ZEITGEIST adventure path (Pathfinder RPG and D&D 4th Edition) fans will be pleased to hear that the penultimate adventure, ZEITGEIST #12: The Grinding Gears of Heaven, has just been released in PDF format (softcover in a week or so). The long, critically acclaimed adventure path is nearing its end, and the gears of the world are turning. Complex machinations, details NPCs, and piles of intrigue have characterised this entire saga, and this adventure is no exception! Spoilers follow, along with a very short interview with designer Ryan Nock.
You can get the latest adventure (and all the others, for that matter) from RPGNow or DriveThruRPG. Silver Subscribers here on EN World can, as always, grab it directly from the downloads area.
The End Has Already Begun
Things are falling apart. An attempt by the Obscurati conspiracy to create a more perfect world was sabotaged, and the world is descending into chaos. With mere months before the planet is devoured by the cosmic gears of the graveyard of the multiverse, the party undertakes an extraplanar expedition to find the means to fix the conspiracy's disastrous failure.
But there in the Gyre, at the center of oblivion, a primordial serpent known as the Voice of Rot has coiled itself around the physical manifestation of time itself, and it intends to drag the party's world to its destined destruction. The party must slay the rough beast if they wish to hold together their dying world so that tomorrow can be born.
Welcome to the twelfth and penultimate adventure in the ZEITGEIST adventure path! An adventure for psychopompic heroes of 20th level (Pathfinder) or 28th level (4E).
[h=4]A Quick Chat With Ryan Nock[/h]
Now you're nearing the end of a multi-year, 13-part (15, really, if you count the Players and Campaign Guides) adventure path, how do you feel? Relief, nostalgia, excitement, regret?
I regret letting Australians buy into our Kickstarter for the same shipping prices as Brits and Canadians, because it costs less to ship to the International Space Station than to Sydney. (KS has thankfully fixed that for future projects.)
But really, I'm feeling a mix of pressure not to screw this up (because I need to weave together a lot of plot threads into a nice bow) and a bit of fatalism (because not even Paizo publishes 20th level adventures, so how many people will actually get to play this?). Luckily there's at least a half-dozen GMs posting regular updates on their campaigns on the EN Publishing forum, but so far only one group is into the 12th adventure. So, like, I want to make this final adventure awesome enough that GMs will want to stick with the series all the way to the end. Or at least cool enough that after the GM TPKs his party in adventure 8, the group will want to hear how things could have played out.
And hell yeah I'm excited, because I've had the climax in my head since we started this project, and I think it'll be the best steampunk fantasy philosophical finale I personally have ever written. Certainly the best one in 2016.
The ZEITGEIST adventure path contains a lot of memorable and unusual scenes, monsters, and locations. What are five parts of the AP which really stand out to you?
Five, huh? Okay, well, spoilers.
First, it thrills me how many groups literally built 'crime boards' like you see on cop shows (with maps, thumbtacks holding up pictures of characters and evidence, and strings linking items of interest), to help the party figure out the criminal network in adventure two, The Dying Skyseer. I'd never seen a large-scale criminal investigation in a fantasy adventure, and I think the adventure does a great job capturing what law enforcement and criminal organizations would be like in a world with magic.
Second, I need to thank Matthew J Hanson, who wrote Digging For Lies, the third adventure, for a clever climax with three different foes all acting towards different ends at once, innocents in peril, a ticking clock, and a monster you get to ram a subway car into. He did a great job transitioning from the 'investigative' core of ZEITGEIST into the wider, weirder metaplot involving an international conspiracy.
Third, hopping way forward to adventure ten, Godmind, Thurston Hillman wrote a ridiculous over-the-top encounter that could challenge high-level PCs (17th in PF, 23rd in 4e) yet still managed to be hilarious. The Father of Thunder, basically a 60-ft. tall primordial fey bison-rhino (and an alcoholic), one of several kaiju-esque fey titans that your kingdom subdued in the ancient past, awakens because of villainous chicanery, and he gathers all the herd animals in your entire country for a giant stampede bacchanalia. You've got to find a way to make him stop, in order to secure your nation's claim to its land on a metaphysical level. The best way to beat him is to piss him off and make him chase you into a nearby city renowned for its distilleries, so he drinks himself into a stupor.
Fourth, adventure seven, Schism, experimented with telling the story out of chronological order. You start by giving the players brief character sheets of villains who are meeting for a conclave, in order to show a short scene and set the tone of the adventure. Then it's back to the party and their mission, where later in the adventure the PCs get to abduct and then impersonate those same villains in order to infiltrate the meeting.
The fifth is what I'm working on now, guidance for how a GM can run a denouement after the final climax. It's one thing to engage in a duel between airships while avoiding an indestructible mechanical colossus and trying to complete a ritual to reset the order of the planets and stars; any fool can run that. It's a very different challenge to then unravel the tension and give the players a satisfying aftermath where they can see how their heroics over the course of thirteen adventures affected the world.
The adventure path has gotten some very high praise from reviewers such as Endzeitgeist? While I'm sure that all comments mean something to you, are there any particular comments which stand out especially?
I recall a review by Leopold compared The Dying Skyseer to the TV show 24 or a Tom Clancy novel, and said it was not an adventure, but an 'experience.' My ego has been inflated ever since.
What's next for you? A break from adventure path writing? New ideas you're eager to try out? Moving on to 5E?
A friend and I are looking at the possibility of crowd-funding the pilot episode for an RPG-inspired cartoon. I would like to at least dabble in adapting the ZEITGEIST setting material to 5e, to see if there's enough interest to warrant doing a full conversion. I'm definitely not looking to create a 20-level campaign again any time soon, but I've got ideas for a shorter series. My dream project would be to collaborate with Peter Mohrbacher and create some grandiose adventures inspired by his Angelarium art.
Before I go, I want to thank all the Kickstarter backers, writers, artists, conversion gurus, cartographers and layout designers, messageboard volunteer editors and playtesters, brainstorm-aiding friends, Russell Morrissey, and people named Kanye who helped us accomplish our grand design.
You can get the latest adventure (and all the others, for that matter) from RPGNow or DriveThruRPG. Silver Subscribers here on EN World can, as always, grab it directly from the downloads area.
The End Has Already Begun
Things are falling apart. An attempt by the Obscurati conspiracy to create a more perfect world was sabotaged, and the world is descending into chaos. With mere months before the planet is devoured by the cosmic gears of the graveyard of the multiverse, the party undertakes an extraplanar expedition to find the means to fix the conspiracy's disastrous failure.
But there in the Gyre, at the center of oblivion, a primordial serpent known as the Voice of Rot has coiled itself around the physical manifestation of time itself, and it intends to drag the party's world to its destined destruction. The party must slay the rough beast if they wish to hold together their dying world so that tomorrow can be born.
Welcome to the twelfth and penultimate adventure in the ZEITGEIST adventure path! An adventure for psychopompic heroes of 20th level (Pathfinder) or 28th level (4E).
[h=4]A Quick Chat With Ryan Nock[/h]
Now you're nearing the end of a multi-year, 13-part (15, really, if you count the Players and Campaign Guides) adventure path, how do you feel? Relief, nostalgia, excitement, regret?
I regret letting Australians buy into our Kickstarter for the same shipping prices as Brits and Canadians, because it costs less to ship to the International Space Station than to Sydney. (KS has thankfully fixed that for future projects.)
But really, I'm feeling a mix of pressure not to screw this up (because I need to weave together a lot of plot threads into a nice bow) and a bit of fatalism (because not even Paizo publishes 20th level adventures, so how many people will actually get to play this?). Luckily there's at least a half-dozen GMs posting regular updates on their campaigns on the EN Publishing forum, but so far only one group is into the 12th adventure. So, like, I want to make this final adventure awesome enough that GMs will want to stick with the series all the way to the end. Or at least cool enough that after the GM TPKs his party in adventure 8, the group will want to hear how things could have played out.
And hell yeah I'm excited, because I've had the climax in my head since we started this project, and I think it'll be the best steampunk fantasy philosophical finale I personally have ever written. Certainly the best one in 2016.
The ZEITGEIST adventure path contains a lot of memorable and unusual scenes, monsters, and locations. What are five parts of the AP which really stand out to you?
Five, huh? Okay, well, spoilers.
First, it thrills me how many groups literally built 'crime boards' like you see on cop shows (with maps, thumbtacks holding up pictures of characters and evidence, and strings linking items of interest), to help the party figure out the criminal network in adventure two, The Dying Skyseer. I'd never seen a large-scale criminal investigation in a fantasy adventure, and I think the adventure does a great job capturing what law enforcement and criminal organizations would be like in a world with magic.
Second, I need to thank Matthew J Hanson, who wrote Digging For Lies, the third adventure, for a clever climax with three different foes all acting towards different ends at once, innocents in peril, a ticking clock, and a monster you get to ram a subway car into. He did a great job transitioning from the 'investigative' core of ZEITGEIST into the wider, weirder metaplot involving an international conspiracy.
Third, hopping way forward to adventure ten, Godmind, Thurston Hillman wrote a ridiculous over-the-top encounter that could challenge high-level PCs (17th in PF, 23rd in 4e) yet still managed to be hilarious. The Father of Thunder, basically a 60-ft. tall primordial fey bison-rhino (and an alcoholic), one of several kaiju-esque fey titans that your kingdom subdued in the ancient past, awakens because of villainous chicanery, and he gathers all the herd animals in your entire country for a giant stampede bacchanalia. You've got to find a way to make him stop, in order to secure your nation's claim to its land on a metaphysical level. The best way to beat him is to piss him off and make him chase you into a nearby city renowned for its distilleries, so he drinks himself into a stupor.
Fourth, adventure seven, Schism, experimented with telling the story out of chronological order. You start by giving the players brief character sheets of villains who are meeting for a conclave, in order to show a short scene and set the tone of the adventure. Then it's back to the party and their mission, where later in the adventure the PCs get to abduct and then impersonate those same villains in order to infiltrate the meeting.
The fifth is what I'm working on now, guidance for how a GM can run a denouement after the final climax. It's one thing to engage in a duel between airships while avoiding an indestructible mechanical colossus and trying to complete a ritual to reset the order of the planets and stars; any fool can run that. It's a very different challenge to then unravel the tension and give the players a satisfying aftermath where they can see how their heroics over the course of thirteen adventures affected the world.
The adventure path has gotten some very high praise from reviewers such as Endzeitgeist? While I'm sure that all comments mean something to you, are there any particular comments which stand out especially?
I recall a review by Leopold compared The Dying Skyseer to the TV show 24 or a Tom Clancy novel, and said it was not an adventure, but an 'experience.' My ego has been inflated ever since.
What's next for you? A break from adventure path writing? New ideas you're eager to try out? Moving on to 5E?
A friend and I are looking at the possibility of crowd-funding the pilot episode for an RPG-inspired cartoon. I would like to at least dabble in adapting the ZEITGEIST setting material to 5e, to see if there's enough interest to warrant doing a full conversion. I'm definitely not looking to create a 20-level campaign again any time soon, but I've got ideas for a shorter series. My dream project would be to collaborate with Peter Mohrbacher and create some grandiose adventures inspired by his Angelarium art.
Before I go, I want to thank all the Kickstarter backers, writers, artists, conversion gurus, cartographers and layout designers, messageboard volunteer editors and playtesters, brainstorm-aiding friends, Russell Morrissey, and people named Kanye who helped us accomplish our grand design.
