Hello, gamers, and welcome back to RPG Superstar 2014! I'm Sean K Reynolds, host of this year's RPG Superstar competition, designer at Paizo, and a judge for the previous four RPG Superstar competitions.
As of 2 PM Pacific time, the Open Call for Round 1 submissions is closed. If you submitted a wondrous item, congratulations and thank you! If you didn't submit a wondrous item, there's always next year!
Now it's time for the public vote. Anyone with an account on Paizo.com can participate in the Round 1 public vote. Just go to the voting page, sign in to your Paizo.com account, and you'll be shown two wondrous items. Take a minute to read both items, then vote on which of the two items you think is better. If you honestly can't decide which item is better, there is a “both items are equal” option, but that actually doesn't help sort items (it's a neutral result in the voting), so use that only as a last resort.
If you see an item that you think breaks the rules of the contest (such as being a copyright violation, such as an item from a novel or movie), contact contest@paizo.com.
Once you've voted, the website will present you with another pair of items to evaluate. You can vote as many times as you like.
You may see your own item—and you're allowed to vote for it. You may see some items come up more than once. As there are hundreds of items submitted to the contest, you might vote many times and still not see all of the items. You might want to save a copy of items you'd like to use in your game, or items you want to talk about later.
Your participation in the voting process is use and critical for the success of RPG Superstar. For the 2013 competition, over 500,000 votes were cast by hundreds of voters. Just like we did last year, we'll be awarding people who vote 100, 500, 1000, or 5000 times with custom message board titles (Star Voter, Dedicated Voter, Marathon Voter, Champion Voter) as our thanks for participating in the voting process.
Over time, these numerous votes sort all the wondrous item submissions into a hierarchy. At the top of that hierarchy are the items which got upvoted more often than any item they were paired with, and at the bottom are the items which got downvoted more often than any item they were paired with. (The Paizo tech team may cull the lowest-voted items partway through the voting period so voters can focus on the evaluating the highest-voted items.)
At the end of the public voting period (January 14, 2014), our panel of judges will look over the highest-voted items and select the Top 32. We announce the Top 32 on January 21, and the authors of those items proceed to Round 2: Create a Bestiary Entry!
Good luck, competitors! And thanks in advance, voters!
Sean K Reynolds
Host, Designer, Former RPG Superstar Judge
