Like a lot of Dungeon magazine subscribers, it’s with shock and apprehension that I learned about WotC’s revocation of the Dungeon and Dragon magazine licenses.
For those who don’t know yet, Paizo, the publisher of the two magazines, created a new D&D 3.5 compatible adventure magazine (they just don’t say it out loud) called Pathfinder to replace both canceled mags. All subscribers were given the choice to transfer the remaining magazines to Pathfinder. I did and I have 1 or 2 more coming up.
Pathfinder’s thing is to be 2 complete D&D campaigns per year (1 magazine per month) in a new Campaign setting of Paizo’s own design. I finally got my hands on the printed copy of this earlier this week…
Oh…. my… Gods*…
The production values of this magazine is absolutely incredible. It’s all glossy, thick, full color paper. The 1st issue is organized as follows:
- Foreword, with a cool ‘ten fun facts about Goblins’
- Burnt Offerings, a 50 pages, level 1 adventure featuring gobbos!
- A 14 page description of the town the adventure takes place
- An history of an old Fallen Empite that acts as a backdrop to the story line (written by my Fluff nemesis, Wolfgang Baur, no less!)
- A Pathfinder’s journal by Erik Mona
- A Beastiary with Crunchy bits
- Four Pre-generated iconic characters
I wasn’t too keen on this product since it came too late to inspire our new campaign. Furthermore, I had already proposed to start the new campaign at level 7 to recognize the player’s efforts in the last one we abandoned at my insistence.
But as I started reading, I was hooked, completely. The Adventure background is phenomenal, the description of the town is crisp, flavourful (the ‘u’ is Canadian/British and it stays no matter what the Google Thesaurus thinks!….. Armour, Humour! Bacon! Weeee!)….
Hmmm, sorry about that…
The artistic layout blows me away! I’m not that deep into it yet but so far it’s worth the 19$ it costs. Like a lot of d20 players, I grew tired of seeing yet another level 1 adventure years ago. But for once, the sheer fluffyness of the product makes it a worthwhile read for me.
I’ll post a more complete review later on.
* I’m not a Cylon!
That sounds good. I think I’ll get it… as soon as I stop moving around and get a real mailing address!
Ah, l’amour d’armour.
Firefox spellcheck doesn’t like Canadian spellings either. Or French. Or the word spellcheck.
I’ve been trying to make sure I use the proper spelling all the time, lately. I used to work for FedEx doing customer service for American customers, so I got into some bad habits. And since it was telephone customer service, well, let’s just say I still say Zee occasionally.
So I’ve been trying to shift all of my words back to the Canadian/British forms. Including those that, even in Canada, are often spelled the American way.
Like organise. And all the other -ise/-ize words. (Though -ize is even used occasionally in Britain, as well.)
Centre, theatre, etc.
But I’m a civil engineer, and it’s spelled Aluminum, darn it. Aluminium my …uh …buttocks!
Yeah my boss kindly but firmly reminded me that I work in a Genomics Centre and not a Genomics Center.
While we’re on language,I finally removed the US keyboard settings from my Vista system. It kills me that my systems always always switched back to US.
I need those: éèê I’m French! And I’m used to finding the ” and : signs at the lower right side of the keyboard 🙂
I’m with you on this one CDM. I’m ploughing through my own copy right now, Pathfinder is stunning indeed.
Paizo deserves to succeed with this one, that’s for sure.
Also, I like how they’ve focus on just one race; it gives depth to the Goblins race like never before. I love it!
I’m still reading the town’s writeup. What I really like is that almost all NPCs have a potential hook or secret that can spark a sidequest or roleplaying.
That’s also fluff made right! I’m looking forward to reading the rest.
While we’re on language,I finally removed the US keyboard settings from my Vista system. It kills me that my systems always always switched back to US.
I need those: éèê I’m French! And I’m used to finding the ” and : signs at the lower right side of the keyboard 🙂
Heh. I’ve had the exact opposite problem with my new computer.
When I bought it, it came with a french keyboard. I could use it normally, of course, but I’m not a touch typer, so it occasionally messed me up. It also kinda sucked, though, so I bought a new keyboard anyways.
But since then (only twice, but still) my Vista system has randomly switched to a french keyboard layout. I go to type / and it comes out as é. It may have been me clicking the wrong place without noticing, or hitting a random unnoticed keystroke (apparently left-alt+shift switches languages), but I had to go into the settings and remove all the Canadian French and Canadian Multilingual Standard (and English (US) just to stay patriotic, or something) to make sure it didn’t happen again.
(Why if the french layout listed under “English (Canada)” anyways? Shouldn’t it be its own listing under “French (Canada)”? Even if they were all listed under “Canadian” instead of “Canadian (English)” it would make more sense. Oh well.)
That’s funny how the comment have went in complete different direction…
Although I don’t anything intelligent to add for Paizo’s work having not seen it. I do have something to add on the frensh/english keyboard setting though. 😉
I, for one, am constantly shifting between settings since I’m a software engineer. I use the English keyboard for any kind of programming language and the French one for everything else.
I’m curious ve4grm. Where do you live? (I would guess somewhere in the Québec province)
Winnipeg….
It seems that all Canuck keyboards are bilingual… like the cereal boxes.
And I don’t care that topics get sidetracked. Although Pathfinder is awesome, there ain’t that much meat to the post… 🙂
Yep, I’m a Winnipegger.
I might be hitting the Bomber/Alouette game on Friday, though. With the University of Manitoba Symonized Engineering Marching Band. Always a fun time.
“I need those: éèê I’m French!”
Where would those normally be on your keyboard – are they separate keys, or?
I know I can pull them off on my American board, but it takes some alt+xxx business.
The magazine sounds like a lot of fluffy goodness. I’ll have to give it a read sometime, I think one of the other players gets it.
On a french keyboard some rarely used charater are displace. here a few example: (french keyboard = english)
ê = [ followed by e
ë = { followed by e
these two could be followed by most voyel.
é = /
è = ‘
ç = ]
à = (The one near the enter key)
‘ = <
” = >
Those are the more important change but as you can see all the {,},[,], and ? have been moved around in some less accessable position which is fine when writing but is anoying as hell when coding.