For the better part of a decade Paizo's Pathfinder Fantasy Roleplaying Game has been an enormous presence in the world of tabletop hobby gaming, seemingly going from success to success with few if any hiccups in between. No small part of that has been due to the leadership of Paizo publisher Erik Mona, a veteran game designer who captained the company's ship through uncertain waters to the success it is today.
I've long been an admirer of Mona's design skills and business acumen, and when I asked to meet with him while he was in town for New York Comic Con 2015, he very generously agreed. We met for lunch and a little conversation about the gaming industry and Pathfinder's next big moves.
SUVUDU: You’ve been in business now for thirteen years-plus. What is the most fascinating thing that you’ve seen happen with Pathfinder and Paizo over that time?
ERIK MONA: Paizo started in 2002 as a magazine company, so starting in 2007 when we did the Pathfinder Adventure Path and in 2009 when we launched the Pathfinder RolePlaying Game, our business has changed almost completely. We’re still editorial-based, and a lot of the people are still the same, but it’s a different business than the magazine business was in the first couple of years of the 21st century. That’s changed a lot. I think that one of the biggest changes that I’ve seen in that period of time is not specific to Paizo, but it’s been a little bit of a demographic shift in the nerd culture and game players.
When I joined the RPG business in 1999 at Wizards of the Coast, there was a lot of concern about the “graying of the hobby”. A lot of us got our start in the eighties during the D&D sort-of fad—a Cabbage Patch Kids-style fad in 1983, 1984. People were starting to look around and see that everyone was in their mid to late thirties, early forties, or older, and wondering if it was just going to be people playing games in nursing homes in a few years, but what’s happened since then is that when you go to a convention like here at New York Comic Con, or especially the Pax convention, there’s a whole generation of younger people who were raised on video games and for whom gaming is not a thing you do in addition to your normal culture and stuff, but is part of culture.
Nobody talks about the graying of the hobby anymore. It’s really invigorating to come to a show and see young people. It’s not just old white dudes, anymore: No part of that statement is still one hundred percent true. It’s become more diverse and younger, and I think all of those things are really good for the future of the tabletop hobby.
SUV: That’s a great segue into a conversation about the future. What are you guys looking at now as far as future products go and general plans?
EM: We have a lot of cool things coming up. We just put out a book called Occult Adventures, that’s psychic magic, dark pacts, and mental powers and things, and that’s been very popular; sort of like the Pathfinder answer to psionics rules. We’re following that up with a book that’s dropping this week, Inner Sea Races. It’s a Pathfinder campaign setting book that gives detailed treatments on all of the races that are appropriate for player characters in Pathfinder, so anything from the twelve different ethnicities of human, to half-elf, to hobgoblin, to some of the crazy races that we’ve done for Pathfinder, like the winged strix people, or there’s a race that I made up called the ghorans, which are like sentient plant-men who evolved from magically created food a long time ago and have developed evolutionary protections to make themselves look like people so they wouldn’t be eaten. The poor ghorans have a racial trait called “delicious”: They taste good, so they’re particularly susceptible to bite attacks. There’s more information about all of those different races, whether they are like dwarves or something that’s been a pillar of the game for a long time, or even throw-away references here and there in the Pathfinder lore, we go into deep detail on how to play those characters and how these different races interact with one another.
Following up with that, by the end of the year we’re putting out Bestiary 5, which is our fifth big 320-page monster guide. One of the things that I’m particularly excited about for Bestiary 5 is that when we were doing it, honestly I was a tiny bit skeptical. Five monster books? There are more than 300 monsters in every book that we do. Are we running out of good monsters? Flipping through Bestiary 5—I got my early print copy—I’m like, “Whoa! No, there are awesome monsters in this book.” The Grim Reaper is in there, grey aliens are in there—you can be probed, let’s just put it that way—and we did a bunch of things like the Annunaki and other really cool things. One of the things Pathfinder has been really good about with monsters in particular is turning to world mythology, and there’s no shortage of mythological monsters. There’s also a lot of original monsters that have come from Pathfinder adventures and what have you, so that’s very, very cool.
Right now, we’re doing an Adventure Path called Hell’s Rebels, in which you’re resistance fighters in a country called Cheliax, a place where devil worshipers run the show. You’re trying to free a city from the rule of the evil devil worshipers of Cheliax. Hell’s Rebels started in August and is running through January. We just announced that in February we’re going to be flipping the script with an adventure path called Hell’s Vengeance, where you’ll be playing evil characters. It’s not in the same location but it is in the same country there’s revolution is going on, and while the good guys are trying to free the city of Kentargo, in Hell’s Rebels, the bad guys are trying to solidify their rule in the rest of their empire, so for the first time ever, you’re going to play evil characters. I think you kill a unicorn in the first adventure: The gloves are off. It’s going to be really exciting to see how people react to that.
SUV: I understand that Paizo is moving into the video game business. Pathfinder is starting to find its way there. What is that starting to look like?
EM: We’ve got a couple of things going on right now. The one that’s been going on for the longest in development is the Pathfinder online MMO that’s being done by a small studio called Goblinworks. That’s still in development and they’re working diligently on it, but there’s nothing real to announce there at this point. The thing that I’m very excited about in the short term is that we’ve been working with Obsidian Entertainment on a tablet version of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. It was a major deck-building card game in 2013 and we’ve done three expansions of it since then. Obsidian loves the game and they’ve been translating that to an app that’s coming out in November. That, I think, is going to be really, really cool. It’s beautiful. The graphics are awesome.
The thing about the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game is that it involves a lot of cards and so setting the game up can take 20 or 30 minutes just to get going to play, whereas with the app you can just push a button and you’re right in and you’re playing. They’ve also added a little bit of a narrative aspect to the game, so the different iconic characters talk to each other and the NPCs in the game. A lot of people who have had a chance to play it at Gen Con or Pax Prime have been really complimentary about just how good it looks. It seems to be exceeding people’s expectations for a translation of a card game to a tablet, so we’re really thrilled.