The Paizo Material you can use under this policy includes:
The contents of the Community Use Package
The cover images of Paizo products, as displayed on paizo.com
Text and art from the Paizo Blog, with a few exceptions
Trademarks, proper names, locations and characters from Paizo products
Yes! The following examples represent a small sample of potential projects a fan might wish to employ the Fan Content Policy for. Let’s dig in!.
Example 1: Val is selling a set of four plushies inspired by the Pathfinder Iconics on his Etsy page. He has made 10 sets in total. Is this permitted by our policy?
YES! Val is selling a limited quantity of hand-made items inspired by our games. Via Etsy, he is responsible for his relationship with his customers and is personally shipping out his items.
Example 2: Ash has created a well-loved, stylized image of Zo! from Starfinder and decided to silk-screen it on a T-shirt, ordering a quantity of 50 to sell locally or at cons. Is this permitted by our policy?
YES! Ash is making a small run of shirts based on their original design, and plans to sell them directly to customers.
Example 3: Ari has designed 100 new Pathfinder Second Edition spells thematically tied to the Lost Omens setting’s many deities. He wants to put this book up as a print-on-demand product in Amazon. Is this permitted by our policy?
NO. Ari is using Paizo’s IP in an RPG product that will need to cite either the ORC or OGL and is not selling the books directly to customers, using Amazon as an intermediary vendor. Ari should release this book via the Pathfinder Infinite license instead.
Example 4: Meris has garnered a good-sized social media following for her digital artwork, and her latest piece is one of her most popular, depicting Desna from both Pathfinder and Starfinder. Meris has announced a limited run of 100 prints to be sold at her Artist Alley booth at Gen Con. Is this permitted by our policy?
YES! Meris is directly selling a limited quantity of prints of a piece she created.
Example 5: Kyra loves the Pathfinder Society faction emblems, and thinks they would be perfect as enamel pins, and a lot of her customers agree. Knowing demand is high, she has ordered a batch of 750 of each emblem. Is this permitted by our policy?
NO. Kyra is using artwork from the game as the basis for her merchandise instead of her own interpretation of those illustrations. Further, she has ordered a substantially large run of these items, i.e. is mass-producing the items. Finally, one of Paizo’s official partners already produces enamel pins of these same emblems. This violates several tenets of our policy and we ask that such items not be created or sold.
Example 6: Dae has a large social media following, and regularly streams on Twitch, YouTube, and other platforms. They want to run the Mechageddon! Adventure Path on their stream, and provide bonus episodes based on Starfinder Society Scenarios exclusively to their Patreon patrons. Is this permitted by our policy?
YES. Live-play streams and podcasts are totally permitted by this policy, and Dae can both use Paizo’s IP in the adventures and well as branding on their pages to indicate that they’re running one of our official adventures. They can even provide exclusive content behind the paywall of their Patreon, so long as they’re not releasing any RPG content there. If they wanted to release a supplement of custom feats, spells, and equipment they and their players invented in the course of the campaign, that would need to be released on Starfinder Infinite rather than on her Patreon.
In general, this means you may create and publish original works using those things in a variety of ways. You can write original fiction using them, you can create original artwork illustrating them, you can write up entries in a wiki about them, and more. (You may not, however, simply republish significant sections of descriptive text from our products—you need to craft new text.)
This also covers things like actual-play podcasts and live-streams in which you or other players may use Paizo’s adventures, setting, and characters in the narrative you create. So long as you’re adhering to the rest of the terms of this policy (like crediting Paizo for owning the copyrights or trademarks you use), you’re free to use those to create original content however you wish.
No. An adventure is an RPG product, so you will need to produce and distribute that via the Pathfinder or Starfinder Infinite community content marketplaces. You aren’t required to charge any money for this product (you can set the price as free or pay what you want), but the only way to use our settings in RPG products is via that platform.
Yes, so long as that material is not monetized. If you want to sell your fan-fiction, you’ll need to publish it on Pathfinder or Starfinder Infinite.
Yes, so long as the wiki doesn’t include rules expressions that would require you to use the OGL or ORC in order to publish them. If you’re just documenting the flavor of the world and events or characters within it, you are fine. In fact, such wikis already exist at pathfinderwiki.com and starfinderwiki.com. Check them out!
Yes, so long as you're creating new cartography, not using our existing maps.
Yes, you can resize them, so long as you resize them proportionally—that is, you don't squish them by scaling them more in one direction than in another. This also applies to product covers and other images.
Use our Paizo Community Use forum. (Before you post your question, check there to see if it has already been answered! Many of the questions previously answered about the Community Use Policy still apply to the Fan Content Policy as well.)
Licensed Content and Open Game Content from our products is covered by the Open RPG Content license (ORC) and Open Game License (OGL), respectively. Use of this content must follow the ORC and/or OGL guidelines and falls outside the scope of the Fan Content Policy. That said, if your product requires the inclusion of the ORC or OGL because you are using the copyrighted game rules those licenses allow access to, your product would qualify as an RPG product and would not be publishable under the Fan Content Policy. If you want to publish something that uses both our Reserved Content/Product Identity and game rules, you need to publish that on Pathfinder or Starfinder Infinite.
Yes, it would, if the Fan Content Policy did not prohibit its use in RPG products. If you need to cite the OGL (or ORC) in your product, it likely can’t use the Fan Content Policy.
They each do very different things. The Paizo Compatibility License allows commercial and non-commercial users to use a special logo that indicates compatibility with one of Paizo’s published games, as well as permission to use Paizo’s Pathfinder-icons font—and that's all it allows. The Fan Content Policy allows users to use a bunch of different Paizo-owned materials, as outlined above. Specifically, it doesn’t allow users to release RPG material, which is what most content using the Compatibility License would qualify as. If you're making RPG material, use the Paizo Compatibility License or release your content on Pathfinder or Starfinder Infinite.
No, a written adventure would qualify as RPG material, and can only use the Paizo Compatibility License or Pathfinder/Starfinder Infnite.
Both adventures and rules supplements would qualify as RPG material and would need to be released on the Pathfinder or Starfinder Infinite platforms. You get to set the price of anything you publish there, however, so you can still make it free. What you can do now that you couldn’t do before is make that content not free, whether that’s pay-what-you-want or a set price.