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I've been working on a setting for a few years now that I use in writing and games with friends and that I intend to make available for public use for free. It is not directly connected to Golarion, uses none of its lore or settings, its ethnicities, its deities, or the like, and is more heavily inspired by JRPGs, Anime, Manga, Light Novels, Web Novels, and the like, as well as more traditional fantasy novels and sources. However, it was built with the assumption that it runs on 1st Edition Pathfinder, uses the Classes, Spells, rules, mechanics (including many variant and supplemental rules), and a fair amount of 3PP and Homebrew content besides.
It is also not compliant with the Paizo's current standards, and not only because I'm an amateur hack working entirely on his own. The setting absolutely contains erotic (and LGBTQ+ friendly) content, slavery, and other subjects common in the inspirational material, some of which would need trigger warnings. It's a smutty, violent, somewhat dark world aimed at a more mature audience than Paizo's current fare and would probably be looking at an R to X movie rating rather than the preferred PG-13 and lower.
That this was a hang-up for Paizo's use policies on unofficial content was not something I'd realized when I first started work on the eventual public version. Among other things, slavery hadn't been booted from Golarion at the time. It probably didn't help that I'd assumed the slightly naughty content of the early Pathfinder setting was tacit approval of similar and more, but that's on me.
That said, one of the reasons why I considered making this setting publicly available was to promote continued 3rd Party support for the first edition of the game; it seems clear to me that there are still fans of it out there and that having a shared setting with relatively few restrictions (and the audience it brings) available to them to create in might encourage people to continue or pick back up their support of the edition.
However, this aspect of the work is meaningless if it runs afoul of Paizo's own permissions. I'd be better served simply creating my own system, which is an extra layer of complexity, difficulty, and time consumption I'd prefer to avoid on top of negating any possible encouragement towards would-be 1e creators. As such, I'm looking for an official response on the subject of whether or not I am allowed to actually do this or whether I should Cease & Desist, so to speak, and start revising terminology and building a new system for it or just cancel the public aspect of the work entirely and stick to personal use. What are the permissions for this sort of thing, if any, and the restrictions?
If it's your own setting for pf1, you wouldn't need the community use policy in the first place, you'd just use the OGL and cite any Paizo or 3pp books you use open game content from.
(note: I am not a lawyer, but this is my understanding of the licensing)
That's promising.
If you are only using rules everything you are doing should fall under the OGL. You may still have to change names of some feats or features if they are Golorian proper nouns.
For instance you couldn't have the Ranger archetype "Sable Company Marine" listed, but you could use it and give it a different name like "Sky Rider" and put Inner Sea Combat pg 43 in the OGL Credits for where to find the rules.
At least I think this is how this works definitely consult the OGL before release but it is definitely the OGL that covers what you want to make the CUP or FCP doesn't cross with what you are doing I believe.
Umu. The problem I have is the uncertainty. It is just game mechanics, not proper names, at least, so there's that.
Someone at Paizo isn't really gonna help you out with this. You just need to read the various licenses and Policies and see which one works for your project. As a 1E project that uses the rules of 1e the OGL is 100% what you have to use. Weather you also need or want to use the CUP is dependent on if you want to use the limited Golorian names, logos, art ect. Granted by the CUP. Based on your description of your project I don't think you need the CUP. But you can't get around the OGL while using 1E rules that is the only way to use them.
Hmmm. Time to bone up on that one again, then. Tfw relying on WotC.