Hey Everyone, I’m The-Magic-Sword and you can find me on reddit and on twitter. The Stream should be starting shortly, I’ll be typing out the minutes and taking screenshots to follow on with the news as best I can! (TMS Note: This is how I’ll say something as myself from here on!) Thanks to VestofHolding (VOH Note: Hello!) for helping me out, two magic items on a mission!

The Stream should be starting after a short break, I’ll be here with the details once it starts, I’ll just start live chatting it once the panel comes up, there are ads on stream in the meantime for various products.

Stream should be starting relatively soon here, just as an update, I want to take this chance to tell all of you to support your local libraries, it's a scary time and they can use it! 

Pathfinder Remastered Panel

Ok here we go! We have Jason Bulmahn, Logan Bonner, Michael Sayre, James Case.

New on-ramp into the game, these two are coming out in November, with Monster Core and Player Core 2 early next year. The legal kerfuffle around the OGL pushed them to do this to get the books under the license, and they wanted to take the opportunity re-present things and give people the things they’ve been asking for.

One goal was to make it an easier entry point by dividing out the GM content away from the player content, based on feedback over the last couple of years. They wanted to remove barriers and streamline things, and make the game work faster. You can use almost everything they’ve already published with no or minor tweaks.

They either trimmed out things that weren’t doing the work, or they fixed things that didn’t work as well as intended– they’re gonna get into it in this panel.

These sketch covers are currently going to be exclusive to retail stores.

This is the first time they’ve done these sketch covers, and the team is really excited to show them off. No interior today, because they’re not done yet. Unfortunately changes continued just a hair too late to include them today.

General Book Contents

Of general note is that these books will be much easier to navigate.

Alignment Removal

It's been a hot button issue for literally decades. It's time to let alignment go and come up with cooler and newer ways to express these ideas, and let go of the confusing parts that cause fights at tables. They already had tools in the game, edicts and anathema, so they’re making those a broader portion of the game. You largely select them, while some classes have stricter ones. The recent ancestry blog included “popular edicts and anathema” as an example. While they have holy and unholy, they found that when they crunched the numbers, law and chaos only really showed up alongside good and evil, so they’re not doing them the same way anymore. General edicts and anathema cover what they were doing with that better.

The Planes are staying the same. Think of the alignments as writing prompts, rather than a necessary thing for the existing planes to exist. In all cases this didn’t change the story of the game, and that’s a recurring theme in the remaster. They’re keeping an eye on those elements.

Holy and Unholy

A cleric can have the option to sanctify themselves. Some deities demand it while others let you not. You get the holy trait or unholy trait if you sanctify yourself, and you get access to spells that become holy when you cast them as a result of you being holy.

Spirit Damage

This is for effects that directly target the spirit and simplifies certain things like ghosts and stuff. Spirit damage can be sanctified. When it gains the holy trait it deals more damage to unholy creatures. Spirit damage works on incorporeal creatures, and then you can upgrade that to holy and unholy.

Schools of Magic Removal

They’re removing spell schools due to the OGL. (See the Wizard section for how this affects that class, and the Treasure section for how this affects equipment such as staves.) It wasn’t particularly important to the PF2e mechanics and philosophy. The only important one was Illusion because of the specific rules around them. Overall, the spell schools were referenced very rarely, and they were messing with the magic items that depend on them.

Player Core

Ancestries

They’re adding the Leshy and the Orc to the Ancestries to this book, promoted to core ancestries. Orcs had already been made common in organized play, and they collected the feats for Orcs and gave them a brush-up. Orcs were scattered around because of half orcs, but now they’re collected under a single Orc header.

The versatile heritages framework creates an opportunity to pull the half-elf and half-orc out of just human heritages, with their new in-universe names. There is guidance they give that helps for mixed combinations in other parts of the world different than the inner sea. These were barriers that were only there out of tradition, and the remaster lets them reevaluate those elements.

Aasimar and Tiefling needed to go due to the legal OGL stuff, but they were really important narratively. So now we have the Nephilim which have content that is remixed and reworked, and lets you play a character with mixed and angelic blood. It's cool because a lot of celestials have animal features, so they were able to open it up by mixing the options for the two– like having a tail as a celestial blooded person. Combining the two allowed them to add new content as well.

The last versatile heritage included in this book are the Changelings.

As to why they chose the ancestries they did for this book, it's about the thematic underpinnings: Leshy is there to go with the nature throughline with the druid, and that plays out in the rest of the book too.

Classes

There are four primary spellcasters, one for each tradition. Then they needed the fighter and rogue, and then the witch fit into that. We’re gonna dive into the classes and the changes with some very juicy information. Jason is encouraging spoilers.

Bard

The Bard is close to how they wanted it, but they wanted to make the story more clear and give them more roleplaying hooks, like elaborating on the muses. The warrior muse got something new because the bard got proficiency in all martial weapons.

Cleric

The Cleric had to be brushed up significantly. Alignment is very important to the current version, so anything with alignment was reworked greatly for the remastered version. It also includes the sanctification process mentioned before (Holy and Unholy section).

They had the opportunity to address the warpriest too: “what can we do to make it easier and more attractive”. There was a perception issue because the cloister cleric could use resources to get armor, so they gave the warpriest more unique things. People are going to be excited that the warpriest's doctrine gives them master proficiency with the deities favored weapon and expert in martial weapons. They added a bunch of new feats and spiced up existing feats. “Why play a warpriest when I could be a sentinel cloistered cleric?” There’s now a warpriest heavy armor feat inside cleric, so you don’t need an archetype to get that anymore.

Feats needed to be satisfying in melee combat, so there’s fun new tools for that. Jason teases us about future changes they might be making, but doesn’t elaborate.

Druid

The druid is a class that most people seemed to be enjoying, so not as many core places to revise. However, they went in and upped the nature flavor of the druidic language. It's been renamed “Wildsong”, for example.

Certain orders got a lot of options, other orders didn’t, so they wanted to make sure that all the orders have cool things they can do, like adding custom spell shaping abilities. Examples include: creating thunder claps when you cast spells, or leaving snow on the ground. No big changes, just tuning and more options. Lots of stuff changed “around” it.

It's much easier to talk to plants and stuff because they were willing to make that easier in the system as a whole. No metal anathema.

Fighter

They removed an entire trait! The "open" trait wasn’t intuitive, and they found it wasn’t necessary. It turned out that not having it made turns more flexible. The "open" trait was frequently ignored by the playerbase anyway. Most people just didn't realize it was there or knew what it did, or outright felt it didn't do anything significant. “Rules that aren’t doing work should be reevaluated.” Otherwise, the fighter was doing its job well. It benefitted from other changes like the generic changes to athletics and the “reposition” action, but overall they knew better than to mess with perfection.

Ranger

They took all the Warden Spells and made them core to the ranger. Everywhere where the class DC increased before now increases the spell DC. They polished up the feats as well. For example, the ranger had the Crossbow Ace feat, but it was patching a hole for the lack of a martial crossbow which they’ve now added in the "arbalest". They’ve reworked Crossbow Ace to be more exciting, so it's not a tax to improve a simple weapon anymore. In general, removing taxes is a consistent theme in the remaster. They reduced dependency on Hunt Prey in the feats as well.

Rogue

The rogue didn’t get a lot of changes, but they made one big change to the rogue: it is now trained in all martial weapons to get rid of the bespoke list of weapons! They revised the rackets to make sure they encouraged specific weapon groups for the sake of flavor. When Treasure Vault dropped, they realized it was too hard for rogues to use the new and exciting weapons based on feedback, so they fixed it. The Ruffian got some new stuff too, and the scoundrel now has a mechanic where it can step after a feint.

Witch

The Witch is the APG class being put in this book, because it's so iconic in fiction and has so many different versions across cultures and time. It’s been hard to crack the flavor, and it's gotten one of the largest reworks. They dialed the flavor of the witch all the way up. The patrons are a lot more specific now, though they’re still mysterious, the “curse patron” is now “the resentment”. The winter theme became “The silence and the snow”. They wanted patrons to be more relevant. They wanted to take the restraints off the witch and give them unique stuff.

They wanted the Witch to really be the signature class that uses a familiar. Now, every familiar has some cool ability from their patron. Example include:

• Silence and Snow lets your familiar freeze the ground around it when you cast a spell.
• Patron’s Puppet is a focus spell where you can use free action to make your patron order the familiar.
• Patron’s Presence makes it harder for your foes to cast spells.

There’s a lot more “asking for help on the battlefield”. Still only one hex per turn, but the hexes are stronger and less restrained. Hair and nails feats have been bundled together into a single package, and there’s new witchy feats like being able to turn a broom or polearm into a flying broom. There’s a feat where your patron uses your familiar as a portal to reach out and grab your enemy’s soul, which is the highest patron feat.

Wizard

With the removal of spell schools, Wizards now have a much more literal school. Like where they learned magic, even including curriculums. Example include:

• “The School of Battle Magic” is like if you learned magic in a war centric place. It includes things like fireball, but also earthbind and other spells useful for ‘military wizards'.
• “The School of Civic Wizardry” lets you build walls, summon constructs, etc.
• “The School of Protean Form” is all about biological manipulation magic, like Gouging Claw, Plant Spells, etc.
• "The School of Unified Magical Theory": You don’t have a curriculum, but you gain additional feats and spells like the Universalist already was.

This leaves the door open to adding new ones that reflect different parts of the setting, like Ustalav having spirit stuff and electricity. Runelords were part of the inspiration for this, and there’s an emphasis on calling back to the Wizard’s actual scholarly education. Certain things like Magus Spellstrike might be errata'd to accommodate this, and certain feats have now been errata'd like Bespell Weapon as well.

The Wizard also got weapon proficiencies. “Frying Pan Wizard”? Feel free, go for it.

Spells

There’s a rules bandaid to rip off here: spell components were an OGL holdover, so they're being reworked. Paizo realized they could pull them out to make them more individual to the characters and put the manipulate and concentrate traits on the spells themselves so you don’t have to do weird things like look in the trait to discover a secret trait. It's more of a presentation change, nothing really changes, they just present it differently.

Some spells are being renamed for OGL reasons, like Force Barrage, which is a renamed Magic Missile. Certain other spells they didn’t love, so they threw them out a few and replaced them. For example, there’s no Tree Shape, but they replaced it with One With Plants, but if you prefer Tree Shape, you can just use the old version.

Revealing Light replaces Faerie Fire. The Light spell is now Light + Dancing Lights. A number of spells were compressed and combined in this way. They remixed some standard things, like the falling stars spell– it's like Meteor Swarm, but you now have damage type options, like cold comets instead of fiery meteors. There’s a multi-season seed spell that also has damage type options based on season. Divine Lance now does 2d4 spirit damage, and can affect anything that isn’t a rock, and you can sanctify it if you’re unholy to make it do more to certain targets.

They looked for spells that are iconic but underperform as well, since they have had years to see how things work in play. Magic Weapon is not called Magic Weapon anymore. “Runic Weapon” and “Runic Body” replace it and Magic Fang. With Magic Fang, you can slap it on a backup weapon or something to temporarily have a more mechanically caught-up weapon, so it scales better.

They changed condition removal spells. They made them stronger and focused it around larger slews of conditions, like a mind condition thing vs. a body condition thing. Now, even if they don’t counteract, they can shut them off temporarily, which makes it easier to use.

Focus Spells

Details on those changes (TMS Note: I’m so excited): when you refocus you now get the point regardless of if you spent them. So now if you spend a half an hour refocusing you get all 3 points back. Now the only recharge feat is for getting your whole pool back at once.

Cantrips

They refreshed a lot of old legacy cantrips. In general they needed to be a bit more useful.

• The Frostbite cantrip puts an orb of ice around someone that gives them a weakness to bludgeoning to elaborate on tactical combinations.
• Ignition lights people on fire.

GM Core

The book has everything you need to run and build your game in one place, a combo of the GM stuff in both previous core books. Chapters include: Running the Game, Building Adventures, Subsystems and Rules Variants, Magic Items and Treasure.

Subsystems

Some subsystems were adjusted, and their chassis were modified mathematically to make them more player friendly because it was too tight and incentivized part of the group to not help. (VOH Note: Ha! Michael Sayre's pun was fantastic.)

Research is being updated to be clear on how to construct adventuring around it, such as if you want to use it to explore a mine, where you would put the checks. Basically, how to diffuse it across a dungeon and use it in exploration mode. It elaborates on when you should use the subsystems and when you shouldn’t.

Vehicles were altered. They added more vehicles from Grand Bazaar and some new stuff, like the Hot Air Balloon. They also restructured the section for land, air, and sea.

Setting

The Player Core has a much briefer setting breakdown, while a lot of the stuff from the Setting section of the CRB is now here in the GM Core.

There’s a section on the planes. The planes were updated to use more in-Golarion terms, and they included the new elemental planes from Rage of Elements in this section.

The Lost Omens line has been killing it in fleshing out the setting. They now tell you the general tone of each area of Golarion, to give you an idea of what adventures you might run there.

The Primal Previews panel tomorrow will have pictures from Rage of Elements. (TMS Note: I’ll be covering that too!)

Treasure

This section got a lot of cool updates. They took it as a chance to update magic item activations. Permanent items now have a named activation that’ll tell you what it actually does such as "Shoot a Fireball". They also combed through the items and improved underperformers.

Talismans weren’t pulling their weight. They had a tendency to be too specific. For example, they updated the Bull Pendant to be one action, gives you a bonus to the check, and increases the distance you push people. The talismans are overall more active now. Some items had too demanding prerequisites, so they tried to make them easier to use like a bag of tricks.

There’s a greater potency crystal, so you can use them at higher levels. There’s a talisman that turns your item into a special material.

They now have a shield rune called "Reinforcing" that can be etched on shields to improve its hardness and durability. Sturdy Shields are still the best at blocking, but the Reinforcing Rune lets you make Magic Shields better and enables you to use shield blocking more often if you want. Paizo found that players were often frustrated that their cool new shields made them feel like they couldn't actually use the Shield Block action as often as they would've liked, so Paizo wanted to address this.

They’re not adding property runes to shields. They do cool things already, and Paizo didn’t want to expand the number of runes you had to get as a sword and board character.

Assistive Items are now featured in core, along with guidance for using them. It's just the basic stuff in core, and that’ll make it easier to expand on them later.

There are a lot of other random little changes in the Treasure section. They rebalanced poisons because certain ones were out of whack. Staves got a big change, because of schools of magic getting removed. You won’t see the Staff of Evocation, but you might get a Staff of Elemental Power instead. They also strengthened the theming, and added new spells to staves. Some sample staffs:

• The Staff of the Dead has a bunch of the spells from the player core like Void Warp, Vampiric Feast, and Grim Tendrils.
• The Staff of Arcane Might: You can snap it to destroy the staff for a big effect that no longer hurts you.

The Walking Cauldron and the Crown of Witchcraft are included in this book since witches are in the player core. Alchemy stuff will be in the other book with the alchemist.

Monster Core Contents

This occupies a similar role as first bestiary, though Paizo is taking the opportunity to move some things around and adjust things to the new rules. There are new monsters for OGL monsters that occupied important niches like the sewer monster.

New Dragons

Dragons are still being designed right now, but we can talk about some of them so far. The new dragons are loosely based on the four spell traditions.

Diabolic Dragons are divine, and you're gonna see a lot of these in hell.

They wanted Arcane Dragons to have elements of the arcane in their being, like the repeating fractal pattern on the mirage dragon, which can be seen on the cover of the GM Core.

Dragon Families will spread across traditions, but the traditions also give the dragons commonalities.

Fiends and Celestials

They had to rely on OGL monsters originally, they brought in some existing ones they had to use to compensate. They have some new ones to fill in the holes. Imps are now general planar monsters that can play a lot of different roles that are unique to Pathfinder.

Hags were reworked to get closer to the source folklore (which also happened to genies), but Hags were reworked thoroughly. So the Sweet Hag has a bunch of charm effects that it can infuse into candy, for instance.

Some major questions Paizo asked themselves include: “Is this doing what it needs to do? Does it reflect the original folklore well? Can we go back to the roots?”

Player Core 2

Player Core 2 will have many of the remaining classes and ancestries that appeared later, such as the renamed hyena-like ancestry. It also contains a bunch of new items. It's not meant to be an "advanced" book, like the Advanced Player's Guide. They just want it to be the "more stuff" book, but they need to get back to us on that.

More Things

Paizo has other books coming out, and panels about those– James and Logan will be on the Primal Previews panel talking about Rage of Elements and Howl of the Wild. Check out the other panels! Michael Sayre is being very modest, and is working on a book that will make us lose our minds that they are not revealing here (TMS Note: Gencon, probably?), much love to the rules team! Preview document coming out at gencon for rage of elements and the remaster?

But that appears to be a wrap on our panel here, join me tomorrow for at least Primal Previews and Secrets of Golarion. Go check them out on the discord for more information! Thanks again to Vest of Holding for the amazing formatting stuff, it's so much more readable than these live minutes usually are.