Nearly every settlement in the Inner Sea has at least one temple, ranging from the modest shrines of remote hamlets to massive cathedrals in metropolises. Temples can act as centers of commerce, community, healing, and sacrifice for adventurers and common folk alike.
Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Inner Sea Temples helps Game Masters and players explore six of the Inner Sea region's most iconic seats of faith. Each entry comes complete with a detailed map and gazetteer; profiles of the temple's notable members; a history of the structure and the organization of its clergy; and a wealth of magic items, occult rituals, and spells favored by the resident priests.
This book contains details on the following temples:
The Cathedral of Exquisite Agony, a dark temple to Zon-Kuthon in Nidal.
Cayden's Hall, a combination church and tavern in the heart of Absalom sacred to the Drunken Hero.
The First Colonial Bank of Sargava, a bank-temple of Abadar in the city of Kalabuto.
The High Temple of Pharasma, a prestigious temple in Osirion dedicated to the Lady of Graves.
The House of Dawn's Redemption, a grand cathedral to Sarenrae in Taldor.
Imvrildara, an ancient shrine to Calistria hidden deep within the forests of Kyonin.
Inner Sea Temples is intended for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and Pathfinder Campaign Setting, but can easily adapted to any fantasy world.
ISBN-13: 978-1-60125-893-9
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I wasn't sure exactly what I would get when I picked this up. I wanted to see how they treated the Zon-Kuthon temple in Pangolais, and the temple to Calistria with its honeycomb ossuary intrigued me. I run and play Pathfinder 2e, so I hoped that the art (maps included) and lore would significantly outweigh the less useful 1e mechanical elements mentioned in the product description.
There are more 1e mechanical elements than I would have hoped for. That said, most of them elaborate upon the strong lore elements introduced for each temple. While I can't port it over right away into a game I might run or play in, the stories and lore to which they are attached seem like they would travel well. If you are running or playing in a 1e game, these might be perfectly fun and useful as-is; I am too rusty on Pathfinder 1e's mechanics to be sure, though.
The worst art in this book is still good. The opening spreads showing off some feature of the temple are all evocative, the maps are clear and easy to read, the NPCs well-rendered characters. With some qualifications, I can say the same thing about the lore.
The temple to Zon-Kuthon was pretty cool in that Hellraiser-cum-Catholic way Nidalese Zon-Kuthon lore tends to go. It wasn't all to my taste, but it gave me a lot of ideas for that daydream Nidalese campaign I will probably never run. It definitely does nott shirk on the torture chambers, some of it consensual and some of it entirely the opposite. It has a fair bit of presumed ableism, too, which I really do think could be peeled out of Nidal's brand of evil in a way that would make everything better for it (& I'll stop myself from ranting on there; that's some other discussion). Definitely not for every reader or gaming table, but quite good.
The temple to Calistria was great. The temple and its occupants provide a number of different perspectives on what vengeance means. No spoilers, but there is enough dramatic tension built into the temple's description that I could easily see it being the focal point for a series of adventures, or even possibly a campaign. I enjoyed seeing Calistria as patron of elven vengeance against Treerazer, too.
None of the others quite captured my imagination as the temples of Zon-Kuthon and Calistria, but I mostly liked them. Cayden's temple in Absalom is presented as a warm and inclusive and rollicking place perfect for even the most eccentric mix of good player characters. It could easily be a touchstone location for PCs operating in the city, as long as all the players involved can deal with alcohol's pride of place.
Pharasma's temple was pleasantly weird, suited to her deep mysteries. The undead-hunting Night Jars (a cool organization in itself) included two named NPCs with different ideas about what moving the undead on ideally looks like, which provides immmediate grist for the storytelling mill.
The temple of Sarenrae presented her worship in a way that helped me better understand her place in the setting. I so wish they had managed to find a better term for her ecstatic dancers than "whirling dervishes." The term is simultaneously dated, gratingly colonialist, and too tightly linked to real-life regional communities to be anything but distracting and irritating to me.
Abadar's temple...meh. He doesn't have to be the god of Inner Sea colonialism, but this temple sure makes him feel like it. And there is a chunk of 1e-era bad habits that transport nasty European colonial biases into the Mwangi expanse and Golarion and, yeah, Paizo has gotten so much better about this that this chafes all the more.
All in all, very good with a few sour notes. I am glad to have it in my collection.
Good temple illustrations, items & spells, bad NPC stats, no adventure seeds
GOOD:
The interior cover has a map of Avistan and northern Garund with icons that show the six temples from the outside and place them on the map.
There is a sample cleric (level) 5 on page 2 for placement in the locations. Each of the 10-page sections has a sidebox which describes how to customize this priest to each deity.
Each temple gets an (upper half) 2-page spread of an interior view (with the rest being history and organisation description), a half-page outer view, a full-page "flip-mat"-style birdsview, four pages of room descriptions and two pages of magic items and spells.
The outer view and 2 page interior illustrations are gorgeous.
The "High Temple of Pharasma" fits on a "bigger Flip-mat", as does "Imvrildara".
Most magic items and spells are either very flavorfull, useful or both.
BAD:
Half of the full-body illustrations for NPCs are so dark, that details are hard to make out.
Four temples are too big to draw on a bigger flip-mat, one doesn´t even fit on two!
UGLY:
None but the first and last temples scream "adventure location that needs to be fully depicted" to me.
The challenge rating for the largest Zon-Kuthon temple of Nidal is way too low with a maximum of CR 10.
None of the high priests of the supposedly largest and/or most prominent temples of six gods in Golarion are awe-inspiring.
There are no adventure- or quest-ideas presented at all.
A good book if you need pre-drawn high-temple locations for low-level characters or some very thematic magic items or spells for Zon-Kuthon, Caiden Cailean, Abadar, Pharasma, Sarenrae or Calistria.
But you still have to come up with your own adventure seeds or NPC stats for characters higher than level 8.
What, we won't be getting all the 'it's only 3 weeks away/wish they would update the cover/it's only two weeks now/perhaps they'll post a preview/just one week/hope it won't get delayed' posts? ;-)
Nifty! How alien are we talking here - Far Realm-like, off-world but still Material Plane, or just a souped-up Aberration type?
E.T.A. I just checked the Blood Queen on the wiki and found out that it's a powerful Outsider servant of some ancient/alien(/Mythos?) deity. Interesting! :)
People only enter the cathedral if they want to become gods. I don't think it would be fair to simply call it a mythic dungeon either, the whole place is above and beyond anything you might call a temple or a dungeon.
[subliminal]
Calistrian play room
Calistrian play room
Calistrian play room
Calistrian play room
Calistrian play room
Calistrian play room
Calistrian play room
Calistrian play room
Calistrian play room
Calistrian play room
[/subliminal]
This makes me think of:
-Dancehalls of the Inner Sea
-Casinos of the Inner Sea
-Guide to Inner Sea Cakes
-Inner Sea Taverns & Inns
-Inner Sea Cities
-Inner Sea Hideouts
-Inner Sea Outbacks
-Inner Sea Rivers & Harbours
-Inner Sea Mountains
-Inner Sea Metropolies Edition
Then, one maybe not too far away day comes:
Inner Sea Lonely Planet edition. Anything you need for the Inner Sea, everything you could think of and a lot more.
Even better, after that is done and there´s literaly nothing left unexplored in the Inner Sea, perhaps, but only perhaps, can some select few other places be explored :D
While i would love to see a product about another continent one day, it makes more sense to flesh out Avistan and Garund with Campaign Settings before.
An entire landmass takes much more time to create and i for one would like to get my hands on a "Brevoy", "Kyonin", "Five Kings Mountains" and even "Varisia" book more than on a Casmaron one.
Tian Xia would make more sense than something all-new too.
But i am sure we will get another continent in the next few years.
While i would love to see a product about another continent one day, it makes more sense to flesh out Avistan and Garund with Campaign Settings before.
An entire landmass takes much more time to create and i for one would like to get my hands on a "Brevoy", "Kyonin", "Five Kings Mountains" and even "Varisia" book more than on a Casmaron one.
I so agree with all of this! Still so much to detail with the Inner Sea.
2025 might be a realistic date, because the average "old school" grumbler person might be looking for a retirement home then and ... oh wait, then they have pension and even more time on their hands.
