I use Golarion, no need for anything else!
Eberron would be awesome using PFRPG instead of 3.5
The homebrew I've used since AD&D 2nd edition.
However, my current campaign setting is starting to look a lot like Golarion thanks to all the Pathfinder modules I run.
I homebrew, or use Eberron. I don't find Golarion to be a particularly compelling or interesting game world.
I don't know nearly enough about golarion to run a game there, so if I run I'm using a homebrew.
I think Pathfinder lends itself easily to Golarion. I feel very compelled to use Golarion instead of a homebrew. Afterall Golarion isn't completely mapped out and accessories are small enough to allow plenty of room for world building within the setting.
Always homebrew, though I do love the Eberron setting. I mostly just incorporate factors of Eberron into my 3.5 homebrew campaigns though rather then use the established setting.
If I were to start today - I would use Golarion and change it to how it suits my group. No doubt some very vocal people would hate what I change but they are not in my game so I don't care.
Once you buy the book you can run your game how you see fit. You can judge your success by the number of people that return to your table.
Homebrew. I have far too many ideas that don't see the light of day in my usual work to not let them all loose in my gaming. I'd be perfectly happy as a player in Golarion, though. It's really every other part of the game that makes-or-breaks it for me.
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Golarion is a major part of the multiverse in which I set the campaign setting all of my Pathfinder games exist in. One of these days I'll have to wrangle all the original players and get the central world-hopping campaign back into gear. (Moving across the country is a great way to murder a campaign....)
Golarion is extremely rich for a flagship world. Somehow it takes the same everything-goes approach that worlds such as Abeir-Toril and Eberron do and makes it fresh and interesting. Sometimes it really is how you treat the old tropes rather than which ones you use.
But there's plenty of room for home brewing a setting as well, and a lot of excellent 3rd party settings exist for those who want a change of pace without the worries of worldbuilding.
I like Eberron and Golarion. I don't homebrew anything because I dont have the time to do it like I would want it to be done.
Does anybody know a good general guide to the world of Golarion? Nothing too specific such as the city or dungeon things, but, just a good overview.
As I mainly play modules and AP's with PF, its entirely in Golarion.
Does anybody know a good general guide to the world of Golarion? Nothing too specific such as the city or dungeon things, but, just a good overview.
http://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Golarion, unless you were looking for a published book.
book. i was hoping to make a purchase for when I'm not distracted by shiny internets.
Until I get around to finishing my homebrew setting I am using Golarion. I made the decision to use one corner of that world, specifically the Western seaboard (Linnorm Kings, Varisia, Nidal and down to Cheliax) as I tend to find the Inner Sea just too big otherwise.
book. i was hoping to make a purchase for when I'm not distracted by shiny internets.
If I did the link right, this is by far the best overview.
Or for a MUCH shorter overview...
Now I don't think it covers much outside the Inner Sea (especially the Primer) but at least it covers the big spots that Paizo has focused on overall (you'll miss 1/2 of an AP area which covers another continent, and 1/2 of an AP that covers Earth and another planet instead of Golarion).
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I've always homebrewed. I had a game world I ran for decades in 1e/2e but when I switched to 3e I went back to Greyhawk for a while. Then I moved states and eventually re-started a new homebrew world with my current PF group. Golarion is fun and I have played in it but I don't connect with it. Greywawk was where I learned D&D as a kid, so it'll always have a place for me. Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Krynn, Ravenloft and the other excellent 3pp settings have elements I like but they're just not mine.
Karnoss, that's my homebrew. Part Ustlav, part Varisia, with heavy doses of Kobold Press' Midgard thrown in for flavor. Yet somehow because I'm doing the writing I feel more ownership of it. My players have begun to make it their own now too. There is the Grimm family bloodline running through central Karnoss, in the Northern Province of Raveneszk. There is the Lightning Blade Smithy in the free city of Ravenhurst. And of course, just this last game session we had a pivotal PC death that resulted in the Blessed Bower of Ulfbert adorned with an anvil and sword.
I'd rather run a world I've begun and my friends have contributed to.
I've always played homebrew because I'm the only one in my group that really knows Golarion and I don't GM. If I were to, then I'd absolutely use Golarion. I love how diverse it is. The biggest reason for me though is names. I suck at coming up with names. My homebrewed setting, for the one time I tried to GM before I discovered Pathfinder, used either archaic names for real places (Byzantium) or was a magocracy called Caenar (arcane mixed up.) So using Golarion which has much better names for countries and people, barring Lord Gir of House Gyxx.
Golarion provides a much better base for open-world gameplay. A homebrewed setting is tighter and is specifically designed to fit the story you're writing but if the players ever go off the rails then you're in trouble. With Golarion, you ahve some idea of where the players could go instead. They were supposed to uncover a conspiracy in Andoran but failed to do anything and got run out by the police? Well you at least know something about Taldor when they run there to escape the fuzz.
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For now just Golarion as is. If I get the time and willingness I will change some aspects of the world. I don't like Galt. A country in a constant state of anarchy yet none of the other more power hungry countries try not to invade. Showing very modern sensiblilties for fantasy empires. It's only defence a fantasy version of the KGB and soul sucking gullliotines.
I only ever homebrew, and have only done so since the mid 1980's. To me, as a GM, one of the primary joys is developing your own worlds. The intellectual and creative exercise of creating a setting with macro and micro aspects is too endearing not to make the effort to do so. In my eyes, to use an existing published setting is tantamount to being lazy, and often minutia content I find to be counterintuitive to a given region, as if the developers made a cultural, geographic decision that I would not have. I have found that I am seldom satisfied with the inclusions for any given published setting.
Although I helped in the concept, development and design of the Kaidan setting of Japanese horror (PFRPG) as an imprint under Rite Publishing, Kaidan is one of my homebrews - and the only published one of mine.
I would have no problems using any of Paizo's standalone modules, perhaps even an AP, but would require me to relocate every necessary site in the campaign, readdressed to fit my worlds.
I generally don't ever make a vanilla setting, or really even an entire world setting - campaigns generally fit within one geographic area. I generally have no needs for knowledge of what's going on, on the other side of the world, and every campaign is nestled within that specific geographic area.
I don't mean to imply that all GMs must follow this paradigm, really this only applies to me and others who share my point of view.
Both! And more!
If anyone has read my threads, it comes as no suprise that I like to homebrew new-worlds (). Which I do. A lot*.
That said, the majority of games that I've run PF in have been Golarion.
But other campaign settings we've played in:
1) Forgotten Realms (it was my first published setting and I still *heart* it so much!); we have several different Forgotten Realms setting: the "3E soldiers on" setting, the "4E happened" setting, the "Shar died, but the one that killed her, in doing so, killed a ton of other things and oh that's terrible" setting, and maybe a few others
2) Eberron (what a bunch of cool ideas to make a world!)
3) Oerth (only briefly, but it was okay... then we world-hopped to Forgotten Realms! Yay!)
4) Home-brew setting called "Telanth" (basically "bubble out of time")
5) Unnamed home-brew setting (based off the generic D&D one) for the game "Rivermeet"
6) Unnamed (or rather name-forgotten) home-brew setting (based off of nothing: limited magic/no difference between arcane/divine, effectively all-NPC-classed characters as <Core PC-plus-LA-race "template">) for a game called "In Darkest (K)night" (puns are cool, okay?)
7) Unnamed home-brew setting (extremely loosely based on the core generic Points of Light 4E setting) for a game called Undercloud
8) Unnamed home-brew setting (extremely loosely based on the core generic Points of Light 4E setting) for a 4E game named after a friend that visited for... one day.
9) A psionic-focused homebrew campaign setting I tentatively titled "Aber" (before 4E was a thing) for a 3.5 variant setting (using a highly modified reflection of Toril and elements of Eberron and Oerth sprinkled throughout)
10) A 4E variant of Rich Burlew's home brew setting, which I called Terra or Thrann.
11) Golarion, naturally
12) three different quasi-FR-based worlds for stand-alone games that may or may not be related to each other and some of our other stand-alone games (such as Rivermeet)
13) A very specific setting called Taereon or Oreon (depending on the language used) that's a mash-up of Forgotten Realms, Golarion, Eberron, and Greyhawk that's been used so far for a 5E playtest game ("The Knight and the Rose" or "Shelyn, Daughter of Shelyn"), a PF/3.5 game ("Tearing of the Weave" in which Bruce Wayne ended up dating Batman), and a 4E game ("Plagueworld"), which have so-far happened in-universe in chronological order with little in the way of "major events" happening between them. It's... kind of "testing ground" for new systems and it has its own convoluted continuity that makes sense to itself, but not with most other things.
14) Earth (or rather, Harry Potter-version of earth, going from ancient times to modern ones, detailing the origin of the Veela, and the death of a dragon)
15) A... home-brew... world... or... two... look, we don't know, we've just run several games on long car trips while we didn't have much in the way of notes and stuff and they might have been in the same world or might be different; one was about a young kid who finds a mask and realizes he has magic (which doesn't actually exist as far as most know) and navigate the haze of visions sent to him in strange dreams; while another deals with a young woman who finds an angel and a demon having basically killed each other in the forest, and so has to deliver the angel's scroll/message to a waiting something down in the deep southern jungles against a host of different enemies, all of whom want that scroll...
* Man, like you guys don't even know. This is just the stuff I've shared. :)
I have yet to play an actual game of Pathfinder yet, but I've been gaming for a long time, mostly using D&D/AD&D and I have used both official campaign settings as well as my own homebrew worlds. I must admit I have always been particularly fond of Greyhawk and I really liked Al-Qadim back in 2nd ed. As far as Golarion is concerned I like it as well as any setting and I would use it, it seems to be a living, breathing setting even though I can't say it impresses me any more than Toril or Eberron, etc.
My group is currently in the process of transferring from D&D 3.5 to Pathfinder. Kind of. The biggest reason we are still partly clinging to 3.5 is the homebrew world that we've developed during the few years that the group has been together. We rotate DMs quite often, with everyone contributing to the world by adding things to "their" respective corners of the setting. Nothing too original, but it's ours, and it's always nice show up at a session and see what everyone has come up with. As it is the setting is very heavily built on 3.5 material, so a complete conversion would be very arduous. I guess we'll get to it once everyone in the group is ready to move on...
With Pathfinder we have been sticking with Golarion. It has captured my attention like no other campaign setting so far. I've read into Forgotten Realms and Eberron and such, but nothing has really sparked my imagination like Golarion has. There is so much depth and variety, and a certain "grittiness" to it, without the need to get too "dark" and/or "realistic". Even the the more basic fantasy tropes feel new and fresh somehow. All the APs and modules we have played thus far have been excellent, and I'm always interested to learn more about the setting, be it through portraying it as the GM or exploring it as a player.
So yeah, I like both. With homebrew you get to really get creative, but with Golarion (or any other good premade setting) you get this rich, interesting world that's already there for you to explore.
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I have played mostly in Golarion, as they have all been APs. I do play in a homebrew world. As for being a GM? Homebrew. Been working on mine for 11 years now. Unfortunately, I don't much of anything finalized (have had 10 iterations of the world map in those years, and just started on a new one). Names of countries, various settlements and geographical features, the planar cosmology, and the deities (for the most part) are 98% set in stone. Thinking of a country's name invokes an image in my head, but keeping a map of the world gets a bit difficult. I have been really getting into the swing of working on my setting lately, so hopefully this can get me further along. Still need to finalize a historical timeline as well.
I like Golarion, as well as Eberron during 3rd edition, and Krynn during 2nd edition, but Golarion is the only published setting I have played in.
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I have played mostly in Golarion, as they have all been APs. I do play in a homebrew world. As for being a GM? Homebrew. Been working on mine for 11 years now. Unfortunately, I don't much of anything finalized (have had 10 iterations of the world map in those years, and just started on a new one). Names of countries, various settlements and geographical features, the planar cosmology, and the deities (for the most part) are 98% set in stone. Thinking of a country's name invokes an image in my head, but keeping a map of the world gets a bit difficult. I have been really getting into the swing of working on my setting lately, so hopefully this can get me further along. Still need to finalize a historical timeline as well.
I like Golarion, as well as Eberron during 3rd edition, and Krynn during 2nd edition, but Golarion is the only published setting I have played in.
Just a suggestion, but why worry about the borders? Minor border skirmishes can add and take away from that border quickly without turning into a full on war, if you go this route your borders can remain fluid as this is just part of the yearly world (day to day would be a bit much) and it's expected. The only times your borders should be set in stone are amongst nations allied in friendship and treaty, and even then new kings rise and new situations develop that could end that friendship and treaty.
Oh and when the border is dictated by actual geological features.
At least that's my humble opinion.
I much prefer homebrew and actually dislike Golarion as a setting, but can play in either. I prefer a "lets all create a world together" idealism.
We use 'golarion' with whatever area the adventure module takes place in shoehorned in to a likely location
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I much prefer homebrew and actually dislike Golarion as a setting, but can play in either. I prefer a "lets all create a world together" idealism.I prefer someone's coherent vision. Create by committee has never appealed to me.
Are you saying a group of people can't be coherent? All depends on who your with and what you expect out of it.
Lets keep the thread happy and talking about ourselves more than talking about what we don't like about a particular person though. Probably for the best.
I have played mostly in Golarion, as they have all been APs. I do play in a homebrew world. As for being a GM? Homebrew. Been working on mine for 11 years now. Unfortunately, I don't much of anything finalized (have had 10 iterations of the world map in those years, and just started on a new one). Names of countries, various settlements and geographical features, the planar cosmology, and the deities (for the most part) are 98% set in stone. Thinking of a country's name invokes an image in my head, but keeping a map of the world gets a bit difficult. I have been really getting into the swing of working on my setting lately, so hopefully this can get me further along. Still need to finalize a historical timeline as well.
I like Golarion, as well as Eberron during 3rd edition, and Krynn during 2nd edition, but Golarion is the only published setting I have played in.
Just a suggestion, but why worry about the borders? Minor border skirmishes can add and take away from that border quickly without turning into a full on war, if you go this route your borders can remain fluid as this is just part of the yearly world (day to day would be a bit much) and it's expected. The only times your borders should be set in stone are amongst nations allied in friendship and treaty, and even then new kings rise and new situations develop that could end that friendship and treaty.
Oh and when the border is dictated by actual geological features.
At least that's my humble opinion.
Talking more the form of the landmass and placement of geographical features moreso than the country borders.
@ Adjule: ironically I've been making my current world for just shy of a decade but have no world maps at all. I've made 2 area maps: Raveenszk and Elderscorn Vale. There are suggestions in the player's guide of areas outside these but these are the only hard-mapped areas.
I don't know why I'm doing it this way. The last world I made as a teenager I took the time to do a world map, then area maps, then smaller regional maps within the major areas. I had a couple binders worth of info stocked up on the whole place.
Now I'm doing the least amount of work and leaving a lot more to my players' imaginations. When they create something, say something in character or make suggestions on what they want, I help make it part of the gameworld. I suppose I'm just lazy.
I do use the CRB gods though. I stole them whole hog. I've made up a new cosmology for them loosely based on the Golarion gods' stories, but I just figured why re-invent the wheel here.
I much prefer homebrew and actually dislike Golarion as a setting, but can play in either. I prefer a "lets all create a world together" idealism.I prefer someone's coherent vision. Create by committee has never appealed to me.
I've never thought world building as a community effort. In agreement for preference of someone's coherent vision, world build is a singular activity done by one person.
I usually run Midgard.
Talking more the form of the landmass and placement of geographical features moreso than the country borders.I have played mostly in Golarion, as they have all been APs. I do play in a homebrew world. As for being a GM? Homebrew. Been working on mine for 11 years now. Unfortunately, I don't much of anything finalized (have had 10 iterations of the world map in those years, and just started on a new one). Names of countries, various settlements and geographical features, the planar cosmology, and the deities (for the most part) are 98% set in stone. Thinking of a country's name invokes an image in my head, but keeping a map of the world gets a bit difficult. I have been really getting into the swing of working on my setting lately, so hopefully this can get me further along. Still need to finalize a historical timeline as well.
I like Golarion, as well as Eberron during 3rd edition, and Krynn during 2nd edition, but Golarion is the only published setting I have played in.
Just a suggestion, but why worry about the borders? Minor border skirmishes can add and take away from that border quickly without turning into a full on war, if you go this route your borders can remain fluid as this is just part of the yearly world (day to day would be a bit much) and it's expected. The only times your borders should be set in stone are amongst nations allied in friendship and treaty, and even then new kings rise and new situations develop that could end that friendship and treaty.
Oh and when the border is dictated by actual geological features.
At least that's my humble opinion.
Ahh. good luck then. I myself am currently building a single kingdom that exists within the caldera of a dormant super volcano thats partially submerged and is the resting place of a semi-dead god. (shh, don't tell my friends.)