Last Voyage is Launched!

It's been a long journey.  I started Last Voyage shortly before the pandemic, and it has been on-and-off a labor of love. Originally inspired by the Pathfinder 2 vehicle rules, I wanted to make an adventure where you could actually use a vehicle.  I made Last Voyage as a dark-ride style adventure with branching paths, very loosely inspired by Fitzcarraldo.

Finally, after a great deal of effort (and quite a lot of help), the adventure is here.

Vehicles

I like boats. And at Last Voyage's inception, Pathfinder 2 didn't have enough boats, or enough chances to use them. Making a steamboat seemed to fill a previously unaddressed niche in the vehicle listings, but even still something was lacking. Vehicles in Pathfinder 2 can be quite fragile. They don't level up with you and they are destroyed at 0 HP. Losing a vehicle is a substantial loss of wealth, especially compared to items of similar power levels.

To partially fix that I came up with Storied Vehicles. Storied Vehicles, much like player characters don't instantly die when they reach 0 hp, they can still be fixed up and held together at the last moment, giving you that one last chance to escape hostile pirates. But I wanted storied vehicles to be more than durable. I wanted them to have a personality.

Storied vehicles have a calamity table, where things can go wrong... or right.

Vehicles With Souls

Heroes can attune themselves with storied vehicles with special rituals. To attune to the Cat's Noodle, you noodle for catfish. If they form a significant bond with the vehicle, they can push the results of calamity up or down on the table. This gives them a chance to steer their own destiny and that of their vessel.

And if a storied vehicle gets destroyed?

The story doesn't end.

If a vehicle nameplate is put on a new vehicle and the new vehicle is renamed, it becomes a storied vehicle... the same vehicle that your heroes bonded with previously.

A Dark Ride

Last Voyage is inspired by amusement park dark rides. In a dark ride, you move through the environment, usually on a cart or a boat, most of your surroundings bathed in darkness, but as you go through, points of interest will be lit, will animate, and will capture your attention. Dark Rides are so packed with the spectacle that often it's difficult to see everything that they have to offer in a single journey, enticing the user to come back again and again.

While you can drive the Cat's Noodle through the Bleak like any other vehicle... in Exploration mode navigation becomes more difficult. The Bleak has many paths, and some parts of the river aren't accessible by others. Like a Dark Ride, you can't see everything in a single journey and just what you encounter comes down to your choices, how skilled your pilot is... and a bit of luck.

What Comes Next

While the Last Voyage is launched, this isn't the end of support. Expect bug fixes, updates, and additional content in the months to come.

River Map of what is to come:

• Accessible text version of the Last Voyage
• Additional Battle Maps
• Individual entries for Steamboats and Storied Vehicles
• Playable Owlbolds