[Kickstarter] Magignosis

[Chamomile]

The way that Kickstarter works, it's best to have campaigns running about as often as not, which is why I'm doing another one. I'm not going to try and sell you on how cool the classes are, because I posted them for free already. I stand by them and all (I fixed the level 16 artificer power I was dissatisfied with, even), but you already have them.

Instead, I'm going to try and sell you on the importance of keeping 3e alive. Pathfinder 2 is going to drop in August of this year, and when it does, I expect the audience for Pathfinder conversions of my adventures to Balkanize between the editions. The last vestiges of 3e will slowly wilt away until they are too few to be viable, at which point I will be designing exclusively for 5e. Most other publishers who haven't already jumped ship to 5e will follow the same trend, and Paizo will almost certainly have ceased releasing concept for PF1 long before then. The last major source of 3.X compatible content of any kind is very possibly about to die, thus bringing what was once the world's greatest roleplaying game to a whimpering demise. I can't swoop in and steal all of Pathfinder's audience, because my adventures simply do not have that reach, but I can try and preserve the 3.X audience I already have against the coming apocalypse, and so long as that audience remains intact, I can justify continuing to convert my 5e adventures to 3.X and continue to grow that audience by offering the 3.X version in addition to 5e versions when Kickstarting.

Magignosis is step one in my harebrained scheme to build a nuclear bunker from which to ride out that apocalypse, a series of books from which I hope to build a Pathfinder alternative that will allow me to retain my 3e audience even if Paizo pulls the plug on 3rd-party PF1 content after PF2 releases, and to give my PF audience a ship other than PF2 to jump to if they decide PF1 is sinking and they need to bail. I think having a backwards compatible PF1 successor could be popular enough to justify continuing to write 3.X content, but only if I already have the successor on the market when PF2 drops and disaffected players begin drifting away from it. This is almost impossible to Kickstart and I doubt I'll have the spare income needed to produce them out of pocket until long after the PF audience has dissolved. As mentioned, I can't pick up all of those disaffected PF1 fans drifting away from PF2 because I just don't have the marketing reach, but I can't get any of them if I don't have something ready to go when they start drifting.

I'll mention the $1 I brought up last time I did one of these: If you like the idea of what I'm doing but don't care enough to actually buy a .pdf, a pocket change pledge will hit far above its weight class in terms of boosting my visibility, although only if it comes in near the beginning of the project, when there's still plenty of time for lots of Kickstarter regulars to see it in their feed.