I've been thinking about starting up a new game with my F2F group and Golarion is in the running for consideration for what setting we'll be using. While I'm not completely new to the setting I've been out of touch with it for a few years (Kingmaker was still an AP or two away I think) so I was wondering what new setting material was out?
To be more specific I'd like to get a list of everyone's top 10 books for fluff on the setting. I'm think of doing the game in the River Kingdoms/Numeria so stuff related to them or the surrounding regions would be really great. Though to be honest anything informative would help out a lot.
Oh, I almost forgot. Is there a document/website/forum post spelling out the basic gist of the various countries, ethnicities and races anywhere? I'm willing to read multiple books on this setting, I'll be lucky if I can convince most of my players to read much more than a paragraph or two on the place they want to be from, let alone all the rest of them.
If you go here and sort the products by "Newest First" you'll get the most recent products for the Campaign Setting. The fan-run PathfinderWiki is a good place for a general overview of the setting, and the pages provide links to products on our site for further information.
I would always start with the Inner Sea World Guide, and we just released the Numeria sourcebook. The River Kingdoms has its own book too, though it is only available in PDF. Anything else would require a bit more info on what kind of game you're looking to run (thematic elements, play style, etc.).
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I'll second the suggestion of using the Pathfinder Wiki. It's quite helpful.
The ten fluff books I'd recommend:
First, the ones you need for what you're doing-
1) Inner Sea World Guide (It's the base campaign setting and has information on a large number of locations.)
2) Guide to the River Kingdoms (You specifically mentioned you wanted to run stuff in that region, and it has its own book.)
3) Numeria, Land of Fallen Stars (I haven't actually gotten my copy of this yet, but it's the sourcebook on the other area you wanted, and I have high expectations for it.)
And now for the others I'd suggest. The three above are what you really need for your game, so these are shifting more into my personal preferences book-wise-
4) Distant Worlds (It's my favorite of the campaign setting fluff books and has what I consider several of the most interesting ideas / places. Given that you like Numeria, I don't think you'll mind it being sci-fi focused.)
5) Book of the Damned (Take your pick of the three. All of them are quite good. I personally lean towards Princes of Darkness, followed by Horsemen of the Apocalypse, followed by Lords of Chaos, but I think that's more a reflection of which outsider types interest me more)
6) Chronicle of the Righteous (An excellent book on Good-aligned planar demigods)
7) City of Strangers (A great take on one of the most unique and out-there cities in the setting.)
8) Rule of Fear (One of the better region-books. It details a gothic-horror styled setting. It's reasonably close over there near Numeria and the River Kingdoms, so your PCs might want to wander into it, depending on where over there they are.)
9) Irrisen, Land of Eternal Winter (My other preferred region-book. It's not geographically close to your campaign, so you might want to skip it, but I think it's well done and on an interesting place.)
10) Dragon Empires Gazetteer (It describes another whole continent and the nations there. It's a fairly brief overview of them for space-reasons, but it's a good book for broadening knowledge of parts of Golarion that aren't covered in the Inner Sea World Guide.)
Into the Darklands and (particularly) The Great Beyond get special mention for being good books that describe some of the more-exotic parts of the campaign setting but fail to make it to my main list because they're 3.5-era books; that said, they're both more fluff-heavy than crunch-heavy and what crunch is there can be translated over, so they're still quite useful.