Organized Play Monthly Update

OPM Musings

In many ways, I’m relieved to see the home stretch of 2020 and that the new year lies just beyond the horizon. With Covid, murder hornets, wildfires, protests, elections, and beloved icons passing, this year packed more into it than I’d expect in a decade. I felt the lack of conventions the most. You, our community, mean the world to me and it physically hurt not to get to meet up with you and get to chat about gaming, organized play, and maybe even our favorite television shows (though I have a great store of talking points now!). As vaccine availability allows us to reopen, I urge everyone to not rush back into games spaces, but to do so responsibility in an effort to keep our communities safe! We will be back together again soon, but only by being careful can we all be together again.

Scenario Release Update

As mentioned above, this year dealt us unforeseen challenges. Almost as if to put convention season crunch into perspective, good ole 2020 gave us a “hold beer” moment scenario production. We’ve done our best to not let the difficulties of remote work impact our production schedules, but as we come to the end of the year, we just didn’t quite meet our goals. We felt it best to share the changes to our schedule now, so that organizers and GMs can plan accordingly, instead of waiting for our monthly release blogs. Here’s a summary of our changes:

December scenarios (PFS 2-09 and 2-10, Bounty 5 and SFS 3-13 and 3-14) will be released on December 30th, the last Wednesday in the month. While we ordinarily try to release early due to the holidays, a pile up of products in the pipeline meant we just couldn’t meet our desired release of December 16th, and are opting to go with the standard organized play release date instead.

Due to an author not being able to complete their contract, we have to push one Pathfinder Society scenario out of January release and into February. In January, we will release PFS 2-11: The Pathfinder Trials, and Bounty 6 for Pathfinder Society. Both Starfinder Society scenarios (3-15 & 3-16) will release as well. February releases include PFS 2-12, 2-13 and 2-14, as well as Bounty 7 and SFS 3-17 and 3-18. Thank you all for your understanding and patience!

Sanctioning

Last month, we announced sanctioning for the Pathfinder Beginner Box. We divided the adventure in the box, “Menace Under Otari,” into two parts and wrote a chronicle for each part. As an incentive to reaching out to new players and building your communities, we designated the adventure as a repeatable event which awards double AcP; players must use the pregens in the Beginner Box or build characters using the rules within the product.

Originally, our next agenda included The Slithering for Pathfinder (second edition). To capitalize on the Beginner Box momentum, we’re diverting briefly to sanction Troubles in Otari first. For Starfinder, we queued up the Devastation Ark AP. Of course, we still have the remaining PF1 content on radar as well.

Several people asked what about our timelines and priorities regarding sanctioning. We tried a different process with the Beginner Box that worked reasonably well, so we will use that method on the next few projects and refine the process. We hope this will get the adventure sanctioning out the door without placing as large a burden on the product line developers and get us caught up so that we can achieve our goal of day one sanctioning on all products. But until that point, we are still a bit behind. We’ll inform you in these blogs as we have updates to share, so stay tuned!

Stars/Novas/Glyphs

Whether stars, novas, or glyphs, achieving a 5 ranking in any program involves a substantial amount of time. To achieve the 5th milestone, a GM must run 150 games, of which at least 50 must be unique scenarios and 10 special scenarios, as well as run between one and three games for venture-captains (program dependant). A conservative estimate of the time needed to reach the 5th milestone is 650 hours!

Two GMs received their fifth star in the last month. We had no one reach 5 Novas or 5 Glyphs.

5th Star: Densial Edmonds, Daniel Harvey

Congratulations to our new 5 Star GMs, and thank you for your dedication!

Conventions

December is usually a quiet month for conventions, but 2021’s schedule is starting to roll in. If you don’t see a convention on the list that you think should be there, contact the event organizer and ask them to register their event for organized play support!

Convention	Location	Start Date	Status	Interactive Events	Staff Attendance
Emerald Con	Seattle, WA	12/4/2020	Online	PFS2 2-00 The King In Thorns, SFS 3-00 The Last Bite	Tonya, Jenny
Con Damage '21	Gulf Region	1/22/2021	Online	PFS2 2-00 The King In Thorns
COTN 2021	Plymouth, MN	2/12/2021	Online	None

We’ve got an announcement for later today, so visit us back here this afternoon for some exciting news! And don’t forget: Explore! Report! Cooperate!

Alex Speidel
Organized Play Associate

Tonya Woldridge
Organized Play Manager