The next Adventure Path, Bastion of Blasphemies, is coming out on July 30 - just over a month from today. The new Beginner Box: Secrets of the Unlit Star and Troubles in Grayce came out a few months ago and are designed to be easily connected to this new AP.

I just started running Secrets of the Unlit Star (initial thoughts are here), and I'm planning to work with my players to rebuild their characters after they wrap up the initial dungeon. I'm now eagerly awaiting the Player's Guide so we can use the new backgrounds when rebuilding these characters, and I'm wondering if folks have any insights (or even just guesses) as to when it might come out.

It looks like the Hell's Destiny player's guide came out about 3 days before the AP was released for subscribers (May 15 vs. May 18). For folks who have been following this longer than I - is that generally when player's guides are expected to drop? It looks like Bastion of Blasphemies is releasing for AP subscribers on Monday, July 13. Does that mean we should expect the guide on Friday, July 10?

Introduction

I just GMd the first floor of the new beginner box: Secrets of the Unlit Star (referred to from here on out as the BB). I GMd and also played Lem, my wife played Amiri, and two of our good friends played Sejan and Seoni. Playing a GM and character made it a bit difficult to juggle everything, but I enjoyed it. I have a lot of experience with TTRPGs and a fair bit with PF2e, but the other 3 had very little TTRPG/PF2e experience.

I want to share what happened, some thoughts about what happened, and some overall reflections about the first floor. Overall, I think this is a great entry point to PF2e and my players had a blast, but I would definitely make some changes. I also want to highlight some mistakes that I made, but also some mistakes on Paizo’s end that I want folks to be aware of. Without further ado…

The Story So Far

Below is my summary of what has happened so far. Plain text are sections of the BB I ran 100% as written. Italics means I made a narrative change that had no mechanical impact. Bold are significant mechanical and narrative changes from the box as written. Numbers indicate footnotes of sorts, I will go deeper into my thoughts and changes in the next section and the footnotes connect things together.

The party was hired by the chief councilor of the town of Grayce to help deal with some pressing threats, but the councilor asked the party to first investigate a lost temple on their way to the town (1). The party found the temple and ended up trapped underground inside the ruins. They fought through some basic enemies, explored some rooms, and cleared out some undead from the Worship Hall of the chamber (2) (3 zombies and a skeleton) (3). Along the way, they encountered several manifestations of a shadowy figure with terrible glowing red eyes (4). In the worship hall, they found a relic called the Unlit Star, which they could use to vanquish the shadows within the temple and escape. However, they had to find 7 more pieces of the star scattered throughout the temple.

The party next encountered several ghouls**, who they convinced to travel with them to kill some rats and a hag** (5). They travelled down a hallway and over some rubble (6) and worked with the ghouls to kill their targets. They then fought the ghouls in the hag’s lair, ending up with 4 of the 8 pieces of the Unlit Star after the main encounters on the first floor.

The party then explored the rest of the floor, collecting some loot, solving some puzzles (7), and clearing out miscellaneous encounters, Sajan went down to bleed damage (8) and they rested for the night. At the beginning of the next day, they brought the pieces of the star they had to the Worship Hall, which summoned a shadow bat (possessed by the shadow presence) and prepared to head to the 2nd floor.

Behind the Scenes/Footnotes

1. The Hook

As written, the BB begins with the party basically just wandering around, getting magically drawn to the temple, and ending up trapped inside. I changed the hook so the party was hired to help Grayce and check the temple on the way. It felt like a way better hook, and I’m hoping that we can carry this forward to Troubles in Grayce and this will make everything feel more cohesive.

2. In the Beginning

Overall, I really like how the BB handles the first few encounters. The party starts fighting simple melee enemies, then enemies with ranged and melee attacks, then enemies with saving throw attacks and regular Strikes, and then enemies with weaknesses and resistances. Each fight felt meaningfully different and amped up the complexity, and this really helped my players figure the game out.

3. That’s Not a Zombie…

The fight in the worship hall is supposed to involve 3 Skeletons and 1 Zombie (all these monsters are CR -1). However, my beginner box actually came with pawns for 3 Zombies and 1 Skeleton. I decided to roll with it and change the encounter to match the pawns and it went pretty well. Amiri and Sejan (in tiger stance) both do slashing damage, so they absolutely tore through the zombies with slashing weakness, but the single skeleton got a crit and rolled max damage, almost single-handedly taking Sejan down. A zombie knocked Sajan down on the next turn, but he was brought back up with a Soothe.

4. The Dark Presence

Lukahn, the fallen high priest of Desna, is the final boss of the dungeon, but doesn’t have much of a presence as written. The party sees glowing red eyes in a mirror on the first floor, but doesn't even learn his name until the 2nd floor. I ran with the glowing red eyes idea and had those eyes appear more throughout the 1st floor. I also had a black shadow with red eyes posses the skeleton and (later) the shadow bat in the Worship Hall (without changing any stats). This flavor change paired very nicely with the skeleton rolling a crit and Sajan shortly after going down. That made this shadowy presence (which will later be named as Lukahn) seem like a real threat from the jump.

I’m excited for some more encounters re-flavored as Lukahn possessing the normal enemies the party fights in the BB. I’m also planning to add some more lore for Lukhan, who I have as being driven insane thanks to the space between the stars which he felt actually dwarfed the stars in prominence. This caused him to defect from Desna and become a cultist of Nyarlathotep (with more of the flavor of the Haunter in the Dark aspect of the god). Should be fun!

5. The Gentle Ghouls

I listened to Paizo’s actual play of the beginner box, which had the GM making a similar decision and allowing the players to talk to the ghouls (named Dusk and Dawn in Paizo’s campaign but named Corona and Stella in mine, which felt more star-like). This ended up being the most impactful decision I made.

Seoni tried to befriend the ghouls and rolled a 25 Diplomacy check (a crit success). I asked Seoni what she wanted to say to them, and Seoni invited the ghouls to come with them and kill some things. The ghouls revealed that they would like to devour the rats and a sea hag they knew were on this floor, and they entered into an uneasy alliance. Stella and Corona were a bunch of fun to play and helped make the rat fight and hag fight a lot easier. The party ended up needing to fight them in the hag room, but I don't think that fight was any more difficult than it would've been in the ghouls' room.

6. Rubble Trouble

Alright, my major frustration with the BB so far is the way hallways are handled (which is normally how Paizo does this). In short, rooms get their own section on the map, but hallways don’t. This means that things in hallways can be really easy to miss. I caught a wall of black energy that dissipates when the party gets the Unlit Star, but I didn’t catch that the rubble in the next hallway was actually an impassable wall, not just difficult terrain. This information is just one sentence at the beginning of the description of one of the rooms, incredibly easy to miss (though I admit I should’ve read more closely when prepping).

This might not have been an issue if the party did the rooms in the order they were labeled, since if they came from that direction they would’ve likely gotten the hall description before they passed over the rubble. However, I mentioned earlier that there were two main ways to proceed after getting the Unlit Star. One way has the players encountering the ghouls as the last encounter on the floor, the other way has them encountering the ghouls right after getting the star. The book is written assuming you would encounter the ghouls last, which I actually think is the opposite for how most players will explore the floor (the Paizo actual play team actually went the same way my party did).

7. Puzzling Choices

The hallway with the rubble has 3 rooms along it. 2 of the rooms each have a puzzle that opens a secret door between the rooms, and the final room has some orcs spirits that your party can fight. I found two weird things about these rooms.

First off, there is absolutely no loot in these rooms. I ended up giving my players some gold and healing potions for exploring, they just felt like a waste otherwise (and my party was desperately low on health).

Secondly, the orc spirits can be fought but also somewhat controlled and eventually dismissed with some skill checks. To me, this sounds like a complex hazard, which the party can either beat into submission or use skill checks to overcome… but it actually isn’t. It’s some monsters that you can use skill checks on to influence (first making them non lethal and then dismissing them). It feels weird to me that they didn’t just introduce the concept of a complex hazard here (especially because they introduced a simple hazard earlier on the floor). As mentioned earlier, my party was low on health, so I rewarded their good use of Detect Magic by allowing them to sense that the orcs would trigger at a certain place in the room and just avoid the encounter. If a party was equipped to deal with this encounter, I would rebuild the orc spirits as a complex hazard to show off that system.

8. The Great Mistake

I messed up the rules for recovering from persistent damage a bit. The BB basically says that you can use 2 actions to assist a character in their recovery from persistent damage, which allows they roll their DC 15 flat check on your turn rather than the end of their turn. I mixed this up with the Administer First Aid rules. I mixed and messed together, which resulted in the party members spending 2 actions to reduce their companions next check to recover from the persistent damage to a DC10. If I had run this correctly, Sajan might've not gone down as he did (though he was able to come back up after using his Hero Point).

This gets to me another general frustration, which is that the character sheets didn't have skill actions on them (I believe with the exception of Amiri, who has Intimidating Glare and so has Demoralize on her sheet). There is a document in the BB called the Heroes Handbook which had all of the skill actions written out, but I feel like each character's sheet should've had 1 or 2 skill actions that it would make sense to use. Especially Sajan, who has Medicine skill and Athletics and IMO should have at least Treat Wounds and Grapple on his sheet. Otherwise, it's expecting the Sajan player remember Treat Wounds on page 55 of the Heroes Handbook... which doesn't feel likely.

Final Thoughts

As mentioned earlier, I had some criticisms and made some big changes, but we all had a blast. There’s interest in continuing to Troubles in Grayce after this, and I would love to get to run Bastardhall after that. Some printing issues aside, the pawns are great. Also, there aren’t only pawns for the BB content, they also have some random animals and enemies you could use for a bit of homebrew just using the resources in the book. The map of the temple is also awesome, and with a few tweaks I think the adventure goes from good to great.

However, I do want to highlight something hinted at above: there is a severe lack of healing in the BB. Sajan has a +5 medicine skill and a healer’s kit, Lem has 2 1st level slots, and RAW there are about 4 healing potions/elxirs on the first floor. Even though I rewarded the party by having them team up with the ghouls, so almost every fight was 2:1, the party was still taking 2-3 hits per fight and there are a lot of fights (10 by my count). I got a 1 on one of my Soothe spells, we rolled a 1 on 3 of the 4 healing potions/elixirs, and Sajan failed his medicine checks about half the time (in line with needing to hit a DC 15 with a +5 Medicine). This was definitely unlucky, but not so unlucky that lots of other groups won’t run into this issue.

I ended up with Lem using both spell slots for Soothe, giving an extra spell scroll of Soothe, and also giving some extra potions. My party was still really struggling and had very low health by the end of the floor. Suffice to say, it would’ve been very good to have some more healing potions or have fewer encounters l. I would definitely cut the rat fight out from this floor as well as reworking the orc spirit fight into a complex hazard as mentioned above.

Which gets to a final concern/criticism that the pregenerated characters (which we obviously played) for the BB are not particularly well optimized. Sajan is the most egregious example, as he starts with +4 Str and +2 Dex, so he is competing with Amiri as a main damage user (mind you, Amiri is doing 1d12+10 damage with her greatsword while raging) and sacrifices AC and ranged attack rolls (Sajan has darts) as a result. After the BB, I'm going to work with that player to rebuild him (probably into +4 Dex, +3 Wis, and +1 Con and Dex) so he does less damage but is more durable and better at medicine. This is the chief example, but all of the characters have a little wackiness to them.

Concluding Questions

Have you all played the new Beginner Box? What was your experience like? Anything more about my experience or impressions you would like to hear?

I'm looking forward to sharing my thoughts for the 2nd and 3rd floors after I finish them (which should be next weekend)!

I travel fairly often for work, and my wife's chronic illness makes it difficult and overwhelming to keep things in order while I am away (especially with a messy dog).

I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations for house cleaners in North College Park that I could hire to help with house cleaning when I am away. If possible, I would prefer a service that can be scheduled ad hoc rather than on a regular schedule (so I can only schedule support during times when I am away).

Thanks!

According to the recent PaizoCon 2026 panel, Impossible Magic will include 4 new Arcane Schools, all of them are ”NexIan” in nature. One school is a school of “NexIan Spaces”, which deals with Demiplanes. What could the other 3 “Nexian Schools” be?

Other things that Nex (either the person or the nation) is connected to include wards and shields (protecting the cities of Nex from the destruction of the surrounding lands), plant life (the creation of the ghorans and other botanical experiments), golems and fleshwarps, and magocratic politics (multiple factions, cults, and manipulative forces).

Do you think any of these could be new spell schools? Personally, I would be very interested in a School of Botanical Experimentation, with some plant options for a Wizard.

My wife and I have just finished watching all of the Hunger Games movies (I had only seen the first two previously) in preparation for the new movie, Sunrise on the Reaping, coming out later this year. I'm wondering what folks' thoughts on the potential box office for Sunrise on the Reaping is.

The original Hunger Games quadrilogy was pretty commercially successful, with each movie making between $650M and $850M or so worldwide. However, the most recent addition to the franchise, Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, made far less money and was much less critically successful as well, only making about $350M on a $100M budget.

However, Sunrise on the Reaping sold much better than the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and the movie is set to have some of the original cast return and the new cast members are stacked with famous actors and actresses (Elle Fanning, Jesse Plemons, Kieran Culkin, Raph Fiennes, etc.). It seems like that could result in a much better box office than the other prequel film.

I am also wondering how our current political moment could draw audience members (at least in the US) to this movie. The Hunger Games is a pretty explicitly anti-authoritarian series and there are many thematic parallels between the Capitol and the fascists and oligarchs who are now amassing power and hoarding wealth around the world. This will be the only Hunger Games movie that will come out under a Republican presidency and will premiere shortly after the 2026 midterms. Could people be in the mood for a big action movie with a healthy dose of anti-authoritarian politics this November?

What do you all think?