What is this game about?
When I first started sketching this Adventure Path, I had a goal in mind: I wanted the players to make game-changing decisions that affected the outcome of the Adventure while exploring a dangerous wilderness.
One of the things that sets an RPG apart from any other game is that you get to make choices as your character that define them as a person, making your game experience unique. That character is yours and yours alone, and the choices that they made brought you to the conclusion. I wanted to build the game around this concept.
In an RPG – even one with a core “moral” system like Pathfinder – things shouldn’t be black and white. You need conflict to induce meaningful choices, and if the conflict is only about “how do we deal with the bad guy”, 9 out of 10 times the answer will involve violence. And that’s sad, because it’s during moral dilemmas that the PCs really evolve from notes on a paper to a truly realized character. At least, that’s what I think.
So I needed moral conflicts to inform some of the major decisions of the campaign. To do so, I’ve borrowed a technique from The Angry GM. Now I know you may have a different opinion of him than I do, but that does not invalidate his advice – particularly this one. Basically, I’ve followed this article about conflicted beliefs and how to make a Pantheon out of it, and I’ve used it to establish the main themes of the moral conflicts of the Adventure Path. This is what I’ve come up with:
Precaution x Knowledge
Community x Individualism
Idealism x Pragmatism
Freedom x Control
Progress x Nature
However, instead of a Pantheon, I’ve used this method to create factions that the PCs will interact with, and it is from those interactions that we will compel them to make meaningful choices. Following Angry’s method, I’ve come up with five organizations for the campaign:
The Government (Community + Progress): the government is what keeps this corner of the world together, but they’re exploring and expanding their domains over natural resources.
The Burning Gauntlet (Control + Pragmatism): an organization that fights an evil force in the region, using whatever means necessary to maintain the order.
The True Way (Knowledge + Freedom): a religious organization that wants to research the ruins of an ancient civilization, with a credo that every creature should be free to pursue its destiny.
The Shadow Dragons (Individuality + Idealism): a group of idealistic outlaws commanded by a leader with a personal vendetta.
The Primordial Society (Precaution + Nature): a secret society that fears that the exploration of this land may bring an unprecedented disaster to the world.
When the PCs interact with the factions in a positive manner, they’ll go up in their favor. Likewise, if they get in a faction’s way, their reputation will go down. That’s the first tool we’ll be using to write our campaign. That will give us a whole lot of themes to work with when writing the adventures that form the Adventure Path.
All of this, of course, will not be explicitly told to the players. On the contrary, while following their own agenda they’ll stumble into the organizations, and sometimes they might even unknowingly do work for them. We’ll cast a veil over this structure so that when the players' interactions with them look organic.
Where does the adventure take place?
Having the themes for the adventures, we’re left with a question: where to put them?
As stated, I want this Adventure Path to be about discovery. I want them in a frontier region. And with the idea of the players bouncing between faction missions, I knew I wanted a Sandbox.
The Sandbox is a game model where the players have control over the flow of the campaign. In its early forms, the GM would have a map full of keyed hexes, and the players would traverse those hexes to “find the fun” hidden on the map. That model, however, felt bland. Having the players hop from one location to another, dealing with problems without a major structure, felt more like a “monster of the week” game than an Adventure Path.
The solution I came up with was inspired by Japanese classic RPGs. In those games, the players often have an initial area that they can explore, but some areas are inaccessible to them. Then, after they gain some levels or abilities, like a raft, boat or giant bird, they can explore more of the map. Finally, they get an airship, and can traverse the whole map with ease.
That model comes hand in hand with the idea of an Adventure Path. In the first module, the players should have plenty of opportunity to explore the initial region, and then, after they gain some autonomy, progressively explore the rest of the map.
So, I drew a rough sketch of how those regions would fit in relation to each other. This is what I’ve come up with:
The players start the Adventure Path in Region 1, and as the game progresses, they’ll have access to the other regions. And just like in the Japanese RPGs, we’ll provide them with incentive, means and rewards for exploration.
I also wanted a lot of different biomes: plains, mountains, deserts, arctic, forest and swamps. Those, by the way, are the terrains provided in the hexploration rules for Pathfinder 2e. If you look at the terrain expertise feat, you’ll see that we also have aquatic, sky and underground as terrain types. So we’ll also add underground to our planning.
At that point, I had a vague idea of what the adventure was going to be about: the exploration of a region with newfound mines of orichalcum, a metal with time-warping properties that is as valuable as platinum (10 times more valuable than gold). But where can I find all of this in Golarion?
Looking at the map, I found a place: Mendev.
Mendev is a cool place because for the longest time it had to concentrate efforts to keep the Worldwound – a massive abyssal rift - at bay. It’s also a realm where the majority of cities are concentrated in the south, while the northern part of the map is mostly left blank, limited by the Crown of the World, a mountain range that marks the frontier of Avistan. Also, there are rumors that an ancient, advanced civilization once dwelled there, so we’ll incorporate that into our adventure.
But the Worldwound was closed, leaving a scar. In the meantime, Mendev’s crown had to concentrate its forces against a new threat in the south, the resurgence of the Lich Tar-Baphon. So exploring the north, once a dangerous operation, is now the realm’s best chance to amass resources for the war. Let’s take a look at Mendev’s map:
As we can see by following the western frontier, the last major settlement in the north is Kenabres. So our game will take place further from it. On the map, it looks that there’s nothing but plains, but what it means – at least for our game – is that the region is not fully mapped. So we’ll get creative with it.
Keeping things moving
Lastly, we’ll need a way to keep the story flowing. We’ll be doing that by using a calendar. You see, if the game is about making choices, the players can’t have all of the possibilities hanging in front of them forever, or they’ll eventually do everything there is to do, and thus will not have made any choices whatsoever. So you need to move the story forward, and you do that with a campaign calendar.
The campaign calendar is a guideline of the events of the campaign, and serves three purposes. First, it informs the GM of the main plot (yeah, we’ll have one of those), establishing windows of time where you can make an event happen. Second, it states when a faction mission is no longer available, for whatever reason, and thus the players feel like their choices mattered. And third, it makes the world feel alive, like things are progressing beyond the table.
I want the game to start midsummer, and the climax of the Adventure Path to be during the harsh northern winter. The Golarion Calendar tells us that the summer occurs during the months of Sarenith, Erastus and Arodus, so our campaign will start in the middle of Erastus.
The amazing Pathfinder community has also put up an amazing tool for keeping track of the days. The Dungeonetics website generates a calendar for every year of the fictional world. We’ll be using the year 4720 calendar for our adventure, and the game starts at Erastus 15. The date marks the first main plot point of the Adventure Path, the heroes’ arrival.
That's the path that we'll be following to write our adventures.