A Tale of Two Covers
Friday, August 1, 2014

The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Advanced Class Guide is only a few weeks from release, and we're all getting excited about what the book has to offer. Over the last several weeks, we've revealed a ton of details about the 10 classes in the book, from hints at their game details to a look at the backgrounds of the iconic characters that represent them in the book's art. Looking over the final hardcover here on my desk, I'm enormously proud of the work our team has put into it, and I'm grateful for the tireless efforts of our playtesters, who made the Advanced Class Guide shine with their diligent testing and commentary. We could not have done this book without you, and we're all really pleased with how it came together.

With one major exception.

The cover of the Advanced Class Guide contains a huge error of the most embarrassing kind imaginable—we printed the book with the wrong logo.

That's right, the Advanced Class Guide, in many ways the most important release of the year, features the wrong logo. Instead of the "Pathfinder Roleplaying Game" logo, the hardcover's front cover features the "Pathfinder Adventure Path" logo.

The story of how something like this slipped through our assiduous quality controls turns out to be pretty boring. On the third round of back-and-forth changes after the book was sent to the printer, an image link somehow got changed, switching the logo to the wrong one at the absolute last minute. After the last minute, in fact. We have sign-off approval sheets for every stage of editing. Multiple employees sign off on the correct logos, on the trademark circle, on the "printed in country," basically on every single element of a book. But this error was introduced after all of those safeguards had been correctly adhered to, and the first time we noticed the mistake was when the first copies arrived from the printer.

Naturally, we were mortified and checked with our printer about turning around a ship with tens of thousands of copies of our book, destroying them, and reprinting from scratch. That effort would have cost more than $100,000, and resulted in literally tons of 99.9999% correct books going into a landfill. We've had considerable success over the last few years, but honestly there's a lot more that we can do with $100,000 to benefit the game above and beyond wiping some egg from our faces. Ultimately, after lots of consideration, we decided that it wasn't worth the expense to fix the logo.

And to be clear, the misprint concerns about three square inches on the front cover. The logo on the spine is correct. The logo on the cover page is correct. The logo on the back is correct. The logo on every spread in the book is correct. One image link broke, to one logo. Yes, it's the most important one, and yes, that's very embarrassing, but ultimately it makes no difference to the book's content. Many folks I've shown the book to did not even notice the difference, as the logos are very similar.

We've already shipped the book to a few distributors. Subscribers could start receiving them as early as next week. Many of you will notice the different logo, and will naturally have questions. I wanted to get out in front of that and explain what went wrong, and why we decided not to fix it.

It's a bummer. It's something we'll fix on subsequent printings, assuming that we do them. We considered making a sticker, or a paper wrap-around cover, or just about anything, but ultimately decided that it wouldn't make much of a difference. The covers are screwed up. Putting a little sticker over the mistake wouldn't fix the mistake, it'd just make the book look even more messed up.

So, yeah. Lame. The Advanced Class Guide has the Pathfinder Adventure Path logo on it. We apologize for the inconvenience this will cause to bibliophiles everywhere. Know that we feel your pain.

The book remains incredible, despite the cosmetic error. We're sure you'll really like it, and we've taken what steps we can to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future.

Thanks for your understanding.

Erik Mona
Publisher

The story of how something like this slipped through our assiduous quality controls turns out to be pretty boring. On the third round of back-and-forth changes after the book was sent to the printer, an image link somehow got changed, switching the logo to the wrong one at the absolute last minute. After the last minute, in fact. We have sign-off approval sheets for every stage of editing. Multiple employees sign off on the correct logos, on the trademark circle, on the "printed in country," basically on every single element of a book. But this error was introduced after all of those safeguards had been correctly adhered to, and the first time we noticed the mistake was when the first copies arrived from the printer.