Paizo, makers of the popular Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, have announced that they have changed their Pathfinder submission guidelines. While Paizo previously allowed Pathfinder submissions through its Open Call program, it found that the responses it received to its request for Pathfinder Society (Paizo’s Pathfinder ‘living campaign’) Scenarios were often not able to be worked into the metaplot of the ongoing season. Paizo also found that the existing Pathfinder submission guidelines, which requested only a few hundred words, was insufficient for them to properly judge the author’s ability to craft an entire adventure, including stat blocks. “The end result,” Paizo’s Mark Moreland noted on the official Pathfinder blog, “was that we weren’t getting submissions we could easily use, and the already difficult task of getting one’s foot in the door as one of Paizo’s writers became even more challenging for those submitting queries.”
Given these difficulties, Paizo has now altered their Pathfinder submission guidelines to request “2,000-word mini-adventures containing one or two tiered encounters and using GameMastery Map Packs and Flip-Mat lines.” Paizo notes that these “Pathfinder Society Quests” will give them greater flexibility in getting publication-worthy material to print faster (because of the self-contained nature of the adventure) as well as giving Paizo a better sense of the author’s overall capabilities in drafting Pathfinder adventures. You can learn more about Pathfinder on the official web page, as well checking out the new Pathfinder submission guidelines. If you would like to see what a Pathfinder Society Quest actually looks like, Paizo has published Ambush in Absalom, a free quest for levels 1 through 5 by Moreland that follows the PCs investigating a Pathfinder that has gone missing in the sewers underneath the city of Absalom. I really appreciate that Paizo went ahead and published the first quest after announcing their new Pathfinder submission guidelines, since it should be helpful (I would expect) with writers trying to draft their own.
