For the news: my next adventure, the all-new "Night of the Skulltaker" is out.

You can get it here!

For some background: I wrote this adventure in just over 2 days. That's from jokey start to final layout and everything. (There were a few extra hours when I woke up, realized my Table of Contents wasn't right, and had to re-upload it in there, too.)

Here's how it got started.

Around Paizo, we joke with each other a lot. This hasn't stopped now that we're all working remotely; it just happens over our work chat where everyone can see it. One of my fellow developers innocently asked whether we'd updated the stats for skum (evil aquatic humanoids who call themselves ulat-kiki) in Pathfinder Second Edition. Some of us pointed him to the entry for "Alghollthu," the larger family where these stats now appear. One of his players jumped in by pointing out they now knew what they'd be fighting in that night's game!

I responded by pointing out that creatures formerly called saxras had also been renamed, and they were called skulltakers now. 

See, that's funny because skum are level 2 creatures and skulltakers are level 18 creatures, way to powerful for his group to handle. That's what passes for humor among us, I suppose. Plus, I'm well aware that any time you have to start a sentence with "see, that's funny because..." then it is not, in fact, funny.

At that point, Lyz Liddell (she's great! see lyzliddell.com) responded in with the comment "I would love to see this adventure in which a skulltaker is a reasonable substitution for a skum." And since I'd been goofing off with James Case's tool about leveling up or leveling down monsters (explained in an earlier blog), I realized I could probably scale back a skulltaker to level 2. I even thought about a story where that would make sense; a dormant skulltaker is awoken by a clan of skum, but the skulltaker kills them all and takes over. Probably menacing a seaside town, since skum have "menace a seaside town" as their core competency. 

Anyway, from there it was a really inspiring two-and-a-bit days, where I stayed up far too late each evening to write, revise, layout, and so on. I even convinced my wonderful wife to give the whole thing a fast editorial pass, when she clearly thought I had absolutely no need to be rushing this.

And now it's available, thanks to the quick response time of my friend Owen at Rogue Genius Games, who's releasing and promoting all my Run Amok Games work these days.

So, what's next? I think I want to make two different versions of this adventure: one for Pathfinder First Edition, to see how that sells, and another like my recent "The Duskwalker's Due," in which it works as a solo adventure. I think "Night of the Skulltaker" would work just fine for our hero Tarklo Dirge to tackle. Look for those soon!