Community & Social Media Specialist
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Welcome to Paizo! If you’ve found your way to this thread, you’re probably interested in one or a few Paizo products and might be curious about playing games in the community. I’m happy to say that you’ve come to the right place! The Paizo Community Forums are a wonderful way for you to interact with other members of the community to make gaming groups, discuss rules, ask advice, hype up a new game, or even just talk about what you had for lunch today. I’m Maya, the Community and Social Media Specialist here at Paizo, and in this thread, I’ll walk you through who we are, what some of our games are, and how you can get the most out of our forums!
Paizo is a publisher of roleplaying games, accessories, and card games with lots of employees based around the Pacific NorthWest, but we’re expanding! We now have employees in Indiana, Colorado, and even Canada! Basically, if it snows a lot and there’s a high concentration of nerds, some of those nerds are probably Paizo people! We used to make magazines, which you can still find here, but these days, our main focuses are the TTRPGs Pathfinder and Starfinder, which I will walk you through in a bit more detail below, Paizo Games like Pathfinder Quest, Starfinder Infinity Deck, the upcoming 13 Omens, and more! Our name, Paizo, comes from the Greek word “paiðzw,” and one of our cofounders, Johnny Wilson, thought it would be fitting as it means, “to play.” At our very core, we’re a company that enjoys making and playing games that bring people together.
Pathfinder is a tabletop roleplaying game that takes place across a vast array of worlds full of magic and adventure. From an idea only you can uniquely conjure, create your player character, suit up with spells and the tools you need to survive and thrive, and begin your journey battling monsters, unscrupulous foes, and make all sorts of friends along the way!
In the Pathfinder Player Core, you’ll find everything a player needs to learn how to play the Second Edition of the game! It’s got the rules of how to play, a walkthrough of how to build your character, rules to advance your character through play, and more! You can play as a Druid gnome, like our Iconic Lini, journeying from the Lands of the Linnorm Kings, communing with animals and nature and deriving strength of self from the earth around her.
Expand your character imagination even further with Pathfinder Player Core 2, adding even more ancestries, classes, archetypes, and more to the mix! If you’re already familiar with TTRPGs, Pathfinder, or you’re just meticulous and love options, this book allows players to take further leaps through their adventure. With Pathfinder Player Core 2, you now have the option to play as a goblin Alchemist, like the Iconic Fumbus, using pictographic runes to remember the formulas of a plethora of incredible potions and elixirs.
If you’re curious about running games yourself, or you’re your friend group’s “forever GM,” you’ll need the Pathfinder GM Core, which has everything you need to build your story and lead your party into their adventures!
Another great way to get started with Pathfinder is with the Pathfinder Beginner Box! TTRPGs as a whole can be daunting, and that’s why we wanted to make it extra easy for beginners of both the game itself and TTRPGs in general to start adventuring! The Pathfinder Beginner Box is a great way to dip your toes into Pathfinder, or get them chomped off by something lurking in the dark!
What’s even better than traveling with your friends in a land of fantasy? Traveling with them IN SPACE! Stafrinder takes your TTRPG adventures and launches them into the galaxy, exploring worlds both familiar and unknown! If you enjoyed Pathfinder, or if you’re looking for a more science-fiction way to start your roleplaying hobby, Starfinder may be exactly what you’re seeking! And last year, we made Starfinder better than ever with the release of its Second Edition, fully compatible with Pathfinder! For now, here are some helpful places to start.
Just like with Pathfinder, we’re making a Starfinder Beginner Box, a starting adventure for players and an introductory “Game Master's Guide” to set up GMs and players alike for success on their journeys through the stars. You can make your own character, or, if this is your introduction to this type of game, there are four pregenerated character sheets you can use to jump right in!
Last year, we released Starfinder Second Edition, with the Starfinder Player Core and more! The Second Edition of Starfinder is fully compatible with Pathfinder, allowing players and GMs to incorporate Starfinder characters into the Pathfinder world and vice versa, and the Player Core is a crucial place to start! In addition to creating a bridge between our two games, the Second Edition adds refined versions of familiar classes, the spellcasting mystic, the diligent soldier, the inquisitive envoy, and the cosmic solarian, adding even more ways to explore the galaxy to the game!
GMs can take their adventures even further in the galaxy with GM Core, which has expanded rules for writing challenging encounters for your players, rules subsystems to allow any creative mind to fully flesh out their idea into a full campaign, and advice aimed to make you even more incredible at your craft! The game has heaps of aliens and ancestries to enjoy, but if you’re looking for more options, don’t forget to check our Galactic Ancestries, Alien Core, and the Galaxy Guide to expand your worlds even forther! Looking for Tactical Starship Combat? That will be released in Tech Core this fall, along with the return of two of your favorite classes, the technomancer and the mechanic!
As a side note and a message to all the GMs out there, if you haven’t played a game of either Pathfinder or Starfinder as a player, I really hope you do so! From me and all the other players in our community, we thank you for the time and effort it takes to run these campaigns and build these worlds and stories for our characters. We’d be nowhere without you! That being said, take this message as an official reminder that you’re allowed to be a player sometimes too. Ask someone in your gaming group if they’ll switch roles for a one-shot or two! You can find adventures like the Dawn of the Frogs, Murder in Metal City, and more in our Game Night line!
The Paizo Forums are here for you to engage with the community in a myriad of ways! If you’ve encountered a rule in Pathfinder Second Edition, and you’re stuck on it, ask our community members in the Rules Discussion forum! We even have a similar forum for First Edition rules here! We also have a place for Starfinder Second Edition Rules Discussion and a place for First Edition as well!
Our games generally involve playing with groups of people, and you can also use the forums to find players to join your party! If you play online, you can either post a new thread or respond to a thread in the Recruitment forum, and if you’d like to play in person, the Pathfinder and Starfinder Stream & Actual Play Forums are a good way to see what games are happening at a friendly local game store nearby. We even have a place for you to talk about things that are entirely off topic from anything at Paizo, including places around the world you’re interested in visiting if you had the chance!
As a word for the wise, our staff will not be answering any rules questions via email or social media correspondence. The best way to get your rules questions answered is to pose them here in the forums in the proper place! It’ll either get answered by someone in the community who had the same problem you had or a dev may stumble upon it and answer it themselves! If you find anything that is an error in printing, like a typo or something printed in one of our books that ended up in the wrong place, please let us know here in the forums as well! The dev team goes through the forums to see if there are any errors we missed that we can correct and adds them to Errata like these so they can be corrected in future printings of those books. So, in addition to finding friends in the forum space, please remember to utilize it also as a way for us to make the books even better!
While we do want everyone on our forums to have a great time meeting new friends and discussing our games, we are committed to making sure our forums remain a safe and welcoming environment to all walks of life that interact with it. We have written up some Community Guidelines for how to interact courteously with others in the forums. As you discuss our games, there are going to be instances where people disagree, and that’s perfectly ok! There is nothing wrong or bad about not seeing eye to eye with a few people you come into contact with, but we do want to make sure that all parties that disagree are being respectful to each other even with their differing opinions. If you see that someone has gone against the Community Guidelines, please flag the comment for our Moderation Team to review.
The forums are not the only place you can engage with our community! We are active on Facebook, Bluesky, Instagram, Tumblr, Youtube, and Twitch! If you leave a comment on any of those platforms, I’ll see it! I’ll answer questions there as quickly as I can. We’ll also use those platforms to announce upcoming releases and all the fun things going on in the world of Paizo.
If you’re interested in playing games regularly with your local friends, you should definitely check out our Pathfinder Society Organized Play Program and/or our Starfinder Society Organized Play Program! Both societies are a great way for you to play Starfinder and Pathfinder games regularly, locally in person or even online!
Thank you again for joining our Paizo Community!
We can’t wait to see what adventures you’ll go on, what questions you have, and where your journeys will take you! With the exception of queries about the rules, if you have any questions in regards to a Paizo product that was not answered either in this post, our website, or anywhere you saw in our forums, I’m always here to help! Send me an email to community@paizo.com and I’ll do my best to get you what you need. Thank you for joining us, and I hope to see you around the forums!
Best,
- Maya (xe/xem/they/them)
Community And Social Media Specialist for Paizo Inc.