Paizo Publishing announces Pathfinder RPG

Back to my gaming roots for a moment.

Paizo (who has, to take a guess, grown tired of Wizards of the Coast's shenanigans with the D&D 4th Edition developers' kits) has announced the development and open playtesting of a D&D 3.5-compatible tabletop RPG called Pathfinder, after the adventure path series they started publishing after Wizards pulled their licenses to publish Dragon and Dungeon magazines.

Rather than convert their Pathfinder line to 4e, Paizo is developing their own ruleset based on 3.5e, and are conducting open alpha and beta tests. The alpha version of the rules may be found at the title link.

Having looked over the alpha version, I find what they have so far mostly good. I especially like the changes to combat maneuvers, but what I like most is the open testing; being able to see production in progress and possibly even influence it is exciting to me.

If you're into d20 tabletop gaming and aren't comfortable with the direction of 4e (or even just have a large collection of d20 sourcebooks that you'd like to keep using, like me) then I highly recommend checking out Paizo's initiative here and joining in the testing. Maybe we can keep up support for our game after WotC abandons it.