Month: July 2019

Enlarge / The floor of Gen Con 2018... (credit: Aaron Zimmerman)

I’ve been an avid player of Pathfinder The Roleplaying Game since its first edition debuted back in 2008 at Gen Con, the great-grandsire of American tabletop conventions. So as I planned to attend Gen Con 2018 last fall, I had my sights set on one part of the schedule in particular. Pathfinder publisher Paizo, Inc. was launching a playtest for what will eventually become the second edition of their flagship title at Gen Con. I knew I wanted to be involved.

Back then, the schedule gods smiled upon me and I had the good fortune of being able to play in some of those first playtest scenarios at the convention. I ultimately played all three playtest scenarios that Paizo ran at Gen Con 2018, and soon after I played and ran most of “Doomsday Dawn," the mini-campaign that the company released last August as a companion to the other playtest materials. I’ve been following and participating in Paizo’s massive months-long playtest ever since.

This week, Pathfinder Second Edition finally makes its official debut, as Paizo is set to release the game to the public at Gen Con 2019 (Ars is in attendance so keep your eyes peeled). That means, as players count down these last playtesting days, it’s time to share some observations and impressions from weeks upon weeks of Pathfinder Second Edition exploration.

Enlarge (credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)

Thanks to the massive trove of exoplanets discovered by the Kepler mission, we now have a good idea of what kinds of planets are out there, where they orbit, and how common the different types are. What we lack is a good sense of what that implies in terms of the conditions on the planets themselves. Kepler can tell us how big a planet is, but it doesn't know what the planet is made of. And planets in the "habitable zone" could be subjected to anything from a blazing hell to a frozen rock.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (or TESS) was launched with the intention of helping us figure out what exoplanets are actually like. TESS is designed to identify planets orbiting bright stars relatively close to Earth, conditions that should allow follow-up observations to figure out their compositions and potentially those of their atmospheres.

Right now, there's a conference happening that's dedicated to describing some of the first discoveries made using TESS. Those discoveries include a three-planet system that seems perfectly positioned to test all of our exoplanet characterization techniques.