Almost one month done with 2019 and the organized play team's chugging away at our to-do list. Meetings over the past few weeks yielded results such as Year 2 storylines for Starfinder Society, and factions/storylines for the next iteration of Pathfinder Society. We've spent a goodly amount of our meetings talking about player feedback we collated from a variety of places - forums, surveys, convention discussions, and Facebook. Community commentary allows us the opportunity to craft a program that appeals to our player base. To all those community members who share their opinions, thank you for helping us shape the program.

Speaking of feedback and programs. February 1st launches the next installment of the Regional Support Program (RSP) for use in locations not qualifying for convention support. This year's program includes Pathfinder Society and Starfinder Society boons for players and GMs. As of Friday, all new boons issued will be from the 2019 pack. To enable GMs to complete the 2018 boon, games run from Friday may either check off a box on the new 2019 boon or continue to check boxes on your 2018 boon each time you run a game at a Regional Support-qualifying venue.

New this year is a program for Online Support (OSP). We've been working on this since spinning up the online region, but it took some time to formulate a plan and then shepherd it through the appropriate channels. When discussing how best to support our online games, one of our biggest concerns involved supporting a player/GM that participated in both physical and online games. Using the same program did not seem to further the programs goals of incentivizing play/GMing. Instead of utilizing the existing RSP program, the team decided to curate a different package of player and GM boons available exclusively online. The requirements to be an OSP event include being open to public registration and ineligible for convention support.

We solicited feedback from Regional Venture-Coordinator Jesse Davis and his team of venture-officers on how to best implement OSP boon distribution. As they already manage boon distribution for online conventions, the OSP process isn't much different. The online venture-officer team will log the OSP games on a tracker, randomly allocate boons to players and recording GM participation. Once the GM completes 6 games, they qualify for Tier 1 on the boon. Tier 2 is 12 games run and Tier 3 is 24 games run. Boons are limited to one per player per quarter and one per GM per year.

If you are running an online event and would like to be part of the OSP, please reach out to the venture-captain for your venue (PbP, VTT, etc.). If you are unsure who that is, check out the online section of the regional coordinators page.

Besides meetings and releasing the OSP and updating the RSP, the team has another update on Additional Resources. From the pen of Organized Play Lead Developer John Compton…

The team's been hard at work developing January's and February's scenarios, outlining several of our final First Edition adventures, and working out the details on our next organized play season (including some really great discussions about factions based on your survey feedback). We've also submitted the sanctioning documents to War for the Crown Adventure Path and for Pathfinder Module: Seers of the Drowned City, and we're expecting those to go live alongside an upcoming blog. But as you can tell from the blog title, we've been reviewing some fun Player Companion books—Pathfinder Player Companion: Martial Artist's Handbook from November and Pathfinder Player Companion: Wilderness Origins from January—for the Additional Resources and Campaign Clarifications documents, both of which are queued to be updated on the site in the coming days.

In the meantime, I'd like to point out some of the updates coming up elsewhere in the Additional Resources document.

Adventurer's Guide 2: In general, we've been treating the "Equipment" entries of new books as though they cover items of all stripes, mundane and magical, but there seemed to be some ambiguity on whether or not the magic items on page 23 were legal. That's been clarified, and those improvised weapon magic items are legal.

Plane-Hopper's Handbook: Somehow the geniekin heritages didn't make it into the Additional Resources in December (I suspect my mind lumped them with the Alternate Racial Traits entry). Those have been formally added.

Ganzis and Planar Adventures: When we first examined the new oddities in Plane-Hopper's Handbook, we decided that this would be a good opportunity to open up more oddities choices to ganzi PCs. That spurred a review of the Planar Adventures options, too, which led to two of them being banned. What we hadn't remembered at the time was that a boon had opened up access to these already. We don't want to retroactively ban those oddities and disrupt some existing characters, so instead we're revising the benefit provided on the Touched by Chaos boon (specifically the 2018 GM Boon #2, according to my records), replacing the second paragraph that cites replacing the quibble ability. You'll also find that the quibbles in Planar Adventures are now all listed as legal.

• Previous Benefit: Ganzi characters created using Pathfinder RPG Planar Adventures as a resource gain quibble as their ganzi oddity ability. By combining this boon with another boon that allows you to create a ganzi PC, you may replace that PC's quibble or ganzi oddity ability with any other ganzi oddity option.
• Revised Benefit: Ganzi characters created using Pathfinder RPG Planar Adventures as a resource may select any one of the listed oddities. By combining this boon with another boon that allows you to create a ganzi PC, you can channel your extraplanar connection in an especially powerful way. As a free action, you can record the name of the adventure you are playing below this boon to gain a second legal ganzi oddity for the duration of the adventure. You can only have two ganzi oddities at a time, and you can only gain additional oddities in this way three times.

So, as we open up ganzi oddities overall, those who combine the two ganzi boons can still gain a limited-use benefit that lets their ganzis show off an especially potent extraplanar power.

Thanks for your continued help in identifying corrections and clarifications in the Additional Resources and Campaign Clarifications documents.

Join us next week for our monthly update on stars, cons, and travel!

Until then—Explore, Report, Cooperate!

Tonya Woldridge
Organized Play Manager