Making It Yours
This engine was designed to be built on. Some well-worn paths, lightest touch first.
House rules first, schema second
Most table variants — free archetype, automatic bonus progression, gradual ability boosts, a harsher dying track — need no schema work at all. Write the ruling into an always-on GM instruction, or a Rules/ page it cites, and play. Promote a variant into schemas and formulas only when it changes numbers the sheet computes, and remember the field budget: at 199 of 200 top-level fields, adding one means nesting or removing one first.
Automatic bonus progression is the exception worth knowing about. If you'd rather not run the treasure-by-level treadmill, granting potency and striking equivalents by level is the standard fix — and because fundamental runes are read off item fields, that variant is an instruction plus a bonuses row, not a formula rewrite.
New content in the existing grooves
The fastest expansion is more nouns: an ancestry with heritages, a background, a subclass, a rack of feats, a regional bestiary. Chapter 3 has the per-type conventions, and the bonuses contract does the integration for you. Two things to keep honest: the association fields that pickers filter on, and traits and rarity, which are how the rules find each other.
A new class is the largest single job in the project — initialProficiencies, an advancement table, features rows for twenty levels, a spellcasting track if it casts, and at least two subclasses with focus spells. Copy @Missing file or @Missing file and work down the fields rather than starting from a blank file.
Building a setting on top
The system layer is setting-agnostic; Thornmill Crossing is the model for everything above it: a location with hooks (@Missing file), an encounter built to the printed budget (@Missing file), three finished pregens (@Missing file, @Missing file, @Missing file), and a game start that opens mid-scene (@Missing file). Replace the hamlet, keep the shape. Set the project's image style once in settings so generated art lands in one world. And use your ten free trigger slots — a world with its own triggered instructions plays like a place, not a rulebook.
What you must not import
Paizo's setting is not licensed and is not here. No Golarion, no named deities, no Absalom, no iconics, no Pathfinder Society, no proper nouns lifted from the books, no Paizo art or trade dress. The rules are yours to use; the world is not. Build your own — that is the more interesting half anyway.
Shipping it
Before you publish a project derived from this one, the ORC License asks four things of you, and @Missing file is the template:
- Carry the ORC Notice naming the license and its Library of Congress registration.
- Carry the Attribution Notice listing every upstream Licensed Material — the Player Core, GM Core, and Monster Core credits in full, plus this project — and say how you want to be credited in turn.
- Carry a Reserved Material Notice naming your own trademarks, characters, settings, and storylines. Your world is yours; say so explicitly.
- Note any of your own material you are expressly designating as Licensed Material, if any.
Then: don't use the Pathfinder marks, don't imply Paizo endorsement or compatibility certification, and make your own cover art. The ORC License is why this project can exist, and passing it forward intact is the whole price.