Pathfinder Playtest: Doomsday Dawn

I don't pay all that much attention to what Paizo is up to anymore; their system has gone the opposite direction I have gone, and their aggressive and offensive cultural Marxism makes their material difficult to swallow lately.  But, I still check in from time to time, and heck—if nothing else, they're a good source of some interesting artwork.  Seeing an all new playtest cover, by Wayne Reynolds on his Facebook page, I thought it'd be fun to go see what was up, and of course, the playtest for Pathfinder 2.0 is free.  I got it, because even if I do nothing else with it ever, I'll extract a big version of the cover art (I bought a program that extracts images out of pdfs a long time ago.  I use it more than my actual pdf viewer with Paizo files sometimes.)

Playtest for original game cover art

The bundle also came with, in addition to the rulebook, a bestiary (without any art, hardly), a character sheet (that looks substantially different from what I'm used to), a tracking sheet so feedback from the playtest can make its way back to Paizo, a few tactical battlemaps, a pdf telling you how to access some sound effects, and... an adventure path.  Not really in the full sense, but a 6-module adventure that kind of reads like a truncated adventure path and which is meant to put the game through its paces to get playtest feedback, I presume.

Needless to say, I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I'm going to do a PAIZO DECONSTRUCTED discussion of it anyway, breaking it up into its constituent "chapters" or separate modules.

The premise is that Aucturn is acting up, trying to converge on Golarion and destroy it.  Think: Yuggoth is actually a sentient planet and is going to eat the world to give it power to become a virtual god itself.  PCs run around doing things to disrupt cultists, reclaim artifacts being used, etc.  There's a whole backstory about how this came to be, but as with most module backstories, it's really just fan fiction for the GM's sake, because I doubt most if it will find its way into the hands of the players.  But it's an interesting playtest adventure path—it is rather Spartan and old-school in many ways, lacking in much in the way of lengthy set-up, setting info, and heavy roleplaying opportunities, and much more of traditional location exploration modules (not necessarily my favorite kind, but I'll give this a try.)  You're not meant to play through it with your characters; you sometimes swap to different characters, and arbitrarily level them up several times through the adventure path.  It makes some minimal references to the passing of time and the events of prior adventure paths; notably, the part that explores the Worldwound, for instance, asserts that the Worldwound was closed as per the City of Locusts module in the Wrath of the Righteous adventure path.

Cover art for new edition playtest

Anyway, I'll spend some time going through the big module and doing my deconstruction routine.  I doubt I'll find much to utilize, because the point of this is to playtest new rules, not introduce new content, but I'll do it anyway.  I admit; my curiosity is at least a little bit piqued.