As I sit down to write my last retrospective blog, I find myself in a bit of a quandry. This is about stuff that happened this year, sometimes mere weeks ago. It's not ancient history—it's what I'm living through right now! That makes writing it up as a restrospective a little weird. Instead of providing the perspective of hindsight, I'm hoping that this blog will give you some insight into why we did what we did this year, why we're doing the things we've already announced for next year, and perhaps a little strategic thought about where Paizo will go in the future. Plans could change radically as the future becomes the present, but at least you can see some of what I'm thinking about right now.

As I mentioned in my previous blog, Paizo found itself in a very interesting position as we came to the end of 2010. Never before in the history of tabletop RPGs was there a market leader that wasn't Dungeons & Dragons. Why is that important? Well, there are certain tasks that the tabletop RPG industry has always relegated to the top dog in the category—and chief amongst those was player acquisition.

So when it came time for us to formulate a strategy for the Pathfinder RPG line, I went back to our plan from ten years earlier. I pitched my team here at Paizo on it and was surprised how quickly everyone came on board. Then came the hard part--if you only have three products a year, what should those products be?First, we came up with a timetable--there would be one release in the spring, another at Gen Con in August, and a third at the end of the year, close to the holidays. The iconic summoner's eidolon looks a bit different in this early sketch by Wayne Reynolds! Advanced Player's Guide approvals!Pathfinder Society was growing by leaps and bounds, and the experience that Erik, Jason, and I had with the RPGA suggested that we might want to release our most rules-heavy books at Gen Con. We also knew we wanted to do one monster/adversary book each year for the foreseeable future, and because the Bestiary came out at the end of the year, we decided to schedule future ones in the winter slot. That left the spring release, which we would keep flexible. We had a lot of ideas for books that didn't fall into the other two categories, and this spot would be the perfect place to put those. Our first spring release was a pretty easy choice. Because we had published all of our core rules in a single book, there wasn't a direct equivalent to D&D's DM's Guide, but we still felt a need to do a book aimed at Game Masters, giving them advice and tools for becoming an expert GM and elevating the experience for their players. To create this book, we tapped into the expertise of some of the best designers in the history of gaming, and they shared their tips and secrets. The GameMastery Guide came out in May 2010, and has been doing very well for us ever since. For the first Gen Con after the release of the Core Rulebook, we needed to have something sexy that would allow us to show some design chops... something that would give Pathfinder RPG players new toys to play with. We sat in a conference room for about three hours and talked about character types we'd seen in fantasy books and movies, or played in other fantasy games. Then we talked about how we could build those characters using the Pathfinder rules. We could build many of those roles by tweaking existing classes in the Core Rulebook; this was the genesis of our archetype system, my favorite thing to come out of the book we ended up calling the Advanced Player's Guide. Archtypes allowed a myriad of character ideas to blossom forth, many of them very niche, without having to flood the landscape with a bunch of new classes. But there were some roles that we felt we couldn't do justice without creating whole new classes. In the end, six new base classes rose to the top for the APG--the Alchemist, the Cavalier, the Inquisitor, the Oracle, the Summoner, and the Witch. Not only would these new base classes allow us to show off what the Paizo design staff could do, but they also gave players something new to dig into. We filled out the APG with a ton of new content, expanding nearly every part of the existing game. Our third hardcover rulebook of the year was the Bestiary 2. In this installment, we wanted to provide Pathfinder RPG versions of many of the popular 3.5-era monsters that hadn't made it into either the first Bestiary or the Bonus Bestiary that we did for Free RPG Day 2009. We also wanted to flesh out outsiders, and provide an array of creatures of every alignment. So you saw a number of Aeons, Agathions, Angels, Archons, Azatas, Daemons, Demons, Devils, Elementals, Inevitables, Proteans, and Qlippoths in the book. Wes and James playtest some of the kingdom building rules for Kingmaker.For the Adventure Path line in 2010, we went a little bit outside of the box. The previous year saw the urban campaign Council of Thieves kick off the Pathfinder RPG era, and we wanted its successor to steer clear of that territory. So with Kingmaker, we tried something we'd never done before: a true sandbox AP. Our APs usually have a very solid and somewhat direct storyline, but in Kingmaker, the plot became more of a framing device for the true story: that of the characters forming and building their own kingdom. Each adventure had a number of mini-adventures that could be played in any order or skipped entirely. Players could create kingdoms large or small, passive or aggressive, dictatorial or democratic, or anything else they envisioned. We were a little apprehensive about the response to this type of AP, but Kingmaker has become one of the most successful APs of all time, rivaling even Rise of the Runelords in popularity. We also added a whole new Pathfinder line in 2010: Pathfinder Tales. We had previously made a valiant attempt to get into the fiction business with our Planet Stories line of pulp fiction, but the book market never quite seemed to embrace the line, and sales were never strong. Erik Mona was the passion and vision behind Planet Stories, and it was a line he personally loved very much, but I felt that if we were going to put time, money and effort into a line, we should do it with books that helped support our other products. TSR had built quite a nice business with their Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms fiction lines, and Games Workshop had more recently built a successful line of novels around their Warhammer line; it seemed that the book trade was more receptive to new gaming fiction than it was to bringing back long-lost classics. Thus was Pathfinder Tales born. For our first couple of novels, we wanted authors who would be familiar names to fans of gaming fiction, and to bookstore buyers as well. We chose two Forgotten Realms authors, Dave Gross and Elaine Cunningham, to launch the line. Dave's book Prince of Wolves arrived at Gen Con, while Elaine's Winter Witch was a holiday release. They didn't quite blast to the top of the bestseller lists, but sales were much stronger than Planet Stories had been, so we felt cautiously optimistic going forward. 2010 also gave me a chance to bring back a variation of the very first product I was ever involved with in the game industry! In 1987, my first company, Lion Rampant, came out with Whimsey Cards--a product that allowed players to insert their ideas into roleplaying games in a structured way. The rights to Whimsey Cards themselves are owned by other folks, so I modified the basic idea a bit, adding an optional Pathfinder RPG-based mechanic, creating Plot Twist Cards. The response has been great; we're currently in our second print run. Sometimes oldies are indeed goodies. We also revisited another oldie but goodie in our boardgame line. Kill Doctor Lucky was--and still is--our best selling boardgame, so we extended that line with a deluxe edition of Cheapass Games' Save Doctor Lucky prequel. Where KDL is all about trying to get Doctor Lucky alone in a room so nobody can see you bump him off, the goal of SDL is to make sure that everyone sees you perform the heroic deed of saving an old man from a sinking ship. It features a game board that gets smaller as the ship slips under. At the 2010 ENnie Awards, Paizo won 11 golds and 1 silver. The awards received were: Best Adventure: Gold Medal to Pathfinder 31: Stolen Land. Best Aid or Accessory: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: GM Screen Best Art, Cover: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Bestiary Best Art, Interior: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Core Rulebook Best Cartography: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Chronicles: City Map Folio Best Electronic Book: Silver Medal to Pathfinder Society Scenario 29: The Devil We Know Part 1: Shipyard Rats Best Free Product: Gold Medal to Advanced Player's Guide Playtest Best Game: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Best Monster/Adversary: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Bestiary Best Production Values: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Core Rulebook Product of the Year: Gold Medal to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Best Publisher: Gold Medal Wes Schneider and James Sutter look down on the Paizo offices after their attempted escape was foiled. The Paizo staff gets together to paint miniatures during lunch! The editorial whiteboard lays out a week's priorities! The editorial staff takes their first look at the big Pathfinder map Erik printed out for the Inner Sea Poster Map Folio. With all of the success Paizo was having in 2010, it felt like we were living charmed lives. That all came crashing down in October when we lost Dave Erickson. At 63, Dave was our oldest employee. He joined the Paizo team in 2002, not even a year after we started, and took over the finance department, freeing me to focus my efforts on making the company more profitable and keeping it alive. Dave and I worked side by side on Paizo's finances. Dave designed reports that allowed Erik, Vic, Jeff and myself to analyze what was working well and what wasn't--insights that were invaluable to a small, struggling company like Paizo. Dave also wasn't afraid to sit down face to face with government auditors, each time sending them away with money due in Paizo's favor. He was a loyal and honest man, and someone I trusted implicitly. The call came on the Tuesday after the Columbus Day weekend. I was refreshed from the long weekend and ready to tackle whatever came. I wasn't prepared for that call, though. Through tears, Dave's wife, Olga, let me know that Dave had passed away in his sleep during the weekend. I was crushed. Devastated. Dave had just started to plan his retirement, intending to spend his golden years with his wife. Now he was gone, just like that. Dave's death showed us all how fragile life could actually be. A company Paizo's size doesn't have a ton of redundancies, but thankfully, I had hired Chris Self in 2008 with the idea that he would take over Finance in a few years when Dave retired. I had sent Chris to start accounting school just months before Dave passed, and he'd worked with Dave enough to fairly seamlessly take over the department a couple years ahead of schedule. Here's my favorite Dave Erickson story: During Dave's first few months at Paizo, I quickly learned that if there was a discrepancy between what I thought the numbers should be and what Dave thought they should be, Dave was almost always right. Well, on one occasion, I finally figured out that I was right for once, and I burst into Dave's office, brandishing a sheaf of paperwork with all my figures, shouting "In your face, Erickson!" To say that he was surprised is an understatement. Another negative for 2010 was the ongoing "edition war." The online arguing between fans of D&D 4th Edition and the Pathfinder RPG goes all the way back to our announcement of the Pathfinder RPG, but it took on new fervor in 2010 as 4E floundered a bit and Pathfinder challenged it in the marketplace. I need to make one thing clear--Paizo never wanted anything to do with the edition war. We weren't trying to take down D&D ; we were just trying to make a game that we enjoyed and that allowed us to tell the stories that we wanted to tell. I would be lying if I said we didn't enjoy the passion and loyalty of our customers defending their game--it was very flattering... but we really hoped that the edition war would just go away so everyone could enjoy their favorite game without attacking the other. This will be news to most readers: By the end of 2010, the Pathfinder RPG had already overtaken D&D as the bestselling RPG. It would take almost half a year before industry magazine ICv2 first reported it, and several quarters more before some people were willing to accept it as fact, but internally, we already knew it was true. We'd heard it from nearly all of our hobby trade distributors; we'd heard it from buyers at book chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders; we could see it using industry sales trackers such as BookScan; we were even regularly coming out on top on Amazon's bestseller charts. Each individual market we sold in had us either tied with or outselling D&D, and none of those sources counted our considerable direct sales on paizo.com. Put all of those things together, and it was clear: Pathfinder had become the first RPG ever to oust D&D from top spot. It wasn't our goal, but here we were. And as we started planning for 2011, we knew that if we were going to be the industry leader, we were going to have to step up our game and act like a leader. 2011 would be our first chance to show what we could do with that position.... Employees who started in 2010 (in order of hiring date): Judy Bauer, Copy Editor Matt Vancil, Warehouse Personnel Mark Moreland, Developer Andrew Vallas, Graphic Designer Hyrum Savage, Marketing Manager Liz Courts, Customer Service Representative Kunji Sedo, Staff Accountant Stephen Radney-McFarland, Designer Employees who left in 2010 (in order of their end date): James Davis Joshua Frost Dave Erickson Lisa Stevens CEO How Paizo 8 My HeadMy relationship with Paizo began in 2007, when I subscribed to Dungeon one issue before the announcement that the magazines were going away. I basically wrote the timing off as bad luck, and decided to try to make the most out of the few issues I'd get before the end. I opted for the Pathfinder subscription instead of credit, primarily because I'd planned on mining Dungeon for ideas for a homebrew campaign and figured I could mine this new Golarion world for ideas too. In August 2007, I got my first issue of Pathfinder, glanced through it, and filed it on the shelf because I didn't think any of it would be useful for the campaign I was running at the time. I did the same for the next few issues. In the fall, I joined a group playing the Savage Tide Adventure Path, and my mind was no longer in GM space. But my involvement in this Adventure Path made me much more aware of Paizo as a company, and of the quality of work the editors on Dungeon (and likely, I assumed, Pathfinder) put out. So I started lurking on the messageboards and reading the Pathfinder books I'd been getting, but I still wasn't sold. Fourth Edition had been announced, and I was playtesting that with some of my friends who'd freelanced for Wizards of the Coast in the past. I was hyped for the new edition, and because I was invested in my Savage Tide group, I was quickly learning as much about the campaign's Greyhawk setting as I could. I didn't have time for another campaign setting when I had 30+ years of canon to catch up on in the world in which I was already playing. Then the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game announcement came out, and my gaming group was all abuzz about the waves Paizo was making. I got the Alpha and started reading all those books I had on my shelf. I was thoroughly hooked. Here was a chance for me to be on the ground floor, not just of a new edition of the game that I was already familiar with, but also of a campaign setting that was only a few months old. I don't know what day it was, but I drank the Pathfinder Kool-Aid sometime shortly after the big announcement. I made my first paizo.com messageboard post on March 31, 2008, in which I said "I am getting ready to dive into Golarion myself." And did I ever follow through! Razmiran Faith Barge Union #107 wins the PaizoCon trivia contest... again!Around that time I joined a small group of folks working on the daunting task of cataloguing all the information about the Pathfinder Chronicles campaign setting (as it was called at the time). The PathfinderWiki was founded on March 8, 2008, and I quickly joined up, and am often miscredited as being the wiki's founder even today. My involvement in the project became something of a full-time hobby, and the countless hours I spent adding and editing content on there gave me a depth and breadth of knowledge about Golarion that rivaled even Paizo employees. I attended PaizoCon 2009 and helped my team, Razmiran Faith Barge Union #107, win the annual trivia contest, in no small part because of the work I'd done on the wiki. At Gen Con a few months later, I approached Sean, Wes, and Josh independently and asked if I could write for Paizo, as I felt I'd displayed my knowledge of the setting and had a whole website of material I'd written about the world to show my writing talents. A few weeks later, I was working on a portion of Gnomes of Golarion, most of the Kingmaker Player's Guide, and a Pathfinder Society Scenario, all of which couldn't have come at a better time for a recently unemployed filmmaker. Once the freelancing started, it didn't seem to end as long as I met my deadlines, turned in my best work, and kept asking the folks at Paizo for more. A few weeks before PaizoCon 2010, I got an unexpected call from Erik (incidentally, while I was exploring Delvehaven as a player in a friend's Council of Thieves campaign). He asked if I was coming to PaizoCon (duh!) and if I had plans afterward (I didn't). I soon did, however, as he offered me a contract to work in the Paizo offices for a week following the con helping build the Inner Sea Poster Map Folio. I detailed my brief time as a Paizo employee in a guest blog at the time. What that blog doesn't tell you, however, is that on the last day of the contract, Lisa, James, and Erik pulled me into Lisa's office to talk about how I felt the experience had been, how I liked working with the rest of the editorial team, and ultimately what I thought about working for Paizo full time. I thought hard about my response for about 3 seconds before accepting the offer. It took me another two months to get myself moved from New York City to Seattle, but once I started, it wasn't long before I was in charge of development of two product lines and making a sizable contribution to the very world continuity whose chronicling caught Paizo's eye in the first place. Now, two years later, I'm still amazed on a weekly basis that this is my real-life job, and that I get to work for such a great company and with such a fun and inspiring group of coworkers. It's a lot of work, for sure, but I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing instead. Mark Moreland Developer Liz Courts can't suppress a smile while looking through her new copy of Wayfinder!

One of the things that has plagued Paizo through most of its existence is that every year, we end up throwing a major project or two on top of an already full product release schedule. In 2005, it was the Shackled City hardcover. In 2006, it was the Dragon Compendium, Monster Ecologies and the Kill Doctor Lucky board game. In 2007, we launched our Adventure Paths and Modules lines as well as the Stonehenge board game. In 2008, we published the hardcover campaign setting sourcebook and launched the Player Companion line, and we ran the Pathfinder RPG playtest as well.Surprise! 2009 wasn't any different. And this time, we were taking on perhaps the biggest add-ons yet: the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook, weighing in at 576 pages, and the Bestiary, with its hefty 328 pages. All told, we were adding more than 900 pages to our regular workload. It ended up requiring hundreds of hours of overtime and the combined effort of dozens of employees. One of the first decisions to make was the physical form that our rulebooks would take. Traditionally, the core D&D rules encompassed three volumes: the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, and the Monster Manual. We thought about following a similar format for Pathfinder, but it had always bugged us that players needed to own the DMG if they wanted to look up magic items, so we decided to wrap all of the information that you would need to run a game of Pathfinder, minus the monster writeups, into a single Core Rulebook. The Bestiary would remain its own book. We also had to make a huge decision about how far we were going to stray from the 3.5 SRD. Our alpha playtest had introduced a number of new systems that pushed the boundaries of backwards compatibility. Ultimately, we decided to keep Pathfinder fairly close to its 3.5 roots while using years and years of GM experiences to update and fine-tune the system. We certainly didn't fix everything we could have in 3.5--some issues are endemic to the math underlying the core system--but we did fix a lot of the problem areas. The white board lets the editors exercise their inner artistic talents.So why did we swing the pendulum toward backward compatibility? Because our customers were telling us that they didn't want their trove of 3.0 and 3.5 books to become obsolete. Everyone had a pile of Wizards of the Coast products, of course, but the OGL and the d20 license had also inspired an explosion of print and PDF books the likes of which the gaming industry had never before seen. And we really wanted people to be able to use all of those products with Pathfinder. For the most part, I think that we did a good job striking the balance between compatibility and innovation. Not surprisingly, the new RPG had a huge effect on the rest of our product lines. Since we were launching a new system at Gen Con, all of the other products scheduled to be released from that date forward needed reflect the new rules. The problem is that we usually contract freelance writers eight months or so before the intended release date of a product, and the rules were still in flux at that point. What to do? We decided to contract in-house authors to write the first adventures and adventure path volumes for the new game. Since our own people were working with the new rules as they were being written, we figured that they would be in the best position to use those rules to write adventures. Even hedging our bets that way, we still had lots of issues, but at least they could be worked out in person and in real time, rather than via email or telephone. Still, not a task for the faint of heart. Whenever possible, we also planned products that were relatively rules light for much of the year. Lisa Stevens is flanked by future Paizo employees Liz Courts and Adam Daigle at Gen Con and cover artist Wayne Reynolds poses with his copy of the Core Rulebook.

As the cold and stormy start of 2008 settled on the Paizo offices, there was a palpable sense of tension. We were well past the point where we normally assigned freelance writing for our Gen Con releases. Wizards of the Coast was set to release Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition at that show, and we were already planning out Second Darkness, the Pathfinder Adventure Path launching at the same time. If we were going to switch it to 4E, we needed to do it soon. But we knew little more about 4E in January than we did at the previous year's Gen Con. Early in the month, Wizards held a conference call with a host of third-party publishers telling us that they were working on a new third-party license and that we would probably have early access to the rules soon, but the lack of a firm commitment or any kind of schedule from Wizards was stretching our patience—and our deadlines.

As 2007 dawned, Paizo had a lot of work to do. The final issues of Dragon and Dungeon were coming in August, and we had already started thinking about what we were going to do once they had run their course. Wizards of the Coast wanted to make an announcement about the magazines coming to an end sooner rather than later, but we knew that this announcement was going to cause an uproar with a fury usually reserved for new editions of D&D--maybe even bigger--and when people came to us with questions, we wanted to have answers. Once again, Wizards was gracious, and allowed us to make the announcement on our own schedule.