Printing Pawns?


Community Use

Envoy's Alliance

Quick question: Can I use art from the Paizo blog to print a cardboard pawn? It's just for personal use, I even own the player pawn set but nothing in there matches what I need...


Not-a-lawyer. It probably would be argued based on fair use. But I don't fully understand fair use laws, and I certainly don't have enough context of your own situation to know how the judgement would go.


Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Starfinder Superscriber

I think they are reworking their 'licenses' however so things may have changed some. However the Community Use license was such that any art from the Paizo blog that was not a Photo was available for use in Community Use Projects. There were several requirements, including any such use being free, not paywalled, etc. I believe it also included a provision that you weren't allowed to edit/modify the image.

So certainly you couldn't sell pawns you made with such images, but if you aren't selling them and just have them to use in games. However if, say you were a 'professional GM' and you never let people use the pawns unless you were in one of your 'paid' gm sessions, that would trigger the commercial clause and that license wouldn't be valid any longer. It might be that if you make a PawnSheet with images from the BLOG and print it off to use personally. To technically leverage the Community Use Policy for its creation, you might need to be willing to send anyone who asks how you made it, and asks if you can share it with them without charging them.

So I think, using the BLOG images as long as they aren't photos, you'd probably be relatively safe for personal use in friendly games and such as long as you don't modify them or they aren't photos. (They mention that photos they sometimes do not actually own the photos, so they can't license them)

Also note, you said off the BLOG, ripping images out of actual products would be different, that license wouldn't explicitly enable that.

On a separate note, from fair use standpoint, making a pawn might seem somewhat similar to making a VTT pawn for a personal VTT, or Importing a map into such a VTT. It seemed like there have been representatively of Paizo posting that it was ok to extract the images for VTT play as long as you owned the PDF source and were using it for personal use.

[Not an IP lawyer, just having read the OGL and CUP before in the past, and made note of other posts asking about map usage and BLOG images before.]


Flagged for wrong forum as this definitely isn't a (game) rule question or discussion. This belongs under Community Use forum I think.

As long as this is for personal use only it's probably allowed.

But hopefully we can get some Paizo personnel to respond.

Community and Social Media Specialist

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The quick answer is: If the art has appeared in a blog and is for personal use, you are good to go. Moving it to the correct forum as well.

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