The following document is a writeup to establish the events of Pathfinder gamemaker Paizo’s revocation of their Community Use Policy, its replacement with the Fan Content Policy.
Where it all began
At the start of 2023, Dungeons and Dragons gamemaker Wizards of the Coast, and their parent company Hasbro, suddenly released major changes to the Open Game License. This caused a massive outcry from the entire TTRPG community, as the OGL was meant to be a perpetual agreement that established the terms for anyone to make content for D&D, and based on D&D. As such, other TTRPG games such as Pathfinder were also affected, as well as every homebrew maker. Essentially, WotC tried to claim the rights to any usermade homebrew made from the OGL, perpetually, and justified this with a vague reading of the clause in the OGL that was commonly interpreted as the OGL being unchangable. This caused a massive backlash from the community and generally ran WotC and Hasbro’s reputations into the ground as they doubled down for a month, until they gave in, reversed the changes to the OGL, and released the same foundations of D&D under a Creative Commons License, which is an independent license that they can’t tamper with, essentially solving the issue for D&D 5e and earlier forever.
During this outcry, rival gamemaker Paizo took the side of the community, saying that this decision can’t just be dropped on everyone’s plates out of nowhere, promoting their own Pathfinder TTRPG as an alternative without such scummy practices. In addition, they pledged to make their own Open Gaming License, the Open RPG Creative License, or ORC. This would be an open OGL for any TTRPG system, managed by a separate nonprofit entity so that Paizo themselves had no control over it, saying that their legal experts would make sure the ORC would be waterproof to protect against incidents such as the OGL drama. This move was widely lauded by the communities.
During this time, Paizo’s president said that to account for the ORC, Paizo would have to change their current license for homebrew and other PF-related content, the Community Use Policy. He stated that the changes to this would be available for public comment at a later date, before going into effect, unlike the OGL changes that were just dropped on the community out of nowhere.
The CUP is revoked
On July 22th of 2024, a year and a half later, Paizo published a blogpost announcing that the CUP had been revoked, and replaced by the new Fan Content Policy. This was a legal move on their part, since the CUP did explicitly state that Paizo may revoke it at any given time. There had however been no preview for public comment at all, and the change was, like the OGL drama before, suddenly dropped and made official without prior warning, despite assurances from Paizo before.
Paizo assured that the new policy was a good thing – that it’d make it easier to monetize your Pathfinder content for creators. The offending item was briefly skipped over in the blogpost, saying “Most of what you could previously do with the Community Use Policy is still permitted under the Fan Content Policy except for making RPG products, which you’ll need to release through the Pathfinder or Starfinder Infinite storefronts (even for free if you want) from now on.“
This innocuous provision flew mostly under the radar since then. There were periodic posts and reddit threads from creators that read the new policy and saw the danger, but most people, through ignorance of the specifics or perhaps the good faith that Paizo had built up, weren’t aware of the implications.
On August 22 of 2024, one month later, a large post on r/rpg spread the issue to the wider TTRPG community and made waves. It outlined the issues with the FCP as following:
All RPG products had to be released on PF/SF Infinite. This has two major implications: to publish on said platform, you sign away the rights of your product to Paizo and Roll20, the owners of the platform, just as the OGL drama had you sign away your rights to WotC.
PF/SF Infinite did not allowed publishing under the OGL license. Pathfinder 1e, and Starfinder 1e, are still OGL-based games, and were therefore effectively banned from getting any new homebrew, as it could only be published on a platform where it wasn’t allowed to be published.
Due to the wording of the new policy, Digital Art of Pathfinder and Starfinder had to be commissioned through Infinite to be in compliance with the FCP. The platform does not support this.
Third party tools that use Paizo’s lore, such as the wiki or online interactive maps, were required to either never update again (to be grandfathered in), or seek a special agreement with Paizo, again mirroring one of the clauses of the modified OGL.
The various communities were understandably hurt by this action from Paizo, which had so vehemently opposed the earlier actions of their competitor, but now had tried to do the same, citing the hypocrisy of it all in the light of their earlier moral high ground, and the deceptive sneakiness with which they’d dropped the changes in spite of earlier statements.
Reinstatement of the CUP
This post caused a wave of complaints on other subreddits and on the Paizo forums. With enough bad publicity, Paizo was quick enough to, after a month of silence on the subject, backtrack on revoking the CUP and instead reinstating it alongside the FCP, for whomever wanted to use the latter instead.
In a followup blogpost, Paizo claimed the FCP’s changes were unintended, but large parts of the community were unimpressed by their previously lauded legal experts making such a mistake, saying that leaving terms like these on the table for a month after seeing the OGL the year before was not a mistake a legal expert would just make, but something done deliberately hoping it’d slip under the radar. In essence, they’d largely tried to do what Hasbro and WotC had tried the year before – and once again failed thanks to the communities refusing to take these changes lying down.
Sources
Yeah I’m kinda done with academics so just have the damn links, not citing this entire thing. You can click them and see who wrote it where.
July 22th Blogpost
Reddit post