Savage Pathfinder Pathfinder Adventure Paths Are Coming To Savage Worlds!

Pinnacle Entertainment Group has announced that it will be bringing Paizo's Pathfinder adventurer paths to Savage Worlds, starting with Rise of the Runelords. They will be launching a Kickstarter in January 2021.

The Kickstarter includes a core ruleset called Savage Pathfinder, and a Rise of the Runelords boxed set.

 PRESS RELEASE

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It’s Thanksgiving here in the United States. For our international friends, that’s a time when we come together as friends and family and tell everyone what we’re thankful for.

Today, Pinnacle Entertainment Group is INCREDIBLY thankful to our good friends at Paizo for letting us play in their amazing world of Golarion, setting of the phenomenally successful Pathfinder Roleplaying Game!

Following the incredible reception we had with Kevin Siembieda’s phenomenal world of Rifts®, we’re bringing Pathfinder’s fantastic Adventure Paths to the Savage Worlds™ system, starting with the best-selling Rise of the Runelords™!

The Kickstarter begins mid-January, 2021, and will feature the Savage Pathfinder core rules, a boxed set with all the usual Savage Worlds accessories, AND the Rise of the Runelords boxed set with all six books of the Adventure Path and other deluxe accessories!

 

[EthanSental]

Never played SW but did buy a few of their Lankhmar books to read and the presentation, story was top notch.

 

[Retreater]

Having never played Runelords, does it really fit the style of play emulated by SWADE? I would expect that having a band of Pathfinders going into quick, pulpy delves of episodic adventure would've been a better fit. Like convert the Pathfinder Society modules, maybe?
Again, I've never personally seen a SW game last more than 2-3 sessions due to frequent character death. Even passing out tons of Bennies only goes so far. However, I've only played vanilla fantasy and Rifts.

 

[Ace]

This is good news . Its going to put a bit of money into Piazos pocket and open up their IP to a whole new audience.

For anyone who hasn't tried it, incredibly well supported with every genre imaginable and robust rules set. Also of note the game does not require but is more focused around minis than even 5E. Templates for blast spells, grenades that kind of thing are measured in actual inches.

Also character generation is very flexible, very fast and doesn't push you to builds or fighting with the system.Its is not my Cuppa Joe but I do recommend giving it a look. You can get a test drive at Pinnacle's own store or on Drivethru absolutely free.

 

[dbm]

I think the badge of quality here is that Pinnacle are doing the conversion, like how Savage RIFTS is handled. For that, as I understand it, they brought in a line editor for the books who knew and loved both SW and Rifts. I feel very confident they will do the same here, so the adventure path will be adapted to the strengths of SW.

 

[dbm]

This is good news . Its going to put a bit of money into Piazos pocket and open up their IP to a whole new audience.

I think it’s a genuine win-win. More people will experience Golarion (never played PF personally, so new to me certainly) and more people will try Savage Worlds because sometimes a generic system lacks the hook that pulls some people in; Golarion provides that hook.

 

[dbm]

...and Pinnacle have just confirmed in their forums that this is just the first Adventure Path that will be converted.

 

[MaskedGuy]

I'm just pleasantly surprised its savage worlds kickstarter because I'm really sick of all cool things coming to 5e since again, I'm really tired of 5e :'D

Like I don't think this is particurly financial move (besides maybe "well the old ap sales are going to dry up so might as well get extra money out of them" way) since if they wanted to go for "most money route", 5e is sadly the biggest money making system assuming the 3rd party competition don't cannibalize each other.

But yeah, not super confident in savage worlds, I haven't ever played it myself, but I'm under impression its for shorter action movie sort of dealios than long running campaigns. Still should be interesting even if I'm happy with 2e related stuff, might honestly make for interesting change of pace to try running 1e aps in savage worlds since by now I'm getting kind of tired of 1e at high level shenanigans.

 

[amethal]

One of the things I'm curious about is if this will be a straight conversion, with no content revised (other than mechanically) or removed. Because Pathfinder and D&D are very grindy systems, built on lots and lots and lots of combats to harvest XP for the extremely long level ladder. The Savage Worlds content I've read has much less combat grind and a shorter level ladder. Combats are fewer, but more dramatic.

I'm glad the adventure paths are being made available to a wider audience. Hopefully it will be more than a straight conversion, for the reasons you give.

(Maybe one day I'll get to see Zeitgeist converted to Fate; I find the idea of doing it myself fairly daunting.)

Pathfinder adventure paths are very constrained by the XP system, although (especially in later ones) they often give out large "story awards" for overcoming non-combat challenges. I'm not very familiar with Savage Worlds, and have no idea how "levelling up" works in that system, but hopefully there is no need for a Savage Worlds version to include all the pointless filler encounters.

In fact, when I run Paizo adventure paths using Pathfinder I tend to leave out a lot of encounters, and change many of the other minor ones from "this NPC attacks immediately and fights to the death" to "this NPC will fight if necessary but would prefer to negotiate". I replace some of them with side-quests - I have lots of published adventures lying around that I have never run, so I can usually find something cool that fits in with the general theme of the campaign. Failing that, the PCs just level up at the appropriate stages even though their kill-count doesn't justify it by the rules. (I appreciate Paizo can't do either of these when they write the adventure paths.)

 

[dbm]

Advancing in Savage Worlds, by default, is 'GM decides to suit their campaign pace'. There are some more XP driven options out there (and that used to be the default in earlier editions).

 

[Guang]

Oh, this does not bode well.

Why not? What do you think it will lead to?

 

[Inchoroi]

Who knows, though. Maybe 5e is next. My guess is that none of the staff wishes to work on converting APs to other systems so they will depend on 3rd parties. It may be just a matter of time before a 3rd party is willing to convert these APs to 5e and Paizo will give them a license to do so.

I'll take that license! /only slightly joking

I'm currently converting Rise of the Runelords, and will be doing Curse of the Crimson Throne, then Shattered Star, then Return of the Runelords. Sandpoint and its hinterlands are done already, and chapter 1 of Rise of the Runelords is also done (Nualia is terrifying). I'd have to go through and scrub everything non-SRD, however, for it to be published.

EDIT: As a note, it wouldn't be super expensive to pay a person to convert the monsters/NPCs from the 1e adventures to the 2e adventures; that's what I did for a while for another company, from PF to 5e.

 

[Davies]

Why not? What do you think it will lead to?

I think it suggests that Paizo is in serious need of the quick cash infusion that the license will give them, which in turn suggests that their product lines aren't doing all that well. As a fan of PF2, I find that concerning.

 

[amethal]

EDIT: As a note, it wouldn't be super expensive to pay a person to convert the monsters/NPCs from the 1e adventures to the 2e adventures; that's what I did for a while for another company, from PF to 5e.

However, for some reason I get fairly annoyed if that's all they do. There always seem to be references in the text to the old monster which don't match the new one, tactics which no longer make sense, or spells/rituals which don't exist in the new version. (Which is not usually the fault of the person converting the stat block.)

I did appreciate the fact that the last PDF I bought from Drivethru actually said in the description that it was converted to OSR from 5th edition and might have a few "5isms" in it.

 

[Sir Brennen]

But yeah, not super confident in savage worlds, I haven't ever played it myself, but I'm under impression its for shorter action movie sort of dealios than long running campaigns. Still should be interesting even if I'm happy with 2e related stuff, might honestly make for interesting change of pace to try running 1e aps in savage worlds since by now I'm getting kind of tired of 1e at high level shenanigans.

I've run one longer horror campaign in Savage Worlds. Right now it's on hiatus as the players hit the end of "season one", but I'm working on the next set of story lines. Setting is from another system converted over to SW, with homebrew adventures.

I'm currently running a hard sci-fi campaign in SW from a published setting and campaign. It's a little over the half-way point.

In both games, there haven't been any character deaths, though there have been a few close calls (including an arm lost, requiring replacement). Characters have advanced significantly, with plenty of options to grow. In both games, the PCs are or about to hit Veteran status (third of five "tiers" for characters, with several "levels" within each tier).

So, yeah, SW can handle longer campaigns just fine.

I haven't tried a medieval fantasy game yet with SW, because or group alternates game sessions with a 5E campaign. But I have run a fantasy one shot, and it was a lot of fun. Definitely NOT D&D/PF though. In that regard, I think people expecting a direct port of the PF APs are going to be a bit disappointed. I think it's more likely the SW Rise of the Runelords will focus more on capturing the gist of the plot points in the adventures rather than trying to reproduce all the same monsters, NPCs and magic items.

 

[dbm]

I guess that is the big question - will they try to port the dungeon-heavy aspects of PF (from its D&D heritage) or will they reinterpret the adventure path through a stronger SW lens?

 

[Stacie GmrGrl]

I guess that is the big question - will they try to port the dungeon-heavy aspects of PF (from its D&D heritage) or will they reinterpret the adventure path through a stronger SW lens?

They reinterpreted Rifts into how Savage Worlds works so I'm expecting that they will do the same thing with Pathfinder.

One of the biggest differences between d20 and SW is how Health and Damage work. SW doesn't use Hit Points. It uses Wounds instead.

This is the biggest difference between these two games, so much so that it's a fundamental paradigm shift for some players that they can find SW hard to adapt to at first, especially if their only rpg experience is d20 Hit Point style fantasy.

After seeing how they adapted SW to Rifts, and taking what was a game that was horribly unbalanced and actually made it a more balanced setting, PEG will do great with Pathfinder high fantasy.

 

[Sir Brennen]

I guess that is the big question - will they try to port the dungeon-heavy aspects of PF (from its D&D heritage) or will they reinterpret the adventure path through a stronger SW lens?

I'm thinking the latter. Both PF and D&D 3.X had an certain expectation of Encounters Per Day and XP needed to advance, so a lot of things that only really serve that in the AP could be trimmed. I'm not that familiar with RotRL, but I wonder if it's conversion will support the SW Plot Point model, which allows a campaign to be a little more sand-boxy than most published d20 adventures.

 

[TheCultMachine]

I am so pumped for this. I just started reading through the 5e version of Sunless Citadel and am adapting it for Savage Worlds. I actually love the system. It’s definitely more cinematic than D&D.

I have a couple players willing to give me two sessions to try it out. Hopefully they like it because if not, it’s back to 5e we go.

 

[Sunsword]

An unexpected development, but a good one, IMO. I'm not sure why they aren't doing this for 5E as well?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

An unexpected development, but a good one, IMO. I'm not sure why they aren't doing this for 5E as well?

1) Because it's a license and Pinnacle may not have asked.

2) Paizo's biggest issue at the moment is to get people to move from Pathfinder 1E to Pathfinder 2E. Creating an easy on-ramp for them to switch to D&D 5E instead isn't really the best business decision they could make. If they do end up going all-in on conversions to 5E D&D, I would take that as a sign that they're throwing in the towel, effectively, on having their own system and just going back to being the best D&D adventure writers around.