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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Jacobs" data-source="post: 5188013" data-attributes="member: 23937">The primary reason is that we want to be able to keep some of what we do to Paizo. All of our rules, from the core rulebook and bestiary out to 99.99999% of the rules we release in our Adventure Paths, modules, and other lines of books are completely open (so far, the only two things that aren't open are two monsters from Adventure Paths that we only got permission to print once and not to make open content), so on the rules side of things, that content is more or less free for anyone to do anything they want with. Such as the (awesome!) project this thread is getting off the ground.The world of Golarion, though, is something we're keeping closed so that we can control it and, frankly, profit from it. This consists of all the world flavor and proper nouns and background and such—everything that makes Golarion Golarion and not some other setting.To use a movie analogy; think of the open rules as the machines you use to tell stories: these open rules are basically cameras and tools and resources you use to create a movie. The world of Golarion and the stories in it are the actual movies. By adding to the overall toolbox of the RPG industry by making our rules open, we enable a lot more folks to build "movies" of their own (after all... that's exactly what we did at Paizo with the 3.5 SRD), but we have to be able to make our own movies as well, and we don't really want to let many others make movies based on our stuff.Put another way: As rewarding and fun as it was for me to get to build content and adventures and the like for the world of Greyhawk with articles like the Demonomicon, or adventures like Savage Tide or Age of Worms or Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk... it's MUCH more satisfying and rewarding to build a game world that we own ourselves and not one owned by another company.By the same extension, using the Pathfinder rules to build your own world for a living campaign will be, I suspect, FAR more rewarding from just "visiting in Golarion."</blockquote>

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