PaizoCon announces post-Remaster Pathfinder books, mech and kaiju adventures for Starfinder

The company behind the Pathfinder and Starfinder tabletop RPGs has decorated its table with a bounty of upcoming releases during PaizoCon Online 2023. Players who attended the digital event on May 26th learned about several new Pathfinder books planned for the coming year - including a deep exploration of dwarven lore and the chance to pilot their own mechs on a planet ruled by kaiju.

PaizoCon allows the Washington, US-based tabletop RPG publisher the opportunity to lay out its development roadmap for the next year, which currently centres on further distancing Pathfinder from D&D’s Open Gaming Licence - a project Paizo previously dubbed Pathfinder Second Edition Remaster Project. Elsewhere, its sci-fi title Starfinder is undergoing a similar refinement process beginning with classes and some core rule changes.

The cornerstone of the Remaster Project focuses on four core rulebooks slated for 2024, but the first published title reflecting Paizo’s new design principles will arrive in August of this year. Rage of Elements, previously announced for a Gen Con release, was called the “first Remaster-compatible rulebook” and will calibrate player expectations for Pathfinder’s lineup going forward.

Prior to Rage of Elements hitting shelves, Pathfinder plans to explore dwarven lore and culture with Lost Omens in June of this year. Part gazetter and part setting guide, the book will contain plenty of options for dwarven player characters and those with ties to Pathfinder’s specific take on the fantasy mainstay. It revolves around the city of Highhelm and outline a reported eight gods in the dwarven pantheon that are currently little more than rough sketches.

Later in 2024, Paizo will release a larger campaign book called Howl of the Wild that delivers players to a deep wilderness unlike anything currently available in Golarion, Pathfinder’s canonical world. The book will offer new creatures and regional variants for a number of spells, creatures, archetypes and other features detailed by the book's in-game narrator, The Naturalist. Six new ancestries tied to more animalistic natures, such as minotaurs and centaurs, will also be included.

Those hoping for new Pathfinder Andventures will not be disappointed. The Sky King’s Tomb, for characters level 1-10, will release around the same time as Lost Omens and across three volumes. Following that will be Season of Ghosts, a series of four season-spanning volumes for characters level 1-12. This campaign will dabble in horror and introduce the Tian Xia continent to Pathfinder 2E, along with a bevy of region-specific character options and encyclopaedic information. The low-level Rusthenge adventure will release sometime later in 2023 and will act as a standalone exploration of the western reaches and the Runelords.

Paizo announced Starfinder Enhanced for its scifi tabletop RPG, a core rulebook meant to bring a selection of classes, rules and game systems into a more contemporary context. Four classes will enjoy an enhanced version: the envoy, solarian, technomancer and witchwarper. The book will also include revamped items, spells and rules for scaling up equipment as characters advance in level.

A hardcover adventure path called Mechageddon is planned for 2024 that will let players travel to Dimalcho, a planet terrorised by massive, devastating kaiju. In order to combat this threat and eke out a small chance of survival, the party can create and pilot mechs into battle. Mechs will level up alongside characters and will come with plenty of customisation options. Mechageddon will be released in 2024 and will be suitable for characters level 3-18.

The last major announcement took long-time Pathfinder players back to the beginning of the second edition. Pathfinder #200, Seven Dooms for Sandpoint, will be a double-sided standalone adventure for characters level 4-9 and returns to the setting for Pathfinder #1. It even brings back writer James Jacob to show how the years have not exactly been kind to the very familiar city.

Edit: A previous version of this article referred to The Naturalist as a new class in Howl of the Wild. The Naturalist is the book's in-universe narrator, not a playable character class. This has been amended.