Recent content by James Jacobs

Not for Paizo, but maybe for other game companies? Paizo is pretty permissive of its employees doing freelance work, be it work for Paizo or for yourself or whatever, as long as you have manager approval and it doesn't impact your ability to do your day job. Whether or not an individual employee...

I do: No one. These are new positions/titles/promotions to fit with our growth and expansion. It's a good thing, not a hidden bad thing! :-)

Sort of. The focus of our playtest was more on balancing player characters in encoutners and less on adventure construction playtesting. It's always awkward when we switch an edition, since the adventures we publish at that time have to be written before the rules are done, and thus before the...

Not as much. To me, the draw of Age of Worms (or Savage Tide, for that matter) being compiled into a hardcover is that this puts it all in one much more durable spot, in a format that can be bought and reprinted, and that isn't disrupted by advertisements. That's in part why I mentioned I'd be...

I would LOVE to see Age of Worms come back to the modern era, for WHATEVER system. Had a lot of fun helping create that and it remains one of my career highlights. It's 100% owned by Wizards of the Coast though, so what happens with it is their choice to make. Paizo doesn't own any of it, so...

Reliquary was considered, but we use that word too often for its real-world usage in adventures, and also it suggest ties to relics (a type of magic item we introduced in the Gamemastery Guide) that aren't appropriate, so we went with soul cage instead.

The idea is that they're imprisoning their own soul in a cage, so "soulcage" is a great word for it (and it has the advantage of immediately evoking the right idea in the reader as to what sort of thing it does). To a lich, a soul is not something to be valued. It's a liability. It's the key to...

Yay! I never owned a copy of this, but the cover was painted by a friend/boss/fellow North California Coast small towner!

As a regular Paizo customer, then I have to assume you enjoy our products and the writers we hire, and until we erode that assumption, you're safe to assume that we'll continue to produce products to the same level of quality that has made you a regular Paizo customer in the first place.

Try again, after I adjusted my response once my frustration and anger at your post cooled down enough for me to see my keyboard again.

Wow. I'm not going to "justify" any author's credentials to some random person on the internet. Regardless of who they are or what the project is. You only get to know that the authors are the right people for the job because we felt that they were the right people for the job, so we hired them...

Yup; we hired Legendary Games to do the first pass. We're deep in the second, internal dev pass for all of this now, and will likely be calling in more contractors in the future to help with the final edit/dev pass for the 5E stuff (we've got plenty of in-house 1E experts already).

We've handled it by hiring a lot of POC to write the book, and by making sure that we get more POC working on sensitivity reads and editorial passes. That was always a primary goal for this book, and making sure we got the right people for the job is part of why we're putting the book out next...

Huh... interesting. Especially since they got the location wrong—we're based in Redmond, not Seattle, so I'm not sure how much I'd trust the rest of the info, although for the purposes of the discussion of which company is more prepared to fund a trip to the moon or whatever, it'll work.

That process is still in the works, but we've worked with contractors to get it started and will likely need to hire more contractors to finish it up. And it's not the entire Adventure Path for those products—just monster and NPC stats that don't already exist in the associated rule set.