Kraken Kings & Kaiju Wranglers! - Tian Xia World Guide Pathfinder 2e Interview

um you mentioned earlier that there's a country ruled by a kraken uh can you can you elaborate on that a little bit welcome to the character sheet comicbook.com official home for all things fantasy and tabletop today I am joined by a very special guest I am joined by James case who is here to talk to us about an upcoming Pathfinder product uh the tianaa uh World guide uh James how are you doing today I'm doing good hi everyone I'm James casee I'm senior designer at piso and I'm one of the project leads on the tensaw world guide and um you know so I guess the first the easiest question is what is the tiaw world guide yeah so um the tiaw world guide is one of our upcoming lost Omens books which focus on the setting and the world lore of you know the age of lost Omens the Pathfinder setting the world of garan um Tia is the portion of our setting that takes a lot of inspiration from Asian folklore and fantasy so this is a large continent uh it's a little F farther away from the Inner Sea region and it has um really takes from a very broad spectrum of Asian fantasy you know both kind of geographically there's some stuff that's a little more Japanese there's some stuff that's very Southeastern um and there's some stuff that's just kind of fantasy first uh themes like the nation that is run by a kraken um yeah happens happens um uh as well as kind of looking at a very like Broad in time as well so for this book it's a very big expansive look into the region we had a huge roster of freelance authors come in and contribute to it and um just going through and kind of taking a really deep look at each of the different nations in this continent basically so back in 2019 when Pathfinder second edition launched piso could have opted to revisit like familiar look house and you know if if you haven't um if you're not familiar with like piso's line of Pathfinder books you know they they you know released a pretty steady stream of like uh uh campaign setting guides in addition to the adventure paths which are you know all fantastic but you know when uh Second Edition launched you guys chose to expand the world uh with the first the wangi uh expense uh expanse uh and now uh this world guide so what went into that decision to kind of um not focus on the familiar and ex and and instead expand the world yeah I mean I think first when we were um when we were sort of doing the update into second edition we of course you know the inner SE is where the majority of our stories have taken place you know we we want to update the Canon you know one of the really cool things about Garian is that the world does evolve sort of in real time so it' been about 10 years in the real world so about 10 years have gone by in Gyan it's why you know characters like Yun she was the kineticist in the first edition and she was maybe about you know eight nine 10 and now she's about 18 to 20 in second edition just because she's gone along with the timeline um so we wanted to look at those locations uh but also you know the gallerian has never just been the interner city region there's been other continents the whole time we had uh books like a dragon Empire uh in the first edition we had a look into we had some looks into Arcadia um you know even as early as first edition but certainly um as we've gone a second edition we've both wanted to look at familiar fantasy tropes but also a very like globally diverse view of Mythology you know there's a lot of cool mythology that we've invented for gallerian a lot of it is taken from the sort of more classical medieval you know European setting but we also have places like uh like the land of shenmen you know which is run by Juma which are you know shape shifting spider creatures and that sort of thing so we we really want wanted to take this look into tanha and really get you know a lot of inspiration from The Source mythology and also put that like Pathfinder Twist on it so uh when when you decided that you wanted to do uh tancha um one of the I flaws of past attempts to um look at culture you know to create fictional cultures based on Asian inspired you know mythology Asian inspired cultures is that they kind of like homogenize it into like one or two uh places and you know basically take the largest continent in the world and turn it into like one homogeneous culture so how did you avoid that trap and you know how how did you go about building this very diverse region yeah I mean uh we definitely get that um this is a project that uh myself and elanar Fen who's the uh one of the co-leads on this project uh you might know her from a lot of her work in the law Omen line have wanted to do for a long time you know we're both part Asian you know she has a formal degree in this you know I like I spend most of my 20s living in Asia and we have a lot of we have a lot of talent in our pool that you know comes from that part of the world or is like you know or our second generation or third generation diaspora but for this book just because it's it's such a large book and there's a character guide as well um we really wanted to spread out so there's a about 40 authors on this book I think almost you know virtually all of them are you know either of Asian descent or living in um places in Asia which made coordination with the time zones quite difficult sometimes um but we wanted to be sure we were getting people who weren't like just you know in the Seattle area even within that experience so you know there's people here there's people who are writing in from the UK there's people who are writing in from you know uh Singapore Southeast Asia and areas like that and kind of everybody had a very different view of it you know um there there were certainly some uh commonalities that came up in the writing of course but the continent both in the real world and in you know garan has very different areas so you know one nation is very high energy that's like you know quain is very your like it's very like your woa your stereotypical Kung Fu place that you might think of but it also you know it has this like really great look into sort of what are the politics like in a region where you know these Immortal Grandmasters kind of are the biggest Force there we just had a Fiction come out this week um in that area that I think is really cool and we also have some other areas that are more for political Intrigue or more for kind of Monster hunting or more for just adventuring so we really kind of wanted to make sure that the theme both in terms of both in terms of the kind of what is the main fantasy kind of conceit of this area what's the high concept but also like what kind of Adventures can you have there we pretty spread out and you know with about 40 authors we were pretty sure we got a very wide range of of ideas I have to ask how do you coordinate so many Freelancers because that's one of the like most impressive things about these these Pathfinder books is some of them like you know like you you have this like list of just like powerhouses and like there's dozens of them how how do you how do you manage that uh I write a lot of emails we have a Discord server you know but also for you know for what it's worth like this is maybe not a project that's undertaking is maybe not something we would have done in our first year um you know we've we've been lucky to have the time to sort of uh sort of grow our author lists and a lot of the times when we offered a section to somebody they would they would say hey this is cool this is a little more work but I would like to recommend this is a little more work than I can take on right now could I maybe take one of these sections and I and I've worked with these people in the industry before um how would you think and of course we you know we looked at their histories and you know got writing samples just to make sure that you know the tone and everything was kind of what we were looking for but you know the we're lucky in that this is an industry where like we can see each other's work all the time and you know there's some people on there's some people on this list who you know we've been working with for years uh you know who have been writing for piso longer than I've been employed at piso frankly and there's some people who I was like well this you know this is that we want to reach out now like this is the project where we might you know we just W to see who see who's available see who can make introductions so I mean uh I'm not going to say it wasn't logistically complex um but I think it was definitely worth it and I think that's something you'll see a lot in the final project uh so so let let's dive a little bit into the the world guide itself uh who or what are some like the dominant powers of the continent yeah so um this is a large continent and there's definitely a lot of regions here there are some kind of of the big areas uh we've taken a little bit of look at already um one is Goa Goa is the largest city on the continent uh you might recognize it from the Fist of the Ruby Phoenix Adventure path that we had a couple years ago um it is it is to Tia what something like absam is to the Inner Sea region it is your large Metropolis can find everything there region it's located on the west it has um maybe notes of like Hong Kong or Singapore maybe areas like that where um there are regions in tancha that are a little more culturally specific you know mink Kai is very inspired by Japan for instance but Goa kind of intentionally takes you know there's um you know there are Chinese words next to you know Korean words next to uh I think uh copit Sams are like a big thing there you know the sort of coffee house you would see in Southeast Asia as meeting places so um it is recovering from uh the events of Fist of the Ruby Phoenix which I don't want to spoil but the uh the town does get a little leveled at some point so um so you know one of the things we have here back to that living Canon it's uh you know there's a lot of construction going on uh people are rebuilding um you have things like uh the leader of the city basically trying to juggle these kind of these two parliament in government to sort of repair the damages done and it sees the return of the Sorceress Howen which is uh she's a long-standing figure in the sort of Pathfinder Universe she's an immortal sorceress and is kind of in some ways the patron of the city who was absent for a long time and now is back so one of the many ways in which that's sort of has evolved with our adventure paths and that sort of thing um uh another another character that I have to bring up uh is you know somebody who dates back to literally the first Pathfinder Adventure that that's that's Amo um who is still the Empress of um I'm blanking on the country mink Kai yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so how's she doing yeah um so I mean Amo goes way back uh in the setting and of course through the events of the Jade Regent Adventure path in first edition she's now Empress um there's this really good uh she's settling into the role a lot but of this has brought with it a lot of change and where uh and where mink Kai was kind of it was always a very uh Japan inspired Nation uh but in the second edition we're looking at this very much in sort of like a taking inspiration from like the Magi restoration okay or periods of History where there's kind of a large influx of um foreign culture and uh and influence um this is also coming with of course uh AO has kind of looked at the samurai class as sort of allowing the rise of the Jade region and is moving to sort of disrupt their power a little bit so you're seeing this very kind of upset in the traditional structures there I think we have a really nice art of her in of a very traditional kind of like Court dress in her like sort of full Empress regalia but she's still an adventurer so it's noted that like she does a lot of she doesn't make people come to her she like goes on all of diplomatic missions to sort of Curry favor but also kind of because she misses being out on the road and adventuring a little bit uh you know and of course anytime you are uh anytime you're breaking up the power structures of the people who ran the country for a long time uh you might have some internal threats so you know she she has some some tricky balancing to do in I think it is called the onori era which refers to roosters because of course uh shizuru is one of the main deities of the setting she's sort of the patron of Samurai and somebody very associated with the Sun so of course roosters Herald the Sun and that's kind of become the the uh era name for ao's Rule now um you mentioned earlier that there's a country rule by a kraken uh can you can you elaborate on that a little bit okay yeah uh We've we've touched on it a little bit in the past the nation of wano uh was a nation that was plagued by War during the collapse of sort of the previous continent-wide Empire the lungwa Empire uh and this was and they were saved from a bevy of Storms and natural disasters that destroyed their ecosyst system by their Divine saviors zagor and Elder Kraken who totally did not also use his his powerful storm magic to cause all of the storms that he then saved the nation from uh so that is uh it's a little bit up in the north there um that is a nation run by a bunch of propaganda and mind control it is very much you know as much as we have heroic Nations where there are places you can go Heroes come from there you know we also have Nations uh in tensa that are not doing so well um you know Infested by monsters or uh kind of you know ruled by evil evil rulers that sort of thing so we wanted to be sure that like as much as we want to show a really vibrant and fun view of Asian fantasy there's also still you know Lands Run by ghosts lands uh Oni a forest that has a bunch of Kaiju in it you know there's certainly regions that have a lot of adventure and a lot of cleaning up to do there um one one of the things that I love about Pathfinder and I love about garan is that there's always seems to be more secrets to discover about the world so I'm going to put you on the spot and ask what what are some of the big Mysteries and secrets that we delve into with this book um what are some of them okay uh there is one nation that has a succession crisis going on between the emperor and his uh and his many sort of uh you know his many children and that sort of thing um unknown to any of them his soul has been transferred into a construct that he is sort of waiting the succession crisis out for uh that's one of my favorite um that's a good one uh we take a look into the Vash Raj for the first time here which is a nation in the middle of the vashi Jungle um you might think it's hard to have a nation when you are in a giant kiju infested jungle but it turns out that they've been living there for quite some time they have specialized professions like Kaiju callers that exist to sort of route to the Kaiju around the major city centers and that sort of thing um we still have the dark LS and the and the caverns of haunted Clockworks below it so uh you know this is a large book um but there were a lot of areas that we wanted to leave on the map sort of as lingering Mysteries um another cool thing I absolutely love about Pathfinder is that especially second edition it seems like the the game has really embraced the uh entric in fantasy like you can just play as literally anything you can think of um and it's just absolutely a blast um what what are some of like the really wild and unexpected things that we'll see in this book um let me see uh I know I'm just asking you all the cool stuff yeah um um I think that one of the things that I think is really fun is the way in which you might see a very sort of conventional a sort of very conventional experience of Asian culture in event you know things like New Year's Festival things like Lion dancing things like you know uh things like bubble tea that sort of stuff you know that's construction family all that stuff and how it's just kind of seen through the lens of the fantasy here there's a nation called lvar which has ties to talor it used to be a manad in the previous Edition this is a tton colony and of course Tor has you know Tor has the grent lion it's this large heraldric you know very very European lion so they do lion dances in linar but they're all with this like six-eyed uh grent Lion on them and it's just like it's this really cool um mix of of like the like a lion dance you know something you'd really think of with this sort of like but what if it was the giant Immortal six side heraldric line you know even the cover of the book depicts like a depicts a um a Dragon Boat Race uh you know very common you see them around but it's within also an actual dragon is uh taking part in the race um dragons are very common this area we have the nation of uh know zaho and tangai and the sort of Southeast are both so high magic um you know we have a nice we have a very cute art of a school for young Sorcerers uh in tangai because uh this is a nation that has just a lot of sorcery in it and so this is a place where you have your little you know your little school for all of your you know kids do learn how to harness their magic powers uh which will be the focus of one of our fictions upcoming so I just think it's it's fun it's it's fun to take that sort of fantasy lens and look through it like Goa has a lot of construction going on it has construction going on because it got attacked by a Kaiju um it has Basher arcades which are essentially a uh they're a place where students go to slack off where they play what is essentially a magical version of uh arcade games uh there's a lot of betting on it that sort of thing and it may or may not be run by former gangsters uh who are trying to go legit so I don't know there there's a there's just there's a lot it's hard to pick one um so we you you've brought up Kaiju multiple times so so I have to ask as part of this you know uh there there's multiple books that are coming out here um involving Tian Chaw um are we going to get some Kaiju stap blocks you don't get Kaiju stat blocks um we've we've depicted Kaiju before um you know Monsters of myth had a had a great section on them um Kaiju are beyond your ability to engage with directly a Kaiju step block uh doesn't show you how many hit points it has it has hazards like roaring breath or you know tail that knocks over a building that you just have to negotiate around um think uh you know when you when you engage a Kaiju it's less about fighting them directly and more about you know Finding what is possible to sort of redirect them or drive them off you know King mogu who's kind of our most I think prevalent Kaiju has a very you is a powerful destructive force of nature but also uh has a predilection for song and can in some ways be directed or called to a place by you know sufficiently beautiful music so uh I don't think you'll be fighting one directly but you'll certainly have those stories so since uh I have to ask like you know are are is this this might be more of a starfinder thing but with Kaiju obviously you you have like Mecca and robots and you know for God every Godzilla be Mecha Godzilla do we do we see any of that in here that in that's probably a little more starfinder but there are a fair number of constructs Clockworks and otherwise in this book um you know we have in addition to all of the lore sections we also have a best area at the back that touches on you know some additional monsters in addition to the ones we've published in other books that might be appropriate here um and there's certainly some kind of magical Clockworks in them uh that are fun but I don't think anything that's quite the size of a Kaiju okay I I just wanted to know if like you know I I could get like a Megazord or something going um so uh last last question um when when it comes to Fantasy tabletop RPGs a lot of people opt to build their own worlds when playing so what's the draw for them them or maybe even someone who's never played Pathfinder to to buy this world guide yeah so I mean to some extent everybody when you play a game you you always want to inject something of yourself in it right and I think this book even if you don't play Pathfinder I think is just a really cool look at a lot of Asian inspired Fantasy Made by some of the best writers in the industry um you know if you look at something like like uh you know if you look at something like the wars that are going on in chida underwater um kind of maybe you don't have exactly that Nation uh but maybe you want to do something aquatic in you know in your world and you can look at sort of the oceans of tsha area and like the sort of Hazards and Adventure hooks in there you can Port them into your world um you might be able to look at some of the monsters in the bestiary and look at uh one of my favorites is the Y no which is a folkloric Korean creature that eats 100 corrupt Aristocrats to return to Heaven um you know even if you're not playing Pathfinder if you want an example of like a Korean inspired monster that you might you know adjust to your own to your own world to your game you could take that and put it in similarly with the deities um so I think that you know even if you're not taking the entire continent and just uh playing in it there's certainly uh like there's so many examples of great like an NPC and Adventure hooks or this town here with this cool conceit that you might you know put into your world like that fantastic well um oh really obvious question when when does the world guide come out yeah so this is coming out uh in April so we're coming up on it right now wow and then the character guide will be coming out in August so look forward to those well uh thank you so much for coming on this has been an absolute blast uh be sure to pre-order uh the TN Sha World guide and you know be sure to check out the character guide too and go to piso's website because as mentioned there's a lot of fiction and there's a lot of blog posts you know talking up about you know some of the many things that you can find not only in tancha but in the wider world of Pathfinder and starfinder too um so uh anyways uh that's all that we have today thanks again for coming on James thanks for having [Music] me

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Keywords: the character sheet, character sheet, rpg news, ttrpg news, ttrpg, rpg, dnd, dnd5e, dungeons and dragons, tian xia world guide, tian xia world guide pathfinder, tian xia, pathfinder 2e, pathfinder, tian xia character guide, tian xia lost omens character guide, pathfinder 2e news, pathfinder 2e tian xia, pathfinder 2e tian xia world guide, pathfinder 2e asian setting, tian xian kraken, kraken gods pathfinder, james case, paizo, tian xia world guide explained, tian xia interview

Id: lxGl5IB4juA

Length: 24min 31sec (1471 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2024