forum, above all by James Jacobs:

Is this case of "ya know we decided we won't name the town Willowshore in an asian language since to locals it would still be Willowshore, so it would be silly" or case of ap starting outside of Shenmen? :O I'mma curious

Because Shenmen is a region that doesn't map directly to a real world region. Just as Ustalav brings in horror tropes from multiple countries, so does Shenmen, and by naming the town as a compound word rather than making up a nonsense word that sounds Asian or by picking a specific real world Asian language, "Willowshore" is on equal footing across all languages.

It's also easier to translate a compound word for products that are translated into other languages.

And by using a compound word, we give the reader some immediate flavor to associate with the settlement. You know willow trees and shores are a part of this brand new town already.

It also follows traditions we've used in the Inner Sea, in naming some towns like Sandpoint, Riddleport, Westcrown, Carrion Hill, Highhelm, Whitethrone, Bloodcove, Starfall, etc.

Sometimes we make up a nonsense word for a place. Sometimes we use a compound word.

The Adventure Path starts in Willowshore with the expectation that the PCs are all locals, or at least have lived in Willowshore long enough to consider it their home town.

Season of Ghosts is 100% built to play out over the course of 1 year, with each volume covering 3 months (one season). Which is plenty of time for some groups to do lots of downtime stuff (and absolutely each adventure will include downtime play elements)... but also too short for other groups who prefer the idea of going from 1st to 12th level be something that takes multiple years rather than just a single year.

But yes. This Adventure Path will have some significant parts that lean into exploration and downtime play as well as encounter play.

The entire adventure path takes place in Shenmen, and is primarily inspired by Asian horror movies (particularly those from Japan, China, and South Korea) and myths. Shenmen itself isn't meant to be a specific "stand in" for any real-world region, and there's influence and inspiration from across Asia in this Adventure Path. Thematically and lore wise, it'd be a very awkward fit for somewhere outside of Tian-Xia, down to and including the very structure of it being a 4-part story built off of not a 3-act structure but a 4-act one based on Kishōtenketsu, a classic storytelling structure used in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean narratives.

Season of Ghosts begins on the first day of summer in the year 7108 IC (which converts to 4608 AR), so 2 years or so after the Age of Lost Omens begins.

This is sort of an experiment in that regard to see how folks react to something like this, but also, the entire adventure path is pretty tightly constrained to a small region in Willowshore. There's not going to be a chance for your PCs to swoop around the world and take part in historical events in other words.

We'll see if we want to do something like that again in the future after these tentative first steps.

This guy, on the other hand, is wrong:

I also realized that you can combine this AP with Fists of the Ruby Phoenix to make a Tian Xia centric campaign that goes from 1 - 20.

Fists of the Ruby Phoenix takes place over a century later, so unless your character is elf, half-elf, dwarf etc., he'll be dead long before then. So all the characters used here won't be usable on the overworld post-Rise of the Runelords, unless via magical means, which is possible but highly improbable, especially for mere 12th-level characters, as they will be at the end of this AP. Also, even if your character can live a hundred years, he'll be back to 1st-level by then unless he plays more adventures (which we won't have because there aren't any for that era) due to Ultimate Edition's Use It Or Lose It rule. So either way, these characters won't be able to play anything else and progress beyond 12th-level unless Paizo releases more adventures for that era at some point down the line. So we can keep these characters "in pause" indefinitely just in case.

Note that the four books of Season of Ghosts are Pathfinder AP #196-199, which is why this guy says:

A four part AP, interesting. AP #200 must be something really special.

It is indeed, and I'll be posting about it in another thread soon.


P.S. Bonus troll level 1000:



They haven't deleted it yet so it looks like the sarcasm has gone over their heads.

[icycalm]

https://paizo.com/threads/rzs43ttt?Path ... th-Vol-2#7

The number 1 reason we made Season of Ghosts 4 books long is so that #200 could be the start of an Adventure Path. Having #100 show up in the middle of an Adventure Path was awkward and diluted our ability to celebrate it as a milestone, so it was important in-house for us to do something to try to make 200 extra special.

Once we made that call, my idea to make Season of Ghosts based on the four seasons was a natural result of that choice, since with four volumes, I wanted to do something based on that number. James Case helped further by pointing out that since Season of Ghosts was a Tian Xia Adventure Path, that it'd be a great chance to do its story based on the four-act story arc construction of Kishotenketsu. Two elements that make for much stronger reasons for Season of Ghosts to be a four volume Adventure Path, even if they did come along after the decision was made!

Note that absolutely everything about the campaign was devised by White guys, and even the traditional Kishotenketsu structure (whatever that is) came from them. Diverse people appear to have zero high-level visionary input in campaigns set in their own lands even as late as 2024, despite the fact that Paizo is by now utterly swarming with them.

The moment the top White guys at Paizo retire, the entire organization will crumble like a brown settlement being carpet-bombed or a yellow city being nuked.