Paizo Ends Pathfinder Adventure Path Softcovers, Switching to Quarterly Model

Paizo is ending its line of monthly Pathfinder Adventure Paths, with a new quarterly hardcover replacing the long-running product. Paizo announced the change yesterday on its blog, with the shift beginning next year. The new hardcover Adventure Paths will be a minimum of 256 pages and will have a retail price of $79.99, which is cheaper than the cost of purchasing four softcover adventure paths. Paizo also stated that they'll release one Adventure Path starting at Level 1, another ending at Level 20, with the remaining two falling somewhere in between. Each Adventure Path will cover 9-10 levels of play.

The first two Adventure Paths announced for this format are Hellbreakers and Hell's Destiny, which both cover the upcoming war between Andoran and Cheliax.

The Pathfinder Adventure Paths series started as an evolution of Paizo's monthly Pathfinder magazine series. To date, Paizo has released 222 Pathfinder Adventure Paths. Early Pathfinder Adventure Paths were for campaigns that lasted six issues and typically encompassed Level 1-Level 20 play. However, more recently, the Adventure Path structure has shortened and grown more flexible, with shorter length campaigns with more variable levels of play.

 

[James Jacobs]

I've been struggling to find a negative take for several days. The best one I've found:
Paizo has acknowledged that compiling the single issue APs into a hardcover also gives them the chance to update to take into account player experience shared on their website and social media channels.
Releasing a single big hardcover adventure all at once prevents this play test experience. Also, they are largely untested in producing big, original adventures of this scale (most are reprints).
They had, what, the Emerald Spire in 1e and the Seven Dooms for Sandpoint more recently? It's a big jump.

It's not as big a jump as you might think. In fact, having an Adventure Path all in one volume will make things easier in some regards, since this allows the developers and editors to work on the campaign as a single unit rather than 3 seperate ones. While the way we have authors create them won't change (we hare all the authors at once and they write simultaneously, with a private discord to chat and share ides), breaking free from the monthly schedule gives us developers and editors a lot more time to finesse the whole into a single story. Furthermore, we won't have to "strand" elements in volumes. NPCs statted up at the start of the adventure won't have to recede into the background in later chapters becasue their information and stats are all still in the same book, for example, and new rules elements like monsters or the like don't have to be limited to the single 3 to 4 chapters of the book they appear in.

Adventure Paths work best in this format, and to me, this is a change that's been a long time coming, but one we didn't enter into lightly.

 

[James Jacobs]

Their costs are more balanced in publishing a single book rather than estimating how many of the later volumes to produce, given they sell worse than the first. Paizo still has their subscriptions, which make them more on each sale at full price than a sale to a distributor (paying around 40% or so). Its my understanding that a single 220 page hardback book is cheaper to produce than three 70 page softcovers. Anyone in publishing please correct me if I'm wrong.

This is correct. Not only is it easier to produce, but it's also less expensive to ship—both from the printer and to the customer. Folks who buy Adventure Paths online will not only save money on the MSRP (about 10 bucks), but won't have to pay shipping for three shipments, which could be a much larger and more significant savings point. And stores won't have to restock multiple books—if one sells out, often a store simply wouldn't restock it, and that left them stranded with copies of later volumes that sold less because folks are less likely to buy a part 2 or 3 if they don't have part 1.

 

[James Jacobs]

That's my biggest hope! That and ending filler in each monthly volume. You could cut out about 1/3 of any given AP and it would be an improvement.

We've never really had multiple developers on a single Adventure Path, with exceptions existing when a developer gets behind and needs some help, or when a developer leaves the company mid-Adventure Path and another one has to step in to take over. That said, and as I've mentioned elsewhere, giving the devleoper (and the editors) the chance to go through the entire campaign at once, rather than splitting it into thirds that are always interspersed with other tasks and distractions, will allow the developer (and editors) to go through the entire thing as a single book and make it much more efficient in stitching things together to be more cohesive. Also, without the monthly grind, we can adjust times to give development and editing more room when it comes to particularly challenging Adventure Paths that could benefit from more time in development or editing—a luxury that was never really that feasible when we had to stick to a monthly cadence.

 

[Reynard]

@James Jacobs I am curious if the format is otherwise going to change. Will there be the same amount of "additional information" like new monsters, new items, location write ups, etc. as there were in 3 volumes?