Master of Heroes is now released, it released very late last year, just over a day before New Year's. And it won 2024 Game of the Year.
Meanwhile, I stumbled into something remarkable. Check this out:
Inner Sea Hexmap (FoundryVTT Module)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/c ... vtt_module
It's a mod for Cult Engine 2 that turns the Inner Sea map into a giant hexmap, not just as an image, but as a playable videogame overworld in CE2, with clickable locations etc. This is what it looks like zoomed-out:
And zoomed-in:
Pretty awesome, but that's not my point here. We may use this mod, or we may not, but what struck me was a comment posted some way down the page: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/c ... nt/jx2tnyf
That's exactly Master of Heroes lol.
He doesn't know how to phrase it because it's such a novel concept, so he still calls it an "AP", an "Adventure Path", but one that "doesn't necessarily have this strict story to follow". But a story without a story to follow (more accurately: to shape, because this is a roleplaying game) is not a story, and an AP without a story is not an AP. And the more complex you want the AP to be, the more it will chain you down to a place, or at least a set series of places. Even in a sandbox AP like Kingmaker, it still all takes place in a tiny corner of the map: the Stolen Lands. But you want an "AP" that stretches across the WHOLE planet, and moreover not just goes across it (there are a couple of APs like that) but can end up ANYWHERE AT ALL THE PLAYERS WANT?
Bro that's not an AP, that's an adventure-strategy game like Master of Magic and Heroes of Might and Magic, but instead of being set in a tiny programmer world, you want it set across Golarion.
Which is precisely Master of Heroes.
He even describes Master of Combat! When he says "Scattered around the map are random encounters to trigger, maybe quests to find or dungeons to explore", that's precisely the Pathfinder Society Scenarios that I am scattering across the map, and I even have his random encounters by pulling hundreds of random encounter tables for each region from the books and powering with them every hex in the map!
When he ends his comment with "this hex map would be amazing for that" he is basically saying THIS HEX MAP IS AMAZING AND IT IS A SHAME THERE IS NO GAME THAT REALLY UTILIZES IT. Because Pathfinder doesn't utilize it. You don't need the whole map to run any AP, you just need the zoomed-in map of the location it takes place in; the rest of the giant map is just for flavor, to make you feel as if there's a huge world around you, so that your zoomed-in location will feel more real, instead of surrounded by invisible walls, and therefore fake, as in the programmer games.
When an intelligent gamer sees this map, his mind reels from the possibilities. Deep inside HE KNOWS THIS IS THE ULTIMATE LEVEL. Nothing else compares to this! Not a Bethesda map, not a GTA map, none of that programmer garbage. This is the biggest open world in the history of open worlds, and it is incredible. Unfortunately, no game utilizes it, so its potential has been wasted. Until now.
So for those who think, "Only icy wants this crazy game", you're wrong. The smartest roleplayers want it too, and occasionally they daydream about it but without even the right vocabulary to express their dream because they don't quite know how to express what they want. We barely even have the terms to describe VTT-powered TTRPGs—for which I coined the GMRPG label—let alone gaming on such a massive scale as Ultimate Edition, and no one is even trying to talk about it because we know it'd be futile: the programmers won't even wait for you to finish your thought before they've lost interest—due to lacking imagination to even grasp what you're saying—and the roleplayers have no idea how to set it up, because they lack precisely the rulesets that were developed for the strategy games.
In sum, there are people out there who want to play this game. They are few, and they don't quite know what they want, and how they want it. But they want it. And now and again, if you pay close attention to them, they say they want it. And imma give it to them.
