Roleplaying

[icycalm]

The new AP just revealed for the autumn is written entirely by a single author, and it's James Jacobs of course. It's inspired by... Castlevania and... Souls games. Now you might say, icy, don't you always tell us that Souls stuff is crap? As RPGs, yeah, so if you want to see the concept done WELL, here you go: an incredible location that's not just a random collection of nonsensical corridors; a massive castle that's deeply tied to the region, and the world, and the metaplot; and a premise that's fleshed out with a host of cool mechanics INCLUDING city-building. It's an incredible project, and I have no doubt JJ will pull it off.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/c ... nt/ntvum5h

All these new systems in Bastion of Blasphemies sound so interesting!!

Essentially, games like the Souls series and even Castlevania are bad attempts at being inspired by D&D, and here is the reigning D&D champion designer saying to all these programmers: "Watch and learn, this is how it's done."

Also, just look at that title, and that cover art. I am eagerly awaiting a high-res version.

Don't visit this link, read my excerpts below: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17ZG ... it?tab=t.0

This is another dungeon crawl AP, similar to "Abomination Vaults" or "Shades of Blood". But this is the first time they're doing a mega dungeon based on a pre-established place, VS inventing a new place to explore. Bastardhall was first written back in the early 1st edition days by Wesley Schneider, so this will be the first time in over a decade where players will be able to actually adventure in this place.

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Lots of Castlevania inspiration from Wesley originally, featuring werewolves and mummies and such. James' favorite mega dungeon games are the Souls series, and so there's a ton of inspiration for those games found in this AP.

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JJ mentioned that while this is happening in one location, there's no timer. This can take years of in-world time to finish...

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James then revealed he wrote the entirety of BoB by himself. No freelance authors this time around. Not that they wanted to stop using freelance authors for the new hardcover APs, far from it. JJ did it partly to prove that he could, but also due to the timing of things with the switch to hardcover APs, there was no time to coordinate with freelancers this time around. So JJ started writing, and ended up doing the whole AP himself. This is the largest thing JJ has written, full-stop. The previous winner was either Seven Dooms for Sandpoint, or a large amount of writing for the Sandy Peterson Call of Cthulu book for Pathfinder.

It's described as not a linear progression, but more of a sandbox one, where you'll keep unlocking new pathways forward and it sort of mushrooms out.

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James Jacobs' spoiler for "Bastion of Blasphemies" is showing off the ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE map of the island of Bastardhall!

[REDACTED]

This is the map of Bastardhall, or specifically the land around Bastardhall, in Chapter 1 of the AP. You might not be able to tell from the image I posted, but there are 5-foot squares across the whole map! So you could scale this map up and take up 10 parking spaces worth of room. There's the village to the northwest, there's a fishing shack, a farmplot, etc. Classic horror movie locales.

This is the 5th level exploration area of the AP. And the big, black footprint in the middle is where Bastardhall proper is. There are several entrances into the castle, and as you explore more and more, you'll unlock more chambers, as well as above and below and every which way in this massive castle.

Again, don't visit the link, just read my excerpts below: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/c ... ng_back_to

Both James Jacobs and the Twitch chat described this as a Castlevania-style AP. It's a big spooky dungeon crawl where you explore a gothic castle and I am here for it.

Some progression info: The new beginner box (lv. 1), Troubles in Grayce (lv. 2-4) and Bastion (5-13) are designed so that you can run them subsequently if you want. They also all take place in Ustalav.

Paizo Live today announced a new Beginner's Box (levels 1-2), a follow up Troubles set of adventures (6 instead of 3, levels 2-5 if you do 3) and this adventure (which is level 5-13/14). Kind of like an alternative to BB->Troubles in Otari->Abomination Vaults set.

It's a relief to be able to chat about this finally! Wrote it about a year ago, and it's always tough sitting on secrets. It is indeed the 3rd Adventure Path for 2026, coming out in the Fall or thereabouts in that same traditional 3rd Adventure Path slot of the year (often but not always aligned to land on or adjacent to Gen Con), and starts at 5th level. The last chapter starts at 13th level, but it's something of a sandbox dungeon (castle!) crawl so if your PCs do every single thing, they'll likely hit 14th level before the end. Which should help, because the ending (and even more so the SECRET ENDING) are intended to be tough fights!

Thanks for the kind words! And yup; I'm the sole author on "Bastion of Blasphemies." We've done this once before, also by me, for "Seven Dooms for Sandpoint." The norm will remain having multiple authors on Adventure Paths, but now that they're always single books, we might now and then have single author Adventure Paths in the future if the stars are right.

A sandbox? A Secret Ending? That raises a red flag for me. Are players going to be punished if they keep following the clear plot and don't turn every single stone?

In that if they "boss rush" things and you're not using milestone level advancement, perhaps, but this should be less of an issue than in, say, Abomination Vaults, which was also a sandbox dungeon crawl, but with fewer "gates" between the leveled content. It's easier for PCs to be "punished" in Abomination Vaults in this way than it will be in Bastion of Blasphemies.

If you played Abomination Vaults and your group avoided exploration and pushed hard down level by level, then milestone leveling is a better fit for your table. There's no built-in timer for how long the PCs have to take to finish this Adventure Path (they can take YEARS doing this in game if they want), nor is there a reward for rushing through the content and finishing it fast. It's more about the journey than the end, I guess you could say.

This is a dungeon crawl that rewards deliberate exploration, which means it's not gonna be for every group. But then again, no Adventure Path is. If they were, they'd be campaign settings, not Adventure Paths.

Nope; I wrote the whole thing. It was a lot of fun to write, but also a weird thing to tackle, since it's building something that someone else started (Wes Schneider) and so I tried hard to make it into something that he'd approve of but that I was still proud of. That was not TOO tough, though, since we've been friends for decades and have very similar tastes and styles when it comes to what sorts of messed up things we like putting into adventures we create.

The fact that this is building on a location we've teased and dropped hints about for many years (as opposed to something like Abomination Vaults, which we invented whole-cloth for the Adventure Path it debuted in) does mean that it's going to compete against a lot of homebrew games or established ideas that folks have had and have run with since Wes first introduced the place to the world years ago. And so I hope those folks who put so much work into it enjoy what I've done with the story, and I 100% agree and support them if they decide their version of Bastardhall is better. In a case like that, your Bastardhall is it. You can rename the one I did in "Bastion of Blasphemies" to something else and canonize it in your game however you want or ignore it or mine it for ideas. Or just read it for entertainment! Reading adventures for entertainment is absolutely a thing.

Anyway, that said, I deliberately did not look into any of the work other folks have done online about building their versions of Bastardhall, because I wanted/needed to keep my version to my own ideas built off of the ideas that Wes originally presented.

Q3 2026.

[icycalm]

I need to explain what this means in terms of Master of Heroes:

JJ mentioned that while this is happening in one location, there's no timer. This can take years of in-world time to finish...

This means that the 4 players who will play this will roll new characters, and begin the AP, and will play the first chapter that takes say a few days to complete, and then if there is a gap of say some months before the second chapter starts during which time the characters are occupied with e.g. crafting or researching or city-building or whatever, the players will deal with these activities during their 4X turns while at the same time playing SOME OTHER ADVENTURE PATH that's more traditional and just takes the typical 3 or 6 months (in-game) to finish, so that by the time they're ready to continue with Chapter 2 of Bastion of Blasphemies they will have finished AN ENTIRE OTHER AP. So that by the time they get to the end of BoB they might have finished several APs.

This btw is also how Kingmaker will work because that takes a DECADE.

It's tough to wrap your head around how Master of Heroes will work because the design is so monstrous. People will just have to see it in action, but if you think of a typical videogame overworld, but one that runs like Civ, but dotted with points of interest each of which is AN ENTIRE FUCKIN' CAMPAIGN, you'll get the gist of it.

That's crazy enough on its own, but then you add even crazier multi-year campaigns like Kingmaker and Bastion of Blasphemies that are campaigns DURING WHICH YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO FINISH OTHER CAMPAIGNS, and then people would lose their minds completely if they grasped the sheer scale of the simulation that's being attempted here.

At any rate the above should serve as a warning to players that Bastion of Blasphemies is a massive endeavor and massive commitment, so don't pick it if you only want to play one traditional campaign at a time. There will be a large warning sign on the overworld linking to this post when the AP goes on the site, and I only want a team of 4 complete nutjobs to pick this and tackle it.

[icycalm]

P.S. None of the above impacts in the least non-CULT players who don't play Ultimate Edition, because they're only playing one group, hence can fast-forward "downtime" so that months pass in minutes or hours. But we can't because we're simulating EVERY SINGLE DAY AS A 4X TURN IN MASTER OF HEROES. Therefore a decade in Kingmaker is 3,650 turns that we have to play lmao, and not just 4X turns but turns during which multiple Adventure Paths and/or standalone adventures and/or Pathfinder Society Scenarios are being played by multiple teams.

So from the perspective of all other buyers/players of this AP, it means nothing that it can take several years of in-game time. It's just aesthetics to them, while to us it's the gaming challenge of a lifetime.

Should probably post the above as a UE chapter: Ultimate Challenge.