https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l7ns&page ... Here#83241James Jacobs, Creative Director wrote:"Feast of Ravenmoor" came out many many many years after our initial hesitation about including Lovecraft in the setting. The first timid footsteps we made there were in Rise of the Runelords (where we introduced the denizens of [REDACTED BY ICY] into the setting in [REDACTED BY ICY], and had introduced the [REDACTED BY ICY] a few volumes earlier from Lovecraft contemporary Frank Belknap Long) and a bit later in Curse of the Crimson Throne (where we brought in [REDACTED BY ICY] of that campaign).
When I mentioned being hesitant, I speak more about including Lovecraft creations in more significant ways—at one point, I was pushing for Nyarlathotep and/or Yog-Sothoth to be in the core 20 deities. Other folks pushed back for various reasons, but then when Starfinder came about, at no actual urging from me, Nyarlathotep became one of the core deities there.
By the time we published "Feast of Ravenmoor," we were already doing a LOT with Lovecraftian elements, so that initial hesitation was far in the past. Again, "Feast of Ravenmoor" was based on a short story I wrote back in the very early 90s, which had some inspiration from the rural horror elements in Lovecraft (but just as much in Stephen King—there's more "Children of the Corn" in the story than there is "Dunwich Horror"), but contained characters and monsters of my own creation. I wanted to preserve that in the adventure version. Changing [REDACTED BY ICY] into, say, Cthulhu, was never part of that plan.
As for the skum—we didn't create them. They were created ages ago for D&D, and were brought into 3rd edition, and were one of the hundreds of monsters we inherited from the OGL via the Monster Manual being open content. We rebuilt a lot of their lore and flavor, along with the aboleths, but they were still invented long before Paizo was ever a thing.
Back in THAT day, Lovecraft's works were in a much hazier place regarding copyright, and TSR had already had a clash with that with the inclusion of Lovecraftian elements in AD&D's first edition Deities & Demigods. As a result of that, they were much more cagey and canny about including Lovecraft-inspired things in the game. Skum are a good example of that, where they essentially took the deep ones and re-named them. There's always a LOT of Lovecraft in the game already (mind flayers, ghasts, evil books like the Demonomicon, etc.). Not all of it is actual copy-paste names.
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l7ns&page ... Here#83160James Jacobs, Creative Director wrote:I'd like to assume that I would be involved if management decides to make a new campaign setting, since I was a big part of setting up Golarion, and my work on the Technology Guide and Iron Gods is what helped convince management to take a shot at Starfinder... but it's a different world today so who knows.
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l7ns&page ... Here#83162James Jacobs, Creative Director wrote:Duskreign wrote:James, have you ever tried Thousand year old vampire? It’s quite interesting. Single player RPG where you are a vampire. Events happen (based on choices you make) and you can only retain so many experiences that define who you are. As time goes on, you have to make decisions about what memories you forget and what memories continue to define who you are. Ultimately, you weave a story around your memories choices. It’s really quite interesting and has incredible nuance. Worth checking out if you haven’t heard about it.
Nope; it sounds familiar though, but haven't played it. I've been pretty cut off from a lot of games lately as a result of the pandemic and having fewer folks around to play games with overall.
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l7ns&page ... Here#83249James Jacobs, Creative Director wrote:Aenigma wrote:Why did Nyarlathotep become one of the core 20 deities in Starfinder and why did you push for Nyarlathotep and Yog-Sothoth to be in the core 20 deities in Pathfinder? I ask this because I have always thought that Chulhu and Hastur are much more famous than Nyarlathotep or Yog-Sothoth in the real world. Was it because you or other folks at Paizo like Nyarlathotep and Yog-Sothoth more than Cthulhu and Hastur?
Cthulhu is the most recognizable of Lovecraft's creations, but he's also actually on Earth, so transposing him to another planet is weird and tricky. He's also just a Great Old One, not an actual God, so his reach and impact are less from a metaphysical sense. Hastur is a lot of fun, especially because he's one that predates Lovecreaft and has a HUGE range of different possible interpretations—which is why he ended up being one of the main parts of [REDACTED BY ICY].
Again, I'm not on the Starfinder team so I can't answer why he was chosen to be a core deity there.
The reason I pushed for him was because of all Lovecraft's creations, Nyarlathotep is the most "human" of them all. He's the one who actually interacts with humanity, playing the role of a tempter or a tormentor or corrupter. He's more active than most, and has personality traits we humans can identify with. He's the most "approachable and understandable" of the mythos deities, but also has many different forms, so we would have been able to introduce new versions of him we invented for Pathfinder while still being able to cash in on the nostalgia of his name. AKA: He's the most versatile of them all.
Yog-Sothoth was a contender as well because he represents time and space—as such he's EVERYWHERE, not just trapped dreaming in a tomb on a distant planet (like Cthulhu). And furthermore, since he's so much beyond human morality and concern, it's possible to set up non-evil (but likely not good) worshipers of him—Yog-Sothoth would be a deity that we could design character options for PCs, not just NPCs, since we assume most players play non-evil characters. But also, Lovecraft himself viewed Yog-Sothoth as the central axis of his mythos—he referred to his connected stories not as the "Cthulhu Mythos" (that term came after his death), but as "Yog Sothothery." So by focusing on Yog-Sothoth as an important deity in our setting, that's me nodding toward the creator's preference for him being important.
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l7ns&page ... Here#83261James Jacobs, Creative Director wrote:W E Ray wrote:What?!?!
The initial inspiration behind the Thassilonian Empire was from a TPK from your White Plume Mountain game?!?!
What?
I have to hear this story. Please expound....
** spoiler omitted **
Yup. It was a one-shot game I ran for two friends in college. They got to the vampire and quickly got in over their heads, and one of the players did a Hail Mary attempt to kill the vampire by stuffing a bag of holding into a portable hole or something like that. The explosion killed the two PCs and destroyed the vampire, but the vampire just came back from his coffin. I didn't want to end the game there, so instead I had the vampire see to the PCs being resurrected and geased to help bring back his ancient intolerant necromancer lord from the dawn of time, and from there I ended up building an entire deep-history element to my homebrew that would end up laying the foundation for what I did with Thassilon (although I did pull some of the runelords from other roles in my setting—[REDACTED BY ICY] and [REDACTED BY ICY] were my setting's versions of Vecna and Kas respectively and predated even that TPK in White Plume Mountain).
Using a lot of this stuff, including deities and several nations, as building blocks to create Golarion was sort of an act of despartion, since we needed a fully realized world as soon as possible in the month we transitioned from the last issue of Dragon and Dungeon to the first month of Pathfinder Adventure Path. Using content I had created for my homebrew starting back in the late 80s was a shortcut that made creating Golarion possible, even if it ironically made it impossible for me to retain ownership over that content for my own use. But then, since a fair amount of my homebrew was itself based on D&D stuff and authors like Lovecraft and Cambell and King, it's only fair I guess to pay it forward like that.
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l7ns&page ... Here#83280James Jacobs, Creative Director wrote:crognus wrote:Do gods/demi-gods have souls? If not, what happens to the souls of mortals who became gods? If they do, does Pharasma judge them if they die?
All living things have souls. Gods and demigods are living, therefore they have souls. What happens to them when they die depends on a case by case basis. In some of those cases, like demon lords, they become a part of the landscape of the Abyss (be it the Rift of Repose or, up until the point she moved, [REDACTED BY ICY]).
As to what happens to the others... that all depends on the story we/you want to tell, and it will change as needed.
Pharasma judges them as all. The last soul she'll judge is herself.
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs43lku?New- ... st-Omens#6James Jacobs, Creative Director wrote:I've been pushing for us to publish more lore about the underwater nations and monsters and regions of Golarion for about as long as I've been pushing for something like the Travel Guide, so the more interest folks show for underwater stuff, the better, I say!
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l7ns&page ... Here#83307James Jacobs, Creative Director wrote:At a certain point, the play of an RTS morphs into an RPG or a sim. To me, the fast pace of a game, combined with the idea that any time you spend just looking at the game rather than clicking a new project is time wasted that will grant your foe an advantage is what makes an RTS unappealing, but take those away and its no longer "real time" really, because you get to take your time making choices. I do love squad based RPGs and, depending on the sim, have fun with them as well BECAUSE you get to take your time and play at your own pace.
You can see he's a genius here, but not a strategic genius. He's a role-playing genius. He explains why there can be no role-playing in RTS, and that's why he doesn't like it. And that's also why RTS is a lower genre than role-playing. But RTS still has its charms. I wouldn't play it as much as I role-play, but I still love a good multi-hour war, that pushes my brain to the edge. His brain just doesn't work that way, and that's fine.
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l7ns&page ... Here#83309James Jacobs, Creative Director wrote:It means that I don't like running stories that rob players of agency. Be it read-aloud text that assumes player actions, up to including things like "You see a room with five chairs in it" (because that assumes that a PC is looking, or can see in the first place), or games set in historical eras where the players KNOW how the events are supposed to end up no matter what they do.
I'm not into Halo so I don't get the Halo Reach comparison exactly, but stories where what's accomplished ISN'T the biggest thing going on in the world at the time are fine... but the more something becomes a full first to twentieth level campaign, the more to me it seems that the story should be about the PCs and how they can affect change through their choices. That's what makes an RPG interactive. If you know what the end is, then you're not immersed in the role. You're just playing out a part with no chance to bring anything of yourself. That's fine, but to me, that's something you do when you act in a play or movie or a public reading of a script, not play a game where you are helping to create the story.
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l7ns&page ... Here#83315James Jacobs, Creative Director wrote:In the well-over-a-decade span of time that we've built Golarion and expanded the setting, we've taken the world into all sorts of new areas we didn't expect back in the earliest days, when we were simply hoping we'd be around long enough to be able to publish all six parts of "Rise of the Runelords" before going bankrupt and having to shutter Paizo's doors. That mindset never 100% went away, and tended to rise up whenever we had to do a big new sea-change to the company (such as when we made the decision a year or two later to switch over to a game of our own design, etc.).
Now that we feel pretty stable and well established, in the past many years we've started to do things more experimental and non-traditional for D&D stuff. And that includes delving into Steampunk genre and gasslamp fantasy tropes. For the former, see "Guns and Gears" and the Outlaws of Alkenstar Adventure Path. For the latter, see "Agents of Edgewatch," which feels and looks more modern than any adventure we've done yet for Pathfinder—deliberately so, as we aimed at a gaslamp era feel.
So, since we've added those elements now, yes, Lost Omens is more steampunk now than it was when we started. It's also just MORE than when we started, with literally hundreds of products exploring and expanding the setting.
If you see us publish something, it was SOMEONE'S deliberate choice. I don't make all of those decisions. Best person to look to for that "deliberate choice's" source is whoever we credit in that book as the development lead, or in the case of a rulebook, the lead designers, with Erik Mona above it all.
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l7ns&page ... Here#83322James Jacobs, Creative Director wrote:Kaiju are above level 26. And while we could TECHNICALLY just extend the monster values up five levels from where they currently cap out at level 25, that puts those stats far beyond the threshold of what a 20th level party could handle–as it stands, a level 25 creature already does that, but it's close enough that a fully optimized party that has access to super powerful magic and has spent several levels preparing specifically for that level 25 monster could have a chance.
That breaks down quickly with each level above that.
Since we currently have no plans for if we ever want to do something that expands the power of a player character past 20th level, we pretty much cannot do stat blocks for kaiju, demigods, [REDACTED BY ICY], or other things that, in previous editions, were above level 25.
But those things are still in the world, so instead of giving them monster stats, we tackle them in different ways.
https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l7ns&page ... Here#83328James Jacobs, Creative Director wrote:AceofMoxen wrote:Hey, James, I just finished reading Wrath of the Righteous. I was wondering about your thoughts on what succubi bring to the game.
The same thing they bring to any story that they take a part of—which is to say, the same thing vampires bring to a story. They're basically the same monster, thematically. They build on horror themes of betrayal, fear of intimacy and sex, fear of being killed by someone you love or lust after, and are excellent monsters to use in adventures that require a subversive element causing a society to rot from the inside out. Their nature makes using them as they work in stories and movies that aren't Pathfinder adventures a bit tricky, of course. They also bring in elements of actual game play temptation, where you can use them to tempt player characters to accept the rules boost they can give, knowing it's a choice that might come back to haunt them.
They also (along with things like vampires) let us tell stories where we subvert the "evil monsters are ugly" trope. Not everything that's pretty is nice.
The converse is true as well. Not everything that's ugly is bad. We try to include examples of "ugly" creatures and NPCs being in heroic or good roles, but those are limited by the fact that the main "heroes" of the stories we tell are the only elements we actually CAN'T tell—the story of your player characters. It's further complicated by the weird side effect that a lot of artists tend to rely on classic visual cues where beauty = good and ugliness = bad. It can be difficult to push back against centuries of tradition there.