Open Call Revisited

Thursday, August 2, 2012

As some have noticed, when we launched the new Pathfinder Society Organized Play homepage here on paizo.com, we removed the Write for Pathfinder Society page. This is mainly because the Open Call as it existed wasn’t working as intended and we were in the process of changing it. Well, that process is now complete, and aspiring authors and game designers can now find the revised guidelines on the Get Involved! page.

In short, for the last few years, we’d been asking for brief adventure proposals for Pathfinder Society Scenarios, while at the same time increasing the amount of plotting that went into each successive season. The result of this was that even when we got an outline for an amazing adventure we wanted to publish, finding a way to fit it into the season’s metaplot or product schedule between other scenarios became untenable. Additionally, we found that asking for a few hundred words of prose didn’t give us a good sense of how an author would actually perform when tasked with writing encounters, designing stat blocks, and mapping, all of which are vital skills any freelancer needs to possess. The end result was that we weren’t getting submissions we could easily use, and the already difficult task of getting one’s foot in the door as one of Paizo’s writers became even more challenging for those submitting queries.

The solution we’ve now implemented is this: instead of asking for an adventure proposal, we’re now soliciting Pathfinder Society Quests—2,000-word mini-adventures containing one or two tiered encounters and using GameMastery Map Packs and Flip-Mat lines. This format allows authors to show us they have a grasp of the rules, can write an adventure on a small scale, and can tell a story using encounters as the primary mode of imparting plot and character to players and GMs. And, to top it all off, a submission we like is something we can immediately use with very little development. Whether we publish an accepted Quest on paizo.com, use it as a Pathfinder RPG demo at conventions or game stores, or promote the campaign by putting the adventure in another medium like Kobold Quarterly, authors whose work we like can get paid for their effort and see the fruits of their labor in print much faster.

You can now download our first Pathfinder Society Quest, the Tier 1–5 Ambush in Absalom (written last spring by yours truly). We’ll let everyone know when we have more available and where you can find them.

I look forward to seeing what great ideas the community has to offer!

Mark Moreland
Developer