PFW1-K1's page

If so, where's the OGL notice located? I can't seem to find one in the PDF bundle — is it in the physical box?

If it is not open game content, and acknowledging that "consult a lawyer" is a valid answer, does this preclude expanding on Beginner Box content with commercial third-party content, or even as CUP-allowed content if it relies on rules from the Beginner Box?

There are a few parts of the CUP text that feel like they need updating or clarification in light of some recent site updates and releases.

The URLs in the CUP and CUP FAQ for many things have changed. For the blog, package, and Tales web fiction, the URLs are specific and used to designate what content is permitted for reuse under the CUP. For web fiction in particular, the content has been folded into the community blog and the paizo.com/pathfinder/tales/serial URL just redirects to the main page.

The current URLs for things linked to in the policy are:

• Policy: https://paizo.com/community/communityuse
  
• Registry: https://paizo.com/community/communityuse/registry
  
• FAQ: https://paizo.com/community/communityuse/faq
  
• Package: https://paizo.com/community/communityuse/package
  
• Blog: https://paizo.com/community/blog
  
• Tales web fiction: https://paizo.com/community/blog or https://paizo.com/community/blog/tags/pathfinderTales/webFiction
  

It's also unclear whether the Pathfinder: Kingmaker CRPG is an approved product, and if so under which section. Other licensed products, like Pathfinder Legends and Comics, are listed in Section 1.

In the FAQ:

The FAQ in general hasn't been updated since the release of Starfinder.

If I have a question about particular situations or the Community Use Policy in general, what should I do?

Use our Paizo Publishing General Discussion forum.

"Paizo Publishing General Discussion forum" should probably link to this forum, at https://paizo.com/community/forums/paizo/cup. Right now it redirects back to the main page.

dude

I've been hanging out here since RPG Superstar 2012, but Superstar is pretty much gone as an event, and I'm moving away from Pathfinder and Starfinder and won't be keeping up with the setting going forward or freelancing anymore. So I'm going on hiatus from the boards (and TTRPGs in general).

I'll still be active on PathfinderWiki and in other ways, at least for a while, but I wanted to post one last time to publicly thank Tim Nightengale and Dain Nielsen for giving me a shot at Wayfinder, Luke Palosaari for working so hard on the Fat Goblin Games books that we worked on, John Mechalas for bring a long-held dream of mapping Golarion to reality, and Judy Bauer for being a true editor's editor.

tl;dr: Have PathfinderWiki, StarfinderWiki, or PFO Wiki been really slow or inaccessible lately? We're trying to get to the bottom of it, and we'll also do some intensive wiki maintenance on the weekend of June 24. Please hang tight until then, and send me a message if the wiki is completely inaccessible!

--

I've gotten several reports from the last week or two that PathfinderWiki/StarfinderWiki/PFO Wiki have either appeared to be down or extraordinarily slow, especially for editing. The issues seem to be intermittent, not related to the amount of traffic the site's getting, and not consistently occurring for all users, making this a different problem than we've had to deal with in the past.

While I try to whittle down the potential reasons why this is happening, the wiki might be intermittently slow to access, unavailable, or set to read-only access.

If the wiki is inaccessible for you for more than 5 minutes, please send me a message with the date and time it's down (and your location or time zone) so I can try to connect some of these dots with server status reports, or escalate them to our service provider.

Also, the wiki server itself is overdue for some infrastructure upgrades. We'll lock down wiki editing for some or all of the weekend of June 24 and move traffic over to a backup server while we deploy those updates.

We've scheduled this as best we can to align with our work schedules while trying not to disrupt PaizoCon or Gen Con, but I know this will potentially affect games somewhere around the world. I'm sorry in advance if that happens—we're doing what we can to limit that potential effect as much as possible, and with any luck we won't go long without at least read-only access to a very recent copy of wiki content.

In addition to the under-the-hood improvements we'll get from this upgrade, this will also include some necessary updates to our wiki theme (including a design refresh), and if our testing lines up with reality some serious and long-overdue improvements to the wiki's across-the-board performance.

Thanks for your patience and ongoing support of the wiki family.

Know Direction link, Twitch channel. I'm not sure what time it'll be, it lists starting at 8:30 p.m. with no time zone, so I assume it's 8:30 p.m. Eastern US time/5:30 p.m. Pacific? That's what the GCal event has, at least.

Dropping a thread in here for discussion of the interview. I won't be able to watch live since it's on Twitch so I'll follow up with a transcript when the podcast comes out, but if anyone is watching live it'd be awesome if folks could drop some notable details in here.

Yesterday, we reached 13,000 articles on PathfinderWiki, a Community Use Project to build a canon reference for the Pathfinder campaign setting. (The article's dog! They're good articles, Brent.). Over the last year, we added about 49 articles and 1,265 edits per month.

Some of the new features we added in the last year include:

• Structured data for sourcebooks and cities, allowing for easier discovery of content based on standardized data. For instance, you can see all articles on Qadiran metropolises, or all Pathfinder Society scenarios that use the 3.5 ruleset.
  
• Interactive region maps for all cities with markers on the official Inner Sea region map, such as Corentyn and Magnimar.
  
• Lists of recurring character, concept, and location appearances in many Pathfinder Society RPG scenarios, such as the list on The Eternal Obelisk.
  
• Hundreds of categorized and annotated pieces of CUP-licensed art from Paizo blog posts, the Paizo store, and Community Use Packages.

We also quietly rolled out StarfinderWiki and have updated it with revelations and artwork from new interviews and blog posts.

We're looking forward to more improvements in the coming year, as well as the launch of Starfinder in August. We're volunteer editors and writers, and if you're interested in contributing, check out the tutorial!

I'm just going to do whatever. Y'all can bite my shiny metal third-party publisher credentials.

"Our" initial lineup is:

• Beardforge: The Motion Picture
  
• 101 Different Self-replicating Fuzzy Ball Creatures
  
• Ultimate Space Bathrooms
  
• Potatoes: Where Do They Come From
  
• You Know That Space TV Show or Movie You Like? That Thing, but Without Copyright Violations
  

I WANNA SEE ALL THOSE RIVERS BLEED

Bricks containing 8 boosters (32 figures total)

Cases containing 3 bricks (128 figures total)

The math seems off here. Should it be 4 bricks to a case like the other sets, or 96 figures to a case for three 32-figure bricks? Or something else?

• Alosar Emanli and the Creatures from the Fallen Star
  
• Elgar Fletch and the Dark Army
  
• Kalgor Bloodhammer and the Ghouls Through the Breach

Each of these is compatible with the Beginner Box, but they're only listed under the Solo Adventures category in the adventure finder.

28,000 new PDF or physical Beginner Boxes and counting have gone out with the Humble Bundle. If you're new to the Box or Pathfinder in general, say hi!

The Beginner Box has been out since 2011, and there are quite a few folks who've been playing it all along. And there are lots of resources out there if you want to tweak or expand your game!

• Want a free online reference to the Beginner Box? See PFBeginner.com.
  
• Want more classes, like the ones in the Advanced Class Guide or Advanced Player's Guide, all for free? See EdOWar's blog.
  
• Want free Beginner Box-compatible creatures? See EdOWar's blog and the Wayfinder fanzine.
  
• Want free Beginner Box-compatible adventures? See PFBeginner.com and the Wayfinder fanzine, and Dan Sargent's Beginnerboxadventures.com.
  

If you have questions about playing or running the Beginner Box, this forum's a great place to ask!

I had some spare time (thanks, insomnia!) and took out my frustrations on the SRD5 PDF. Except for the monsters and magic items, I converted it to Markdown and removed the remaining PI content so I could more easily remix it into a bunch of other formats, search it, copy from it, and have my screen reader actually read it.

For instance, here's a really ugly website version of it, a Word version, and a stripped-down epub of it.

Props to John's work at 5esrd, but I figured this might help folks (especially OGL publishers) who need something offline or copyable, or gamers who need something friendlier to accessibility software. I'll keep tweaking this in my downtime, and it's up on GitHub if anyone wants to tinker.

It looks like the Weapon Master's Handbook is on two different URLs:

http://paizo.com/products/btpy9hdy has the prices and preorder link, but no description.

http://paizo.com/products/btpy9hdx has the description, but no price or preorder link.

Both have the same discussion thread, and both show up in search results.

Congratulations! Looking forward to some awesome encounters.

I'd love to see future map rounds require a specific or minimum pixel dimensions for the map image, and for the ppi/dpi setting to be a recommendation.

The dpi/ppi metadata is not useful for designers, cartographers, layout, or publishing. The pixel dimensions are. The rules, if they're designed to accurately model working for Paizo as a freelancer, should reflect this.

It's clearly confusing to follow the rules that let you submit an image that follows "the 72ppi requirement that could get you DQ'd" but has an unreadably low actual ppi by its pixel dimensions. Any image could follow that requirement, including a 1-pixel blank dot.

More importantly, that also suggests an entry could potentially violate the rules and be disqualified by having a readable, publishable, and correct actual ppi by pixel dimension but potentially be disqualified because the ppi/dpi metadata is not 72, even though the metadata has no bearing on its display in the contest or value to a cartographer.

I missed the timeout in the blog post thread to fix the missing folks from the Wayfinder list, so I've flagged it as a double post and put the list on a Google Doc. Sorry to everyone I left off the list--RPGGeek is not a reliable source, it seems.

Elvanna's out as of 4713 AR, having served her 100-year term.

Is there anything out there that confirms who the current queen is?

IN B4 "GET BACK TO WORK OMG THE ERRATA PRD SPAM RULES UR FAULT"

I know PFS scenarios don't have a subscription option like print products do, at least in part due to the Paizo store's subscription system not being designed for PDF-only releases that don't have a shipment date and opt-out grace period.

For those of us who'd like to grab all of a season's scenarios on their release date, without buying each of them individually, would it work better to offer a season pass?

For instance, I could pay $100 up front to have each of a season's 25-odd scenarios in my downloads as soon as they come out. I give up the ability to opt out of individual scenarios in exchange for the convenience. (And a little discount for throwing money at Paizo ahead of time wouldn't hurt. wink)

I'm officially pitiful!

Woo! Thanks, blog crew!

Who's already planning for it?

Never trust a goblin with an abacus.

Welcome!

Read Out Loud hasn't worked with some of my recent PDF purchases and updates, using Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 and Adobe Reader XI on Windows 7:

Technology Guide 1st printing: Body copy is tagged and reads fine. Document is fully tagged, watermarks are not read aloud.

Technology Guide 2nd printing: Body copy appears to be untagged; only the covers, images, page headers, and navigational sidebar have tags. Only the inside cover tables and the back cover copy are tagged and readable. All other pages read "Warning: Empty Page" or "Blank". Watermarks aren't read aloud.

Core Rulebook 5th and 6th printings, lite or full versions, single file: No tags. Reads the watermark aloud repeatedly, crashing Acrobat. None of the body text can be read aloud.

Monster Codex: Body copy is tagged and reads fine. Chapter title pages don't read at all ("Empty page" or "Blank"). Page headers and numbers are read aloud, but not the watermarks.

The Wounded Wisp: Scenario body copy is tagged and reads fine. The page headers are read aloud, but not the watermarks or page numbers. The first and third bestiary pages added after the scenario read fine, but the second page doesn't read at all.

Throughout, the use of dashes instead of minus signs results in negative numbers not being read aloud properly. The dash is skipped and only the number is read, so "–2 size" reads "two size" instead of "minus two size". A unicode minus sign (−) is visually and metrically similar in most fonts and would read aloud properly.

As I have the last two years, I'm building a Google Doc that tracks every item posted to the Critique My Item thread, and every review of every item.

Leave comments on the doc if you've got 'em! It's usually a perpetual WIP for months and isn't intended to be updated in real time; if you want to know if an item's been reviewed, the critique thread is always the best and most current source.

I'm taking the train from Portland and back. Anyone planning on riding train 508 north on May 21 or train 501 south on May 25?

Twelve characters and I haven't drank all the Numerian fluids yet?

Did you traverse space and time just to call the Technic League a bunch of haters?

Are you slap-happy and painfully literal?

Spam can include cross-posting the same information in multiple threads across multiple forums, repeated advertisements in several threads, or posts containing less than helpful content (such as "+1", "first post", or "grabbing popcorn").

Is it still OK to dot threads?

shodan no

Paizo Fans United is up too!

I'm working on a few spare-time projects right now, but in a few weeks I'd be open to starting and running a community project to build a print-and-play Sandpoint Box aimed at Beginner Box players.

There's some forum interest in having Paizo make such a box, and Erik Mona mentioned it about a year ago as "something I've been thinking about doing since we decided to put Sandpoint in the Beginner Box in the first place", so I'm wondering:

1. Would this be a bad idea to take up as a Community Use Policy project? Would I be stepping on some toes that I can't see yet? I don't see anything BB-related on the public editorial schedule, and it's been at least a year since we've seen any new official Paizo BB content--even free stuff.

2. Would anyone be interested in contributing to it?

As last year, I'm tracking the items and reviews posted to the 2014 Critique My Wondrous Item thread in a Google Doc.

If you posted an item, it should help you find reviews of your item. If you're reviewing items, it should help you find items that haven't been reviewed.

If you're just a fan, you can use it as an index to find any items put up for critique.

(If you're curious, here's last year's doc, which Ziv Wities and I worked on.)

If anybody wants to check if I've seen an item, pre- or post-cull, just send me a PM.

DO NOT REPLY IN THIS THREAD WITH ANY IDENTIFYING INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR ITEM. THAT'LL DISQUALIFY YOU. Just send me a PM!

If you don't have the item title, just send me a keyword or some details you remember. If I haven't seen it, I'll put it on my watchlist and let you know if I do.

I'm not reviewing items until the critique threads are posted to the boards after voting. This is purely an offer to notify folks wanting to confirm whether an item has shown up.

I save many (or all) of the items that come up in voting, and I know some of you all do as well, so as a distraction, here's how I'm saving items:

• In Firefox, I select the item, right-click, pick View Selection Source, and copy the HTML.
  
• I dump the HTML into an HTML-to-BBCode converter.
  
• I copy the generated BBCode to a keep, reject, or further review file, depending on what I want to do with that item. (For me, the further review file is for items I'll keep an eye out for in the post-RPGSS critique thread.)

Once I get on a roll, it's all doable within the minute it takes for the buttons to unlock.

Does anyone have a better HTML-to-BBCode solution? Maybe a bookmarklet that converts selected text to BBCode? Or maybe a notable item-archiving solution of their own?

Apologies if I missed any items or reviews. Doesn't include GM_Solspiral's Good/Bad/Ugly thread. Current as of this post's time/date. YMMV.

FRIDAY BEGINS HERE

Items on Page 1
Chelish Silver-Tongued Devil
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22
Gentleman's Ensnaring Cane
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19
Ghoulslayer Gloves
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22
Ethos Swarm Charm
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18
Porcine Pendant
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
Siegebreaker Cymbals
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
Amulet of the Grasping Soul
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
Candle of Distant Assurance
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
Fiddle of the Dance (reformatted)
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
Handkerchief of the Scoured Visage
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
Intellectual's Clay Pipe,
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
Wings, Resplendent Battle,
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
Time's Tide Pendant
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20
Orator's Torc
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
Orb of Aggravation
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
Elixir of Last Will
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
Shroud of Certain Return
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
Findeladlara's Brush
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
Hunter's Geas
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Garter of Hidden Fortune
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Ointment of Last Sight
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
Tabard of Cunning Tactics
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Chalice of Communal Dweomer
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Vest of Mongrelkind
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
First Light
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Shadow Sentry
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Tempest Regalia
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Tablet of Heretical Lore
Review 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Nethian Scroll Tube
Review 1, 2, 3, 4

Last graf:

the Hunting Vampires section (page 26 and 26)

Should be pages 26 and 27, as in the 4th list item above ("roles for vampire hunters on pages 26 and 27").

I'll be going up for my first PaizoCon now that I'm within driving distance! Anyone interested in splitting a room?

This is 100% my dumb opinion and following it as advice might or might not get you kicked out of RPGSS. I would love for the dumbest parts of this rambling rant to be called out, especially in how it relates to Superstar.

I haven't seen anyone write about Distant Worlds and its relationship to RPGSS--if someone has, please point me there. This is a clumsy attempt to fill that gap a little bit.

Distant Worlds is by far my favorite Pathfinder publication, and I imagine it will factor into at least a few Superstar 2013 entries.

Which means it might be good idea to revisit an important piece of advice in SKR's list that also comes up in the 2011 Superstar panel:

By "inventing" a magic item that does exactly what a piece of modern technology does, you haven't really invented anything, you've just reskinned it. It's not superstar to design a magical train, or a magical telephone, or magical cold medicine.

This goes for near-future or theoretically-possible technological items. Spider-Man's web-shooters technically don't exist, but they're plausible enough that someone could invent them, therefore wristbands of the striking webs aren't superstar (they also run into #9, the intellectual property violation). Batman's utility belt isn't superstar. And so on.

Not to say that these items aren't cool, but being cool only gets you so far in RPG Superstar.

Since Distant Worlds dives head-first into Sword-and-Planet gameplay, I have a creeping fear that we'll see (or, more likely, the judges will see and dump into their reject pile) tons of things-lasers, space suits, rockets, plasma swords, whatever-that run afoul of this rule.

Which, I think, still applies just as much with DW in the canon.

John Carter isn't modern

In a lot of ways, the Sword-and-Planet genre predates science fiction as we know it, even though modern S&P is greatly informed by it.

But Burroughs' A Princess of Mars turned 100 years old this year. As DW roots itself in S&P, and Barsoom is arguably the foundation of the genre, I think it's extremely important to remember that the context of S&P is far, far more late Victorian/turn-of-the-century than sci-fi.

That means if you're considering a S&P item, it might be a good idea to instantly discard sci-fi, however tempting it may be. No lasers, no rockets.

Steampunk, as popular and potentially fitting as it may be, is also a little behind scope--Burroughs' world was one that had seen the automobile and scooter. The French already had a national air force. Marie Curie won the 1911 Nobel Prize for chemistry. People were already watching the very first movies.

If we're tacking "punk" as a suffix to the world that birthed S&P, it's oil, but more broadly (and in my opinion, accurately) this is an era of groundbreaking awe-inspiring invention as opposed to the motifs of augmentation, scale, and efficiency that define so much of the steampunk aesthetic. It was a time of rapid, visible, tangible scientific discovery, the likes of which inspired Burroughs to write about civilization on Mars as much as it enabled Méliès to make Voyage to the Moon, much less imagine it.

None of these things exist in Golarion, but the flavor of the Earth history that inspired DW has to be accounted for when dipping into that playground.

Think about it this way: Minor tweaks to function and form of the inventions of the 40 years surrounding 1900 would have dramatically reshaped everything we know, do and use today. What tweaks to those turn-of-the-century forms and functions would create a civilization or society that could exist in the stars of Golarion, and could potentially interact with it and leave a Wondrous trace?

Invent what can't exist

My advice--which is probably not worth much, but I'll throw it out for discussion--is if you're planning to riff off DW in your Superstar entry, stay far, far away from anything that exists.

Don't just follow SKR's rule against modern devices; expand it, not just to what you might want to create, but what you know and understand about our universe.

The toughest thing for me to grasp sometimes with fantasy worlds like Golarion is that as much as we know about them, they know nothing about us, and as their world exists entirely in fiction, the laws of reality in each of our worlds mean nothing to each other unless a relationship is explicitly (or very strongly implicitly) defined.

In Golarion, we assume a lot of things. For instance, we assume most of Golarion's creatures and common sentient races breathe air like we do, water has the same effects on most humans in Golarion as it does to us on Earth. But if you're going to design an item that plays with the interplanetary (and interstellar) concepts of DW, throw out your understanding of our universe's physics. Forget about Earth. Turn off your science brain.

If it's magic, you don't have to justify it with science. If it's science, I don't want it in my magic item ...

(via)

If you're going to play with the rules of DW, remember that the rules of our universe don't necessarily apply unless explicitly described, and the presence of magic means the rules and limitations that do exist are also are ripe for exploitation--which is especially relevant for a Wondrous Item.

I'll re-iterate this with an example:

If it's out of this world, how in this world can someone craft it?

So a Wondrous Item that comes from DW may do some very modern-sounding things, in that the words "space" and "starship" and "terraformed" might crop up because DW explicitly describes those concepts.

But this is also a universe of aether, and

Just don't take it as an excuse to make a space shuttle, because that isn't the Pathfinder definition of Wondrous. We already know what a space shuttle is like; it's not fantasy anymore. A Gnomish Steve Jobs could possibly whip together a sort of GolariPhone, sure. Big deal--There's (already) a Spell for That(tm).

The key in SKR's rule is to avoid making something "plausible enough that someone could invent them." Mechanical inventions, and even minor magical items, are fundamentally mundane. Wondrous items are extraordinary. Superstar Wondrous items play around with the rules in creative ways.

But on the other side of the coin, Wondrous Items are still crafted items. They have costs. They can be reproduced with the right materials, knowledge, and spells. The crafting requirements for an otherworldly item may require some creative applications of the item-creation mechanics; DW does a good job suggesting spells for specific environments, which may help.

But if you're going down this sort of route for RPGSS, ask yourself what would be Wondrous and fantastic to someone who's never seen anything more advanced than a windmill, staring up at the stars, asking what could possibly be in all of that inky mess. Make that thing Pathfinder Wondrous and put it in that person's hands.

Worry about how to craft it once you've made it, and don't worry too much. Your job with a Wondrous Item is to supply the item, the wonder, and the instructions; it's the GM's job to fill in the why, or the history and backstory, or to determine how relevant it is to be able to craft it on Golarion.

Best of all, even if DW inspires the item, don't make the item require it if you can help it at all.

Judges have gingerly knocked niche items as less marketable, but niche items + attention to detail + great flavor - dumb mistakes = the kind of thing that's made it to the Top 32. If you can't unwedge a Distant Worlds-inspired item, I haven't seen any reason to hold back.

Just make sure your idea is a fantasy idea rather than a good implementation of real one.