A coworker of mine recently lamented that she was nearly finished with an adventure she was writing, but it was still under her target word count by a large margin. Although over-writing seems more common than under-writing, it’s important to know a few techniques to get those last several words you need down on paper. My friend Luis and I took turns coming up with Very Bad Ideas and Very Good Ideas about what do in that situation. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader which side I ...

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My solo Pathfinder adventure, The Duskwalker's Due, has proven to be a bit hit, so I'm designing a few more solo adventures. I thought this might be the case, so I planned by preparing a fairly generic "here's how to play a Pathfinder solo adventure" section near the beginning of that adventure. With light tweaks, it can go into any solo adventure. Even into yours! If you want to take this language and make it your own, do so! In these strange times, more solo adventures can be a big help.

Pla...

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I've already updated a few of my Pathfinder First Edition adventures to Pathfinder Second Edition, including Teeth of the Storm and The Six Griffon's Haunt (updated to Ghosts of Sparwell Lodge). Now I just did it backwards!

My recent Night of the Skulltaker was concepted and written for Pathfinder Second Edition. But when I saw someone online asking if a 1E version would be available, I looked it over carefully and realized a conversion wouldn't be very difficult. So I put that together, and n...
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Just a quick note today about Pathfinder Second Edition stat blocks. We now list a creature's equipment differently than we did before.

In short, it's strictly alphabetical. But it's alphabetical in a bit of a strange way. Let's say an NPC has the following items: a stunning snare, a moderate healing potion, a ring of climbing, +1 striking composite shortbow (40 arrows), +2 greater striking longsword, +1 resilient breastplate, 54 gold pieces, and an ivory bracelet worth 25 gp. 

The listing is a...

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For the news: my next adventure, the all-new "Night of the Skulltaker" is out.

You can get it here!

For some background: I wrote this adventure in just over 2 days. That's from jokey start to final layout and everything. (There were a few extra hours when I woke up, realized my Table of Contents wasn't right, and had to re-upload it in there, too.)

Here's how it got started.

Around Paizo, we joke with each other a lot. This hasn't stopped now that we're all working remotely; it just happens over ...
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The Pathfinder Gamemastery Guide is out, and it provides several neat tools. One of these tools is the suite of instructions about how to build a hazard. These are more useful (and less labor-intensive) than they appear, because they also let you modify existing hazards to different levels. Let’s see how! 

First, let me take a classic trap, the poisoned dart gallery, from the Pathfinder Core Rulebook.

Poisoned Dart Gallery    Hazard 8

Complex, Mechanical, Trap

Stealth +16 (expert) or DC 31 (mas...

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I’ve been designing gyers, a new ancestry of honorable and reclusive vulture-people. I’ve finished everything but their ancestry feats, but those are the most in-depth part of the whole process! I’ve talked before about how there are certain low-hanging fruit of ancestry feats, like AncestryName Lore and AncestryName Weapon Familiarity, and I plan to use those to focus on gyer concepts, such as their reliance on shields. I flagged earlier that they should be able to change into vultures...

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I’ve been designing gyers, a new ancestry of honorable and reclusive vulture-people. I finished their introduction and base statistics, so now I’ll turn to their heritages. 
 

Heritages aren’t a thing in the Pathfinder First Edition version of gyerfolk, so that’s something to consider anew now. I could look at different kinds of vultures, maybe, or different habitats of vultures, but I think I want to try something a little bit different to differentiate their heritages: their hatching....

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