2024 has been a big year for Paizo and Pathfinder, with the Pathfinder Second Edition Remaster in full swing, a massive year-long meta event in War of Immortals, and brand new player options and adventures releasing all year. One of the biggest pieces of news out of Gen Con was the release of Player Core 2, a new book for players that offers a deeper expansion of lore and classes for PC’s in the world of Golarion. To learn more about the seismic changes coming to Pathfinder, we sat down with James Jacobs, Narrative Creative Director for Pathfinder.
Dan: So I’m curious what going into Player Core 2, what your guys’ goals were to go on from 1.
James: So the original Pathfinder Player Core really set down the fundamentals of the game, the “how to play the game.” This is what gives you humans, dwarves, elves, fighters, wizards, rogues, you know,those basics. Player Core 2 is meant to take this and push it into a little bit more specialized areas. This is places where you will have eight new ancestries: Kobolds, Catfolk, the new Dragon-Blooded Heritage, which lets you be basically half dragon on any type of ancestry. We also have eight new classes in this as well like the monk, the barbarian, the alchemist, the sorcerer. So this was meant where once we had that kind of baseline lockdown, we could expand this out in different areas.
This is also where you see the return of archetypes, which is a really important part of the Pathfinder engine that lets you take your character and say, well, what if I wanted to also be a pirate or also be a martial artist or also be a medic? So with Player Core 2, really it was now that we had a good solid base in the remaster laid this is to kind of expand your options at once.
So I’m curious how you narrowed down your options to bring in from First Edition Pathfinder?
James: The goal in the “core four”(EN: Referring here to the Player Core, GM Core, Monster Core, and Player Core 2), as it were, was to kind of replicate the four tentpole releases the pre-Legacy Edition. Player Core 2 then is, in many ways, our version of the Advanced Player’s Guide, although the mix is a little different. Some things that have since become a little more popular in the game like Lizard Folk were originally in the Character Guide, but they’ve become quite central in the setting, so we wanted to make sure they were in the Core Book as well, and that’s a very accessible idea.
In the Player Core 2, there’s still stuff that’s gonna be very core to the setting, as opposed to things that are a little further out on the fringes, you know, even once we’ve set down the foundations, we still have books like Howl of the Wild, which is where you have playable minotaurs or centaurs. We have things like the upcoming Tian Xia Character Guide, which is very focused on the ancestries and class options in the Asian-inspired part of our setting. So Player Core 2 is really to get that last of the core releases down, the things that you might find a spot for in any game.
Is there any stuff that is coming in now for the new edition of Pathfinder, maybe for the first time, that’s changed a lot?
James: Several of our classes in the Pathfinder remaster, we updated them not only to move them off of the OGL into our own ORC license, which in some cases pushed some pretty big changes to the class. We don’t have alignment anymore, for instance. So the Champion has a number of causes, like justice or grandeur, that affect how they play. I think those are really fun ways to expand the class. We’ve done things like, with Rage of Elements, we introduced the Planes of Metal and the Planes of Wood in addition to your classic fire, earth, air, water. Those are now options in the Sorcerer’s elemental bloodline. Even in the core, we’re not just reprinting the Barbarian exactly the way it was before. We’re taking these changes to our canon and the updates and we’re sort of building them in at the base. That way we have a good foundation to move on to that more specialized stuff I was talking about in the future. We have War of Immortals ,for instance, coming up in a couple months where we kill a god and we introduce some new classes on top of that.
Is there anything that you were really excited to to bring into the bring in personally?
James: I worked to remaster the Oracle, that was the big class I did. In addition to simplifying some of the Curse mechanics, I also wanted them to feel like they were a lot more spooky and not really in control of their powers. So they have a lot more flavor of portending disasters that then strike the surrounding area. They have one feat I really like that I added, not really for any real design reason, just because I wanted to add it, called Epiphany at the Crossroads, which you can only use while you are unconscious and you have the dying condition. So you can only use this ability while you are actively in the process of dying, and you have a near-death vision. You see a portent of the future, and then you heal a bunch of HP and you stand up. I just like that idea, well if I’m an Oracle and I’m close to the boundary between life and death, maybe that’s where I get my vision of what’s to come. That was one I really put in just because I thought it’d be fun.
There’s a lot of those classes that have become very specifically Pathfinder. Oracle is one, Investigator and Alchemist are others. Those are other classes that are in there that really build out that sort of very item-focused or very skills and exploration-focused parts of the game. So that’s another reason we wanted them in this book because they kind of let you play those play styles.
You mentioned the War of Imortals earlier and I’m curious. That’s such a big overarching project you guys have had. It’s sort of a most cohesive event that I think you guys have done. How did you approach that?
James: We really did think of comic book events. We thought if we’re going to kill Gorum, then that’s not going to be one and done. That’s going to leave some ripples. We have a Pathfinder novel coming out by Liane Merciel, which is our first foray back to fiction in quite some time, to a number of adventures and adventure paths, to even some things that are coming after that we haven’t quite talked about quite so much yet.
Not only does it get us a chance to look into these really larger-than-life, very mythic folkloric tropes. It also brings two new classes. We have the Animist, who is your very flexible caster who channels a bunch of spirits, and the Exemplar, who is a very folk hero-like divine martial character. You have sacred relics that you’re throwing at your opponents to deal extra damage and smite them. You have a whole number of Mythic Destinies that culminate in immortality of one form or another. I think it’s going to be pretty fun.
One of the things we really wanted with Mythic was that it’s not just all the numbers being 40 higher. We really wanted to lean into the idea of the sort of narrative tropes of a folktale that are very different. We have some mythic monsters in the book that are very high level, do not get me wrong, but we also have some that are they’re not strong, but they have larger than life complication. We have a lower level spirit that crafts things and it crafts things that are so beautiful that they cause problems in nearby cities, or they cause strife between people. Sure that monster is not strong in a combat sense, but its story is larger than life.
It was a bit more of a challenge when writing the components when thinking about them as part of this big cohesive event, it’s certainly a lot of interlocking parts, but especially as I think all of our teams have gotten to work a lot more cohesively together. The rules and lore team is integrated as one big unit now where we used to be separate teams. The narrative team is working really step-in-step with us to come up with these stories that interface with the death of this god. I think it’s just a testament to what can happen when you have everybody really in sync.
You can order Player Core 2 now from Paizo, Amazon, Demiplane, or your FLGS, with physical copies going for $59.99 and the PDF for $19.99.
Images via Paizo
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