A lot has changed in the past 8 years, not the least of which is that I'm no longer the sole creative director for Pathfinder. Comments I make here on the boards are meant to be taken as my advice or opinions, and shouldn't be given equal weight to something we officially publish in a book—something that I wasn't quite as clear about 8 years ago.
Pathfinder—and Golarion—are not something that only one person controls. It's a shared creation among Paizo's entire creative staff, and my role as a creative director is to direct the creativity (currently, I share that role with Luis, with me focusing on the adventures and him focusing on the rules and lore) and not to be the arbitrary decider of all of it.
My take on things, as quoted above, remains my personal preference, and if the need to put this lore into print manifests, I'll suggest and direct the creativity in that direction but the actual decision will be made not just by me.
This wasn't intended as a gotcha, just to provide prior context because it had already been captured there. Since there's no printed source about whether the planets share a galaxy, we sometimes rely on clarifications from Paizo staff when things are unclear. I also assumed the prior discussion might be helpful in the FTL end of the discussion.
And that's why I nixed Mark's theory about where Golarion is, frankly, because Golarion is in a different galaxy than Earth; a galaxy where magic is more common. And Androffa (from Iron Gods) is in a THIRD galaxy. I want all these three planets to be super far apart because that helps to KEEP them separate and, frankly, because it gives us more time to maintain the illusion about whether or not there IS a Golarion out there. As Mark points out, there are stars in our galaxy that you can observe at 93 light years away, and that's too close for me.
Mark's central flaw to his theory is the assumption that he's basing it on science and the idea that light is a constant and that nothing can travel faster than that. When something travels instantaneously (like teleport, or the Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga), all that science logic breaks down. If something traveling faster than the speed of light appears to be traveling back in time, then something traveling INFINITELY faster than that (as in the case of instant travel like this) breaks that assumption entirely. Which means Golarion could essentially be anywhere.
The 4718 date is the correct one. During the development of LO World Guide, I asked James about an appropriate date for the closing of the Worldwound. While the AP released in 4713 and the typical rule is to use the year of release with the equivalent year in the setting to determine when the AP occurs, we didn't go with that for Wrath of the Righteous. We agreed that an AP like this wrapping up in just a few months didn't feel right. It's basically a massive war, so it taking several years would make sense, right? Thus, we landed on the 4718 date. However, at some point during the remaining development process, the date got changed back to 4713. It's also cropped up once or twice since then, which has caused this frustrating confusion.
The Worldwound closed in 4718, full stop. We'll be doing our best to make sure that this is the date that's used in the future and being able to help oversee these aspects of the setting as Creative Director will hopefully prevent this mixup from propagating in the future.
I was looking specifically for a PFwiki page like this, but I didn't find it. Is there an obvious way to navigate to that page that I missed?
There's not a really obvious way, and that's a good point. The link from the Adventure Path page that Mudfoot mentions here is probably the most prominent one.
As Laclale prematurely pointed out, I just (as in, the last hour) finished a similar index for 2E APs at Index of articles (2E). I also added a redirect for the keyword "support articles" to help people find it more easily.
Again, those articles are on the product pages once the issue in question come out, it's just a matter of scrolling through them all.
To clarify for OP, there is no centralized list on one webpage of all the backmatter articles in AP volumes. There are c.200 webpages on the wiki which, aggregated together, list all the backmatter articles of AP volumes.
PathfinderWiki has a one-page index of all Adventure Path articles from volumes 1-144 (all the 1E issues), broken into broad categories like "geography and locations", "deities and religions", "races and ethnicities", etc.
We're working on converting the table-of-contents work on each wiki product article into queryable data. This would let us reuse the work we've already put into the product pages for purposes like this.
I've always enjoyed the Holiday Illustrations. Well done Kent Hamilton.
Are the past ones archived in one place anywhere?
PathfinderWiki has a category all of the holiday cards that have been posted to the blog. I think we're missing 2012 and 2013, but otherwise it goes back to 2007.
Thanks! Took some sleuthing but I eventually tracked down the blog posts (on the old Paizo store blog rather than this one) and got 2012 and 2013 cards uploaded to the wiki.
I've always enjoyed the Holiday Illustrations. Well done Kent Hamilton.
Are the past ones archived in one place anywhere?
PathfinderWiki has a category all of the holiday cards that have been posted to the blog. I think we're missing 2012 and 2013, but otherwise it goes back to 2007.
More Amaya would rock in general, but I wonder if she's too connected to be an iconic. It'd always gnaw at the back of my mind that the next person in line to the throne of Minkai is in some random adventuring party at some random location.
The 2E APG reportedly also introduces a dhampir ancestry. The most iconic dhampir who'd fit an APG class would be Larsa, a Royal Accuser of Caliphas, from Bloodbound. She was last statted as a level 6 rogue in Inner Sea Intrigue but might fit as a 2E investigator. That'd be a trip, all things considered.
On the same track, my next guess after that would be Ikiko, the tengu swashbuckler and jinx eater from the Friends and Foes section in A Song of Silver.
Mordant Spire, Thuvia, Bloodcove, Kibwe, Mzali, Nantambu, Senghor, Usaro, Vidrian, Ravounel, and Galt all appear to have new or updated symbols in Lost Omens World Guide.
Oprak, Gravelands, New Thassilon are new entities that also have symbols in Lost Omens World Guide.
We unofficially track this on PathfinderWiki. For instance, here's Iron Gods and its related products. I don't know that I'd call it comprehensive, but it's a start!
Bumping this topic up to note that we now have a really rudimentary UptimeRobot reporting on our uptime. (Sorry for the crummy URL.) If you think the wiki's down, check that status page to see if we're having problems. It'll also notify me when we have downtime.
Since we finished our server upgrades, our response times have dropped considerably, and we've had about 20 minutes of total unavailability since June 26.
Hopefully the wiki's working better for everybody! If not, please let me know.
Bumping as a reminder that the wiki will undergo some maintenance tomorrow. Things might look weird or be unavailable while we work through it. Apologies again if this inconveniences anyone!
Update: Looks like we've at least got a workaround in place. Let us know if the site misbehaves, but both availability and response times have improved considerably in the last week. Maintenance is still on for this weekend, however.
I've heard more reports that it was down today, but I've not seen any downtime and none of the reports provided any specifics about time of day or location, so I have nothing new or good to report.
I've been on it frequently all weekend, up to late last night and early this morning, with no issues, so if this is regional or limited to very specific times of day, I really need details to know how and what to escalate to the provider
tl;dr: Have PathfinderWiki, StarfinderWiki, or PFO Wiki been really slow or inaccessible lately? We're trying to get to the bottom of it, and we'll also do some intensive wiki maintenance on the weekend of June 24. Please hang tight until then, and send me a message if the wiki is completely inaccessible!
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I've gotten several reports from the last week or two that PathfinderWiki/StarfinderWiki/PFO Wiki have either appeared to be down or extraordinarily slow, especially for editing. The issues seem to be intermittent, not related to the amount of traffic the site's getting, and not consistently occurring for all users, making this a different problem than we've had to deal with in the past.
While I try to whittle down the potential reasons why this is happening, the wiki might be intermittently slow to access, unavailable, or set to read-only access.
If the wiki is inaccessible for you for more than 5 minutes, please send me a message with the date and time it's down (and your location or time zone) so I can try to connect some of these dots with server status reports, or escalate them to our service provider.
Also, the wiki server itself is overdue for some infrastructure upgrades. We'll lock down wiki editing for some or all of the weekend of June 24 and move traffic over to a backup server while we deploy those updates.
We've scheduled this as best we can to align with our work schedules while trying not to disrupt PaizoCon or Gen Con, but I know this will potentially affect games somewhere around the world. I'm sorry in advance if that happens—we're doing what we can to limit that potential effect as much as possible, and with any luck we won't go long without at least read-only access to a very recent copy of wiki content.
In addition to the under-the-hood improvements we'll get from this upgrade, this will also include some necessary updates to our wiki theme (including a design refresh), and if our testing lines up with reality some serious and long-overdue improvements to the wiki's across-the-board performance.
Thanks for your patience and ongoing support of the wiki family.
The only quibble I've found is that on very rare occasions the wiki includes images that only appeared on the Pathfinder Society page (which doesn't have blog in the URL path) and they're marked "Community Use"
Got any examples? I'd love to figure out what's up with that.
Yesterday, we reached 13,000 articles on PathfinderWiki, a Community Use Project to build a canon reference for the Pathfinder campaign setting. (The article's dog! They're good articles, Brent.). Over the last year, we added about 49 articles and 1,265 edits per month.
Some of the new features we added in the last year include:
Interactive region maps for all cities with markers on the official Inner Sea region map, such as Corentyn and Magnimar.
Lists of recurring character, concept, and location appearances in many Pathfinder Society RPG scenarios, such as the list on The Eternal Obelisk.
Hundreds of categorized and annotated pieces of CUP-licensed art from Paizo blog posts, the Paizo store, and Community Use Packages.
We also quietly rolled out StarfinderWiki and have updated it with revelations and artwork from new interviews and blog posts.
We're looking forward to more improvements in the coming year, as well as the launch of Starfinder in August. We're volunteer editors and writers, and if you're interested in contributing, check out the tutorial!
The Solar System plays a role in the Second Darkness AP, with a gazetteer in Children of the Void (now mostly supplanted by Distant Worlds). The AP's plot is heavily rooted in some space-comes-to-Golarion themes.
The module Doom Comes to Dustpawn is space-related and involves a unique spaceship's fate.
The module The Moonscar predictably involves Golarion's moon.
Occult Mysteries has a section full of astrology on Golarion, including astrological events that can affect characters during certain planetary alignments, phases, or conjunctions. Dragon Empires Gazetteer covers the Tian Xia zodiac.
The Iron Gods AP doesn't go to space, but it involves a lot of space stuff that's come to Golarion, including alien races. This includes supporting books People of the Stars and Numeria, Land of Fallen Stars.
The wiki article on souls, via The Great Beyond and Pyramid of the Sky Pharaoh (mostly Pyramid):
PathfinderWiki wrote:
The souls of atheists and agnostics pass through to a plane related to their principles, but dissident souls that refuse Pharasma's judgment and failed souls that never exhibited faith or passion in life never progress. Pharasma dispatches them to a dormant existence in the Graveyard of Souls or roam it in distress, wander the Astral Plane, or are chosen by Pharasma to return to the Material Plane as a reincarnated being. The souls that never leave the Graveyard eventually break down into dormant quintessence called soul debris, which comprises the spire atop which the Boneyard stands.
...
Given sufficient belief in an alternative path, a soul can forego the River of Souls for a different fate, such as reincarnation. Such diversions are ultimately temporary, however, and at some point the soul attempts to reach the Boneyard.
Sorry you couldn't find what you were looking for, Apupunchau! I've added stub articles with sources for each of the institutions named in this thread so far, and reorganized the categories for magical studies to make them easier to find. See the new magical studies category, which contains the arcane colleges category as well as other institutions of magical study like the Arcanists' Circle and Golemworks.
I'll keep working on fleshing these categories out with other relevant articles. Thanks!
I'm late to the party, and the list isn't comprehensive by any stretch, but here's what we track so far on PathfinderWiki by level. By definition, these are in setting content only, and doesn't include setting-neutral books like the NPC Codex:
Found a second level 8 commoner:
Spoiler:
Kajsa, a musical instrument crafter of Azurestone, in Flight of the Red Raven.
My take: Commoners and all of the NPC classes can range in level, and absolutely do. Just check any of our adventures pretty much for plenty of examples.
That said, they almost NEVER go above 5th level. When they do, it's for unique and unusual and specific story reasons. For example, I made a shopkeeper in Burnt Offerings a 7th level commoner to catch players off guard for assuming that he'd be a pushover in a fist-fight, but also to model the fact that he's got an uncommon drive to be a grocer, but not enough drive to be anything MORE than a grocer.
I'm late to the party, and the list isn't comprehensive by any stretch, but here's what we track so far on PathfinderWiki by level. By definition, these are in setting content only, and doesn't include setting-neutral books like the NPC Codex:
- Ohmun Kotem of Wati, in The Half-Dead City. His 8 levels of commoner, with no other class levels, must mean that making dye from giant crawfish is effin' hard.
It isn't featured as a location in any AP issues, modules, or PFS scenarios that I've got handy. It's got a paragraph in Wrath of the Righteous 4 (The Midnight Isles), and Jezelda has a partial block in Second Darkness 6 (Descent into Midnight), but the rest of the info is scattered across mentions in other sourcebooks, namely Lords of Chaos (the full demigod block for Jezelda, and a one-line mention of the bog), The Great Beyond (on a map), and Demons Revisited (a one-line mention).
Mighty Skeld, seer of the portable document, I seek the cover artist's name and the list of credited authors. I have brought this fatted swine of rare markings and a cask of the Green Sight.
But I'm more active on the wiki than he is, so who's he to say that Golarion isn't orbiting HD 70642? ... if we aren't actually outside the universe in which Golarion exists, there is no fourth wall. We're simply writing non-fiction works about a world in a distant part of the galaxy.
If wiki activity is how we determine who can define reality, I'm greatly underestimating my capabilities.
I couldn't find anything that provides a specific origin. It's possible, but somewhat unlikely based on what we can piece together.
Akatas hitch rides on comets; Bestiary 2 suggests that's because they come from a planet that's been destroyed. (I say suggests because the Bestiaries aren't necessarily canon sources for Golarion, as they're setting-neutral.) Though technically, there's nothing saying they are (or aren't) related to the planet where the Silver Mount originated.
Iron Gods:
Androffa, the world that launched the Divinity spaceship which crashed into Numeria to form the Silver Mount, is still intact, and akata comets have landed on Golarion after Earthfall, long after Divinity crashed, which suggests they aren't directly related.
Having said that, Androffans were curious folk—that's why they launched the Divinity with habitat pods to carry alien species. Iron Gods intentionally doesn't expose every piece of the crashed ship, and akatas can hibernate indefinitely; if you want to say they brought akatas with them and the akatas survived the crash, it wouldn't be unlikely.
I've updated the PathfinderWiki article on the Prophecies of Kalistrade with content from the Faction Guide (prohibition of tattoos), Paths of Prestige, and Faiths & Philosophies!
Unfortunately, I couldn't find specifics on many of the prohibitions; very little more specific than "many meats" or "most sexual activity".
In fact, some occult circles have a strange view of the interaction between the Positive and Negative Energy Planes as being part of a single whole, rather than opposites, that, while many inhabitants of those planes disagree, could be a deeper reality.
That philosophy's known as the esoteric tradition, which has a section devoted to it in Chapter 6 of Occult Adventures. (There's even a cute bit of art of a[n apparently now blonde] Enora standing on a chair just to talk to Rivani about it.)
