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I'm about midway through running my first AP, and I'm considering going homebrew for the next campaign. We still have a long way to go in the AP, but I figured it would be better to get started early.

I'm looking at running a sandbox campaign, set in one of the larger cities in Varisia. This would be a Lankhmar-inspired urban campaign, set 90% in town. I have a copy of the ISWG and Birthplace of Legends. Besides the book for the specific city (currently leaning toward Magnimar), what other resources would you recommend? Most of my group are veterans of Golarian, so I'd like to start off as close to canon as possible.

So my players are going to be exploring a ruined city in a few weeks. In addition to the normal loot, I want to include some very minor magic items, specifically items with no combat application of any kind. My thinking is that a highly magical society would produce items for a variety of uses -- entertainment, vanity, housework, etc. From a metagame standpoint, they're really just there to be sold -- but if I could inspire some spontaneous RP, that would be fantastic. Some examples:

• A whistle that attracts dragonflies -- almost a small swarm but not enough to provide any kind of concealment

• A hand mirror that allows the user to speed up the growth of facial hair

• A decanter that can change soup into wine and back

• A clockwork songbird that predicts the weather

I really want to create a sense of the strange and unusual, without giving the players any kind of immediately obvious practical advantage. Minor curses/drawbacks might be fun though. Anyway, I'm sure someone has tried this. If you could share ideas, it would be much appreciated.

I think that another one of FR's problems was the large changes that were frequently made that affected the setting as a whole. I've never really followed it, but it's my understanding that at a minimum, each edition changed was accompanied with major changes in the setting, and even in between edition changes they made changes that could vastly affect campaigns that tried to stay within the canon (such as killing off large numbers of gods).

That's about the shape of it. In fact, you describe exactly what happened to my campaign back in the day. I drifted away from D&D after 2nd edition, but my understanding is that the jump from 3.5 to 4.0 was even more extreme. I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think Faerun suffered a Thundar-style apocalypse.

I don't really see Paizo blowing up Golarion that way. I get the impression that even if they made huge changes to the Pathfinder system with PFRPG 2nd Edition, they would leave the flavor material of Golarion pretty much as it stands now.

Given the history of the Pathfinder RPG, I expect that Paizo would be smart enough to never attempt a full-on 2nd edition. Likewise, I really hope they never try to inflict a reboot on Golarion. The Inner Sea region is a small enough section of the world that there's room for new sub-settings to co-exist peacefully with the old.

@Kazred: Yes and no. Golarion's definitely modular, but that's not exactly it. I have no trouble treating Greyhawk/Realms as modular. Greyhawk/Realms are traditional fantasy settings, and if that's what you're looking for they're great. Golarion has a lot of modular microsettings, and if any/some of those appeal to you then great. Since I'm looking for a traditional fantasy setting, I'd have less work making Greyhawk/FR "my own" than making Golarion "my own". I can see that if you were looking for something more like some of the microsettings, Golarion would be less work (understatement).

I agree with you regarding Greyhawk. By happenstance rather than by design, Oerth is as much of a blank slate as Golarion. If I felt the itch to convert an old school setting to PFRPG, Greyhawk would be at the top of my list.

As you pointed out, Krynn and Middle Earth have basically the same issue. The canon heroes loom so large, that the setting simply can't withstand their removal. I experienced this first-hand trying to run MERP back in the day. It ended up feeling like crappy fan fiction. I don't really feel this way about Pathfinder's Iconics. They seem more like examples than actual in-canon characters, and I suspect this is intentional.

With FR, the issue is less the canon characters than it is the canon itself. It moves and changes independently of individual campaigns, which makes any attempts to keep things relatively in-canon impossible. The setting has become over-documented, and has been retconned far too many times across too many different editions... there's no white space left for individual GMs.

Golarion's advantage over the Forgotten Realms may simply arise from the fact that it's a far younger setting. As Paizo continues to support Golarion, it's entirely possible that it will eventually have the same problems with over-documentation. But right now, I believe it's far more GM-friendly than any of the old-school D&D settings.

Golarion isn't particularly interesting (to me) when it comes to fiction, but as a setting specifically for games, it shines.

The OP mentions Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms. Both of those settings have played out across novels, comics, RPGs, computer games and pretty much any other medium you could name. They're incredibly detailed, with canon that has been built up (and torn down in some cases) over decades. And that's the problem: a tabletop game is supposed to be about the players, not about the characters from a tie-in novel. In Golarion, there's no Elminster, no Drizzt, no Tanis. The players are the heroes and what they do matters. Likewise, having a setting that evolves over time is not a plus for a commercial RPG setting. I don't want to have to adapt my campaign to the current events in Waterdeep or Shadowdale, as detailed by the latest sourcebook -- I want a jumping off point and nothing more. The events in a campaign should center around the actions of the players.

Is Golarian a superior setting from an artistic point of view? Absolutely not. But let's be honest, neither are Faerun or Krynn. If you're looking for artistic merit in fantasy world-building, read J.R.R. Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, Michael Morcock, H.P. Lovecraft, or any of the other authors from whom game publishers so liberally borrow.

Golarion works exactly because it's a blank slate. I can run any kind of game I want there without having to do the heavy lifting.

I'm late to the conversation here... just a few thoughts. I believe that EVE's plex system is an excellent model for several reasons. First, it allows for sanctioned exchanges of real money for game currency. You may not like it -- I know I don't like it -- but gold sellers have been present in every MMO from the start. It's unavoidable. Bringing it in-house allows GW to control it, and it keeps the flow of money going one-way. As soon as people start playing to "cash out," the game becomes something other than a game. Exchange rates are controlled by the players and inflation is a non-issue, since no money is being created.

Other than that, I really would rather not see any other micro-transactions in PFO. No horse armor, no monocles, no special hair-styles. If I'm expected to pay a monthly subscription (something I have not done for quite a while), I want the entire game. That's not a complaint. I believe that PFO will be well worth the price. Most subscription MMOS fail because the players are simply not getting $15 worth of content every month. $15 may be the cost of a trip to Starbucks, but it's also the cost of an entire indie game on Steam. Sandbox MMOs are different beasts. Your subscription isn't paying for the latest raid or quest hub -- you're buying access to a simulation. The content is infinite because it's created by the players.

Cash shops weaken that value proposition by adding elements that are external to the simulation. If, for example, a player's character is a clothier and there's a special cash shop hat that he can't create, then the simulation has failed for that player. Too much of that kind of thing, and the whole point of the game is lost.

This is close to my personal theory. Aroden killed himself specifically to break fate. There are a number of hints (mainly literary and religious allusions) that the Golden Age of Humanity would be followed by the release of Rovagug and the end of the world. With his death, Aroden prevented the Golden Age and therefore (maybe)the apocalypse.

Ironically, the free will granted by the end of prophesy could very well result in the foretold Golden Age anyway.

Glad to hear that this is the "default" for Golarion.

Whatever helps you guys sleep at night...

And now for the blasphemous, unutterable truth: if you were to but glimpse the eldritch, non-Euclidean stat blocks of the Outer Gods, you would descend into gibbering madness. The dreaded .pdf version, with its cyclopean Javascript, has also been known to cause Windows to blue screen.

Got to call foul on Wesley being CG. I seem to recall he was probably the #1 rules lawyer of the movie. Cannot see him being chaotic, with that personality. Wesley may have been LG. Buttercup was definitely Good, but was she Lawful? She basically just did what everyone told her to do. I think that makes her NG (Naive Good). Andre the Giant may fit the CG niche, he was definitely good natured, but was rather a free spirit.

I knew I was going to have to defend this. To give you a fighting chance, I'm typing this post with my left hand. :)

Wesley was a (spoiler alert?)pirate. No lawful character would engage in piracy. He lies, steals, cheats, and nearly overthrows a monarch. Regarding his being a rules lawyer, you're talking about the marriage, right? He was hardly arguing points of law -- he was BSing Buttercup to get her to feel better about running away with him (see below). The character was a combination of Zorro, Robin Hood, and Captain Blood -- any of which could be held up as the very model of CG.

Regarding Buttercup: As you said, she does what people tell her to do -- it may be naive but it's also the definition of Lawful. She agrees to a marriage out of obedience rather than love. When Wesley rescues her (the second time), he has to convince her that her marriage wasn't valid. Only a lawful character would let a coerced sham-wedding stop them from from being with their True Love.

And Fezzik is LN all the way. He's a joiner and doesn't care about the morality of those in charge. First it was Vizzini and later it was the Brute Squad. He believes in fair-play and he's loyal to his friends. Good-natured, sure, but Good-aligned characters don't sign on as muscle for murder/kidnapping plots.

Here's how I actually explain it to my players:

LG: Buttercup
NG: Miracle Max's Wife
CG: Wesley
LN: Fezzik
N: Miracle Max
CN: Inigo Montoya
LE: Prince Humperdinck
NE: Vizzini
CE: Count Rugen

My guess would have been Ohio.

It was suicide.

Seriously. Here's my thinking: According to the Starfall Doctrine, Aroden's return was supposed to kick off the Age of Glory -- a 1000 year golden age where Aroden was going to personally lead the human race to greatness. That sounds an awful lot like something I read before:

6 Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.

7 And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison --Revelations 20

(first two stanzas omitted for brevity)

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Aroden knew that the Age of Glory prefaced Rovagug's release. In order to stop the prophesy, he had to destroy prophesy itself. His death was the only sure way to accomplish this -- the preordained sequence of events could not occur from that point forward. This is why prophesy stopped being accurate afterward -- fate itself was broken. This is also what caused the cataclysmic events of 4606 AR; the Eye of Abendego, Worldwound, and Shatterfield are scars in the fabric of the universe, left behind by a mass reconfiguration of reality itself. It was like trying to divide by zero.

The details can't really be known -- I prefer to think that Aroden just put a metaphysical gun to his own head for the good of humanity. It's possible that he engineered his own murder, Sandman style, and deliberately let his guard down at the right moment (Asmodeus is my prime suspect, but there are certainly others).

The more I mull this over, the more convinced I am that I'm right (Mr. Jacobs, please feel free to disabuse me of my pretension).

Your planetar definitely needs to *believe* he's the good guy. Even if his god has severed all ties, he still believes his actions are serving him/her. When he succeeds in his evil plan, everyone will see that he was right and he'll be allowed back into Heaven...

However, I would initially present him to the players as one-dimensionally evil. As the campaign progresses, reveal his motivations to the players in drips and drabs. By the time you get to the big fight, the players should understand his perspective to the point where they might even be slightly ambivalent about opposing him. When everything is over, they should end up pitying him more than hating him.

Think Tilda Swinton in Constantine or Christopher Walken in The Prophesy.

Like some of the other posters, I think it's a bad idea to stat divinities. Players who pick a fight with the gods are going to lose, simple as that. They're going to need to find some other way of dealing with these entities.

If you need to establish some kind of pecking order, my rule of thumb is: Old Ones > Full Gods > Young gods (e.g. Starstone Winners)> Demigods > Eldest/Elemental Lords etc > anything with a CR. The Old Ones need to be at the top of the food chain or they lose a lot of their flavor. There needs to be absolutely no hope of defeating these creatures -- it's only their remoteness and/or sleepiness that keeps them from destroying everything.

I'm going to play devil's advocate on the world building thing. Apologies in advance.

For a long time, I was a world builder. Months before the start of a campaign, I would start working on the maps, cosmologies, conflicts etc. I would have 10,000 years of history outlined. I'd have lists of races,local customs,languages and lost civilizations. And, in my opinion, it was a big waste of time.

Why? Because I'm never going to publish any of my settings materials -- I have no aspirations of becoming a game designer, and game settings make the bottom-barrel worst fantasy fiction settings. And honestly, unless you're going high-concept, most of the world-building process consists of reinventing wheels and making up nonsense words. Whether your giant city is called Greyhawk, Waterdeep, Absalom, Lankhmar or Bayonne, it's still basically the same thing. That goes for all the other tropes, from dark forests to dark lords. It's all been done before. That's not a bad thing, necessarily. Part of the appeal of fantasy RPGs is in the recognition of elements from favorite movies, books, and games. But the fact that your dwarves live in the Great Hollow Mountain instead of the Lonely Mountain or Five Kings Mountain does not add anything to your players' experience.

Of course, you may actually enjoy world-building for its own sake, or maybe you want to do something strange and different. If so, I can respect that. But if you just want to play the game -- and that game is going to contain most of the elements in the rule books and bestiaries -- you're better off just dropping $40 on a published setting.

Tweak anything you don't like and flesh out the area where the campaign will start. Use the time saved to concoct three-dimensional NPCs and a compelling story. The players may not remember the name of that ruined city they explored, but they'll definitely remember what happened there.

Your mileage, of course, may vary.

I think that a neutral character can be just as interesting as any other alignment. Their motivations are character driven, be it by their past or their personalities, making ethical neutrality a bit more complex.

I'll grant you that TN characters are not inherently bland. I may have overstated things a little in my earlier post. However, extra work needs to be done to flesh these characters out -- if their convictions fall outside the typical axes, then those convictions need to be explicitly defined. If the character simply lacks convictions of any kind, then it's tough to make the case that they're worth paying attention to.

And again, morally conflicted characters are the most interesting. Ethical dilemmas -- whether internal or external-- are a basic feature of storytelling. Morally simplistic characters are just less compelling -- it's why X-Men comics outsell Superman comics. A character who abstains from taking any kind of moral or ethical stand needs to fill that gap or risk becoming milquetoast.

But please understand I'm talking about fictional characters only. To wit:

Here's my thing: I believe that we're all intrinsically selfish and self serving.

A gamey abstraction like alignment can't really be accurately applied to real-life people. People are infinitely more complicated than that -- it's a hopeless exercise to try putting them into one of nine moral boxes. If there were 9,000 alignments, it still wouldn't be enough.

Yes, people are selfish. They're also altruistic. Sometimes they're both at the same time. In my professional life, I've had the opportunity to observe people in all sorts of ethically challenging situations. More often than not, people will do the right thing when there's no tangible benefit benefit -- even when they think no one is looking. They probably don't even think about what they're doing; they act according to instinct.

Time and again, science has shown that there's an evolutionary advantage to selflessness. More than our big brains or opposable thumbs, it's the reason why human beings have lasted as long as we have. One naked ape with a pointy stick is no match for the brutality of nature. One thousand naked apes working together, on the other hand, has ensured our collective survival.

And yes, people also do horrible things to one another and to themselves. It's so self-evident that I hardly need to provide examples to prove the point.

I will, however, say that we pay disproportionate attention to these things -- and remember them -- precisely because they are unusual. "Dog bites man" isn't news, but "man bites dog" is. Mass media, by it's very nature, distorts our view of reality by drawing our collective eyeballs to the unusual. For example:

• Do you think there's more violent crime or less than there was 30 years ago? Most people would say things have gotten worse, but the statics say that incidences of violence have dropped by more than half during that time.

• What's more dangerous? Getting on an airplane or buying a soda? More people die every year from tipped vending machines than plane crashes and terrorism combined.

• If you have children, do you check their Halloween candy for razor blades? Do you know how often children have been injured by sabotaged treats? It's happened exactly once, and it was the kid's mother who did it.

Conversely, real-life goodness is boring. It's not dragon-slaying or rescuing maidens from towers -- it's holding a door for a stranger or giving up your seat on the bus to an old lady with a walker. It's putting a can of food or an old coat in the collection box. It's ubiquitous; so much so that we don't even see it.

In the world of fantasy, good and evil are monolithic, opposing forces. In the real world, good is mundane and evil is sensationalistic. It's easy to become cynical if you don't get into the habit of looking beneath the surface of things.

Evil requires some malevolent intent or purpose, not just apathy. Not being good is not the same as being evil.

That's my take as well. Evil actions are not the same as evil alignment. Intent matters.

A mercenary wouldn't necessarily be evil aligned for involving himself in a war where he had no stake other than money. Yes, his work may make him a party to atrocities -- and he would certainly be morally culpable for his actions or inaction. But moral culpability for a single incident (or even several such incidents) does not change the character's nature.

People do horrible things every day -- even people who could otherwise be considered "good." What matters (for the sake of alignment) is the response to those actions. Is the mercenary wracked by guilt? Does he wake up in a cold sweat every night after seeing the faces of slaughtered innocents in his dreams? Does he try to make amends somehow?

If, on the other hand, if has no remorse for his actions in the cold light of day -- maybe even enjoys doing it -- then the shift to an evil alignment is warranted.

Stepping outside the mercenary example, consider a woman who comes home and catches her husband doing the deed with her best friend. In the heat of the moment, she kills them both with her +5 vorpal steak knife. Murder is unquestionably an evil act and the woman bears moral responsibility for her crime. However, that single incident does not in-and-of-itself change her basic nature. She could still be considered neutral or even good, depending on her actions and motivations outside of that single incident.

However, if the same woman regularly murders her husbands when she gets bored with them -- that's evil.

On the opposite side of the coin, a character might join a good cause for a non-good reason reason (Han Solo in the original Star Wars*). He's aiding the forces of goodness, but his motivation for doing so is purely selfish. Therefore, he's still neutral. If he eventually drinks the Kool-Aid of Light begins to believe in what he's doing for its own sake, he would then become good aligned (Han Solo in Return of the Jedi).

*I refuse to call it Episode IV: A New Hope. I'll fight anyone who tries to make me.

I think it's helpful to consider alignment in terms of the real world. Heroic fantasy tends to fall into cliched black-and-white ideas of morality. Life is more nuanced than Gandalf versus Sauron, High Elves versus Drow. With all of the outlandish elements found in your garden variety RPG world, it aids suspension of disbelief if the people act like people and not action figures.

The whole "seeking balance" thing, in particular, never really struck me as remotely plausible. Almost everyone believes they're good, even when their actions contradict this belief. If you feel compelled to do good simply because there's too much evil in the world, then you're Good. There has always been too much evil in the world and there always will be. As the Dread Pirate Roberts said, " Life is pain...Anyone who says differently is selling something."

On the other side of the coin, no sane person --ever-- feels compelled to do evil because there's too much good in the world.

Instead, I look at Neutrality as the state between the selfless altruism of Good and the active malice of Evil. The neutral character looks out for number one, but he isn't a jerk about it. He might occasionally commit a random act of kindness -- but only when it doesn't inconvenience him. He might also do something really crappy - but only when it serves his own immediate benefit and he can justify it to himself somehow.

In other words: most real people are neutral.

For example, let's say a character finds a wallet full of large bills in a parking lot. The address on the driver's license is in a very wealthy part of town.

• A LG character would take the wallet directly to the local police station -- or maybe to the address on the license. If the owner could not be located, she would give the cash to a charitable organization.

• A CG character would skip the police and just give the money anonymously to a needy acquaintance -- maybe a big bag of groceries would show up on the doorstep of a neighbor who recently lost a job. She might then mail the credit cards etc. back to the owner.

• A NG character could do any combination of the above, depending on the circumstances.

• A LN character would keep the money and use it to pay down bills or complete home repairs. She might mail the empty wallet back to the owner if she had some stamps laying around.

• A CN character would keep the money and spend it on something frivolous: booze, hookers, a case of Pathfinder Battles Miniatures, etc. Maybe she'd mail the wallet if she felt like it.

• TN might do any combination of the above depending on the circumstances.

• A LE character would keep the money, max out the credit cards, and then dispose of the evidence in her backyard trash burning barrel.

• A CE character would keep the money, go to the address, break in, murder the owner, and make a suit out of his skin.

• NE, again, might do any combination of the above.

That's my interpretation anyway. YMMV.

Thanks for the responses (and for the links Lucent).

I'm not looking to create my own nation from scratch really -- I'm actually keeping all the places and people. I'm just changing things about the revolution and the events that followed -- I guess you could call it an alternate history (I miss Fringe).

For those that are interested, here's what I'm thinking: The main thing I don't like about Andoran is that they abolished the nobility *after* the Red Revolution in Galt. In the real world, the French Revolution followed the American Revolution. The Reign of Terror scared the crap out of everyone -- even in America, where they passed the decidedly undemocratic Alien & Sedition Act. Had the order of events been reversed, it's not hard to imagine the American Revolution looking very different, or not happening at all.

In my version of Andoran, the aristocracy was already frightened of another Galt when the war against Cheliax broke out. As soon as it became clear that the revolution was for real, they switched sides. Taldor (where the campaign is centered) quietly supported the revolution, since it was an opportunity to expand their sphere of influence at the expense of Cheliax. The Empire already experienced the influx of refugees from Galt on their northern border, so they also had an interest in moderating the politics of the revolution.

As a result, this Andoran is more of a nominal Republic than a Democracy. Political power remains in the hands of the elite, but the personal freedoms enjoyed by the common people have been expanded. The mythology of the revolution (Lady Liberty etc.) never took root, because it made the new rulers nervous. Behind the scenes, Taldor exerts far more influence than anyone is willing to acknowledge. Supporting the new nation has been costly for the Empire though, which has emboldened the enemies of the Grand Prince.

There are a lot of ways I could go with this -- At some point, Taldor will overreach itself and try to annex Andoran. Qadira may take advantage of the situation and invade. A Napoleon-like figure will arise in Galt with ambitions of reuniting the Empire. Karthis and Eutropia are both waiting for their opportunity to sieze power as well. I'm going to let the players influence the direction of events, but in general I'm going for a very Game of Thrones sort of campaign.