Paizo

Paizo Publishing
Alignment	Chaotic Good
Divine Rank	AAA
Pantheon	Tabletop
Portfolio	Pathfinder, ORC
Domains	Actual Listening to Fans
Home Plane	Washington, United States
Worshippers	The former fans of D&D following the Pinkerton incident.
Favoured Weapon	Adventure Paths

Paizo Publishing is the company behind Pathfinder and Starfinder and the former publisher of Dragon and Dungeon magazines from 2002-2007. While they had spent years essentially being a distant second compared to their former employers at Wizards of the Coast, they've recently found themselves thrust into the spotlight as a major alternative RPG.

Founding

As mentioned above, Paizo got their start writing the old Dragon and Dungeon magazines. Back when Hasbro bought WotC, a whole bunch of people from the company jumped ship rather than see it get butchered from the inside. About a year after the purchase, Hasbro started slicing off or shutting down a bunch of stuff they got from buying Wizards. Paizo was started up so that the magazines wouldn't die, and took on all the magazine staff still working at Wizards. It was during this time that they started writing their first Adventure Paths (Savage Tide and Age of Worms) and, eventually, the Inner Sea Guide, the origins of what would become Pathfinder.

Along with the D&D mags, Paizo also took over Star Wars Insider and Polyhedron from Wizards, and later tried starting a generalist gamer magazine Undefeated and a relaunch of Amazing Stories -- neither of which lasted more than about a year. SW Insider didn't last that long with Paizo either, moving to a different publisher due to politicking over the official Star Wars fan club.

When 4E was around the corner, Hasbro made Paizo give back the magazines, after which they were replaced with a digital subscription. With nothing better to do, Paizo decided they'd abandon ship and started up Pathfinder as its own RPG that's based upon their prior work in 3.5E; the rest is history.

In 2022, Paizo started releasing content for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition starting with a conversion of one of their popular adventure paths, Kingmaker. While people were quick to accuse this on the failure of their own game's new edition, what they all forgot was the fact that this was a backer goal for Owlcat Games' game of the same AP, and that they had another company port it all to begin with. Hell, that same conversion also had a conversion for PF2E, so it was clear this was just an attempt to loop in more cash.

ORC

In 2023 however, everything changed when Wizards attacked. Releasing the 1.1 1.2 edition of the OGL and attempting to destroy the 1.0a version, people thought this would be the end of Paizo, whose flagship titles originated from exploiting the license to make their own offshoot. While Pathfinder 2E was easy enough to just split off the OGL thanks to being more than just 3.X, Starfinder would find itself in that precarious situation by being essentially 3.PF but sci-fi.

Think again. They only kept the OGL in PF2 books to extend the open license to PF 3rd party because, again, this game wasn't nearly as unoriginal. Instead, they announced the creation of the Open RPG Creative License (shortened to ORC, funnily enough) with the help of several other publishers and lawyers who helped pen the original OGL. Under this initiative, they have chosen to make an open-source system-agnostic document for all tabletop games, all in response to Wizards trying to do the opposite. Even better, the ORC is being specifically made with a clause that it can't be revoked later like Wizards is trying to do with OGL as well as being set up in such a way that no company can twist it to their favor by being set up with an uninvolved third party. Time will tell whether this will end favorably, though for now Paizo has stated they will fend for itself and other companies like Kobold Press and Chaosium in court if need be.

And if anyone wants to put the contrast between the two any further, just remember that Wizards hired the fucking Pinkertons to beat someone up for a mistake that wasn't their fault and Paizo had their employees form their own labor union - for whatever good it'd do for a bunch of sweaty neckbeards to negotiate pay rates.

This transition against the OGL has also given them a significant headwind, as in the direct aftermath of the OGL 1.2 reveal and their counterproposal in the ORC, they've managed to see a massive surge in sales as players bailed from 5E to learn other mainstream systems. To capitalize on this, they've already announced a remaster of PF2E that will be further divorced from its D&D roots while also adding a significant amount of errata and being published under the new ORC, while Starfinder is looking to see similar changes but wasn't obliquely mentioned as using the ORC.