Paizo Publishing has announced a line of fantasy novels set in the fantasy world of its Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.
The series of 300-page mass-market $9.99 paperbacks will kick off in September with Winter Witch by Elaine Cunningham, the author of many of the Dungeons & Dragons “Forgotten Realms” novels from Paizo’s competitor, Wizards of the Coast.
Cunningham also wrote the New York Times best-selling novel Dark Journey from the “Star Wars: The New Jedi Order” series.
“I’ve been waiting a very long time to write a story like Winter Witch — an adult version of a Slavic fairytale, set in a land that’s both sinister and beautiful,” said Cunningham in a press release. “The folks at Paizo are a joy to work with.”
Paizo, founded in 2002, published the official D&D magazines, Dragon and Dungeon, until it lost the license in 2007 when Wizards of the Coast took them back in-house and turned them into online-only publications. Around the same time, Wizards released D&D’s 4th Edition and Paizo created the Pathfinder RPG from the open-source framework of D&D 3.5, gaining an instant pool of customers who didn’t want to switch to all-new rules.
Other authors contributing to the range will include Paul Kemp and former Dragon magazine and Amazing Stories editor Dave Gross.
The novels will be sold through bookstores and hobby shops, as well as directly from Paizo.com and by mail-order subscription. They will be available as PDFs, and the company said “other electronic formats may be announced in the future.”
