Paizo had their annual GenCon Keynote where they announced a number of new products.

Lost Omens: Saga Lands: A source book dealing with Varisia, New Thassilon, the Lands of the Linnorm Kings, the Realm of the Mammoth Lords, and Irrisen. Scheduled for release in May 2027.

Starfinder: Beginner Box: An adventure set on a Kalistradian funerary ship. Also releasing May 2027.

Pathfinder: Invaders from the Dark: A Starfinder cross-over AP, running Level 1-10. Set in Numeria, leverages Starfinder rules to showcase the compatibility between the systems. Coming June 2027.

Starfinder: Galactic Arsenal: Corporations, factions, starships, equipment, and more. Sounds like a Treasure Trove-like book for the stars. GenCon 2027.

Pathfinder: Tome of Dungeons: Adding options for Delvers, Dungeons, and Denizens, including GM-facing rules and options for dungeon building, new monster statblocks, and the Daredevil and Slayer classes. Oh, and Awakened Ooze and Gargoyle ancestries! Releasing GenCon 2027.

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The PF2e subreddit broke out into Yet Another Discussion About Feats and Improvizing, and this time it caught Mark Seifter's attention. So, I thought I'd reproduce his post here:

> Hi everyone! Mark Seifter here. > >I've seen several threads this past weekend about the video Linda and I made about improvising actions in PF2 (I actually found out about this by following a trail from a large spike in the video's views on Saturday when I checked the analytics today). The OP of the first thread that started the conversation summarized our video in a way that was (likely unintentionally on their part) turned out to be a bit provocative, a bit confusing especially for those who hadn't seen the video, and made a harder and harsher case than what we were trying to say, so I thought it might be helpful to give some tips here in text form. Some of these are in the video too, but not everyone wants to watch a video. Some notes about improvising in your games: >Caveat > >First and foremost, only do this if you and your group want to do it! Yes, I am one of the original creators of PF2 and I worked on the rules involved here (the improvising rules were mostly written by myself and Logan), but so what? It's your game. Never let the statements of one of the game designers make you change something that is working for you and your group (not even this statement... well wait a minute...). If you don't like the improvisation rules or you feel they create issues for your group, you don't have to use them in your game. If you feel they actually don't go far enough and you have a bigger or more sweeping solution you like better, use that (the video mentions that too). The existence of the improv rules and the advice for how to use them is not meant to stop you from making an even bigger change or to convince you that there's no need to do so (I guess that video title would be "Don't Let the Improv Rules, or Designer Statements, Stop You From Running the Way Your Group Likes"). Everyone who said "This is just something Mark said, we don't have to listen to it and my group does it differently" has my full support! Honestly there's a reason I try to caveat everything I say and why I try not to weigh in too often when a rule is legitimately ambiguous (even if I felt like I could clear it up), but mostly just when there's clear rules to point to, since I know that people who agreed with what I said already might use my statement more aggressively than I'd like, and those who disagreed aren't likely to be convinced anyway, so it's not going to necessarily help. >How to Use the Improv Rules > >If your group is open to using the improvisation rules to handle situations where the player wants to try something that the rules does not say their character can do, some folks were worried that the next step is to memorize every feat in the game or at least do a deep-dive to find any feats similar to the current situation so you can analyze them and present a carefully nerfed version of them to your player. That's very much not something I would recommend. Instead, treat the situation by its own merit. Whether you know about any feats on the matter or not, is this something you think they should be able to try? If so, what feels like a good and fair way to make it work (the improv rules have some good starting points but they are open-ended to allow you to decide). > >Once you've made your call on whether to allow the attempt and how to make it work, potentially using the improv rules as guidance, you might later discover a feat that does something similar. Technically it might happen at the same time you're making your call if you suddenly remember the feat (or you always remembered it because you are a rules encyclopedia, huge respect!), but that's fine either way. If the feat lets you do the same thing but better, faster, or more easily, then you probably don't have to do anything. But what if it doesn't? What if you essentially allowed the feat for free, or your improv rule was actually stronger than what was in the feat to start? At that point, you'll want to think about the way you adjudicated and the feat and make a decision. Maybe involve the players too. Think for a moment about why the feat might exist and see if there's any merit in it for you and your players' enjoyment of the game. Maybe the player was using one skill to do the role of another skill and the feat being a gate helps preserves the second skill's niche. And this analysis might be enough for you to decide you want to nerf your initial improv ruling the next time someone tries it... but if it isn't? Just stick with the improv ruling as an official houserule and cut the feat. If someone doesn't know about this houserule and takes the feat later by accident, immediately refund it once you find out. >How Not to Use the Improv Rules > >Important aside: the way this works, we starting by deciding whether you wanted to allow the thing they were attempting in the first place. "Don't Let Feats Stop You From Improvising" (not just skill feats by the way, another common thing to improvise is some kind of much smaller jump and less efficient leaping attack than the powerful class feats for it) does not mean that you are obligated to let players try anything they can find written in a feat without the feat. It means that if you would have allowed an improv anyway without a feat or any rules for it, then you should. One of the most obvious examples of this are feats that give you a bonus or better action economy for something that is already in the rules. The base rules for those actions exist already. > >For example, several people in the weekend's discussion gave an example of actions like Battle Medicine that they said they would never allow someone to do without a skill feat, since it allows quite a bit of healing for 1 action when you normally would need to spend 10 minutes to heal that much out of combat. In that case, don't allow it. Aside: This is not to say that the people mentioning Battle Medicine were wrong or making a mistake to do so; because of the way the first thread's OP summarized the video, it made it seem like every feat (or at least skill feat, but the video was about feats overall) was fair game, even math boosters and action economy compressers. In fact, folks who brought that point up were (in my mind at least) right to do so. >Last Thoughts > >I feel like a lot of people were making very good points this past weekend from multiple conflicting perspectives, but also getting a bit heated with each other in part because some had watched the video, others were relying on the summary from the first post or a comment made partway through the discussion. I hope this post helps clear things up a little and explains what Linda and I meant when we were referring to the improv rules (several people kept wondering why they were relevant to the conversation, but they are absolutely foundational to the concept, so I hope this post makes it clear exactly how we might suggest using them and why). > >I'll end with the same caveat as I started: as always, don't use this advice if it doesn't work for you and your group, and on the flip side, even if you really like this advice, please don't go around using it as an arrow in your quiver "against" people who don't. It's not meant for that, and as much as I know it's inevitable that statements I make might be weaponized, I'd prefer if they weren't to the extent we can avoid it. The other view is a valid one; different groups play the game in very different ways. But do feel free to share it with people who might not have thought about this topic or decided one way or the other to help them along the way! > >EDIT: Adding this link to the video at the request of one the commenters! (here and up top).

I've come to really hate April Fool's Day. I never used to care. As a kid, April Fools pranks were annoying things like locking doors, tying shoe laces together, and nonsense like that. Things that might be annoying, or even amounting to physical assault, but ultimately nothing that toyed with my feelings.

In the age of the Internet, though, all April Fools Day pranks are are people just very lazily trying to get me excited for things, and that feels so, so, so much more malicious than anything the schoolyard bullies ever did.People and vectors I rely upon for information just become really sloppily unreliable for a full day out of the year, while they smugly pat themselves on their own backs for engaging in some social ritual I (apparently mistakenly) thought we'd all outgrown by the time we were 10.

Fanatical has 3 tiers:

1. Beginner Box, GM Screen, and Threshold of Knowledge
2. Player Core, Troubles in Otari, A Fistful of Flowers, Big Trouble in Little Absolom, character sheet packs, and the flip map for TiO
3. GM Core, Player Core 2, Monster Core, Abomination Vaults (PF2e & 5e), Rusthenge, Fall of Plaguestone, Crown of the Kobold King, A Few Flowers More, and a bunch if pawns and maps

I'm somewhat confused by some of these titles, because they're Free RPG Day releases, but I've heard they're no longer accessible on Paizo's website :/

https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/introduction-to-pathfinder-2nd-edition-rpg-bundle

Humble Bundle also has 3 tiers, and is paired up with a Hero Lab subscription:

1. Hero Lab (3 months), Beginner Box, Player Core, GM Corev Troubles in Otari, plus the old Core Rulebook and Gamemastry Guide
2. Howl of the Wild, Seven Dooms of Sandpoint, Lost Omens: Divine Mysteries
3. Monster Core, Wardens of Wildwood, Curtain Call, and Seasons of Ghosts

https://www.humblebundle.com/software/hero-lab-x-pathfinder-software

As usual, higher tiers include everything in the lower tiers, too. The Humble Bundle top tier's a little more expensive than the Fanatical top tier, but Seven Dooms, Seasons of Ghosts, and Divine Mysteries are some pretty heavy hitters here. The only thing one would really be missing is Rusthenge.

Shilling for another Kickstarter I've backed. This one's supporting PF2e and D&D 5e: Kib Kibones' Guide to the Twin Realms.

A full setting, with new ancestries, monsters, items, and a new parallel progression track. It's the first publishing project by the author, so the backer risks are maybe a bit higher than average, but I, personally, do my best to back projects that extend PF2e's reach beyond Golarion.

Wherein the Summoner nee Druid finally gets to show his nature knowledge!

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/J2-iv_pm5QM

Sportsnet: Shane Bieber opts in with Blue Jays for 2026

Everyone and their dog seemed to believe he was going to be gone, testing free agency, if he had anything even close to an OK fall.

I wonder if this means he's been told something about to cohesiveness of the team in the face of all of the free agents right now.

It wasn't how any of us wanted the series to end, and the fact that they were literally millimetres from walking it off was tough to stomach, but damn was it a good series. Damn, did the Jays play some good baseball this year. And while I may be snacking on grapes that are a little under-ripe, I know that they should have won that series.

People can point to the mistakes the Jays made -- and they made plenty -- but we can just as easily point to key bad ball/strike calls that significantly changed the outcome of the series (while also acknowledging that we got some almost shocking calls in our favour, too), or to the absolutely wild bad luck we had with broken bats, lodged balls, and BABIP.

They lost the series by millimetres at least 6 times by my count.

That's wild. And it resulted in some of the best games I've ever watched.

Here's to next year. We're just 3 months from the start of Spring Training!

Over in the basement, prolific poster u/Killchrono asked the question: What encounters have you enjoyed the most in PF2e?

The answers given are interesting and insightful (a lot of them focus on terrain, twists, and knife-edge scenarios that broke in the players' favour), but they're also over there. I'm curious to know what the Fediverse's favour encounters have been!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw3UoN6ZWu4

Utkarsh posted this video to his Patreon last week, and I've been looking forward to folks' responses to it since. It's good stuff! Give it a watch.

I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about the balance mandate in Pathfinder 2e -- thoughts and feelings that seem to go against a trend in the discourse around the game. Thoughts that often get me labelled an unquestioning white knight of a fanboy.

I've gotten to actually play very little PF2e, as a player. Like 90% of my experience with the game has been as a GM -- originally a trepidatious and uneasy GM, unilaterally pulling my table away from 5e after the OGL nonsense a few years ago -- so I have to admit that my pain points have been very different from many players.

But I've come to identify those players' pain points not as the system, but as their GMs. At least for the ones who I think have valid frustrations. I've come to understand that a significant number (a minority, I hope) of Pathfinder 2e GMs functionally run the game as if they are just a computer code interpreter. Too many people are seeing the robust support the system gives them and, apparently, deciding that they don't have to do any actual thinking.

"The spell/feat/action does what the spell/feat/action does, no more, no less" is a common thing I see said, as I look on in horror and disappointment, realizing that a lot of my peers in this space -- both GMs and players alike -- get their fun from bureaucratic middle-managment. And while their fun is valid (as is yours), they seem to think that I should be getting my fun from the same thing, and worse, that pages spent on anyone else's fun are just "bloat".

But what came out of this video -- or, at least, the comments on the promo post on Reddit -- is that a lot of vocal complainers are really just feeling aggrieved because they want to be more powerful than the other creatures at the table, players and enemies alike.

u/Killchrono put together a really good response about the bitter feelings that opened my mind to some folks' feelings about player-dictated power scaling. Or, rather, the lack of it in the system.

I get that this is a big part of what power-gaming was in 3e (and therefore in PF1), and to an extent what it is in 5e, but I have always found this element of the games to be kind of gauche. I mean, I totally get it from a theorycrafting perspective -- I like puzzles, and build optimization is a kind of puzzle -- but bringing this kind of thing to an actual live table says a whole lot about someone as a person (assuming, of course, it's not an explicitly gonzo table). So the fact that the designers decided that Level was going to be the measure of character power in PF2, and that that measure was going to be as accurate as possible has been a huge gift to me. Theory-crafters get to keep their lane, but their monster trucks don't get to squish my little Honda Civic, as it were.

For a while now, I've had this feeling that a lot of complaints about "balance" were coming from a place of players being used to break the level curve, but not being able to be honest with themselves that they are, in practice, playing a character that is 2-3 levels higher than everyone else around them. This is not a popular opinion among those who feel held back by the game's guardrails, of course, but the hollowness of their push-back has kind of solidified my feelings on the issue.

But I was not at all prepared to see people crawl out of the shadows to say, out and proud, that they resented not being able to be more powerful than others at the table. And, while it was only a handful of people being so brash and mask-off about it all, they came fast, and hard, and kind of all over the place.

To plagiarize myself from elsewhere: I was totally blindsided by some people popping in to say the quiet part loud: that they should be allowed to be the main character if they know the magic cheat codes.

It's going to take me a little bit to shake that one off.