Thousands of years ago, the skies above northern Avistan on the planet of Golarion split open and bled fire unto the world below. The night grew scarred with streaks of smoke and burning debris, and the ground burst into plumes of ash and ruin as fragments of an immense starship plummeted to its death against the wildlands below. When the sun finally rose over the wracked lands of Numeria, it did so on a landscape pocked with craters and ruined by an alien apocalypse. Those who lived through the night would never forget it, and tales of the fiery devastation would be told for centuries. It became known as the Rain of Stars.

Although the Rain of Stars devastated Numeria over nine thousand years ago, so immense was the event that it still shapes and defines the savage lands today. The craters and furrows torn into the earth that fateful night so long ago have largely vanished, the alien wreckage buried by fearful and superstitious barbarians who, after some early misadventures with explosive and dangerous technological debris, came to view the strange wrecks as taboo. Yet there have always been curious adventurers and scholars and explorers willing to brave the wilds of Numeria to explore these alien wrecks. And indeed, to the adventurer, the navigation of violent barbarian tribes eager to fight to prevent intruders from unleashing more technological horrors on their world can be as thrilling as the actual exploration of a wrecked alien vessel!

Recently, a new group has risen to power in Numeria - a group of spellcasters known as the Technic League, grown obsessed with the recovery and control of the ancient technology hidden throughout the metal dungeons and buried wrecks of the region. The Technic League was founded with altruistic goals, but their original hope to explore the ruins of these ancient wrecks and spread the lore found within throughout the world has been lost to greed, ego, and the lust for power. Today, the Technic League consists of squabbling sadists and cruel taskmasters as eager to secure their own cache of technological weapons and items as they are to hoard them from anyone else who might seek them out. Numeria’s technological treasures have, in effect, traded one guardian for another, but unlike the fearful barbarian tribes of yore who sought only to suppress the technology, the Technic League hopes to keep it for themselves to enhance and extend their power. To what purpose they hope to some day put this power, none can say, although the nature of their cruel experiments and vile personalities bodes ill.

~ Mixing Super Science and Mystical Magic ~

It is this dangerous and exotic realm that serves as the backdrop for Paizo’s newest Adventure Path - Iron Gods. To now, the campaigns and storylines that have appeared in our Adventure Path line have been various levels of relatively traditional fantasy fare, with evil wizards, wicked queens, demon-worshiping elves, lovelorn genies and fey, undead necromancers, dragons and demons and pirates and witches haunting the pages and preparing to wreak untold punishments and danger upon the as-of-yet unsung heroes of the world. True, now and then we got a little strange with some locations and villains along the way, but even when we turned to other planets or historical Earth, the adventure paths themselves never strayed far from their fantasy roots.

And truth be told, with Iron Gods, we won’t be straying as far as one might think. It’s true that Numeria, the setting where Iron Gods takes place, is a realm where fantasy and super-science mix, but the decision to include a realm like this in the Inner Sea region of our official campaign setting was not one we made on a lark. The mixing of fantasy and science fiction has a long tradition in RPGs, both in the tabletop tradition with classic Dungeons & Dragons adventures like “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks” or “Temple of the Frog,” and in the video game arena as well with the Might & Magic and Wizardry franchises. But it goes back even further than that. Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard weren’t afraid to periodically have their heroes encounter modern day, futuristic, or alien technology now and then (although never to the extent that the heroes exploring that strange metal cave in the Barrier Peaks would experience), and more recently, entire games like Shadowrun have embraced the mixing of technology and magic as a fundamental element of their game world.

And so it is with Iron Gods. In this, Paizo’s seventeenth Adventure Path for the Pathfinder campaign setting, we finally travel to the land of super science we first started to drop hints about back in the very first volume, “Burnt Offerings.” There, in the Pathfinder’s Journal, we had only this to say:

“...Elsewhere, Gojan the Sharp endures a decade of hardship under the oppressive Ontar, the Black Sovereign of Numeria, in order to gain access to the Silver Mount, a titanic edifice of steel that looms over Numeria’s capital, Starfall. Included in this volume is a complete catalogue of seven different types of skymetal littered about the plains of Numeria and the (wildly outdated) prices each variety is likely to garner in the markets of Taldor and Absalom.”

Not a lot, but certainly enough in a book that was many peoples’ first glimpse into the world of Golarion to tantalize and tease with possibility. We didn’t come out and say there in the first volume of Pathfinder that the Silver Mount was in fact a ship from beyond the stars, but we certainly heavily implied it. By the time we got to the hardcover revision to our campaign setting, The Inner Sea World Guide, all pretense of being coy about the mixing of magic and technology was gone when we opened the four pages of information about Numeria with an illustration of a classic fantasy barbarian facing off against an enormous robot scorpion armed with guns and a plasma-launching tail.

An entire Adventure Path set in this region was, in many ways, inevitable, and not just because I, as Paizo’s Creative Director and the lead on the Adventure Path line was eager to do one (although that certainly didn’t hurt!). Very little in the core Pathfinder rules provided direct support for the types of foes and treasures and hazards and surprises that await those who would explore Numeria’s secrets. When we decided it was time to do something with Numeria for real, we had to go all in. To support the Iron Gods Adventure Path, we’ve created several books to aid GMs and players alike, from the Campaign Setting books Numeria, Land of Fallen Stars and the gadget-filled pages of the Technology Guide, to Player Companions like People of the River and People of the Stars. There’s even a novel, Reign of Stars, which chronicles some of the events that take place in the Technic League a few years before the events in Iron Gods start to play out. These stand-alone books are in addition to the support articles and new robots and technological items we’ll be introducing in each and every volume of Iron Gods itself over the course of its six-month run.

~ Starting The Iron Gods Adventure Path ~

So far, the spoilers have been pretty light. I’m going to try to KEEP them light for the rest of this article, but if you’re planning on playing in the Iron Gods Adventure Path, you might want to stop reading now. Although... you’ve already seen some samples of the amazing artwork we’re putting into the adventures on these pages already, so perhaps it’s too late! I’ll apologize to your GM for spoiling those elements for you the next time I see him or her, I promise!

We start in the Numerian town of Torch, located in the southern reaches of the region. Here, on the Numerian Plains, the Technic League’s stranglehold on the nation’s citizens is less potent than it is in the capital city of Starfall, yet their presence is always felt. The key to Torch’s prosperity is the violet fire that burns atop Black Hill in the center of town. This mysterious flame burns incredibly hot, and is one of the few places not directly controlled by the Technic League where the exotic skymetals can be forged and worked. Torch allows smiths and metalworkers from throughout the Inner Sea access to the village fires, all for a nominal fee, of course, and as long as the town continues to pay the relatively unfair but not completely crippling taxes the Technic League demands, Torch is allowed to continue on its way without much oppression or control.

For nearly a century, the town has grown and prospered in the light of its violet namesake, but as the Iron Gods Adventure Path begins, this fire has been extinguished! Several teams of explorers and mercenaries, including one of Torch’s beloved leaders, have mounted expeditions into a freshly-discovered network of caverns below the town’s Black Hill to seek out a cause for the loss of the settlement’s namesake, but to date, none have returned. With the next round of taxes to the Technic League coming due soon, reliance upon the violet fire for income is greater and greater, and if something isn’t done soon to rekindle the fire, Torch may be doomed!

Of course, by the time Numeria’s newest heroes solve Torch’s problems, they’ll have uncovered a greater threat to all of Numeria - a threat that will have them traveling the breadth and width of the land as they come to learn the true dangers and surprising opportunities offered by the lands newest divinities, the mysterious Iron Gods!