Sometimes
irony is, well, ironic. The day after I posted my blog about Thornkeep, it was announced that
Goblinworks laid off all but three of its people, and the company was looking
for a buyer for the Pathfinder Online
game. I feel terrible for the guys I know who sank a couple of years of hard
work into putting the game together. Unfortunately, that is the digital game
biz—companies fall short and collapse all the time, some of them quite a bit
bigger and better-funded than Goblinworks. I’ll be pulling for the Goblins to
land on their feet, wherever they wind up.
I still
think there is a good market for a small, clever, shoestring MMO publisher to
create an EVE-like fantasy game—it’s
not for everybody, but there is a really interesting niche there. You can do
quite a lot with a small number of highly invested fans who make your game
their own and introduce their own social structures and player-kingdoms. If
there is any postmortem I might offer at this point, I suppose it would be
this: That game I just described isn’t what Pathfinder fans necessarily wanted.
The initial enthusiasm for Pathfinder
Online was driven by an unrealistic expectation on the part of the
Pathfinder audience that somehow Goblinworks would create a $100 million dollar
WOW clone that let them explore Golarion like it was Azeroth. That was never in
the cards. I think Ryan and the Paizo leadership were pretty upfront about what
they were trying to deliver, but people really had their hearts set on hundreds
and hundreds of hours of PvE content showcasing huge parts of their favorite
fantasy world, and that is an extraordinarily expensive proposition.
Pathfinder Online also faced another
significant obstacle in the fact that the OGL on which Pathfinder itself is
based explicitly does *not* extend to electronic games. So, Pathfinder Online couldn’t use the
mechanics familiar to Pathfinder players. This was not necessarily a fatal
flaw—there are some very good reasons to go with EVE-style time-based skill advancement instead of grinding for XP,
for example—but, taken with the fact that the game couldn’t be built to
spotlight the world of Golarion, it was heading toward a place where PO wasn’t
the Pathfinder game and it wasn’t the Pathfinder world (at least in the eyes of
Pathfinder fans). Great gameplay attracting deep-end MMO players is what Pathfinder Online had to go on, and I
guess that just wasn’t enough to pull in the second-stage funding/investment
they needed to build out the game.
During my
work in and around Pathfinder Online,
I did get to create an interesting little town called Thornkeep, which got
published as a sourcebook and small collection of dungeon levels. And I also
got to build another town called Fort Inevitable, and a much bigger collection
of wacky dungeon levels: The Emerald Spire.
#26: Emerald
Spire
Pathfinder Online actually ran two
Kickstarters. The first was for the “tech demo,” an initial exploration of the
game concept and basic engine. Thornkeep
came into existence as a physical Kickstarter reward associated with that first
Kickstarter. The second Kickstarter (with a cool $1 million ask) was to begin
the funding of the game proper. The signature physical reward for that second
campaign was the Emerald Spire
Superdungeon.
The Emerald
Spire itself was a “nearby feature of interest” I came up with when I worked on
Thornkeep. The Inner Sea World Guide suggested mysterious Azlanti ruins in that
corner of the River Kingdoms, so I made sure to create a handful of likely
sites. To my surprise, the Paizo folks seized on the notion and ran with it,
choosing to make it the focus of a multi-level superdungeon with each level
created by a notable game industry luminary. Celebrity contributors included
Keith Baker, Wolf Baur, Ed Greenwood, Frank Mentzer, Chris Pramas, Mike
Stackpole, Lisa Stevens, and myself. To that list. Paizo added a number of
staff aces including Jason Bulmahn, James Jacobs, Erik Mona, Sean Reynolds, Wes
Schneider, and James Sutter, along with freelancers Tim Hitchcock and Nick
Logue. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the herculean work of Logan Bonner
as the developer who put the final polish on the whole thing.
I took point
on wrangling the sixteen authors up front, soliciting dungeon pitches from each
of them, suggesting refinements, and then organizing the dungeons so that the
high-level dangerous ones were deeper down than the low-level ones. In a couple
of cases, I contributed a lot of help on Pathfinder mechanics—a couple of our
contributors hadn’t written for a 3e-era product before. But overall I tried
very hard to keep each authors’ original vision intact, and allow levels to be
whimsical or serious as the author preferred.
The
trickiest design constraint was once again the maps. The Paizo folks wanted to
make sure that each level could be represented on a flip-map (basically, a
tactical-scale map of a level, shown in 5-foot squares). So, the maximum horizontal
spread of each level could only be 22 by 30 squares, or only 110 feet by 150
feet. On the bright side, there was no reason we couldn’t stack up a lot of
small dungeon levels one on top of each other, so we figured out that the
Emerald Spire needed to be a “dungeon shish-kebob” of many levels joined by a
common story or theme. I met with James Jacobs, Erik Mona, and Wes Schneider,
and we came up with the idea that the Spire itself was a physical object—a
needle of green crystal 2 miles deep—that passed through or adjoined each of
the levels we were creating, linking the surface to the deepest stratum of the
Darklands.
My level was
Level 6, the Clockwork Maze. Since the brief writeup on the Emerald Spire in Thornkeep had mentioned a Numerian
wizard playing around with weird constructs, I figured at least one of us
authors ought to make that guy the star of a Spire level, and I volunteered
myself for the job. The fun part of the level is that giant clockwork revolving
turntables change the alignment of key passages and intersections—to fight your
way through the level and continue your descent, you’ll need to figure out how
to align the control levers found throughout the level. I also had fun using the
metal-clad template to create a steam-borg wizard who looks a little like
Tharok, the Legion of Super-Heroes villain.
My other big
contribution to the project was the first 20 pages—the town of Fort Inevitable,
and big-picture overview of the Spire, how it works, and why it’s there. I seem
to be in the business of making up starting towns, for some reason—besides
Thornkeep and Fort Inevitable, I also wrote up Phandalin for the recent Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set, Duponde,
Harkenwold, Fallcrest, Pommeville, and more. Fort Inevitable is interesting because it’s a
lawful-evil starting spot ruled over by an iron-fisted tyrant; your characters
have a Sherriff of Nottingham they can play Robin Hood to.
Next Time: The Search for the Diamond Staff.
