Under Section 5 of the Compatibility License it says.
In order to make use of the compatible content, your product must operate under and rely on the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Standalone game systems are in no event authorized hereunder.
You agree to use your best efforts to ensure that the licensed products are fully compatible with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game as published in August, 2009. Your products may additionally be compatible with other systems.
What exactly does that mean?
I am working on a campaign setting (which will be entirely free and non-commercial) that I would like to release with the "Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Compatible" logo.
The setting does not use some of the classes from the CRB (like paladins and monks) and others only with restrictions (rangers have the skirmisher archetype by default, rogues can not use the minor magic and major magic rogue talents).
Would that make the game not "fully compatible" and therefore ineligible for the License?
Even if there is no strict definition of what constitutes incompatible content, knowing the intent of that section would help me a lot.
Just as a heads up/for example:
If you check Little Red Goblin Games new campaign setting Necropunk you'll see it doesn't support spell-casting classes yet is still PF compatible. As an outsider, I'd say you are fine.
You do raise a good point Yora - I have wondered about this myself - just what is the line in the sand where tweaks become "incompatible"?
I found an older thread in which someone quoted "can you put some of the content from your product into Paizo adventures, and vice versa?".
Which raises the question what would be "some"?
I think I am actually pretty well on the safe side and just send the application once I have a "first final" version ready, but it would be nice if there could be any semi-official confirmation what the intent of that passage is.
Paizo seems to be quite generous and laid-back when it comes to these things, so I think it's mostly enough to go with an "elephant definition": Really hard to describe, but almost everyone knows one when they see one.
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The line between "compatible" and "not really compatible" is fuzzy at best. Basically, players need to be able to pick up your book, and use it with other Pathfinder books without encountering significant problems. The more you change fundamentals, the less likely that is.
For example, if your world doesn't use magic, can it be compatible? Probably. How about a world that doesn't use any of the standard races or classes, or anything in the Bestiary? Probably. Or what if you create a totally different combat system? Yeah, you can probably do that in a way that's compatible. But if you had a product that does *all* of those things at once, would most people feel like they're playing Pathfinder? Probably not.
It's pretty much impossible to give you a strict ruling here—all I can do is offer you this test: if you hand your product to a bunch of Pathfinder players, will they generally agree that it's the same game?
Okay, that works for me as an explaination of the "intent" of the paragrph. I think that's something most people can work with.
Thanks.