While Starfinder was the biggest star of Paizo’s 2025 Gen Con offerings, that doesn’t mean Pathfinder showed up empty handed either. With a new book, Battlecry!, and a new meta event, the Hellfire Crisis, there’s a lot to look forward to as Pathfinder 2E enters its sixth year. To learn more about these books, as well as a surprising new Paizo partnership, I had a chat with Pathfinder Narrative Lead Developer John Compton.
Tell me a bit about creating a book in Battlecry! that is entirely focused on warfare?
One of the difficulties that we sometimes run into with a mass combat system is that it turns it into a mini game. It’s like we learned how to play Pathfinder and suddenly you want us to learn something else on the fly. And at least in first edition, that was a little bit of a difficulty. It caused some people to drop off. What Battlecry! does is it plays around with what is called the skirmish system. This is something where instead of massive armies, you’re still working on five flip grids. You are still using the three action economy that you’re used to, and in this case, each player character is in control of one troop. So a gargantuan set, it’s a gargantuan swarm of people. So it can shift a little bit in how it flows, but it’s a 20 by 20 foot square to start with. You get five actions to split between you and the troop that you command. You can say, “I want to cast spells”, two actions, “I want to command my troop to move and carry me with them,” One action, and then a two action attack with the troops. You’re going to need a little bit more mapped area, but you’re still going to be using all the rules you already know. You don’t have to learn new media.
Is it something that needs a map to be able to use it, or is it something you can still do with just the books and paper?
Of course it helps to have maps that are going to have a grid. One of things that I found in working on some adventures that deal with skirmish encounters is that having an extra 50% space or so is kind of helpful. Paizo has a number of flip mats that are the bigger or expanded flip mats that are half again as large. Those can be a really great fit for troops and have some room to maneuver.
I think the big challenge as you scale up any tabletop RPG is that it gets fiddley, like you said, but the time investment starts to grow. It seems like you worked to avoid that.
It will increase the time playing just a little bit because you have that much more to of keep track of. When we were doing some demos of it early on for an internal play testing, we found that an encounter could run maybe 50% longer. But what we found in creating adventures for it is you’re not doing skirmishes every encounter. It’s kind of an interesting set piece that you might be doing a couple of times a level in a war campaign.
And then you say, okay, troops, you go and do this other thing. We’re going to sneak behind enemy lines and do, you know, unlock the drawbridge, yada, yada, yada. And then they come in through the main courtyard and you’re like, okay, skirmish to finish up the campaign.
When you’re playing RPGs, you do want to sometimes have bigger things, so it’s nice seeing that being covered in Pathfinder. It’s a little underserved and often hard to put in as a GM.
The other thing I really like about the Skirmish Encounters is that there are things called Skirmish Bonds. These are basically a way of saying, okay, I have hung out with my troops for a little while and taught them some of what I know. If I’m a rogue and the campaign says I’m getting a group of paladins, I can look at them and scream, why can you guys not sneak? Well, now you can choose the Skirmish Bonds as long as you’re an expert in stealth for ambush tactics. And now they get to use stealth and if they attack an off guard target, their abilities are harder to avoid. You get to give a little bit of your class flavor or your own personality to your troop no matter what it is. So I can apply ambush tactics to paladin troop, a swarm of harpies, whatever it is that we want.
Last year the big news coming out was the War of Immortals event, this year we’re looking at Hellfire Crisis. So tell me a bit about what’s happening there and where we’re starting off with that.
For years and years people who know our setting have looked us and said, wow, Andoran and Cheliax sure do hate each other. Why are they not doing anything? It’s just guerrilla warfare. Well, we’re finally having a hot war between them that sort of event is something that any neighboring areas are of course going to look at with interest and say, OK, now that they’re fighting…what can I do in the meantime? You’re going to find that it’s not just about entering Cheliax, but it expands so much farther beyond that. The Hellfire Crisis covers this event, which is going to last a year-ish.
There are different ways of getting involved in that in case you want to weave it into some of your ongoing campaign. If you want to play some existing or some new campaigns, then you can totally pick up like the adventure paths that you’re going to be exploring. There are different hooks that are tied into Hellfire Crisis to say, all right, what’s happening in my favorite nation over here? Let me turn it into my own homebrew adventure.
So this is going to be another sort of setting shift, similar to War of Immortals, correct? Where it’s going to change some of the board?
I mean, War of Immortals kind of had a setting-wide shift with little Gorum nuggets falling everywhere. Whereas this is more that we have our epicenter in the southwest of Avistan. It’s a little bit more contained, but this is still an event, maybe we’re changing up a little bit of our map, maybe XYZ characters are getting killed off, it remains to be seen. But you’re right to draw that overall parallel. It’s very similar in approach.
What’s the big hook for players who might want to get involved or pick a side or something after they’ve been in that Cold War for so long?
The one adventure path that we’ve announced that ties into this, or at least that we’ll have announced by the time, is called “Hellbreakers”.” “Hellbreakers” is a level one through nine adventure path that primarily takes place in Isger. Isger has long been a puppet state of Cheliax. It’s been under its thumb and has kind of wanted a bit of freedom, but Cheliax is so much stronger that it always just slaps them right back down. Now all of Cheliax attention is on Andoran, so this is the perfect time for Isger to say, “ha ha, revolution!” So “Hellbreakers” is referencing this group of rebels within Isger that are leading this independence movement. The PCs are going to be part of that group, or working with that group. It’s the sort of thing where, depending on the style of play you want to do, it could be as much as, hey, we want to be the head of the Hellbreakers and be president of Isger by the end. It’s not the assumption, though. The assumption is more that you are important heroes within this rebellion. You’re doing some cool stuff. And if you want to ride off into the sunset afterwards, go nuts.
Is this a war that we’re able to pick a side in?
That’s one of the most complicated things to do in an adventure path. I remember when we were doing War for the Crown. That was our adventure path with Taldor’s succession. One of the pie in the sky ideas was man, what if you could choose which person you back? But then we realized how much that would pull you in all sorts of different directions. So not this time around. We are assuming a more heroic bent, more anti-Cheliax. But can say for “Hellbreakers”, even though it aligns with Andoran in ideology, that doesn’t mean that Andoran has the bandwidth to really be helping out. So you’re going to find that even if you’re reaching out to Andoran, they don’t necessarily have the resources to spare for you, but maybe after you’re done with your rebellion, then you’ll be able to link up a little bit. So you’re not really choosing a side so much, but if you had to choose a side, we probably know the one you would choose.
What’s it like partnering with Dungeons & Dragons on Abomination Vaults?
It’s a really neat opportunity to be able to get our adventures in front of a whole new set of eyes. Because that’s really how Paizo started, was the adventure. So we’re proud to share those with really any rule set. It just happens to be the one we’ve linked up with. We’ve done a couple of those adaptations of some of our adventure paths for Abomination Vaults, and Gatewalkers coming up soon, but it’s certainly not something that we’re planning on doing with every single adventure. As we continue to see how they sell and whether it’s gaining us some more eyes on our storylines then it’ll kind of influence whether it’s something that we do a lot more of or every once in a while if you see fit.
I think one of the easiest parts about it is that, unlike some collaborations, it’s much more one-directional because we’re not having to deal with a lot of their intellectual property of their setting’s stuff. So we don’t have to meet with people on a weekly basis to be like, is this okay? It’s more, hey, you’ve published your rule set. We have read your rule set. Cool. Okay, let’s apply that rule set to what we’re doing.
Images via Paizo
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