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Archives of Nethys

Pathfinder | Starfinder

4/14/19 10:08 PM PST

Hi everyone! It’s been a while since an update on this side of the fence, and I am sorry for the delays. There’s been a lot going on in the life of Nethys - I don’t want to repeat the text here, but you can see a summary of it over on the updates at www.aonprd.com.

More excitedly, I’m happy to announce we have a couple of new Acolytes to assist the website. First, Mark von Drake joins to help with the Data Entry side of things, focusing on the Starfinder RPG (but hoping to help us catch up the final two Bestiaries on Pathfinder as well!) Second is Alex Reeser, who will be working on some UI improvements to the main menu, with a focus on mobile accessibility. Welcome to both of them! Mark in particular has been instrumental on getting this side of the fence caught up with the releases, experience he brings to us from his own take on the SRD at the Hidden Truth. All of the recent Adventure Paths, along with material from Starfinder Society, is now online! Mark also wanted to assure everyone that he’ll still be continuing updates at THT, in addition to the Archives, so fans of both sites will continue to enjoy the content.

Next, Devin has been working on an official plugin of his own that, while not ready for full release yet, will assist users in searching through the website’s content. We’ll have more on that later.

To help with announcements, we also have a new Twitter account - follow us @NethysArchives to get the latest updates on the Archives of Nethys!

Lastly, a question that continues to come up is whether or not we will be doing a website for 2E - I am very happy to announce that not only will we be doing a website for Pathfinder 2nd Edition, but we will have it online at 2e.aonprd.com on August 1, 2019 at 7:00 AM (Pacific Time)! Look forward to it then, and thanks for all of your support!

Announcement Threads

Paizo
Patreon
Reddit

New Books

[Adventure Path] Starfinder #10: The Diaspora Strain
[Adventure Path] Starfinder #11: The Penumbra Protocol
[Adventure Path] Starfinder #12: Heart of Night
[Adventure Path] Starfinder #13: Fire Starters
[Adventure Path] Starfinder #14: Soldiers of Brass
[Starfinder Society] Starfinder Society Roleplaying Guide
[Starfinder Society] Scenario #1-01: The Commencement
[Starfinder Society] Scenario #1-03: Yesteryear’s Truth
[Starfinder Society] Scenario #1-04: Cries From the Drift
[Starfinder Society] Scenario #1-08: Sanctuary of Drowned Delight
[Starfinder Society] Scenario #1-09: Live Exploration Extreme!
[Starfinder Society] Scenario #1-11: In Pursuit of the Scoured Past
[Starfinder Society] Scenario #1-22: The Protectorate Petition
[Starfinder Society] Scenario #1-24: Siege of Enlightenment
[Starfinder Society] Scenario #1-27: King Xeros of Star Azlant

12/2/18 9:57 PM PST

Hi everyone! With November’s update comes the Against the Aeon Throne adventure path - enjoy!

Announcement Threads

Paizo
Patreon
Reddit

New Books

[Adventure Path] Starfinder #7: The Reach of Empire
[Adventure Path] Starfinder #8: Escape from the Prison Moon
[Adventure Path] Starfinder #9: The Rune Drive Gambit

11/5/18 5:09 PM PST

The remaining material from Alien Archive 2 is now live; thanks for the patience and I hope you enjoy the content!

10/29/18 1:12 AM PST

This is a partial update, as you see, Alien Archive 2 is still missing a bit of content. The full list of what’s been uploaded so far is in the link below - I had hopes to have it finished by today but things get in the way, and as such it’s now in a partial state. I plan to have it completed by this coming weekend and will push another update to finish it, so you needn’t wait long. The main reason I wanted to push the update now is because a long-awaited feature is ready - the new search!

Announcement Threads

Paizo
Patreon
Reddit

New Books

[RPG] Alien Archive 2

Site Updates

  • The Search Engine is ready for use! This is a similar initial layout to my Pathfinder one, but you will find the output drastically different. Now the various results will sort by highest matches found, with exact matches and matches that contain all words searched taking priority. It also runs like lightning compared to the old code I wrote on the Pathfinder side. Huge amount of thanks to both Milan Badzic and Andy Mason for their work in putting this engine together. Please send any feedback about the search engine to feedback@aonsrd.com - assuming people like the format, we will push out more updates to the layout and eventually migrate the code over to Pathfinder as well.
  • I’ve updated Systems with a new feature that will check for any Aliens that appear on the System, now listing these at the bottom (eg: Castrovel).
  • The Rules page has been updated to allow sorting by Source or grouping all rules entries.

Coming Up - 11/25/2018

Adventure Paths and material from Starfinder Society will be arriving next month, though as mentioned above, expect an update in a week or so with the remainder of Alien Archive 2!

9/13/18 12:00 PM PST

Hey everyone! I imagine most of you are here because you saw the news on paizo.com today - if not, you should give it a read, but the short version is that the Archives of Nethys is now the official and licensed representative of the Pathfinder and Starfinder reference documents. This is something I’ve been excited to talk about for a long time and now it’s finally out in the open.

There’s a lot to cover here, both for brand new visitors and for those wondering what’s next. I’ve organized the information below to help with that.

What’s Going to Change?

Paizo and the Archives of Nethys (underneath Rose-Winds LLC, the company I founded to represent it) are still going to be seperate entities - business will be mostly as usual on my end of the fence, with the only real changes coming from the greater access I’ll have thanks to this partnership. I’ll be working with Paizo to get my hands on content, errata, and other updates earlier than normal, allowing us to prepare an update in advance of release dates. Due to the agreement with Paizo, we still won’t be posting content until ~2 weeks after products have been released in a given month, but now we won’t have to wait until a book is out before we can start formatting it. Lastly, though this comes later on the priority list compared to getting rid of the backlog, this partnership will give the Archives access to some of Paizo’s art and illustrations! While I likely won’t display art automatically on any existing page to save on bandwidth costs and loading times, the current plan is to add links where applicable so (if you desire) you can click to see what exactly that monster or item looks like.

The State of the Sites

On the Starfinder side, I’m happy to say that we’re caught up on every title that Starfinder has released save for Starfinder AP #7 and some Society content. The only remaining big ticket item for Starfinder is a proper search engine. To go along with the other good news, Andy and Milan (the two developers working on a new search) are nearly complete with the first build and we plan to deploy that to the site in less than 1-2 weeks.

On the Pathfinder side, the backlog is a little larger, but it’s getting smaller every day and we’ve been keeping up on all of the new releases (save for Adventure Paths; see below). With Starfinder’s massive update behind us (posted last week on 9/7), our focus is now on ingesting our current backlog and other Rules content which was previously missing from the Archives.

Pathfinder Backlog

Books: Adventure Paths #120 - Present; Bestiary 5 (76 monsters done); Bestiary 6
Rules: For a long time I chose not to post this longer content as Paizo’s own PRD had it covered; generally, I focused on mechanics which were reproduced across multiple volumes, like Feats and Spells. Since the discussion of this partnership, however, we’ve made large strides towards bringing that same content onto the Archives. Still, this is the one area in which we’re behind the original PRD, but that gap is closing every day. We’ve already finished ingesting the rules from the Advanced Player’s Guide, and the Gamemastery Guide is next on the list.
Other: Universal Monster Rules page; errata and changes from the Advanced Race Guide

Starfinder Backlog

Books: Adventure Path #7
Other: Search Engine feature; content from a number of Starfinder Society adventures

Pathfinder 2E / Playtest

A number of people have asked me if I’ll be supporting the Pathfinder Playtest - the short answer is no. Sadly, I don’t have enough time to focus on developing a site for a game system which is still very much in flux. That said, we aren’t being idle either. We’ve been taking a look at the new rules and have slowly started creating new tables in the database for the future content. As rules get more solidified, we’ll start ingesting them, and when the Playtest is over and the new edition released, the Archives will be ready with the content.

Future Updates

The next update coming for Pathfinder will be this weekend, which will add:
  • Heroes from the Fringe
  • New material from the Comics product line
  • Improvements to the loading times for Spells (potentially other areas of the site)
    •  Starfinder was just updated last weekend, but as soon as the Search feature is ready then I’ll deploy it, ideally in the next week or two.

    After each new update, I’m going to start calling out our next planned update date - I want to bring some more stability to the Archives and make sure the players know when content is going live. Another top goal is to improve mobile accessibility - the new Starfinder search is being designed with this in mind, and I want to eventually make the left-menu collapsable as well.

    Support

    Nothing is changing with regards to how the Archives generates income for hosting expenses. I aim to keep the sites free and available to all players for the duration of its existance, along with minimizing any ads (right now we just have a single one, at the bottom of the screen). If you do want to support us, the easiest way to do so is by visiting the Patreon, but there are other ways to help out if you’re interested.

    Contacting Us

    In order to make sure the players have a voice, I’ve setup a few more emails for these sites that will allow me to better reply back and address bugs that are found. The "Contact Me" page still needs to be updated, but all of these emails are now live and should be used:
    Pathfinder: bugs@aonprd.com (Bugs/Errors), feedback@aonprd.com (Comments/Suggestions)
    Starfinder: bugs@aonsrd.com (Bugs/Errors), feedback@aonsrd.com (Comments/Suggestions)

    If you have something to discuss that isn’t really appropriate for one of the above emails, or is about both gaming systems, you can still use nethys@archivesofnethys.com to get a hold of me.

    With Bugs, please don’t be offended if you don’t hear back from me immediately - my process when getting a new bug is to firstly generate a ticket in our tracking system for it. I generally won’t send a reply until the bug has been fixed, but sometimes a bug will get fixed and I neglect to tell the person who notified me. Apologies in advance if that ever happens, there is a lot to do and my priority is always on correcting the content first, letting those who reported it know about it second. I encourage anyone who spots an error to send me an email, it is the best way to get the content corrected.

    Conclusion

    Back in March of 2010 (note: the link for the Archives in that post is old/dead), I thought it’d be fun to start learning SQL and C# by making a simple database and front-end for Pathfinder rules. At the time, I just wanted a faster way to identify what was legal for Pathfinder Society, as my friends and I were heavily involved at the time. I never dreamed that the Archives would grow to encompass the content it does now, or that a partnership like this would ever take place. There were many times over the last few years where I got behind in content, had to deal with health problems, and other "attacks of life" that made me doubt whether or not I could keep the Archives running. The support of my family and the thousands of Archives fans out there is ultimately what kept me going - I hope that the updates we bring to the Archives will suffice in some small way as a thank you.

    It’s here that I want to call out a special thank you and shout out to Devin Burke - he’s been a humongous help with data entry, catching the site up on dozens of titles, helping me brainstorm ideas, and never once complaining about the pile of work to do. His work allowed me time to build the new Starfinder site, get its content online, and now I can bring other improvements I’ve learned with Starfinder’s code back to Pathfinder. This partnership would have been a lot less likely without his help, and I owe him a world of thanks.

    I also want to give very special thanks to my wife, Katina Davis. She’s never stopped believing in me or the website, and has even helped out herself by adding a few dozen of the monsters in Bestiary 5. She is a large part of my drive to improve things every day, and I owe the world to her.

    Thank you so much to everyone who’s ever used the Archives, talked about it with their friends, sent me an email, or even just said "Hi" in the hallways at PaizoCon. When I won "Volunteer of the Year" at PaizoCon 2016... that remains one of my happiest gaming-related memories. I didn’t really think anything could eclipse it until this day.

    Thank you, everyone... thank you.