OPM Musings
But I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more…
With the calendar turned to 2021 and vaccines starting to rollout, we’ve got a chance that some of us will actually get to travel to conventions. Unfortunately, we aren’t quite at the point where it is safe to attend events in person. So for the next few months, our presence will remain digital. We’re in talks with a few shows about being virtual guests and will let you know more as soon as we make the final determinations. If you have a digital show between now and April and would like some organized play participation, please email the team at organizedplay@paizo.com with your event particulars.
Not traveling gives us a few more months of internal process smoothing and a chance to finalize a few projects. In addition, Alex’s first anniversary at Paizo approaches. His presence on the team brought much needed stability to program functions and the venture-officer support. I look forward to doing even more now that we’ve acclimated him into the program. Most of the planned projects involve behind the scenes activities, but we hope that they make the forward-facing aspects even better for our community.
Alright, that’s enough musing from me. Without further ado, let’s get to the list of updates for this month!
New OP Developer
As we announced in last week’s blog, Mike Kimmel has joined the team as our newest developer! A prolific Paizo freelancer, Mike wrote many beloved adventures for Organized Play, such as Starfinder Society Scenario #1-22: The Protectorate Petition and Pathfinder Society Scenario #7–10: The Consortium Compact, as well as backmatter for Pathfinder Adventure Path #135: Runeplague and parts of several Lost Omens rulebooks. He also founded the Freelance Forge community, a forum for current and prospective RPG freelancers. You’ll hear more from him next week, but we’re thrilled to bring him on board and can’t wait to see what our fully-staffed team produces going forward!
Digitization
We originally set the final day for Fame purchases in Pathfinder Society as December 31st. I’m happy to say we all took a much needed holiday break. This does make getting final decisions through the pipeline a bit problematic. So we decided to push the deadline out to January 31st, 2021. This is it, though, the final extension. Once February hits, Fame will be gone as a purchasable currency.
We know there are still a few items that we haven’t imported to either AcP or faction reputation or game rewards. We took the transition process slowly to make sure we’re doing it right and not breaking anything more than we had to. Some of the outstanding items, such as a method of bequeathing rewards between character and alternative methods to revive dead characters, are questions we will answer in the next few weeks and will share with you once we make decisions.
Sanctioning
Right before Christmas, we announced sanctioning for the latest Pathfinder adventure, Troubles in Otari, which offers a great transition from Beginner Box play to utilizing the full Pathfinder ruleset.
We’re also excited to announce that the Starfinder Society Additional Resources have now been updated! This update includes the character options from the Threefold Conspiracy adventure path, which were accidentally passed over when we released the chronicles.
Looking forward, work on Pathfinder Adventure: The Slithering nears completion and we hope to upload sanctioning before the end of the month. After that, we’ll shift gears to rulebooks, focusing on Starfinder Alien Archive 4 and the upcoming Pathfinder Lost Omens: Ancestry Guide (releasing in February), before we jump back into adventures. We’ll keep you all updated as we have news to share.
GM Achievements
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!
One GM received their fifth star in the last month. We had no one reach 5 Novas or 5 Glyphs.
5th Star: Shannon Petrosky
Congratulations to our new 5 Star GM, and thank you for your dedication!
Conventions
In their holiday message and update, Gen Con announced that they were postponing badge registration and event submission until they have a better idea of what the year will bring. Once we know their plan, we’ll have more info to share about volunteering for that event. We’ll have information on volunteering for other Paizo-sponsored conventions soon as well. There are just a few questions left to answer before we are ready to push go!
Otherwise, we have a few events on the calendar already to look forward to in 2021! 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 |
| OrcaCon Online 2021 | Bellevue, WA | 1/8/2021 | Online | None | Alex |
| Con Damage '21 | Gulf Region | 1/22/2021 | Online | PFS2 2-00 The King In Thorns | |
| EpiDemiCon | Great Lakes Region | 1/22/2021 | Online | PFS2 2-00 The King In Thorns, SFS 3-00 The Last Bite | |
| COTN 2021 | Plymouth, MN | 2/12/2021 | Online | None |
Until next time: Explore! Report! Cooperate!