Hugo Solis's page

I hear that when Liz wants to create art, she simply stares at the paper and drawing tools and they form the picture out of fear.

Liz's cookies are so awesome, Nabisco tried to steal her recipe once. Once.

Liz can feed garbage into a computer and not get garbage out.

I just wanted to send Neil Spicer belated Valentines day wishes from the entire Paizo editorial pit*. Neil's exceptionally nuanced analyses of each contestant's work should be one of the highlights of this year's show for anyone interested in freelancing for Paizo--he's really giving away the secrets here folks. But, for me and all of the developers and editors on the Paizo staff, Neil's writing advice is worth its weight in gold, as it's the exact sort of feedback we give our freelancers.

It turns out that having awesome ideas isn't even half the battle of writing for RPGs (it's actually kind of expected). You've also got to make your ideas exciting to read and easy for your developers and editors to work with. Someone might have the coolest adventure ideas in the world, but if I have to rewrite every sentence, I'm never going to assign that freelancer work again. So, all you would-be designers out there, dust off your grammar books, read Paizo's published products and really consider the styles and formats you're seeing, and take a good look at Neil's advice throughout this competition.

Below I've copied a number of the comments that provoked all this gushing.

- Your use of the word "will" is also a sign of weak writing. Look for ways to avoid that. It'll strengthen your prose. Instead of saying a creature will do something, just say they do it. That makes your writing much more active and evocative.

- You're using a lot of passive voice, though. Try and avoid as many conventions of the verb "to be" as you can. So, go back and highlight just the places where you used "is"..."are"..."was"...and "were" etc. If the majority of your write-up is relying on those types of verbs, you need to work on replacing them with more active verbs to make your prose read better and come across as more evocative.

- Go back through and identify all the usages of the verb "to be" by highlighting "is"..."are"..."was"...and "were"...and you'll see you rely way too much on that to convey your ideas. Overall, your writing would be stronger if you can find ways to use more active verbs as you present your villain's backstory and the location's history. Sometimes, it's okay to rely on a "was" or "were" when talking about things in the past. But use them sparingly.

- On top of all that, you keep capitalizing non-game terms like goblin and ogre as proper nouns. That's not how those terms should be presented in a game product.

- You left commas out of your XP values.

- You've failed to italicize references to the Bestiary, Bestiary 2, and Gamemastery Guide.

- There are a lot of spacing problems in your writeup. Several words got jammed together...

- Missing an apostrophe

- More proofing problems

With all of that in mind, I strongly RECOMMEND Mr. Spicer advance to judge next year's competition**. Thanks Neil, from all of us in the pit!

* And we love the rest of you judges too. Just slightly less then Neil. (Unless you're Sean... screw that guy.)

** Sorry dude. No rest for the wicked.

It’s a celebration of Pathfinder Classics!

In honor of the 5th anniversary of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, as well as 10 years of Paizo, we invite you to return to your Pathfinder roots! Yes, it is time to go back to your bookshelves, and start rereading your Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path, your Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path, your Darkmoon Vale modules…and expand upon them! Give us your sidetreks into the countryside around Sandpoint, explore the flanks of Droskar’s Crag, or uncover new secrets hidden in the Vaults of Korvosa. Pathfinders, tell us your tales!

Goal
The goal for the fanzine is to create a collection of fan-created articles and supporting art set in Paizo’s Pathfinder Chronicles world of Golarion. In conjunction with the anniversary celebration at PaizoCon 2012, Wayfinder #7 will be focusing on Year One of the Pathfinder product line! Please use the products list below as your main references (as well as that handy-dandy PathfinderWiki)! In the case of a plethora of articles on similar subjects, preference will be given to articles that follow this theme. As always, crunch, fiction, and flavor articles are welcome! Also, artists be sure to note our Call for Art Submissions as well!

In addition, writers can submit to one of several regular series featured in Wayfinder:

Looks like a member of the messageboard community has decided to run a Play-by-Post Carrion Crown campaign using these pregens. Awesome!

Sebastian wrote:

LilithsThrall wrote:

If he was not here illegally, he would not have bought the ticket (Georgia lottery tickets aren't for sale in Guatamala). So, his winnings are a result of his committing a crime.

Uh...that's not how reasoning in general works, much less how legal reasoning works.

Are you a lawyer?

That's what I tell people...

Gary: Also, I bet I haz moar favorites than anybody!

Sara Marie: How about in ratio to how many posts they've made?

Gary: pfft

Gary: sara versus gary

Gary: Note that mine goes to 3 pages!

Sara Marie: I need numbers!

Gary: Someday I'll get around to making a "popular favorites" page or something... that's where I'm a viking!

Sara: Gary has 104 pages of comments with 3 pages of favorites.

Gary: Math is no use to you here!

Sara: I have 33 pages of comments with one page of favorites. And its not the number of individual posts that are favorited, its the number of favorites TOTAL!

Gary: k fine

sara: Because some of my comments have lots of favorites.

Gary: Yeah, those are the ones that are quotes from me!

Gary: favorites for posts created by me: 382
favorites for posts created by sm: 165

Sara: Gary's ratio is 13.513089
my ratio is 9.9757575

Crystal: No love for sara :( Well... 50% love for Sara

Gary: To be fair, her posts are all business. My posts are all about whoring for favorites.

Sara: Gary wins. Time for me to go favorite whoring!

Sara: Paizo.com > Off Topic Forums > Overheard at the Paizo office > Add new post

gary: it's like herding cats through a field of catnip

Gary: I don't need Facebook, i have the fawtly thread. It works just the same!

Gary: posting your own quotes will make you blind

Chris Self: Sara does it all the time =)

Sara: Hmmm.. I do need new glasses.....

A few weeks ago, I was interviewed by the folks over at GMS Magazine about LPJ Design in general, the business of PDF publishing, The creation and development of NeoExodus, working with Paizo and Pathfinder, and I even manage to make a few comments and crazy moments about venture captain JP Chapleau too. If you are interested in the world of PDF publishing, I think you will find it interesting listing to this podcast. Listen to it here! Enjoy!

The only dice you ever need

Video of the guy talking about dice Part 1

Video of the guy talking about dice Part 2

Jeranimus Rex wrote:

wizoroc wrote:

So unless a real study on marketshare or sales is made public, I just don't see this.

I actually heard from somewhere that Pathfinder and D&D now have a roughly equal share at the moment.

Afraid not.

Scott is totally right here. Pathfinder has surpassed D&D in most of the markets that I check.

Thanks for ninja'ing me Scott!

-Lisa

101 Magic Items for Peasants, Serfs and angry Village mobs

Remember, if we can get a full 101 items, we will submit it to KOBOLD QUARTERLY. They like publishing unpaid stuff.

1. Pitchfork of Bailiff Impalement
2. Everfull bucket of Dung
3. Burning Torch of Mob leadership

True story: I proudly claim that I have embarassed Mr Dave Gross having him ask to the guy at the counter of a fancy-pantsy liquor/beer/wine store for a PBR... The guy had real trouble recallig what's a PBR and when he remembered and told Dave what it was -and that they don't sell it, of course, Dave went all red and told me grinning: Don't ever embarrass me like that again...

Let this be a lesson to all not to bring Hugo into a classy joint.

Hi all,

Profantasy decided to celebrate 50 annual styles by releasing one for free - and they decided to give away my June Dungeon Style! The free style is here.

I wrote up a post about the style and put together a quick free map with it over on my fantasy maps site.

Hope that's useful to everyone!

I guess this is as good a time as any to point out that I have coined a new thingie:

Sebastian's Law: Anybody who wants to be a moderator is unfit to wield the banhammer.

I really hate how this keeps coming back to my item.

This really isn't about why or why I didn't get rejected.

The reason it keeps coming back to you—and it's you much more than your item—is that you came onto our boards, trashed our judges and employees, and called us a bunch of glorified copy-and-pasters, with posts dripping in sarcasm and attitude, painting yourself as the victim all the while.

I'd especially point out these parts:

...looking over the stuff [Clark's] company has published and the comments he's made before, and listening to his stuff here, I just don't see how his opinion is worth anything.

And in your very next post, you state:

Now nothing I said so far has been inflammatory...

Either you don't understand how you come across, or you don't understand the meaning of the word "inflammatory."

And then you write this:

I think you should realize that you are representing yourself and your company to your audience, the people that buy your stuff.

You know, you also need to realize that people are judging you by the things you say, and though you called Clark a "a giant, over-glorified troll," well, I'll just note that the trolling being done here is all by you.

I'll tell you this: if Paizo *had* ever given you an assignment, after seeing the way you conduct yourself on our forums, I'd ensure that we never gave you another one.

I don't look forward to the next contest knowing he is a judge.

I hope you follow through with the indications you've given that you won't be entering. You'd be wasting everyone's time, because you're disrespectful, and in comportment, you're as far from an RPG Superstar as you can be. I'm glad you think highly of Neil, because you could learn quite a lot from him—and I'm talking about in life, not just in game design.