Pathfinder

It began with a sword called Winter. Jorm, one of the party's dwarven heroes, found the long sword still clutched in the skeletal hand of a Northman barbarian. It will end at the The Lost Sky Citadel of Akrafell, a dwarven fortress at the top of the world of Golarion.

My Second Darkness Pathfinder campaign is rapidly approaching its climax. The heroes recently started Book 4: Eternal Night but, as is often the case with my group, they quickly went off the proscribed path. Far off the proscribed path.

It illustrates one of the big lessons I learned while running an adventure path.

My group's been playing Second Darkness for over a year now, and if there's one weakness we've found in the Golarion campaign setting, it's religion.

The setting is geopolitically diverse, with the same sort of kitchen-sink-of-cultures approach that made Greyhawk our go-to setting for so long. But what it lacks are gods.

My gaming group entered Book 4: Eternal Night of Paizo's Second Darkness adventure path this weekend, officially taking us past the midpoint of the campaign. All along the heroes have been battling the drow, including a massive fight to take back Celwynvian.

It was a good Christmas for my Pathfinder campaign, as I got two of the new game master-friendly books released by Paizo -- Ultimate Equipment and NPC Codex -- and one player-friendly book, the Advanced Players Guide.

After 18 months of playing Second Darkness our heroes are finally ready to take the fight to the drow. They've skirmished with the dark elves before, but avoided the major battle at the end of Book 2 when they inadvertantly stumbled into the drow lair and had to retreat. The drow then escaped under the cover of night while sending a shadow demon to kill them.

In the real world, our gaming group's seen numerous weddings (and will see yet another this fall), but in the game world our heroes never got hitched. Until tonight.

A new RPG system, a credit card and iPad are a dangerous combination. Especially when the game is Pathfinder, the company is Paizo, and the PDFs are priced at $9.99 a piece.

Pinterest is a social bookmarking site for images: you find photographs, illustrations, or posters or other images that you like an "pin" them to a collection of boards. It's like dumping a stack of art catalogs onto your desk, cutting out the illustrations you like best, and then thumbtacking them to your bulletin board.

The site's popular with crafters, and when I was casting about for ideas for a recent "Summon WebScryer" column for Knights of the Dinner Table I decided to see if it could be used for gaming.

It's been a year and a half since we started Paizo's Second Darkness adventure path. The first two books -- The Shadow in the Sky and Children of the Void are done. The characters are 5th level and the third book -- The Armageddon Echo -- is on hold while they level up to the recommended 6th.