After five rounds of intensive competition, amateur game designer Matt Goodall has won RPG Superstar 2010, the largest annual tabletop roleplaying game design contest in history. The popular vote of paizo.com’s more than 100,000-strong fan community chose Matt Goodall’s Cult of the Ebon Destroyers Pathfinder module submission over the final-round submissions of competitors Alexander MacLeod, Jim Groves, and Matthew McGee. Goodall will receive a contract to write the full adventure, which will be released by Paizo in January, 2011.
Paizo challenged amateur game designers from around the world to show off their skills in RPG Superstar 2010, the third season of Paizo's search for great undiscovered game designers. Regular judges Clark Peterson of Necromancer Games and Paizo's own Sean K Reynolds and F. Wesley Schneider narrowed a field of hundreds of open call submissions to 32 would-be RPG Superstars, and guest judges including game designer Greg A. Vaughan, cartographers Corey Macourek and Robert Lazzaretti, Pathfinder RPG lead designer Jason Bulmahn, and Paizo’s Creative Director James Jacobs, plus last year's finalists Kevin Carter, Eric Bailey, Matt Stinson, and 2009 RPG Superstar Neil Spicer provided their advice as the contestants answered each new challenge.
In the final round, we asked this year's Top 4 to propose a 32-page Pathfinder Module for use with Paizo's Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Contestants Alexander MacLeod (Raleigh, North Carolina), Jim Groves (Ontario, Oregon), Matt Goodall (Cheltenham, Victoria, Australia), and Matthew McGee (Davis, California) responded with four excellent submissions. Matt Goodall’s Cult of the Ebon Destroyers emerged victorious after a week of public comment and voting at paizo.com. Goodall’s winning adventure is currently available for preorder at paizo.com.
"This was my second year as guest judge for RPG Superstar," said Paizo’s Creative Director James Jacobs, "and once again the contestants all impressed me with their creativity and writing skill. From where I'm sitting there's not one winner but several, since making it to the final few rounds of RPG Superstar gets you a lot of attention even if you don't win the grand prize! Well done, everyone!"
RPG Superstar will return in 2011.
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Paizo Publishing®, LLC is a leading publisher of fantasy roleplaying games, accessories, board games, and novels. Paizo's Pathfinder® Roleplaying Game, the result of the largest open playtest in the history of tabletop gaming, was the most successful RPG launch of 2009. Pathfinder Adventure Path is the most popular and best-selling monthly product in the tabletop RPG industry. Paizo.com is the leading online hobby retail store, offering tens of thousands of products from a variety of publishers to customers all over the world. In the six years since its founding, Paizo Publishing has received more than a dozen major awards and has grown to become one of the most influential companies in the hobby games industry.
