Game RPG Pathfinder:Main Page

The Open Game License released during the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons led to widespread adoption of the system by other publishers, and to a tsunami of D&D-compatible material. These books were of widely varying quality; some were well thought through and carefully developed and expanded on the original material in interesting and imaginative ways, while other books were worthless shovelware churned out to make a quick buck. Many RPG companies that made their name with third-edition supplements are still around today and still relatively major players in the RPG industry—Kobold Press, Green Ronin, Goodman Games. But perhaps no third-party company made as much of a mark on the third-edition D&D scene as Paizo, not least because it had been the publisher of D&D's official magazines, Dungeon and Dragon. It was largely through these publications that Paizo really made a name for itself and became well known to the RPG community.

The roots of Dungeon and Dragon magazines go back far beyond Paizo, beyond third-edition D&D, and even beyond Wizards of the Coast. They were both launched by TSR, the company that created Dungeons & Dragons, Dragon in 1976 and Dungeon a decade later. They would remain in-house publications until Wizards of the Coast bought TSR in 1997, and for some years thereafter, until in 2002 it decided to narrow its focus and offered to farm out publication of the magazines. Two former Wizards of the Coast employees and a game designer with extensive experience in magazine publication formed a new company, Paizo, with the purpose of acquiring the license. Paizo's work with Dungeon and Dragon would be widely popular with D&D fans, but would last only five years; in 2007 Wizards of the Coast decided not to renew the license. For all practical purposes, this was the end of these classic magazines; for another six years there would be digital publications bearing the names of Dungeon and Dragon, but they were pale shadows of what the magazines had once been. In 2013 even that ended, to be replaced two years later by an unexciting app called "Dragon+", but that petered out within seven years and forty-one issues and would have no successor (at least, not yet).

But while the end of Paizo's license was the end of the magazines (at least in physical form), it was not the end of Paizo. By this time Paizo had branched out into other products for 3.5E Dungeons & Dragons, one of the most popular being its "adventure paths". This product line, however, was put in jeopardy by the end of 3E D&D and of the Open Game License. Paizo hoped Wizards of the Coast would release fourth edition under a similar license, but it became increasingly clear that they had no intention of doing so—there was a "Game System License" for fourth-edition D&D, but it wasn't a true open license and its terms were so unfavorable that few publishers wanted anything to do with it, Paizo included. So how could they stay in business, and continue their adventure paths, if they couldn't use the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons? Well, even if fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons wasn't under an Open Game License, the license still applied to the third edition, and if making adventures for a discontinued game system was an unpromising prospect, Paizo could stay in business by making their own game system using the Open Game License, and continue their adventure paths under that license. And so that's what they did.

The first edition of Pathfinder was very close to 3E Dungeons & Dragons—very intentionally so, since Paizo wanted it to be compatible with old D&D products, not excluding their own previous publications. Golarion, Paizo's flagship campaign setting, even seeded in locations that seem to have been specifically designed to allow certain famous D&D adventures to be run there—many of the adventures made for D&D's Ravenloft setting could have a home in Golarion's land of Ustalav, for instance, and Golarion even included a crashed spaceship on a mountain that called back to the classic D&D adventure "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks". As the line continued, Paizo did add more original content and expand the game beyond its D&D 3E origins, with new classes and other content that hadn't existed in D&D. Finally, in 2019, Paizo released a second edition of the game, and divested it further from the D&D 3E ruleset. Certainly there are still many remnants of its D&D roots—it still uses the same six D&D attributes, for instance, and most of the same core races and classes—but it's much more of its own thing ruleswise, and has more of its own flavor.

And then when Wizards of the Coast attempted in early 2023 to revoke the Open Game License completely, Paizo found it necessary to scrub out even more of what remained from the 3E D&D Open Gaming Content. (In the face of enormous backlash, Wizards of the Coast did eventually relent regarding the license revocation, and even went so far as to release the 5E System Reference Document under a Creative Commons license, but the damage had largely been done, and many companies leery of what other absurdities WotC might try in the future still wanted to distance themselves from it as much as possible.) Hence the current "Second Edition Remastered" line, published not under the now-tainted Open Game License but under a new license created by Paizo with input and advice from many other publishers, the "Open RPG Creative License" (ORC).

Pathfinder is among the most rigidly structured and formulary of major role-playing games today, with a strict class and level system and sharply defined choices of abilities characters may gain at each level. There are enough options, however, to still allow for a fair variety of characters and playstyles, though of course much less so than in a more open-ended system. Unlike many RPG publishers, Paizo doesn't seem to offer any quickstart adventures or free light versions of the rules, but most of the Pathfinder rules and content—excepting only some setting-specific material—have been released under open licenses and are freely available online on sites like the Open Gaming Network and the Archives of Nethys.