Frog God Games 2015 Previews


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Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

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Howdy all!

I was just writing a short post in a nearby thread about folks who actually have the nerve/madness to run their players through the epic campaign The Slumbering Tsar Saga that Frog God Games put out a few years back, and in the process of teasing some of our upcoming stuff my short post became quite bloated. I then realized I was repeating some stuff I had put piecemeal in a few other posts here and there and thought it might be more efficient just to get it all in one place rather than answer the same questions in 9 different threads. So for those of you who have seen this for the umpteenth time, my apologies; I will commence shutting up after this/these post(s). (except to answer questions of course) ;-)

For the rest who may be interested, here is a large part of the proposed schedule of releases by Frog God Games. It is by no means complete and focuses mainly on the Kickstarters I see us doing (which we do for our larger, more-expensive-to-produce products). We try to do around 4 KS a year and then release smaller projects that we can fund with less risk in between or in concordance with those flagship releases. So without further ado:

First Quarter:
Shipment of Sword of Air and Quests of Doom Kickstarters from 2014 are our first priority.
I know Sword of Air has gone to the printers and released in pdf form for backers. The pdf for nonbackers will become available when we get the print copies back and shipped. That is also when we'll put the hard copy version of SoA up for sale for nonbackers as well. This is my understanding of the distribution schedule to get give the backers priority, but Bill can come and correct me if necessary.
Quests of Doom is either at the printers (or nearly so). I know the adventures are all done and haven't heard any panicked discussion from the rest of the FGG crew which is usually a good sign it is either printing or at least going through layout where the capable hands of Chuck Wright can bring all chaos to order. Anyway, I think this one will become available shortly after SoA and will probably be handled in a similar way as far as distribution goes. A great deal of thanks to the patience of all the backers. Between scheduling issues related to the release of 5e rules by WotC and sanity issues related to trying to corral and bring together all of the loose threads of Bill Webb's magnum opus, getting these two projects into print has been a trial and much more time consuming than we originally calculated. But we want to get them right the first time rather than send out a substandard product, so we truly appreciate the loyal backers who have patiently awaited these. You guys are the best.

However, as a result of the slowness in delivery of those two KS, we have made getting them shipped before going onto new projects a priority. As a result none of the other KS scheduled for 2015 will happen until at least one (if not both) of those have shipped to the backers. That said, assuming those begin shipping in Q1 we will do our next KS in Q1. It will be a bit less ambitious and more wallet friendly than SoA to let everyone and their holiday expenses take a bit of a breather. And that KS will be...(more to follow in next post)


Sweeeeeeet.

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

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Q1 Continued:

Cults of the Sundered Kingdoms
I've teased this one before, but I wanted to get the information all in one place along with the probable timetable for release.

One of my design goals as the Pathfinder Creative Director for Frog God Games is to take all of the pre-existing Frog God Games and Necromancer Games products and meld them into a single coherent, playable, and ultimately old-school cool campaign world. with Paizo's own Golarion and dozens of other excellent game worlds over the past few decades to guide my development philosophy, if I was to pick one that the philosophy of our Lost Lands Campaign Setting most closely matches I'd have to say it would be Gary's Greyhawk setting (the pre-From the Ashes gazetteer). But more on that later. I say that in order to explain Cults of the Sundered Kingdoms. As you've know doubt seen with products such as Rappan Athuk, Stoneheart Valley, and Lost City of Barakus, we've taken old 3e and 3.5 adventures produced by Necromancer Games, updated them to Pathfinder, and integrated them into the Lost Lands setting. We do this in a way that their original content is preserved so you could run them from the 3.5 versions pretty seamlessly if you didn't want to buy the new version, but many people don't want to do the 3e-PF conversion themselves and many people don't have the original versions. So my goal over the next decade or so is to produce updates of ALL of the old Necro stuff fully updated and integrated into the Lost Lands. Cults of the Sundered Kingdoms is a part of that process.

Cults of the Sundered Kingdoms takes the 3 old Necro adventures: Morrick Mansion, Aberrations, and Crystal Skull and integrates them into a continuous storyline for an adventure path that takes PCs from level 3 to 15+. But it's much more than just an update of those three previously published adventures. Into the storyline/AP plot it adds three new original adventures called The Beast Within, Shades of Yellow, and Vengeance in the Hollow Hills that both tie in to the three older adventures and also move the plot from one to the next. So you've got the three old adventures now as part of a much larger and expansive story.
In addition, Cults includes a campaign guide that expands the regional map of the Sinnar Coast as introduced in last years Lost City of Barakus. That regional map covered a large swath of territory just south of the infamous dungeon Rappan Athuk. It's northern edge starts in the vicinity of the city of Endhome (featured in Lost City of Barakus) and extends southward almost all the way to the Domain of Hawkmoon (created by Lance Hawvermale and featured prominently in several Necromancer Games adventures). The central portion of that regional map is called the District of Sunderland, known more colloquially as the Sundered Kingdoms. Cults of the Sundered Kingdoms includes a poster map that gives a close up of Sunderland extending from Endhome to the Duchy of Southvale (featured in Crystal Skull). The gazetteer then details this close up map including dozens of countries, cities, wilderness areas, ethnicities, and geographic features of note. It also includes a regional history of the area (including certain events that have a more global perspective) that extends back more than 3,000 years telling the history of not only a significant area of the Lost Lands but also the unknown back stories to multiple old Necromancer Games products. The campaign guide also includes a guide to the 13 insidious cults that are endemic to the Sundered Kingdoms and are perhaps the actual reason for its centuries of political instability. This guide includes not only a write up of some iconic and not-so-well-known evil powers of the Lost Lands (yes, Orcus and Tsathogga are there, plus 11 others) but also details of their individual cults, where they are located, and how they affect the Sundered Kingdoms. Finally it will include the possibility of some bonus stuff--a never-before-released secret level from the original Crystal Skull adventure updated and expanded, some short fiction based on the unique history, stories, and adventures of the Sundered Kingdoms by a guy whose name rhymes with Smed Smreenwood (still working out the details on this but it looks like it will be a go from what I've heard so far), and whatever other goodies we can think up.
A couple final notes on this KS:
The complete manuscript for this has already been written, converted (where necessary), and edited. Maps are done. Art has been ordered. I say that to because of the slowness of the previous KS mentioned above and to reassure you that this one should have a fairly quick turnaround. Other than some of the bonus add-ons (a relatively small amount compared to the whole) all that remains is layout and printing.
The manuscript all told runs around 250-300,000 words, so I'm guessing the book will run around 400-500 pages. About a 0.5 on the TSBS (Tsar Scale of Bookcase Stress). For comparison Slumbering Tsar was a 1.0 and Tome of Horrors Complete a 0.8.

Probably releasing in tandem with this KS will be Tom Knauss's next excellent entry into FGG's environment series (continuing the tradition started by Necromancer Games with Glades of Death and Dead Man's Chest): Fields of Blood. It's great look at adventuring on the plains (not planes)--whether they be the arid steppes of Asia, the Serengeti, or the Great Plains of the Western Frontier, the myriad feats, spells, skills, items, gods, and biome information to be found here are a must-have for any campaign. It also includes three largish adventures (30-50,000 words each, iirc) that are set in the Lost Lands (2 in the plains of Libynos, the "Dark Continent" of the Lost Lands, and 1 in the Haunted Steppe west of the Stoneheart Mountains), though you could easily adapt them to any plains-setting (as opposed to a planes-setting). Anyway, if you haven't seen what Tom did last year with his deserts book Dunes of Desolation, then you're really missing out. His work is a treat to read and a lot of fun to use in your game. The manuscript is completely written and going through final development with the inestimable John Ling, so I'm expecting it ought to be going into print about the same time as Cults of the Sundered Kingdoms. I think it'll run around 200 pages as best I can recall, but don't hold me to that.

Whew, okay, more to follow. I'll be back in a bit...

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

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Okay, actually just got a 2015 product development email from the guys while I was writing this, so it is subject to change. But as far as I know. This projection is still good.

Q2: The Northlands Saga Complete (KS)
Back in 2010 we published a series of four small adventures by author Kenneth Spencer that we called the Northlands Saga (NS1-4). Ken is a writer but also studied archaeology and had a specialization in Norse archaeology. So when he approached me about the series to me at Gen Con the previous year, it included a organized proposal complete with a synopsis on Norse culture and customs. He wanted to write viking adventures that were more than just normal adventures but with guys wearing horned helmets (of course they didn't really, but you know what I mean). He wanted to write adventures that captured the full feel of the culture while placing it a fantasy game setting...sort of the best of both worlds. The campaign world we were planning just happened to have a northern area that needed to be developed, so the Northlands were born and Ken put together an outline of a dozen or so adventures and began writing.

The four initial adventures were well received by those who got them but ended up being overshadowed by larger projects that kept diverting the attention of the company and the customers, so they never got the attention or sales that they probably deserved.

Eventually Ken started working on other games for Cublicle7 and told me that he wouldn't be able to complete the other Northlands adventures that we had talked about or the campaign guide that he had been working on. Wanting to get him what we could I asked if he would send me the notes and partial manuscripts that he had been working on to see if we could finish development. He sent me what he had, and no surprise--it was brilliant. He had a nearly complete manuscript for a campaign guide, complete or nearly-complete manuscripts for another half dozen adventures and notes and outlines for a handful more. Something had to be done.

For the last year I have been developing, rearranging, adding to, hiring out to other writers, and writing myself to get this thing done. It is awesome and it is huge...and it is nearly done.

Here's what it consists of:
A campaign guide complete with poster map of the Northlands region, gazetteer, history and timeline, new ethnicities, new player races, details on the gods and the concept of the gods' families (a big deal in Norse mythology) as well as the unique way that the Northlanders interact with their gods (clerics are actually pretty rare), new archetypes, a ton of new monsters, new optional rules for giving your game a truly Norse feel, and loads more.
An 11-adventure AP taking PCs from level 1 to nearly 20.
The first four adventures are reproduced and updated to fully conform to the full campaign setting plus all have additional content added. Since those four adventures started at level 5, we included a triple-length introductory adventure for levels 1-4. Then after NS4 we added NS5-NS10. All are done except NS6 (which is written and in development) and NS10 which is being written as we speak. Average adventure length was supposed to be 15,000 words (roughly the length of a long adventure in the days of Dungeon Magazine or half of a current Paizo AP adventure), but all have been expanded to some extent. There are very few less than 20,000 words. NS is triple-length (45,000 words), NS5 and NS7 are double-length, NS8 triple, NS9 quadruple, you get the idea. The campaign guide itself runs 60,000 words alone.

As I stated on another thread: this is not just typical adventures dropped in a setting with guys that have horned helmets (because of course they didn't actually have those!--except in the operas), this is some legit retelling of the Norse culture in a fantasy game setting. If you're interested in your game involving things like wyrd, the holmgang, the Things and Althings of the Northlands, rules of hospitality that have real bite and matter in-game, mind's worth, and the choice to give up the ghost in exchange for a legendary death when you feel your end is nigh, then this will be the campaign/adventure path for you. Bonus: it connects within a couple hundred miles of the northern end of the Sword of Air regional map, so it fits seamlessly with your Slumbering Tsar, Rappan Athuk, Stoneheart Valley, Barakus, and assorted other Frog God Games games.

So it's going to be a big book. I'd guess somewhere around 7-800 pages. That's around a 0.8 on the TSBS. A big book fully worthy of its material, and I'm excited about it and to finally get Ken his due.


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Fantastic thread. Thanks, Greg. :)

I presume these upcoming projects (other than the environment books) will continue the PF/S&W dual system approach?

Any thoughts on how 5E support is going to fit in to things going forward? (I realise you probably don't know yet, but I wondered if you had any thoughts so far you'd be willing to share publicly?)


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber

Wow, I am excited!

Silver Crusade

Thanks so much for the previews. Northlands Saga and Cults look to be worthy additions to the bookshelf. Can you say anything about Richard Pett's The Blight? A massive tome that crosses the Styes with a heavy dose of Cthulhu/Ravenloftesque weirdness is probably the FGG book I'm most excited about.

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

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Q3(ish, maybe Q4): The Blight (KS)
Since I don't have the final turnover on this yet, I don't know the best time for release, but my best guess is that we'll be able to make it by the end of 2015.

The Blight is the infamous Richard Pett's magnum opus (of which I'm sure he'll have many). Back in the old days of Dungeon Magazine he wrote an adventure called The Styes, a hideous urban blight with every sort of corrupt, unsavory, or unwholesome type of inhabitant. When Dungeon Magazine went away, the rights to the Styes went with it, but it was based on Richard's home campaign of the Blight. So now Rich will finally get to publish in full his disturbing campaign: the Styes with an (un)healthy of a twisted Alice in Wonderland and Frankenstein thrown in for good measure.

The Blight will consist of a campaign guide detailing the dozen or so districts of the city in detail complete with locations and some of their more notorious inhabitants as well as many adventure seeds for the use of the conscienceless GM. And then to cap it off Richard wrote his 10-part adventure path "Levee" which will plunge players into the full depravity that the Blight has to offer as they fight for more than just life and limb but their very souls and sanity as well.

Bonuses for the KS will include "Bloody Jack", a sizable mystery adventure of disturbing proportions for 4th level PCs set in the Blight but unrelated to the AP itself. It was playtested at North Texas RPG Con, Pacificon, and Paizo Con in 2013 and received excellent feedback and positive reviews (if the gamers' horrific experiences could be described as positive). Other possibilities for bonus material include some interest I had heard from masters Logue and Hodge about writing some suitably creepy corresponding adventures as well. I don't know the status of those yet, or if they'll even happen, but they were on the table as of last year. I'll get more details on those as we get closer.

I don't have the full manuscript yet, so I don't know its size for sure. Richard says he's done with the campaign guide and all but 1 of the adventures, so we're nearly there. My guess is that this will weigh in at somewhere between a 0.6 and a 0.8 on TSBS.

As we get later in the year I'll have more details on The Blight.

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

Tzzarg wrote:
Thanks so much for the previews. Northlands Saga and Cults look to be worthy additions to the bookshelf. Can you say anything about Richard Pett's The Blight? A massive tome that crosses the Styes with a heavy dose of Cthulhu/Ravenloftesque weirdness is probably the FGG book I'm most excited about.

Sorry, I was still working on it when you posted. :-)

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

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Steve Geddes wrote:

Fantastic thread. Thanks, Greg. :)

I presume these upcoming projects (other than the environment books) will continue the PF/S&W dual system approach?

Any thoughts on how 5E support is going to fit in to things going forward? (I realise you probably don't know yet, but I wondered if you had any thoughts so far you'd be willing to share publicly?)

As far as I know they will all have PF/S&W support. That is our standard. The only time we won't is when our S&W gurus deem a title as unfit to make a good transition to the S&W rules (Fire As She Bears for example from Razor Coast). So until I am told otherwise (which I haven't been yet), I assume it will be in both. As I know more I'll let you all know.

I honestly don't know about the plans for 5e since that is outside my bailiwick, but I assume that if Necromancer Games opts to continue doing 5e conversions of the FGG adventures, then they will be in 5e as well. But I don't know the Necro plans yet. I'll update on that as well as I know more.


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Sounds like a exciting year for FGG I'll be their for the kickstarters :)

Dark Archive

Greg A. Vaughan wrote:
So my goal over the next decade or so is to produce updates of ALL of the old Necro stuff fully updated and integrated into the Lost Lands.

Despite having ALL of the old Necro stuff anyway, I have to say I couldn’t be more excited about the prospect of picking up an updated Pathfinder version.

Does ALL include Maze of Zayene?

Do you have a fairly set idea of the order in which you want to do things, or could twelve months of pleading possibly get me a Pathfinder version of Shades of Grey for 2016?

Greg A. Vaughan wrote:
Cults of the Sundered Kingdoms takes the 3 old Necro adventures: Morrick Mansion, Aberrations, and Crystal Skull and integrates them into a continuous storyline for an adventure path that takes PCs from level 3 to 15+. ... it adds three new original adventures called The Beast Within, Shades of Yellow, and Vengeance in the Hollow Hills that both tie in to the three older adventures ... In addition, Cults includes a campaign guide ...

OK, I was wrong, turns out I could be more excited! That sounds awesome. Since it is (presumably) going to be a Kickstarter, is there any chance of a stretch goal for an adventure from level 1 to 3?

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

amethal wrote:
Greg A. Vaughan wrote:
So my goal over the next decade or so is to produce updates of ALL of the old Necro stuff fully updated and integrated into the Lost Lands.

Despite having ALL of the old Necro stuff anyway, I have to say I couldn’t be more excited about the prospect of picking up an updated Pathfinder version.

Does ALL include Maze of Zayene?

Ulp (busted already), ahem, when I say "all" I mean "all that we can". The Maze stuff is Rob Kuntz's so we won't be updating it (though it will still tie in with the Lost Lands setting). We can't do any of the Judge's Guild stuff (which is its own setting anyway). We won't be updating Gary Gygax's Necropolis but it will still directly tie in with the setting and we will be doing new stuff out of Khemit.

We will be updating Braden Morten's Ancient Kingdom's Mesopotamia so that it will fit into the Lost Lands rather than just being fantasy ancient Earth (much like the treatment we'll be giving Khemit/Ancient Egypt).

amethal wrote:
Do you have a fairly set idea of the order in which you want to do things, or could twelve months of pleading possibly get me a Pathfinder version of Shades of Grey for 2016?

Sort of. We've got a short-term "to do" list where we've already got major plans/writing/revision underway and a long-term "to do" list. That's more on the long-term list, so a 2016 release is probably unlikely. We'll try to do some cool stuff though for 2016.

Remember, if you're willing to do your 3.5 to PF conversion on the fly, all of the old stuff will still work just fine with the Lost Lands setting. The setting is being built off of the old books rather than the old books being changed for the setting. There are very minor changes here and there (see the map in Shades vs. the map we produced with Sword of Air, for instance) to make incompatible geographic descriptions fit together, but by and large these types of changes consist of changing east to west here and there. That sort of thing. The PF updates are easily 99.99% compatible with the old books and should be seamlessly playable with them. The main difference is getting more of the "big picture" description from the updated versions like regional gazetteers and whatever bonus add-ins we decide to do (like the 3 new adventures in Cults of the Sundered Kingdoms). So if you're jonesing to run Shades in Lost Lands. Just use the SoA area map as your guide over the area map in the book and you should be otherwise good to go.

amethal wrote:

OK, I was wrong, turns out I could be more excited! That sounds awesome. Since it is (presumably) going to be a Kickstarter, is there any chance of a stretch goal for an adventure from level 1 to 3?

This is a possibility. We haven't got all the stretch stuff worked out yet. However, Barakus works as an absolutely perfect lead-in for 1st level PCs to get into Cults. It actually starts out on the road outside Barakus.

Dark Archive

Greg A. Vaughan wrote:
We will be updating Braden Morten's Ancient Kingdom's Mesopotamia so that it will fit into the Lost Lands rather than just being fantasy ancient Earth (much like the treatment we'll be giving Khemit/Ancient Egypt).

That's good news about Mesopotamia as well. It's a great book, but it's not a very good fit with anything else so I've never been able to use it for anything. (Writing my own Mesopotamia campaign is a non-starter!)


Wow! It sounds like this will be good year for FGG! I'll keep an eye on the Kickstarters and will likely support them on some level. This past year, I had a couple Kickstarters (one was for FGG) where I had to drop my pledge to the $5 range so I could follow it, but didn't get any products from them.

I have been enjoying reading Slumbering Tsar. It is a HUGE tome and quite devious most of the time.


Looks like a great year coming up! Hope to see the S&W content keep rolling as well.

Scarab Sages

Pathfinder Maps Subscriber

Greg,

Is the campaign setting in the schedule for 2015. You mentioned it in other threads but did not cover it here.


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*blink*

Dark Archive

Dunes of Desolation was awesome. Tom really did a great job on the book. I am really looking forward to the rest of the series.


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lastgrasp wrote:
Dunes of Desolation was awesome. Tom really did a great job on the book. I am really looking forward to the rest of the series.

I agree 100%. And those adventures he did that were included! The first two were probably two of my favorite adventures I read all year, with "Child's Play" Pretty sure that's the name being my absolute favorite.

Can't wait for more.


Thirded, Dunes was very much a total blast that even took out the previous FGG-environment books.


Thanks everyone. I appreciate it tremendously. FGG really has a lot of great products in the offing for this year. I've seen some of the upcoming the Lost Lands material, and what I've seen is really incredible, so you won't be disappointed.


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Looks like some very very cool stuff coming up, I was disappointed when NS petered out so can't wait to get in behind that!


Greg A. Vaughan wrote:

Q3(ish, maybe Q4): The Blight (KS)

...

VERY interested in this. I loved the Styes from Dungeon days, and am keen to see how this one goes.

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

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Itchy wrote:

Wow! It sounds like this will be good year for FGG! I'll keep an eye on the Kickstarters and will likely support them on some level. This past year, I had a couple Kickstarters (one was for FGG) where I had to drop my pledge to the $5 range so I could follow it, but didn't get any products from them.

I have been enjoying reading Slumbering Tsar. It is a HUGE tome and quite devious most of the time.

Sorry to hear about the pledge dropping. When money is tight, it's tight. Have to prioritize, and game books come WAY after important things. One of the things we're looking at for 2015 is remodeling our KS model (still working out the details) in order to create lower backer tiers that still get something substantial related to the main book.

One idea we've kicked around for something like Cults of the Sundered Kingdoms which includes both an AP and a rules-light gazetteer is to maybe offer a lower pledge level for people who just want to nab the less-expensive gazetteer to fill some gaps in their Lost Lands campaign but maybe don't want to shell out for the whole AP series (or don't see the need to replace the original 3.5 versions if they've already got them). Meanwhile the normal higher level would be the big book including all of the above.

We still want to do our big mega-books, and I think though they are priced high that they give an extremely good value for the quality as well as sheer quantity of their content. But we want to be mindful of those who might be interested but either don't want to or can't shell out for the whole thing (I doubt as a gamer that I'd have bought Slumbering Tsar when it came out....fortunately I received a free copy. :-P)

So we're still working out the logistics on all that, but look for some changes to how we structure our KS starting with Cults of the Sundered Kingdoms.

Greg

P.S. Thanks for the kind words about Tsar. The labor and delivery were a painful nightmare and the resulting progeny was worse. :-)

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

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MichaelSandar wrote:
Looks like a great year coming up! Hope to see the S&W content keep rolling as well.

We're committed to S&W as well as PF, so you will continue to see S&W content.

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

Shem wrote:

Greg,

Is the campaign setting in the schedule for 2015. You mentioned it in other threads but did not cover it here.

You beat me to the punch, Shem. I was going to post about it tonight. :-) I'll have details up in a little bit.

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

Endzeitgeist wrote:
Thirded, Dunes was very much a total blast that even took out the previous FGG-environment books.

I think Tom has definitely lived up to the reputation of the old NG environment books and has even raised the bar.

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

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mach1.9pants wrote:
I was disappointed when NS petered out so can't wait to get in behind that!

Honestly, m1.9p, that has bothered me for years, both for Ken never really receiving the attention and accolades I thought he deserved but also for all for all of the awesome content I knew about that had not been able to see print.

I'm extremely happy to get this bigger, better version than even we had originally envisioned out into the hands of gamers.

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

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Q4: The Lost Lands Campaign Setting

Shem mentioned this above, and this is really the trickiest one. This is the compilation of ALL of the old Necromancer Games products AND the FGG products into one coherent campaign setting. I've been slowly working on this nonstop for the last 4-1/2 years ever since we formed Frog God. (Okay, let's be honest, just like everyone else I've really been working on this for my home campaign since Necromancer Games started publishing in 2000).

Anyway, it's been a long, slow, tedious process. I love reading our stuff and the old NG stuff, but I've had to read through every single product with a fine tooth comb and a highlighter in hand to mark every single instance of something that affects the campaign world as a whole (yes, I committed the sacrilege of marking up all my old Necro stuff--but hey! it's the design edition for the Lost Lands, so that ought to be worth something someday, right?), be it a geographical feature, a nation, the names of nobles or neighboring nobles, population types and densities, particular races, languages, snippets of history, original spells, magic items, feats, religions, technology levels, even types of plants in particular regions. Then I add them all to my big binder full of sheets of notebook paper that hold all these little peaks at the larger world. From these I have to reference and cross reference to create a coherent world map that encompasses all of the previous products plus review and account for all new products to create this giant picture to hold all of the older smaller pictures.

My goal with the campaign setting is to allow people to use their old NG stuff without having to change anything for them to set them in the Lost Lands while staying true to the intent of the original authors. If you've got the original adventures, you shouldn't HAVE to buy the updated versions to be able to use them in the Lost Lands.

NG put out something like 80 products, mostly by all different authors, with very little to hold it all together beyond the First Edition Feel philosophy and some individual attempts as interpreting and connecting some of the iconic areas (Bard's Gate, Rappan Athuk, Barakus) while giving tantalizing but uncoordinated hints about other places (Reme, Tsar, Tircople) without ever providing any real detail. These were all considered to be plug-and-play for dropping into the GM's own campaign, so there was very little if any organizational oversight of how they were all developed. You can still use our stuff as plug-and-play for your own campaign, but the setting will give you the option of using ours if you want to.

Some things I learned during this process:
1. Orcus is everywhere (no really, he's everywhere). I like Orcus. He is cool. He is iconic. He is representative of Necromancer Games. And he will continue to enjoy that status with Frog God Games. But, seriously, he's everywhere.
2. Where Orcus isn't, there Tsathogga will be (and sometimes even where Orcus is--I'm looking at you Tomb of Abysthor). It's almost like the founders of Necromancer Games personally identified with Orcus and Tsathogga or something. I don't know; I don't really get it. Anyway, fortunately we at Frog God Games have no such strange predilections. :-P
3. Almost every adventure takes place on the frontier, somewhere at the very edge of civilization. But hardly any actually take place in or describe this alleged civilization. I get it, The Keep on the Borderlands and all that. The edge of civilization is a great place to put the action. But for there to be all this frontier there has to be a civilization somewhere that's encroaching in all this wilderness. To make a complete campaign setting, you really need to have this alleged civilization. So either, all of these adventure-laden frontier areas are within like 5 miles of each other (one seriously bada$$ place to roll for random encounters) or the campaign setting is HUGE with lots of areas for frontiers to exist and lots of civilizations, ex-civilizations, and quasi-civilizations that have encroached upon the wilds enough to create these myriad frontiers and also enough wild places left over for them to be frontiers of. We opted for the latter, so the Lost Lands is a really big place with all the attendant issues and details that accompany that (hint, these don't speed up the development process).
4. There...are...a...ton...of...gods. I think every author created a half-dozen gods, or something like that. Sometimes a fully fleshed-out pantheon and stat block and sometimes just an throwaway reference. (Yes, this is an idol to another forgotten god...no not that forgotten god, another one). Don't get me wrong. I love this hodge-podge of crazy unassociated deities that have been thrown into the mix over the past 15 years. They give the campaign world a real sense of depth and age, but man, they've got to all be catalogued, given descriptions (if they haven't already), placed in some kind of pantheonistic context (or determined to be outside such a context), and have enough diverse cultures, epochs, and landmass to justify these apparently super-religious folk. This leads me to a small request for current and future FGG writers...NO MORE GODS! PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF THESE SELFSAME OVERABUNDANT DEITIES, NO MAS!!!! That's not entirely true. MY spreadsheet is sitting at somewhere over 250 unique divine powers introduced in NG and FGG products. For the most part we're good on the number we have, but there are actually a few pantheonistic holes to fill. WE'll figure out how we want to fill these remaining few slots, and it'll be cool. But that's going to be a seriously huge chapter with even only short write-ups for these deities.
5. If you like evil cults, the Lost Lands is the place for you. There's other stuff for PCs to kick the crap out of, but there are definitely plenty of evil cults to sharpen your swords on. This is not a negative in my opinion, it is just a fact. Our Q1 book is basically all about a number of these evil cults, why the exist, how they operate, and putting them in context with each other. I like evil cults, nuff said.
6. There are all kinds of craziness going on here in the way of campaign styles. Just think: Rappan Athuk, Khemit (from Gary's Necropolis), Bard's Gate, Hawkmoon, Razor Coast, the Northlands, The Blight, and all the others all have to fit and have to make sense as well in their own context without breaking, denaturing, or intruding on any of the others. Heck, at Green Ronin's request we even wrote a sidebar in Razor Coast detailing how Freeport could be placed in the setting. This is no one-flavor campaign setting, I tell you.

Okay, so you get the idea. This process has been going on behind the scenes for several years and, surprisingly, I have been able to assemble this Frankenstein's Daddy with very little change to the source material. There are a few instances where a directional descriptor had to be changed (different authors just sort of made up their own version of the world's geography), but these are actually surprisingly few and unobtrusive. Some of my favorites actually stem from when this was Bill's home campaign world in high school and college, and Rappan Athuk and Sword of Air were adventures that he wrote for his own players. His personal campaign maps were 2 parts Middle-Earth, 6 parts Wilderlands, and 5 parts I don't give a crap just roll for initiative. He was running adventures, not world building! So you get things like Rappan Athuk being on the east coast of the continent as published by NG way back at the beginning of this century and then a throwaway reference to the Amazon Village in Sword of Air (that I didn't catch DADGUMMIT!!!!) that states it's just a few miles east of Rappan Athuk. Apparently it was supposed to be a floating village or something (not really). Anyway, if you bought SoA you'll get that amusing little non sequitur to laugh at. :-/ (Don't worry, the SoA maps and adventure geography totally work, I just failed to catch that single reference in my canon review of the manuscript so you'll just have to ignore it...or consider it an Easter Egg, yeah, that's it, an Easter Egg!)

So how does all this relate to Q4? Well, as I said, I've been working on this in my spare time for years in between writing for Paizo and FGG, school, familying, and working on other more-pressing little projects such as Slumbering Tsar, Tome of Horrors Complete, Razor Coast, and the three I have mentioned above for Q1-3 of 2015. Needless to say, the campaign world kept getting pushed to the backburner. But with Cults complete, Northlands nearly complete, and Blight not only nearly complete but being the written by Richard Pett and requiring minimal input with me, I can finally put aside those other projects (probably in mid year) and devote my attention solely to this project. Despite the many distractions, the world history, ethnicities, and geography has been pretty much developed and/or written. I'm about 7/8 of the way through my reading and research of the older projects. My deity list is reaching critical mass but is shaping up into a neat series of pantheons and outlyers. And my prototype poster maps have managed to incorporate all of the above as well as leave room from plenty of new adventures to come.

So while a Q4 release of this is probably unlikely, I think considerable progress on it will be made so that an early-mid 2016 release is not unrealistic. Allowing it to become my main design priority will help accelerate it a lot I believe.

And then I will crawl into a clear bottle of a brown liquid and sink into sweet, sweet oblivion.

(Maybe it's just the med school affecting me, but my attempt at a poetic description of partaking of a well-deserved bottle of scotch now seems uncomfortably like a description of someone drowning in a stool sample when I look at it again, so what say we just forget that last little part, okay? Thanks. Greg)


It's not the med school. ;)


And more importantly. That sounds great! The campaign setting is what I've really been hanging out for. I'm glad to hear you're doing it right, rather than quickly. :)

Shadow Lodge

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I second what Steve just said. Take the time, and do it right! That's one of the things I like about FGG...you guys may not release stuff as often as some publishers, but you always deliver quality. (And it sometimes seems that you also deliver in large batches....you sometimes seem to go through several months of a dry spell, and then release a good half-dozen products all at once.)


Greg, what do you envision the Lost Lands setting physical product/products being? One book, multiple volumes, box set? How about the maps? Thank you for spending the time to update us. I always enjoy hearing about the design process and behind the scene peeks.


Yellow is my favorite cult colour. Will "Shades of Yellow" deal with Hastur?

Scarab Sages

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Pathfinder Maps Subscriber

Thank you Greg.

What I like most about FGG kickstarters is that they have more often than not done the writing already and the product is ready to go in a relatively short period of time. Sword of Air was one of the slower books (60 more day?), but in between we got the Lost City that came out very quick.

I am waiting on at least one kickstarter from about three years ago (never again with that company) and another seems to have completely stalled out. With the second one the books of this publisher are very good but the writing was not done prior to the kickstarter and it has stalled completely.

With FGG, they do a kickstarter to curb the expense of publishing quality books (signature stitched - that was for you Bill) and not to write and develop the whole project.

I am totally in on every Greg has talked about. I wish for the campaign setting earlier but we take what we can get.

Greg and Bill and all the other Frogs. Thank you for the products you have and will give us.

I am about four sessions into my Lost Lands campaign and plan to adventure there for a very long time.

Already it has been a brutal, fun and frightening ride...


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Thank you, Greg.

One of the reasons I love FGG (yes, even more than NG back in the day) is that you guys don't rush things and still get them done - I'd rather see any and all projects delayed than compromise in that regard.

I am waiting on a couple of projects and all of them started *way* before SoA, so in the meanwhile, I'm happy to read SoA.

Also: Northlands Saga + Blight, plus the options you hinted at to only get the new material in upcoming KS...you, sirs, are awesome.
Just wanted to put that out there!

Cheers!


THanks for your posts Greg, you (in your NO MORE GODS etc ranting) are doing nothing more than increasing our appetite for more! So well done and we can't wait :D


Greg, as a certified specialist in spirituous liquors, and a Scotch enthusiast myself, might I recommend a Single Malt or a blend for you?


Awesome!

About the gods, though, 250 does not surprise me.

As I was setting up my Tsar campaign, I thought it would be nice to include the deities from the NG/FGG products as part of a campaign guide for my player.

After getting to about 50, I stopped and just decided to use the ones mentioned in Bard's Gate and Tsar itself. :)

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

Steve Geddes wrote:
It's not the med school. ;)

I think I asked that we forget that part... ;-)

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

Kthulhu wrote:
I second what Steve just said. Take the time, and do it right! That's one of the things I like about FGG...you guys may not release stuff as often as some publishers, but you always deliver quality. (And it sometimes seems that you also deliver in large batches....you sometimes seem to go through several months of a dry spell, and then release a good half-dozen products all at once.)

We sometimes have people working on different things and they all come together at the same time. Sometimes this is by design...sometimes it is not. It's sorta what happens with a garage-and-basement publishing company I guess.

UPS used to have these commercials where they would sing about "logistics". Having worked with Paizo many, many times I am in awe at the grasp that they have on the logistics of their production to bring out all these excellent products more-or-less on a constant schedule (and even THEY sometimes get stuck by a slow boat from the printer). Around Frog God I sometimes think logistics is a four-letter word that we punch in the mouth whenever we see it. :)

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

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Redapple6 wrote:
Greg, what do you envision the Lost Lands setting physical product/products being? One book, multiple volumes, box set? How about the maps? Thank you for spending the time to update us. I always enjoy hearing about the design process and behind the scene peeks.

Probably a big book version and a stripped-down little book version (like Gygax's Greyhawk folio) for people that don't want to spend as much, if we manage to do with KS what I was talking about in a post upstream a little ways. Maps will be big, full-color posters larger than those that came with SoA and Barakus (once again, probably Greyhawk size) but with 250-mile hexes (it's a super big world). It will include all of the continent of Akados (the site of most FGG/NG adventures), a tantalizing slice of the continent of Libynos (where can be found Khemit and Ashuria [aka Morten's updated Mesopatamia] and some other stuff), and a tiny hint of Boros where it comes down as the Shadwolands (the polar continent that connects to the Far North of the Northlands series) where it comes down to the Haunted Steppe as the Shadowlands. What the map will not include is Razor Coast (which is too far south across the mother ocean, Oceanus, though Razor Coast will be mentioned in the gazetteer). The Far North also does not appear on the map, but the Northlands do.

Our plan in the future is to have supplemental campaign releases to fully detail Libynos, Boros (and a little place some people like to call the Ebon Shroud--if I can ever get Logue and Pett off their lazy butts), the southern ocean and its islands, and an Under Realms book to include the Cyclopean Deeps stuff. And probably some more stuff I'm not going to mention yet. But that is all projecting far,far out into the future.

No boxed set. Too expensive, too much hassle/expense to put together, and too fragile for shipping all over the planet considering the greater risk of damage and greater cost to replace. Solid books tend to travel better. I love boxed sets, but I don't see us ever doing boxed sets again. It just doesn't make sense financially for a company our size.

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

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GreatKhanArtist, I can neither confirm, nor deny...but you may be very happy with it.

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

mach1.9pants wrote:
THanks for your posts Greg, you (in your NO MORE GODS etc ranting) are doing nothing more than increasing our appetite for more! So well done and we can't wait :D

I assure you that outcome was entirely accidental and unforeseen. ;-)

(I'm glad it's as exciting to you as it is to us.)

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

Thanks Shem and EZG!

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

justmebd wrote:

Greg, as a certified specialist in spirituous liquors, and a Scotch enthusiast myself, might I recommend a Single Malt or a blend for you?

Better than a steatorrhea with an extra dose of stercobilin. Sorry justmebd, that was completely uncalled for on my part. Yours definitely sounds much better. :-)

Please, for the love of God, people don't look that up!!!!!

Pathfinder Creative Director, Frog God Games

DaveMage wrote:

Awesome!

About the gods, though, 250 does not surprise me.

As I was setting up my Tsar campaign, I thought it would be nice to include the deities from the NG/FGG products as part of a campaign guide for my player.

After getting to about 50, I stopped and just decided to use the ones mentioned in Bard's Gate and Tsar itself. :)

I know, right! It seems like there can't be more than 50 or so, even if that many. I mean how could they have crammed that many into those products. And then you keep reading and there's more, and more, and more, and more. It's crazy. I will be happy to have them all catalogued and available in one place for players and GMs to reference.

My one hope to add to them is that we can get Lance Hawvermale to write some more for us. He brought Hawkmoon to Necro and as he wrote additional products (he ended up writing something like 6 or 7, I think) you could see the geography, culture, and deities of Hawkmoon developing further in his mind until at one point he mentions there's an entire unique pantheon in the Domain of like 27 gods or something. And they are WEIRD (in a cool way). They each have a dichotomous and seemingly unrelated portfolio (like being the god of fire and horses or something) Anyway, they're very unique and interesting. The problem is that he only names and describes around 7 of them. I'm hoping we can get him to give us the bare bones of the rest for us to flesh out or to even be willing to write the material himself. This is on my to-do list. I just hope Bill still has his contact info.


Greg, thanks for the insight into the schedule. It's great to see how much material is in the works!


Greg A. Vaughan wrote:

Better than a steatorrhea with an extra dose of stercobilin. Sorry justmebd, that was completely uncalled for on my part. Yours definitely sounds much better. :-)

Please, for the love of God, people don't look that up!!!!!

I love it when doctors talk dirty. :-) That is some colorful scatological humor.

Doctor's don't adjust humours anymore, do they? Sometimes it is sad to see old things pass (like renal calculi). But often, joy comes with the new!

I love it when I encounter medical terminology that I don't know. I work in disability claims and my best friend is a nurse, so I encounter a lot of medical terminology. It's always nice to learn something new.

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