Pathfinder 2E What's Happening With Pathfinder 2E 3rd Party Licensing?

At Paizocon this weekend, some information was released about the plans for the upcoming third party publisher licensing (3PP) for Pathfinder 2E (thanks to Owen KC Stephens for filling me in on this!)

There is a Pathfinder 2E compatibility license coming; and the Pathfinder 1E compatibilty license is not ending.

If you're a third party publisher who has products available on paizo.com or through the US distributor Alliance, you can apply for an early copy of the Pathfinder 2 ruleset. To do so, you need to contact licensing@paizo.com. Those rules will be sent out in June.

 

[trancejeremy]

But is there going to a system reference document for 3rd parties? Paizo had the "Pathfinder Reference Document" or PRD which just had the open content from their books, but they killed that off in favor of a fan site that includes non-open content, which is basically worthless to publishers.

 

[Nylanfs]

I don't mind them having the non-open content, if they could clearly mark what is OGL, what is IP, and what is non-OGL.

Also, are there any changes expected in the Community Use Policy? That's what we use at PCGen.

 

[Kaodi]

Archives of Nethys still hosts the Legacy PRD, and most of the stuff on that website lists its source. It might be harder to work with but I would not call it useless...

 

[trancejeremy]

You're right - it's actually worse than useless - it's dangerous. The first rule of writing d20 stuff back in the day was to put away your books and work only from the SRD, otherwise you might inadvertently include something that's not open content. Many companies ignored that and ended up infringing copyright. Granted, few were ever punished and these days it's easier to just remove something from a PDF than it is to scrap a run of printed books, but it's still dangerous. Fan sites/products and open content should never be mixed, they are two completely different licenses

And the trouble with most websites that have open content is they really don't list the correct section 15. Section 15 is vital, you need to include a products entire section 15 in your product if you use content from it. But all too often, they'll just list the title of that product and nothing else.

 

[Nylanfs]

We tried to get early access for PCGen, but couldn't since we aren't using the Compatibility License, only the Community Use.