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!

 

[Vinicius_Zoio]

I’m super excited about this, as it implies a whole swathe of fantasy materials like arcane backgrounds, edges, equipment, treasure and bestiary.

It’s basically ‘fantasy companion’ for SWADE.

My thoughts exactly!

This opens up so many options! Hopefully, we get at least a Bestiary sooner or later for Savage Pathfinder!

 

[Retreater]

No to be cynical, but I think financially, drove this outcome. I am guessing with Pathfinder 2nd Edition taking out any hope of more Pathfinder 1st Edition content, and Paizo not wanting to recycle the 1st Edition Adventures Paths for 2nd Edition (apart from KingmaKer Anniversary Edition), a new revenue stream was needed for the old APs.

Ideally, 5th Edition D&D should have been the go to, but I am guessing Paizo did not want to boost D&D even further.

Anyway, Savage Worlds is a great choice for the recycling of the Pathfinder 1st Edition Adventure Paths. Steady revenue stream for Paizo too, without needing new art or story , just making the necessary rules changes especially stat blocks for NPCs.

Yeah, I don't want to criticize PF2 on this announcement thread, which I think is good news for the Pathfinder brand and Pinnacle. I would like to see more 5e conversions (and PF2 conversions of past APs too).
But when a system is falling behind (like Rifts), converting it to Savage Worlds seems like a go-to strategy.

 

[dbm]

Who has played Savage Worlds? What’s it like?

It’s a generic system with a pulp emphasis. Their tag line is ‘fast, furious, fun’ and it mostly lives up to that in my experience. It supports battle maps and tactical combat well, and also fairly big groups of enemies without bogging down. The current version is ‘Adventure Edition’ and it is a really complete game in the core book, allowing you to cover a lot of bases.

They have already adapted Rifts to SWADE with great success, and I am sure this will be just as thorough a job.

 

[Sir Brennen]

I’m super excited about this, as it implies a whole swathe of fantasy materials like arcane backgrounds, edges, equipment, treasure and bestiary.

It’s basically ‘fantasy companion’ for SWADE.

The actual Fantasy Companion for the new SW Adventure Edition will likely come out before Savage Pathfinder (the publisher has mentioned it's likely to be Q1 next year), so I think SP will incorporate a lot of that.

The FC is being re-written "from the ground up", so I wonder if testing and converting Pathfinder to Savage Worlds informed any of the design decisions for the new Companion.

 

[dbm]

The release schedule seems to be in flux. ETU Studying Abroad was supposed to be the ‘next’ Kickstarter but instead we have Blood Drive.

 

[Sir Brennen]

It's also an extremely swingy system - which is something that gives me pause about trying to do an adventure path (or any long term campaign). Exploding dice (the equivalent of crits) are very common - and it's not rare for a minion to kill a PC or a PC to kill a BBEG in a single turn.

On the PC side, I find that bennies and having someone with Healing mitigates the swinginess quite a bit. BBEG have their own bennies as well, but if they go down, they're probably going to stay down.

 

[dbm]

I’m currently about 110 hours in to a sci-fi campaign using SWADE and haven’t found it to be too swingy or deadly. We did find that with earlier editions, however.

 

[Sir Brennen]

The release schedule seems to be in flux. ETU Studying Abroad was supposed to be the ‘next’ Kickstarter but instead we have Blood Drive.

This was from the Hollerween event about a month ago. And ETU was mentioned as the next Kickstarter event. The Companions will probably not have Kickstarters, but will just be made for sale.

Blood Drive was what the called a "Kickstarter Booster Campaign" - smaller, quicker and with no Stretch goals. Because of this it might not have figured into their announcement as the next KS campaign, though it was mentioned.

From their Twitch Q&A during the Hollerween event:

• Confirmed 4 Companions being worked on simultaneously to ensure cross compatibility, but indicated that they would not be released at the same time, with Fantasy being first out the gate, most likely Q1 '21. Supers and Horror most likely next since they are next closest to being finished, with Sci Fi bringing up the rear, but no dates for anything yet. Fantasy rebuilt from the ground up rather than an update and Shane mentioned Stronghold (base-building rules) as a really cool feature. They sounded like a repurposing of the Lodge rules from Rippers to me in that it is something the group does together and additions (like a Chapel for example) provide some mechanical benefit. Also, the Strongholds will generate adventures from time to time so there is a "cost" to having a Stronghold.
• Next product to get a Kickstarter will be ETU: Study Abroad, featuring material taking place in 4 different countries (Italy, UK, Costa Rica and one other I can't recall) written by people from those countries for extra authenticity. This one is going to be like the Irongate KS for Last Parsec in that it will be just the thing, no stretch goals.
• They will be boxing up the Rippers Expeditions stuff they've previously released and adding pawns and some other cool stuff.
• For Deadlands, they are updating the Blood Drive trilogy of adventures to SWADE, again adding some "cool stuff" and making it a hardback book.
• Deadlands Dark Ages is no earlier than this time next year or possibly early 2022.
• Necessary Evil 3 is cosmic level campaign a la Guardians of the Galaxy that will get released after the Supers Companion.
• Nothing for Weird Wars until 2022, because 2021 is too full as it is, but something in the works.
• Next Savage Rifts book is Atlantis.
• There is something else in the works that they can't talk about yet. (Let the speculation begin!) (Editor's Note: This was probably the Pathfinder KS)
• Overhaul of the website to be more product focused is underway. Part of that is a built in crowdsourcing piece to let them do smaller things since they can only do so many Kickstarters per year and they need to save those for the really big things.

 

[marv]

This confuses me. I’m assuming this was agreed to by Paizo out of some mutual love/passion and not for significant financial reasons.
No offense intended to Savage Worlds (I’ve never played it so have no opinion) but if Paizo wants to get the most $ out of their IP then more 5E conversions (like Kingmaker) would be needed, rather then converting to some other minor game system. And history has shown that more 5E generates more PF (it’s definitely not a zero sum game).
But I’ve converted a lot of PF1 and PF2 content to 5E and it is very easy to do (especially if you use ToB, CC, and ToB2 from Kobold Press to help you reskin monsters) so I’m not complaining. And in such a small market as TTRPGs, a good passion project is a beautiful thing. Might get me to check out Savage Worlds (but likely not because I am fine with both 5E and PF2 systems).

 

[Stacie GmrGrl]

This is very cool and it's nice to see strong support for a game system that's Not D&D 5e.