Russ Taylor's page

Hey, thanks everybody! Really appreciated!

Erik is fine and continues his ever-expanding role as publisher.

As for my title, we haven't had an editor-in-chief for some time and for the last three years my role has been considerably more than just "guy in charge of the editors." As the company continues to grow Erik's attentions rightly move toward exploring exciting new projects and possibilities, while I've been increasingly helming the day-to-day adventure of making sure Paizo Publishing keeps... well... publishing.

What this promotion means for me is that now all of our editing and development officially falls under my umbrella, as well as much of the organization and outlining of new products - along with the champions of our individual product lines (and others, because coming up with new books and adventures is usually fun). Pretty much, if it has to do with our print projects, assigning them, developing them, editing them, approving them, getting feedback to authors, or any of the other bits that go into making a book happen (that isn't layout or on the design team's shoulders for the three hardcovers in our Pathfinder RPG line), it's on me and my crew's shoulders. Other than that, most of the other ramifications of our internal changes are mundane (or DOUBLE SUPER TOP SECRET... if that's a thing).

What this means for folks playing the home game... is pretty much nothing. The crew that brought you everything you already love is the same crew bringing you everything you're going to love. Nothing to see here, move along.

In other news, this has meant that Fiction Editor James Sutter has stepped up to Senior Editor to take on direct oversight of the wilder-than-you'd-expect world of editing everything for the Pathfinder brand, as well as captaining the most bombproof team of editing geniuses in gaming.

Beyond this, James Jacobs continues to be our creative director, assuring elf eyes from Pathfinder Society to Pathfinder comics to Pathfinder Miniatures to Pathfinder Everything Else are appropriately shaped, continuity is maintained across our brands, ideas cleave to the highest calibers of coolness, and that his writer's callous never grows soft. Lead Designer Jason Bulmahn still heads up the design team and spends his days coming up with innovative new ways to kill characters (or is it monsters this week?). "Señor" Art Director Sarah Robinson continues her jet setting as head of the art team (She's at Spectrum Live this week, less than a week since her return from a con in Germany) and wrangler of a thousand incredibly artistic cats. And beyond that, everyone else - Andrew, Chris, Crystal, Judy, Mark, Mike, Patrick, Rob, Sean, and Stephen - got other rewards for their fantastically hard and continually awesome-under-fire work (except for Adam who just got a pat on the head and half a shiny red apple [and not even those] because he's still new; but we love him anyway).

So that's the scoop! Now back to work!

Ingredients:

* 1 unstated rule that all deities grant their alignment domains, even if the deity isn't really a proponent of that alignment
* 1 unstated rule that deities grant no more than 5 domains

Recipe:

* mix ingredients
* wait for dumb things to happen

Hey Greg - what are your favorite adventures of all time - and what inspired you to write Tsar?

Geez, DaveMage, that's kind of like a 5,000-word answer. However to give you the short (and incomplete) of it:

what are your favorite adventures of all time--

Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth
Secrets of the Slavers Stockade
Dwellers of the Forbidden City
The Temple of Elemental Evil
Probably others that I'm missing at the moment...

what inspired you to write Tsar?--

All of the above, plus Rappan Athuk, of course. :-)

Adam and I have been getting into trouble together at shows and rolling dice at the gaming table since we were too young to buy beer legally. Some of the best times of my life have been had with Daigle at my side, and I wouldn't even be writing in the biz if it wasn't for his relentless insistence that I get into the freelance game. Going to be tough not having him a mile up the road or next to me at our weekly game sessions, but I'm unbelievably excited that he's going to be doing what we love as a full-time job.

Here's to you, Adam. Wind in your sails and all that. Paizo's getting the best of us, and it is good to know that my future work will be in the hands of my best friend. Don't you dare change a word of it! Hahaha.

Sail away, and find your way to Mariana, my friend.

I am mostly worried that it is the Final Cover of Paizo Stories. It was a great run that I would love to see continue.

In any event... I would rather have folks worried we made the demilich too powerful for its CR than have folks worried we made a demilich too easy for its CR.

This is going to be my only post in this thread. I would not have posted anything, but I think I have to say a few things about OrganizedPlay and Living City just to set the record straight.

I negotiated with Wizards to take over the whole RPGA on my exit. There was a good chance they were going to close it down or outsource it, just like they did with GenCon and Dragon & Dungeon magazines. We were unable to come to terms. As a fall-back position, I was able to license the Living City campaign.

Unfortunately, as I learned after the fact, Living City was probably unsavable by the time I got it. Living Greyhawk was a superior product in every way - and one of the ways it was vastly superior was the freedom it allowed in scenario design. Effectively overnight the people interested in writing scenarios for the RPGA switched from Living City to Living Greyhawk.

When I got the Living City campaign, the hopper of scenarios was already empty. There were a handful of submissions in the queue and they had already been flagged by the RPGA as unsuitable. I reached out directly to the authors of the "best" Living City and Living Greyhawk scenarios to ask them to write for Living City and every person turned us down due to the workload they'd taken on supporting the Living Greyhawk campaign.

At that point we went to a series of Plans B, C, D, etc.

We tried to contract the scenario design to Bastion, run by my friend and former coworker Jim Butler. That plan didn't work out.

We tried to license adventure content from AEG, who had just finished producing several dozen short adventures for D20. The time required to convert these adventures to Living City's unique rules ended up being almost as long as the time to write a scenario from scratch.

We tried to pay a small group of professional tabletop designers to do the work, and none of them were able to rise to the challenge. Living City scenarios require an extensive knowledge of the characters in the campaign and the unique conditions that exist in it, and without that knowledge the scenarios we were getting were simply unusable.

Then we tried to re-boot the campaign, with the idea that we'd strip out all the stuff that was making it nearly impossible to get scenarios written, and get rid of all the legacy power inflation that had made a lot of common D&D rules nearly unusable. I personally wrote the entire first "season" of the rebooted campaign to ensure there would be enough content (instead of doing what I should have been doing, which was raising investment capital for the business).

Then we decided the only way forward was to self-publish the Living City modules so that the campaign could have a business model that would support their development. To make that happen I had to put the squeeze to Wizards of the Coast, which transformed a formerly friendly relationship to one that was not so friendly.

Finally, after more than a year of struggling to roll that rock uphill, I took a long look in the mirror and realized that the Living City project had become a distraction and a time & money sink and that it was time to cut my losses and move on.

For the record, I invested hundreds of thousands of dollars of my own money into OrganizedPlay, most of which was sunk into Living City. I did everything in my power to keep the campaign operating, and I ascribe its death primarily to the fact that Wizards just had a better product in Living Greyhawk, and the world wasn't big enough for two D&D Living Campaigns to run side-by-side.

It is unfortunate that there are still people out there who hold a grudge about Living City, but I'll stand behind all the labour and love I poured into the project and don't believe there was anything else we could have done that would have led to a better outcome.

RyanD

I bought my copy with $20 cash out the trunk of a black Monte Carlo in a hotel parking lot.

Beastiary 2, page 49, Brownies. "when facing danger, brownies rarely engage in combat, preferring instead to confound and confuse their attackers in order to buy enough time for escape."

I appreciate you using that bit of text as an example of flavor mixed with combat tactics, not only because I wrote that entry and it came out mostly unscathed from development, but also because when I wrote the brownie, I consulted every instance of the creature in various D&D editions as well as the folkloric record. As a matter of fact, you’ll likely see that approach in all the monsters in the Bestiaries when they come from folklore and previous iterations of RPGs.

I’m tickled any time I’m able, in designing these monsters, to explore more and more flavor text for them, but I admit I greatly enjoy the single-page format. So, if I have to drop a few sentences of flavor to make the mechanics make more sense and work towards a more usable product, I’ll do it each and every day. Many times, you can infer tactics and behavior from the statistics, and with the exception of newer players, folks reading the entries can extrapolate their previous experiences into the description and behavior of the monsters presented.

Also, Stefan, I truly appreciate you putting the word ‘fluff’ in quotes.

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.