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PossibleCabbage wrote:

Bringing up Nidal is an example of how most of Cheliax's allies are not anybody who can or will help them very much.

To be sure, Egorian doesn't actually need much from its alliance system in a war with Almas other than their benevolent neutrality (that is, for its allies not to provide aid to Andoran or otherwise hinder Cheliax's own efforts). Having a secure strategic rear and flank so that it can commit to a single front on the Aspodell Mountains and on the Inner Sea is fine.

This is a very good point and does render the Eloiander/Kholas split kind of irrelevant. I don't see the isolationists trying to side with Andoran or haha Cheliax. The Shades just wanna sit in their first playing with their aliens.

That does move me to wondering about Ravounel, Oprak, and Molthune... I'm rather unread on the current state of Avistani politics, but I can imagine Ravounel, at least, being a bit split between the need to placate Cheliax and possibly giving at least a little bit more with Andoren philosophies. I know Nirmathas (or was it Molthune?) had been hoping Oprak would attach Nidal what for Golarion-years ago? And that doesn't seem to have happened...

I can also see Andoren spies in Nidal trying to stir some s+*~ in order to break exactly what you're saying and blunt Cheliax's ability to focus on them. That would be a FASCINATING campaign, tbh, and I would play it in a hot second... How would those shows go about doing that, though? Trying to get Oprak to move against Nidal? Trying to support a third faction that is neither isolationist nor pro-Cheliax? Something involving that trade delegation from Feb a decade or so back? Something else?

To get back on track it’s worth noting that the VELSTRAC shared Hell with the Asuras and Gigases.

Geryon used to be a Asura Rana before switching sides to Asmodeus when his fallen angels invaded.

I always found the idea of a Divine Mistake that hates the gods betraying their kin to a god to be kind of suspicious. Especially that most of the Velstrac, Asura, and Gigases don’t seem to be very mad at being forced out of their homes and sent to other realms or essentially Reservations in Hell.

You think that would leave some resentment. Unless it’s Greyon’s plan and when Asmodeus is weakened Greyon will vomit up the 812 Tyrants and rush Asmodeus.

Considering the Velstrac and Asura use to share Hell. It’s weird that no source commented on the interactions between them.

. . . I like that. A lot. I might put a cult devoted to Geryon in my upcoming "But Oh, Oh, Those Nidalese Nights" campaign that believes exactly that!

And another! . . . Just a little too late to edit my previous post XD

General Azaersi's name means "Aza the Immortal" in Goblin.

Ooo I found another one!

The motto of Korvosa is in Archaic Taldane ~ "Trosker ep Styrk", meaning "Fidelity and Strength"

Why is everyone so certain that Nidal will show up on Cheliax's side? Like, I know they were occupied for three centuries and have had a treaty for 85, but the possibility of the treaty pulling Nidal out of it's vaunted isolationism, especially when the last time they tried the Ulfen kinda kicked their ass, almost certainly will strengthen Eloiander of Ridwan's anti-Chelish position against Kholas and his pro-Chelish faction. Al if there's a push for the Belevais Doctrine, I could easily see Nidal pulling out of the conflict entirely....

Religious rites involving human sacrifice kind of nessitate a disposable population to draw from to get sacrifices from.

Unlike in real life where typically human sacrificial rituals were performed sparingly. Cults devoted to more malign deities practice the ritual far more often then real cultures that had it as an element.

Mostly because it makes them better villains.

In cultures that practiced it they were drawn from captured enemy soldiers who would have been enslaved in most other cultures or slaves.

Of course sometimes their own children were taken as sacrifices like in Carthage.

On a side note I always would have found it interesting that a god of some kind required human or elven or dwarves sacrifices only to then lavish their souls in the afterlife.

Mesoamerican conceptions of sacrificial rituals had the souls of the sacrificed be taken to some of the better afterlives.

It’s worth noting that more civilized cultures waged their fingers at human sacrifice while essentially performing it.

Like how the Romans used it to smear their enemies only to also commit human sacrifice.

There’s an uncomfortable element is that so many “evil cults” in fantasy are based on smear campaigns of minority faiths.

Of course lot all of them. I heard about a GM making Zon-Kuthon worship resemble a messed up version of Catholicism.

Human sacrifice, like most religious practices, has deeply varied meanings in a wide variety of cultural contexts. One of my big bugaboos in fantasy stories in general is that human sacrifice is almost treated as having an alignment of "Always evil" when I just don't think that is so ~ when viewed from within that culture and when taken seriously as a religion.

For positioning's sake ~ I speak as a member of at least two traditions/religions in which human sacrifice is central (one of which being Catholicism) and have learned a lot from thinking about its place in the functioning of the cosmos. No, I do not practice it. Duh.

In neither of my religions would slaves be useful sacrifices, tbh ~ in the one, they're not Jesus, and in the other . . . well, there's Big Cosmology Woowoo stuff, but basically they wouldn't be seen necessarily as having much motion of their own accord and so couldn't contribute a very large push to the universe to keep it moving (the metaphor of like cranking an engine is not at all accurate to the religion's cosmology but is a useful way of communicating it). One of the more common sacrifices would be warriors, who would be seen as having lots of self-willed motion. This is not a very accurate description, but it is quick and this is not the place for me to go on and on.

I don't know if I would make "in the real-world they did sacrifice sparingly" as an axiom, as it could sometimes be relatively regular ~ however, IRL the scale was **much** smaller than in the fantasy stories and it wasn't an everyday thing for sure.

As for Nidal being Catholic ~ it's at least as accurate as the conception of Zonny K as the BDSM god. Medieval Catholicism, anyway ~ we had a LOT of body horror and flagellation and interest in pain and the glorification of suffering back then. And hell there are still qweens who wear the cilice, for example. Although my personal interpretation of Nidal leans much more into the BDSM aspect, it definitely draws some from medieval Catholicism (though it revels in the body rather than trying to transcend it).

I don't see Rovagug being interested in protecting the Star Towers, especially since he gain from them being destroyed.

The demodands are't trying to destroy the tower, but to siphon off its power to their thanatotic titan to makem super powerful. I imagine that might include siphoning off some of Rovagug's, but I'm not sure.

It could be cute it Irrisen has a head start on film and puts out all sorts of weird fantasy and horror flicks.

That could make a lot of sense, considering the whole

Two decades ago, 2.5 decades ago, there was a short-lived trend for writing versions of fantasy settings in the equivalent of the year 2000 ~ *Dragon* did Greyhawk 2000, one of the writers on Legend of the 5 Rings got the job by doing a fan project called Rokugan 2000, etc. These settings took the pre-existing worldbuilding and reinterpreted with modern-to-cyberpunk societal and technological innovations, and sometimes blending the narrative constructions of genres pointing more towards the modern world with those of the high fantasy genre. Occasionally, there were anime conventions brought in, such as mecha and the like.

Starfinder wouldn't be Golarion 2K, since it is set in a conceptual "further future" than modern-to-cyberpunk.

So.... that was a long-winded intro to asking:
In G2K (Golarion 2000), where would the equivalent of Hollywood end up, the center of the film industry? Oppara, maybe? Absalom? Somewhere in Varisia or Arcadia? Something else? Would it end up kinda like the US structure wherein movies are more Hollywood and TV is more NYC but neither of those are anywhere near monolithically true? What about a more global view (irl tehre's Bollywood, Nollywood, etc.) ~ what other centers of the film industry might exist?

I reminded myself today that the Tower of Slant Shadows had a strange syncretic religion pop up around it a few Golarion-decades ago - cultists of Desna and of Rovagug who originally named together simply to protect the Star Tower from a group of demodands (shaggy and tarry, iirc). One interesting dimension which probably has a slight (but prolly no more than) influence on their religious understanding is that both are opposed to Zonny K but are now defending his works or one of them, at least... So there is a TINY chance that he might end up being worshiped by the cult as well? Mostly, I imagine it would just be Desna and Rovagug.

Complicating the question is that James Jacobs has said that they wouldn't be doing anything with demodands in 2e XD

Wondering if anyone has any ideas about what that syncretism might look like and how it has evolved in the time gap between 1e and 2e (both from a world building POV and mechanically as a 2e pantheon)?

Maybe these planes have multiple Malabranche orchestrating Hell’s interests there? I dunno, but I now wanna run a campaign where Hell begins invading the Dreamlands.

I would play in that game in one HOT second! The surreal battles that brings to mind, the metaphysical questions posed ("What happens when a highly legalistic, tricksy plane takes over dreams?"), the chance to revel in all the occult/psychic magic everything . . .

I'm a dirty immersionist who read too many Tolkien encyclopediae in my formative years ~ this kind of deep inquiry into worldbuilding elements that are not directly relevant to the game-as-game of Pathfinder (or any fantasy setting) is fun for me XD

Do we have any definitions for any words in the languages of Golarion? Like, do we know any words in Azlanti or Vudran or Taldane?

So far I've only found one ~ Cities of Golarian mentions that "Nisroch" means "Place of the Drowning Spirits". The book describes it, I believe, as either "the language of the ancient horselords" or "the ancient Kellid language" cuz back then the Nidalese were considered Kellid and not their own ethnicity (being their own ethnicity makes more sense imo), but I have mentally placed it as a word in the Proto-Avistani language I mentioned in my Nidalese linguistics thread.

Oh! and I just remembered that Nidal, Land of Shadow does give us the names of two horse breeds. One of them is chiardmarr, I think, but I can't recall the other one off the top of my head.

Are there any other words defined anywhere in any Golarionic language? I imagine place-names will be the most fertile crops here, as those seem most likely to be defined as Nisroch was.

In asking this question else-net, I've come to the idea that there was a Proto-Avistani language family spoken concurrently with Azlanti and Thassilonian. Proto-Avistani then evolved into the modern
* Hallit (which I imagine as a mix of Irish, Scythian, and Mongol),
* Nidalese (which I imagine as a blend of French and Arabic, based on many Nidalese names being clearly one or the other),
* Shoanti,
* Ulfen (which I imagine as Old Norse), and
* Varisian (which I imagine as incorporating elements of Romany and Classical Greek) languages.

Oh, and I think having a Nidalese language separate from Shadowtongue makes some sense in my version of Golarion ~ the idea that Shadowtongue mainly serves as both a ceremonial language and as a way to talk in front of foreigners so they don't understand is one that really makes sense for me. The rest of Golarion probably thinks of Shadowtongue as the only language "indigenous" to Nidal, mostly because they generally only interact with Nisroch (which is an Akkadian deity IRL!) and Nisroch is intentionally engineered by the Umbral Court to be off-putting to foreigners.

I have always seen (and often described!) Nidal as:

"A wide variety of Frances, from the Dark Medieval to how mid-20th-century USians imagined urban Paris, by way of Conan the Barbarian and Hellraiser. Which comes out feeling a lot like the Chronicles of Riddick lol"

The French and Riddick bits seem the most "modern Nidal qua modern Nidal", while the Hellraiser bit is obviously the influence of Zonny K and his velly boys. Conan the Barbarian is my way of mentioning the ancient Kellid influence, though tbh I see a strong element of not only REH's Cimmerians but the **actual** Cimmerians of the Caucasus region in the Kellid, as well as some Mongol influence in their names (Attai, for example, feels very Mongol to me), specifically the Mongol empire without a centralized ruler like Chingis Khan (so, basically, how we imagine the Mongols).

I know everyone says that Taldor is French, but (noting that I'ven't really dug into the Taldanes), it feels more "Byzantine Empire if it wasn't the surviving portion of the Roman Empire, but rather had the historical place of Rome instead".

Cheliax feels more like Iberia (minus the Andalusia part of history) with some Italianate bits thrown in.

Varisia I have often described as "Ancient Greek city-states by way of the Rom/Sinti, with some Native American-esque cultures in the non-urban areas", though I feel like that description of the Shoanti might be quite outdated at this point.

Like...one thing i appreciate about Golarion is that it manages to have cultural analogues without cultural allegories and part of that is that I can't just say, for example, Brevoy=Russia but rather **have** to inflect that with additional description. And that description can ALSO pull ona nalogue and be relatively quick, too! It's one of the Worldbuilding Wonders of the World lol

I'm a bit confused by the languages used in Nidal . . . They speak

* Common/Taldane ~ but they were never ruled by Taldor, requiring it only to trade (not a huge focus of theirs for many years) until Cheliax conquered them, which was only a very short time in Nidalese history (which is twice as long as **all of human (written) history in our world**

* Shadowtongue ~ a combination of Infernal (okay ig altho velstracs feel like something else but they are LE and have origins in Hell), Azlanti (okay ig cuz Nidal accepted so many refugees) and . . . Taldane for some reason??? Why not Infernal, Azlanti, and Hallit ~ certainly their ancestral language should still be present in their language somehow?

* Varisian ~ why??? Like, yes, it's a neighbor, but it's also one very much associated in Nidalese culture with Desnan worship, which is a driving force of rebellion. I would imagine speaking Varisian is likely to be met with at least a little suspicion from the Nidalese (and very often, maybe most of the time, not too much more than that, tho when it invites more suspicion, I would imagine it invites a **lot** more)

Why no Hallit? Why those languages?

I mean, all the arguments about the sheer UNLIKELIHOOD of there being even a couple traces of English in Pact Standard are super valid. The chances are vanishingly small.

AND

Vanishingly small chances are not no chance. The sheer immense number of vanishingly small chances in the universe results in some of them occurring (the Law of Big Numbers; if it's a 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance, it's prolly happened to 8 people currently alive on Earth, for example).

SO

If someone got really super excited that the Indo-Arabic numerals were showing up on robots in Starfinder, there is a (very, very narrow and limited) path for that to occur. It would prolly be a common sight on one of those lists of random weird facts that have gotten so many socially awkward people through parties in their 20s and it might be fruitful/worth it/necessary to trace that path.

Those kinds of weird fluke things are what give reality its savor!

And, yeah, Irrisen with Russia seems to be the closest contact, but I swear that there were a few others? (none particularly helpful re: English, tho) Osirion and Kemet, mebbe?

And again, I also remember there being some something special about Golarion, Androffa, and Earth, as a like "The only three planets which..." kinda thing....

( Though its probably picked up a ton of stolen grammar and vocabulary from a dozen other languages, ranging from Tian to Verthani. . . )

And Earth is confirmed to exist in Starfinder, with some contact between it and Golarion dating back to Pathfinder and before (tho not much). It is quite possible that SOME English made it into Pact Standard...

Someone once figured out the approximate year conversion between Pathfinder and Earth. The Gap obviously exists to make such history gathering difficult, but one could certainly do some math and make a guess about when Starfinder is set...

Also, what was the thing that was special about Golarion, Androffa, and Earth? Was it that they were all possible origins of the human race? Or something about divine attention?

Ah dagnabbit, I forgot numbers and letters came from different systems x'D (the latin numbers would be like I, II, III and etc right?)

Ita est.

("It is thus" - Latin lacks a word for "yes")

I'm considering a campaign in which the PCs are a group of sentients involved in the judicial system somehow, which leads me to wonder....

How does the judicial system of the Pact Worlds work? Is it more like the US, more like Britain, etc. Are jury trials common, are they juries of one's peers, juries of elders, juries of clergy, juries of professional jurists, juries of Councillors or appointees thereof?

Is it mediation-focused? Evidential argumentation-focused? Criminal, civil, both, neither? Is it transformative, punitive, restorative?

Are there lawyers? How many sides are there in a case (one, arguing for the facts, OR a defense and a prosecution OR three, with an added side representing the state/society itself)?

Is there a series of courts, with a ladder of appeals that slowly shifts focus from proving what happened to ensuring the validity/propriety of the previous proceedings to determining if the judgment/law was even legal?

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera....

there's very likely some strict prohibitions on what the pact worlds government can control as opposed to the members, like the early US constitution or UN

My read on the situation is that it's somewhere in between the general lack of power held by the UN General Assembly (since the Security Council basically is the only bit that has any power, even if very limited) and the United States Senate and House of Representatives (which, despite the general ascendancy of the executive branch, is intended to be the central governing power in our country).

The lack of a specific executive branch seems to indicate that the Pact Council and Directorate have that power as well as legislative power. It's even possible that they have judicial powers as well! Considering the likely scale of the Council (we're dealing with planetary populations here, mind you - it almost certainly resembles Star Wars's Galactic Senate than, say, the US Cabinet), it seems like those functions could somewhat easily be handled by various committees and subcommittees of the larger Council. Alternatively, the Directorate might represent the executive branch....

I think I'd play it closer to corporate structure, I think (though I am an anti-corporatist by nature). The Directorate, well, directs, establishing a high level, sort of meta-, legislature that the Council is intended to follow while they process the everyday legislative and higher executive/judicial functions. They would then have the power to veto, or even just step in and take over, most any decision or function of the Pact Council that they deemed was either not proceeding according to their Directives or that needed their personal attention to ensure that it does.

No doubt, there is a procedure and/or (probably both) threshold which can protect a decision/function of the Council from Directorate intervention. The Council and most of its sub-bodies would probably require some sort of majority (prolly closer to 50+1 than, say, 2/3rds, but I'm not sure), while the Directorate can only act with consensus.

Interestingly, I just noted that the Sun is "held in common by Pact World members" as a protectorate, which means that it has non-voting representatives on the Pact Council. I imagine that Absalom, Eox, and Apostae have often maneuvered for its seat(s) on the Council, simply to further amplify their voice in decisions....

The Burning Archipelago, however, is self-governing and so can thus send its own representatives to the Council

** spoiler omitted **

This idea, honestly, seems like the most useful one so far...

The idea is a take on the Pentagon Papers (revealing the depth, longevity, and, well, just plain s****iness of the US's involvement in Vietnam), so I think this one fits the best so far and definitely starts popping off in my brain a bit! Thank you!

Absalom Station, Eox, and Apostae probably have influence out of proportion with their populace, though, as for various reasons they all should have above average levels of political savvy. Absalom Station is the center of trade and culture for the Pact, which makes it a defacto center for a lot of politically influential forces. Eox and Apostae, meanwhile, are both ruthless cutthroat societies both likely to spawn skilled intriguers and negotiators, and whose continued survival at least in part depends on their ability to manage their involvement with the Pact.

First of all, thank you SO MUCH for your well-thought-out answer. It is singularly the most helpful one I've received on two platforms so far!

Second of all, I think I would solve this "problem" of those three having more influence than would be math-ily indicated much the same way the UN does for colonial powers in our world ~ of the six seats on the Directorate, one is for the Director-General of the Stewards (obvi) and two can only be seated by the Absalomian, Eoxite, and Apostaean representatives. So, although their population gives them very few votes, the system still enshrines their presence and input in the highest decisions. This is in addition, of course, to having very dedicated and skilled social and political maneuverers and (at least for Absalom and Eox) incredibly valuable resources that they can parlay.

I am considering a campaign in which the PCs come across evidence that the Pact Council somehow arranged for the Swarm attack in 291 AG as a means to engineer an end to the Silent War, probably using the Exo-Guardians faction of the Starfinder Society as their agents (possibly including several who joined the Acquisitives after the Scoured Stars Incident). Or maybe the Aspis Consortium?

So I'm trying to figure out how the Council/Starfinders/Consortium could have done that....

So how does the Swarm choose its targets?

Do they just wander aimlessly, striking at whatever decent target they come across like some Hollywood misunderstanding of a biker gang, or is there some kind of plan or deliberation behind it?

The Pact Council is made up of delegates representing member planets, their number determined by their sentient population.

As far as I can tell, we are never given numbers of delegates or planetary populations. If I think about running a campaign in which political maneuvering or repercussions are important, then it might be useful to develop an idea of the numbers on the Council.

So in the absence of canon, how do you imagine the makeup of the Pact Council?

Voting members: Aballon, Castrovel, Absalom Station, Akiton, Verces, Idari, Eox, Triaxus, Arkanen, Osoro, Bretheda, Kalo-Mahoi, and Apostae

Anything that should look like Akkadian?

Still wish I knew that language myself and all.

I know more Sumerian than I do Akkadian (not saying too much) and OOH BOY is that a wibbly-wobbly, silly-willy, go-home-you're-drunk orthography. I've tried writing out Sumerian using the cuneiform you can access on Google products, and it was an exercise in patience and frustration.

But so pretty, though! <3 you, cuneiform! Kakama!

There is, obviously, Ninshabur as a place that begs to use a cuneiformic system (and is even stated as having done so), but that means players are pretty unlikely to see it....Areshkigal is a demon lord, and there's Nurgal and Nergal, and there are girtablilu and shedu and lamassu and such around....

Ninshabur seems to have exerted a significant influence on Kelesh, and thus on Qadira. Considering the other influences there, Keleshite script might be a Demotic-like cursive form of cuneiform in a flowing, calligraphic style like Arabic. Sounds pretty ~ if I had any visual-arts skill, I might play around with that.

Sarenrae has made High Ninshabur part of her realm in Nirvana, too, so I can totes see cuneiform being the basis for a cultic language in her worship.

I had the idea to stat up Hello Kitty mostly because one of my Beloveds is a GINORMOUS Hello Kitty fan. Well, okay, zey is actually a Bad Batz Maru fan, but guess whose merch is easier to find?

So then I started thinking about a world called Sanri, a D&D setting I could slowly build up from that base idea. Only I couldn't decide between statting up HK in D&D5 or PF1. I could see benefits to both, but the way either system would shape Sanri was less easy to predict.

Meet Haroktii Howait, ruler of the realm of Mishru in Sanri Phaivii. She has a counterpart, of course, in Sanri Pyefwan, and I plan to stat out more and more characters from this and other IPs to explore the similarities and differences between the types of setting each system is most suited towards.

Lemme know what you think!

Ah, Pangolais! The city which hides away even from Nidal’s dimmed sun beneath the black leaves of the Uskwood! Where every sound’s reverberations are swallowed by those leaves til they whisper and that whisper can almost be heard above the hush! Glittering in a thousand grays, interrupted only by streets like captured moons glowing dimmed while the cathedrals watch with their rose-shaped eyes and academies glower miserly over the ancient laments of those whom Earthfall saved.

I imagine that some overwrought Edgar Allen Poe look-alike among the Nidalese here has written of this city like that. It does sound romantically beautiful. Here, explorations into the Dark Tapestry and the Shadow Plane which would be the defining pursuit of any other town pale in comparison to the Cathedral of Exquisite Agony, Zon-Kuthon’s greatest temple. It’s described in Inner Sea Temples, so at least it doesn’t distract from the gothic dream home that is Pangolais.

Elegance rules the day ~ night? ~ no, day ~ right? ~ anyway . . . ~ in Pangolais, where Kuthite bladed harps drift weavingly among the fragrance of moonflowers in the cafes where vampires and caligni chat and chuckle among those races who could handle the sun if they ever saw it.

We’re given a statblock for Pangolais, and it’s pretty much what you would expect, honestly. In a vast improvement over its mother-game, Pathfinder has finely tuned its city statblocks to convey useful information (rules can be found in the GameMastery Guide). For example, the third line down (after the name of the city, its completely unshocking alignment, and its general size category) tells me that bribery attempts, Bluff checks against guards and officials, and Stealth checks outside will all get a +3 bonus, as will (coincidentally) Diplomacy checks to gather information and Knowledge checks when researching in libraries. That’s rather a lower Lore rating (the latter bonus) then I would have guessed, considering Nidal’s unique stores of texts twice as old as Earthly civilization. I’d probably play that as the Nidalese keeping quite a stringent grip on this national treasure of theirs, as well as a myriad very specific specializations among its sages that makes finding the exact thing you’re looking for harder to find than it would seem at first.

Crime is kept relatively low here, giving only a +1 bonus to Sense Motive checks to avoid being bluffed and Sleight of Hand checks to pick pockets. This is a weirdness in Pathfinder’s rules, actually ~ these bonuses seem at odds. Crime +1 means that not much crime happens in Pangolais, enough to be a worry (it’s not negative, after all) but not a big worry. Why does that make pickpocketing easier while also making it harder to bluff people? Surely the first represents people being suspicious while the second represents them letting down their guard?

Checks to make money get a +2 bonus, reflecting the wealth of the large city. Again, lower than I might have expected for such an important place, but it makes sense in a society so driven by patronage. People don’t necessarily go shopping in such cultures, they have their usual providers from whom they always purchase whatever particular good or service that person produces. Personal relationships are very important here, which is something I do which this book stressed more. The strictness of Nidalese law can result in a whopping +6 bonus to Intimidate checks (if you invoke the threat of the law to force friendliness), Diplomacy checks against government officials, or Diplomacy checks made to call on the city guard. On the other hand, Diplomacy checks to alter the attitude of non-governmental officials get a +4 bonus due to the town’s cosmopolitan openness to unusual visitors. Disguise checks, as well.

A list of qualities follow, letting us know that the city is both academic and insular (the latter of which increases Law slightly and decreases Crime, but weirdly has no effect on Society, which reflects the society’s openness to the new and unusual), as well as three new qualities described right here in the stat block. Religiously intolerant is the same as racially intolerant from the GameMastery Guide, only it forces non-Kuthites rather than any particular race to pay half-again for everything and to get harassed in various ways. It seems that its dominance by the cruel and literally dark faith of Zon-Kuthon DOES effect the city’s Society rating negatively, as well as upping its Law rating and greatly increasing its Danger. As the seat of Zon-Kuthon’s worship, its Corruption is increased, as is the maximum spellcasting available here (by a whole two levels, which stacks with the benefit from the academic quality, maxing out the available spellcasting at 9th-level spells).

That Danger rating I mentioned? It’s a whopping 30, which is intended as an addition to percentile CR-ranked encounter tables. Using the samples given in the GameMastery Guide, this means that in many urban environments, nothing easier than a CR 3 will show up randomly.

Pangolais has 18,900 people in it. That’s on the lower side of Rome’s size in 1300, and just about 1100 people smaller than Cahokia was a century earlier (on the bottom range of possible sizes for Cahokia at the time) or Paris was three centuries earlier. Of those, 11,000 are humans (about 58%, almost 3 in 5 people), 3500 are caligni (18.5%, a little more than 1 in 6 people), 2400 are fetchlings/kayal (12.7% or about 1 in 8), and 2000 are members of various other races (a tiny bit more than 1 in 10). This is certainly a very integrated city!

Most of the NPCs described in this statblock will be discussed later, but I’m gonna guess that the Hierarch of the Cathedral, a LE male vampire (of what race originally? Grrr!) cleric of the Midnight Lord 13 named Chartaigne, is described in Inner Sea Temples, because the statblock is his only mention.

Finally, the statblock informs us that it’s fairly easy to find mundane items of a value up to 8000 g, which is rather impressive considering that any given shopkeeper can only afford to pay about 6 times that for anything the party has to sell. Magical items, on the other hand, well . . . n average, you’ll find 10 (anywhere from 4 to 16) minor items, 7 or 8 medium items (3-12), and 5 major items (2-8) for sale here. That’s quite the magic shop! It’s probably 3 or 4, to be honest.

Wonder what they do for the rest of the calories they need to do their Monk stuff (and just live)? Follow up with really bad food?

A quick spot of research tells me that martial artists need between 4 and 5 thousand calories a day to operate at a high level ~ which also seems to be true for long-distnace hikers/campers. I found this exact breakdown of a 4000-calorie diet for ultralight hiking, which weighs only 2 pounds a day. Sure, much of that requires our industrialized food production system, but consider that the entire point is that they ride the line of "not having enough food" to meet their masochistic needs as Kuthites, and . . .

Damn Breathatarians

You laugh, but this is a place where wizards casually violate the laws of physics and monks turn into angels if they advance far enough along their way. The idea that the scarred monks practice some sort of esoteric meditative/chakric/body control techniques to reduce their calorie needs and optimize their metabolism doesn't pop my susspenders of disbelief.

******

Kayalhi, as you might be able to tell from the name, is a town full of fetchlings who view visiting humans with wariness. It’s peaceful and as prosperous as someplace described as “hardscrabble” can be. Despite their lack of piety, and moreover their disinterest in making a show of what devotion they do have, the Umbral Court tends to leave the 175 residents of the village alone. You can send your thanks and support to Chancellor Zelvith, a LN female fetchling mesmerist 4 (yay! Occult classes!) who does make a show of things and generally don the gladhanding performance work necessary to appease the Court. She also runs a network of anonymous foreign spies, trading what they have learned for Kayalhi’s unmolested existence. Her age is catching up to her, though, so she has a need for a successor to this work.

In a lovely little detail, we are told of Kayalhi’s fame and how that fame has inspired the creation of inconspicuous taverns and gathering places called “the local kayalhi” where fetchling culture and cuisine allows them to relax, gossip, support each other both financially and socially, and hold special events like weddings, new-baby celebrations, parties of all kinds, and memorial services. It’s an early version of a community center, and it sounds weirdly cozy for Nidal and for its gray-skinned oppressed minority. Next time I’m running a game in Nidal, I will have to ensure that there is, at minimum, one scene set in the local kayalhi!

A Desnan cult used an occult ritual known as veil structure to hide away a secret lodge in the Uskwood where they stored many treasures and a library of Kuthite vulnerabilities. They were tracked down and destroyed or forced to go into hiding. With no initiates who could see it, the lodge was lost. The druids set up some monstrous defenses where they thought it might be, mostly a nest of deathwebs (CR 6 undead spiders from the third Bestiary) and struck it from their record books. Of course, now even the druids have forgotten it ever existed, leaving only a few scattered writings and a single memory in the Cathedral of Embodied Wisdom to be found by revolutionary PCs, which is a rather nice hook for a very interesting Leverage-or-Shadowrun-style heist.

A slightly domed 25-foot-diameter crystal window overlooks Nisroch Bay from the cliffs above it, the result of a Chelish magical defense during the Everwar against a random portal to the Shadow Plane. It’s called the Moonless Mirror and it attracted the attention of Yisaothai the Oil-Tongued, a dark naga with the shadow lord template (CR 10, in total, with appreciation from me for combining elements of two different books). I seriously love the name Yisaothai, bringing together a very Kellid Mongolian sound with some serious and not-boring serpentine sibilants (I’m looking at you, Faerun). Yisaothai now rules a fiefdom on the Shadow side of the portal and continuously works to convince mortals to break the mirror blocking the portal. A young fisherman by the name of Wyldon, a lowly N human expert 1, is his most promising possibility, as he is susceptible to promises of wealth and the affections of the :local beauty” he has a crush on. Of course, erosion is wearing the cliff that holds the mirror away, so Wyldon better get on it if he wants help from the other side with his problems.

A nice small story with pretty large consequences, that is. Far larger consequences than just Yisaothai’s Challenge Rating would indicate; recall, please, that they rule an entire fiefdom. I approve. We need more such things, to force murderhobo and heroic PCs alike to recognize the everyday struggles of the common people.

Also near Nisroch, though hidden by very specifically planted black-leaved trees is a fortified quay called Nightbinder’s Wharf, which sees shadowcallers and other Nidalese agents (including druids with shadowy or powerful companions on paid commissions by the Umbral Court, the rich, or even foreign dignitaries, mostly Chelish) leave for foreign service. Tight secrecy is kept by the Court with the disappearance of both spies and the occasional random wanderer. I assume this is another call out to Liane’s two Nidalese novels.

Speaking of “gloomy, salt-stained” Nisroch (why not “salty, gloom-stained”? More poets need to write these things :p Though its other name, the Maw of Shadow, is kinda cute if awkwardly worded; it’ll be Shadow’s Maw in my game) is noted as the most joyless and forbidding of cities. Its status as the primary port for foreigners is blamed for this depressing state, though the text notes that this is an intentional effort by the Umbral Court to discourage long-term, meddling visitors. Thus, the city is very quickly established as Nidal’s own domestic noir setting. This is only cemented by mention that the Usk River sharply divides the beautiful villas of the well-to-do from the poor hovels. It’s detailed in Cities of Golarion, so this is all we’re told.

The Ombrefell stretches its branches between the Atteran Ranches and the Uskwood. This is where the Xoskerik shadow giants have made their home alongside forest drakes, malevolent fey, and a few Uskwood druids. Other entries from the gazetteer can be found here: Soth-Silir, the Fields of Pain’s Forgetting which I’ve already discussed, and the Viridian Forge.

Orolo’s Quay has almost forgotten its days as a bustling seaport, coastal Varisia’s settlement having stolen its business, leaving the Chelish fortress here to crumble among the gulls and smugglers. Speaking of, I simply adore the last name of the smuggler leader, Brovos Gulltongue, a CN male Varisian half-orc brawler 6 and pirate who was forced to flee into superficial devotions to Zon-Kuthon as a way to escape the enemies he’d made from Riddleport to Magnimar. Sadly, he has named his gang simply “the Gulls” and will beat you for mocking its drabness. They tend to take food and liquor in and take drugs and oddities out, but occasionally they smuggle people if Brovos thinks it won’t be a risk to his perch in the nigh abandoned city. Fancying himself a hero of the people, he mostly does this for runaway slaves and needy old folk, though pretty ladies can flatter the ill-mannered rogue into helping them. Gifts of good stories or live fish and swigs of Riddleport scorpion rum also work. Googling “scorpion rum” mostly just turns up things about a Buffalo wing restaurant.

A colony of incutilises (incutiles? However you pluralize it, they’re brain-like CR 2 nautiluses with CR 8 lords) has joined the Gulls in the harbor, occasionally kidnapping them or their cargo of people to use as zombies. No one has noticed against the background level of disappearances among the outlaws.

Tiny content warning: there’s a bit of gruesomeness in the very last sentence that might be difficult. Please take care of yourselves.

There’s a fortress in the southern Mindspins that seems made of shadows and probably houses velstracs performing strange rituals. It’s called the Hall to Broken Dream and will be detailed later in the book.

Chelish diplomat Perevill Hesperix made his home in a rather Gothic manor between Ridwan and the Umbral Basin. Much like the Chelish family that founded Dauphenal Vineyard, Perevill’s family lost all claim on the manor when they lost their lives for backing a House other than Thrune in the Chelish Civil War. Its new owners, the Umbral Court, ignored it until an agent of theirs named Celefin of Pangolais, a LE female half-elf wizard 15, bought it 30 years ago. Her vocal support of the Belevais Doctrine has convinced the undead contingent on the Umbral Court to block her ascension. Once Celefin realized this, she withdrew and retired here in disgust.

Celefin has become a scholar of anti-undead warfare, even publishing on the subject under a false name and corresponding with foreign worshippers of Pharasma and even Sarenrae. Her careful adherence to Nidalese law, shows of (probably honest) loyalty, and powerbase have protected her so far. But there are definitely people on the Court itching to punish her.

The House of Lies is one of my favoritestest locations in Nidal. In the northwestern Uskwood overlooking the Usk River, it hosts a quintennial competition of untruths in which the greatest liars, braggarts, and con artists compete. It’s a carryover from the cultural openness of the Shadowbreak and will be detailed later.

Icebow Bridge is the home of the Library Without Light, where the texts brought by Azlanti and Thassilonian refugees fleeing Earthfall 10,000 years ago brought into Nidal. To this day, they are not organized but randomly stores on the Library Without Light’s shelves. Written in a hundred languages (most long-dead), the library contains an almost unimaginable amount of all manner of knowledge from a world that, simply put, no longer exists ~ the rituals, genealogies, naturalists’ notes, and even the maps are unrecognizable today. Nonetheless, people come from all over Avistan (and probably Garund, Casmaron, and even Tian Xia, I would imagine) to study these texts. Anyone can petition Master Librarian Hale Craggox, a NE human investigator 4/wizard 2 to study here among his many acolytes and apprentices. Of course, the folk of the Library are filled out with at least one member of the Umbral Court and three or four of their agents. It’s considered a very prestigious assignment.

As I’ve said before, I simply adore the idea that Nidal hosts more ancient knowledge than any other nation in Avistan, as it gives PCs a reason to go there while disincentivizing a righteous murder spree against the evil pain-lovers. Pitting taste and possibly alignment against advancement of goals is a classic conflict. It’s nice to see the investigator get some play here, too. It’s one of my (too many >.< ) favorite classes in Pathfinder 1st edition and is art of a larger trend in Paizo’s game design that I really enjoy. It’s something that attracted me to Exalted, as well (squeezed in between squeeing at the glorious intersection of shounen anime and classical epics) They’ve often done a simply brilliant job of writing classes, archetypes, monsters/race, and the like that reference unexpected inspirations ~ the investigator being essentially Sherlock Holmes, which is one of the least D&D things I can think of, but also stuff like the magical child archetype of the vigilante ~ and then find ways to integrate it into the setting and expand their conceptual space. I’ve used the investigator, for example, to represent a 17th/18th-century style naturalist before. It also lets you bash together disparate ideas in a way that’s very D&D and yet feels organic and appropriate to the setting. One of these days I’ll play that caecilia magical girl vigilante character, which is to say: what if Ursula from The Little Mermaid became Sailor Moon in D&D? Poor unfortunate souls, indeed…

The scarred monks of Nidal train at the millennia-old Irogath Monastery, literally carved into the side of the Mindspin Mountains. A knotted maze of monastically bare chambers whose doors can be in any of the six directions (yes, including up and down) twists among itself with only stone benches unadorned with cushions for reading and others for sleeping. Unexpectedly and delightfully, its noted that the monks eat delicious food, but that the torture comes in the infinitesimal nature of their portions. I love that detail, and it fits in with a lot of my understanding as an aspiring polytheist nun of how monastic devotions work, at least outside of a Catholic context. It’s not about rejecting pleasure or the world, but maximizing one’s ability to delight in it. Of course, for Kuthites enjoying the pain and discomfort is more of the focus than the old canard, “A mundane person can drink as many kegs of ale as they like and stay stone sober, but a magician can get drunk off the mere sight of a glass of water.” But I think there’s not much difference between the two, and that’s a large part of why I love Nidal. For extra sadism, snowmelt flows through some of the rooms, channeled into beautiful kinetic sculptures. Oddly, these sculptures also make heavy use of the light effects of the water (presumably, glints and rainbows).

Merinda the Striped (such a good name), a LE human monk (scarred monk) 8, is the Mistress of the monaster, and she is said to be able to see one’s devotion to the Midnight Lord or any of the heresies against him with steady eye contact. Rumors ascribe any number of tortures and horrors to the inner chambers, including the lovely image of previous monastic hopefuls, maimed yet living, serving the ordeal by taking out their agony and envy on newer contenders. None know successful aspirants receive for enduring these tortures, save for a brand of a spiked chain on their back and access to the scarred monk archetype from Horror Realms. Said archetype replaces high jump, wholeness of body, abundant step, and empty body with the monk’s choice of several “mortifications”. My favorite are doll face, in which the monk removes their face and from then on can steal porcelain doll versions of corpse’s faces for intimidation and can shift the doll to look like people’s loved ones, and tongueless master, which allows monks who wear their own tongues on a necklace to steal people’s voices with a punch in order to be able to speak with that person’s voice (they can’t speak usually).

The Fields of Pain’s Forgetting grow a wide variety of narcotic and hallucinogenic plants, most of which commit the Nidalese sin of dulling or negating pain. All are addictive. Mushrooms are mentioned (of the luminous sort) and poppies (specifically white ones), too, but the most notable among them is flayleaf, a muscle relaxant and analgesic that increases suggestibility and can be made into a very hallucinogenic drink called Riddleport tea. As that suggests, flayleaf is mostly associated with Varisia.

The Umbral Court, who operates the fields by means of the grumpy and jaded Mistress Cultivator Preali Dhat (N fetchling alchemist 4/druid 2 whose anger stems from not being in the Court), loves to mix these drugs with poisonous substances to help them find weakling infidels who try to avoid Zon-Kuthon’s teachings. I imagine these poisons cause particularly spectacular deaths and Umbral agents across the realm have been trained to listen for sudden outbreaks of such deaths, allowing them to locate the users and dealers of these drugs.

I kinda like that Nidal has a War on Painkillers like this. It’s a neat little extrapolation from their premise. I also like Preali Dhat ~ her alignment is a welcome break from the waves of evil and could provide for quite interesting interactions with PCs, and her class combination is both unusual and appropriate.

Of course, there are sometimes uses for removing the touch of the Midnight Lord, and so the Fields’ primary beneficiaries are churches, cathedrals, and the wonderfully termed “independent houses of torture.” Pragmatism wins out every time.

Leading through the Minspin Mountains to Molthune, Ghorvaul’s Crossing is home to an ancient bit of tribal revenge. Enemies of the main Nidalese tribes, the Ehrotai tribe refused to seek refuge with Zon-Kuthon after Earthfall. Their spiritworkers committed ritual suicide, hoping to preserve the mory of their people by becoming ghosts.

Instead, they rose as a multi-limbed monstrosity known as a charnel colossus (CR 19), that did retain their memories and traditions. So that’s nice, at least.

Shadowcallers trade sacrifices for questions. The sacrifices have their bodies and minds incorporated into the Speakers of the Ehrotai, as the colossus is named. Usually, it’s one person per question, but if the Speakers can learn a lot from the person, they might allow more. Giving yourself over to the Speakers is well-known amongst the jaded members of the Kuthite faith as a way to both end their ennui and to have, at least, a novel kind of suffering accompany your death.

The Speakers of the Ehrotai are a wonderful way to keep the Kellid history of Nidal present. It fits right in with the themes and ways of the culture while still allowing for a relationship with PCs other than “kill it!” and provides a nice element for any deep-immersion role-player to include in their character’s backstory. How did their ancestors relate to the Ehrotai 10,000 years ago? This could also provide backstories for ancient Nidalese magic items untouched by the Midnight Lord, which might also prompt involvement with the Speakers, who won’t say anything (such as a command word) without a sacrifice. What are your good-aligned Desnan and Milanite PCs gonna do in that case? How deep is their dedication to revolution? Or just think of what it might mean for the Molthuni, if they ever manage to get it together to invade Nidal? An invasion of Nidal seems like the one story I might tell involving Molthune, which is largely pretty bland in my limited reading of that realm.

Caustic, poisonous crimson smoke that will slay any living creature in minutes and blackened stone walls herald the rich deposits of gems in the Godsblood Crevasse, which cuts through the hissing wastes southeast of Ridwan known as the Weeping Fields. Wow, that’s a region that really calls forth the purple prose and heavy metal imagery, isn’t it? Specifically, the crevasse holds pigeon’s-blood rubies, and its stores (mined by alchemically-petrified skeletons) have seemed inexhaustible for centuries. Surely, it’s a gift from the Midnight Lord! The rubies are the only colored gemstones considered in good taste by Nidalese fashonistas.

Grenda of Elith Lorin, a LE female graveknight fighter 9 and member of the Umbral Court, oversees the bony miners. I bet Preali Dhat hates her for being on the Court. She gets her skeletons, officially speaking, from Kuthites who have sold their labor after death. However, the smoke wears away at them, even through their alchemical processing, and so her overseers are less than strict about their methods of replacing them.

A curiously cold basin of water surrounded by frost blighted plants sits near the outlet of the Usk Lake to the Usk River. Despite the local’s dismissal of fisherfolk stories about seeing ice deep below the surface, this basin hosts a qallupilluk by the name of Kialuk. The qallupillk is based on an Inuit creature, the qalupalik. She’d fought with her sisters over a stolen child and was exiled, travelling south (presumably from the Crown of the World or damn near) til she came here. Several crates of liquid ice stolen from an unlikely Kuthite caravan made her hovel at least livable and intimidated the merrows, scrags, and other monsters of the lake. She is now a petty queen living in fear of running out of the very limited resource that allows her to live and maintain her power. This fear drives her to command her servants to travel Nidalese rivers in search of a replacement, preferably a permanent one.

Kialuk is nice ~ she connects Nidal (somewhat randomly) to the outer world and feels pleasingly like the kind of kids’ TV villainess common to the many cartoons and shows I watched as a child. I simply cannot help but imagine Rita Repulsa’s voice bubbling out from Kialuk’s mouth. Aristotelian ideas of dramatic conservation want me to tie her into Alkaiva of the Uskwood’s winter wolf, but my interest in immersion and mythopoeia would want to resist that as being unrealistic.

Dauphenal Vineyard was founded in the Northern Plains during Shadowbreak by a disgraced scion of a Chelish noble house. We get another fun, immersive detail: Dauphenal grows a varietal of grape known as alvarno, which is probably not fantastical but a reference to alvarinho (a.k.a., albariño). On Earth, alvarinho is mostly grown in Portugal and Galicia, Spain. On Golarion, we are told, it was at the time popular in Cheliax but largely unknown in Nidal.

For the most part, Avistani nations are written in a nice balance when it comes to comparing them to European countries. None can be described well as “fantasy Germany” or “pseudo-Norway” or “faux Andorra”. And yet, many resonate strongly enough with European countries to give players an easy path to figuring out their cultures. Varisia is vaguely Greece if it was populated by the Rom. Taldor is kinda Byzantine. Brevoy is kinda Russian. Nirmathas calls up images of Robin Hood. There two Frances: Galt in an unending revolution and Nidal itself I have often described as France by way of Conan and Hellraiser.

Cheliax, arguably, is in the sweetest spot in this balancing act. It obviously draws on southern Europe,but people have a hard time identifying if it’s Spanish or Italian. This detail of the wine grape tells me that viticulturally Cheliax resembles Spain more than it does Italy. And it’s specific enough that it doesn’t negate the bits of Chelish culture that feel Italian while still flashing out the image of Chelish culture in my head. Well done, Lianne!

Anyway, Dauphenal was an immediate success, showcasing a light but surprisingly nuanced white wine made from the alvarino grapes. Crisp and herbal, Dauphenal wine looks a bit like liquid moonstone, shining gray in the glass, and has notes of pear and lemongrass. This kind of detail is lovely, but I find myself sad that I don’t know the flavor profile of any other Avistani wine. It’s the kind of detail that shines most when it can be compared to other similar details. I want to know how Dauphenal gray (as I call it in my head) matches to, say, a Brevish icewine. This wine maintained the founders family for generations...until they decided to back someone other than House Thrune in the Chelish Civil War. In the aftermath, the Umbral Court took control of the vineyard, causing the quality of the wine to worsen.

The Court’s solution was to bring a Chelish-trained vigneron to operate it. Ylise of the Pale Sun, a NE female druid 3/enchanter 2, graduated from the famous Nidalese universityin Elith Lorin and has managed to restore the vineyard to its former prestige.

Edammera of the Dusk Hall performed his research in a steel-doored tower that has been abandoned for centuries. I remember noting that the timeline didn’t explain why Mesandroth Fiendlorn’s exploits resulted in a tower called Edammera’s Folly. Well, we learn now ~ Edammera was on Mesandroth’s assistants.

The afore-mentioned Elith Lorin is a beautiful 1500-person town on the Usk River, made even more beautiful by Meletir of Nisroch’s statue “The Fountain of Shelyn’s Lament.” I do wish I know what it depicted exactly; I have an idea but only a vague one. After the Everwar, Chelish investors also helped make the city uncommonly gorgeous as they built limestone buildings ringing that marketplace, as well as the ornate Bridge of Vainglory over the river.

Almost all Nidalese trade passes through Elith Lorin ~ Atterani ranchers drive livestock there, the southern plains bring their produce there, and both then flow out west to Nisroch or east to Pangolais. Its port is very busy. Occupying Chelish dignitaries’s mansions have been reborn as offices for state officials and the clerks and legates in their employ. Of course, the west is unruly and all that trade makes Elith Lorin the headquarters for Nisrochite spies and Pangolaise inquisitors, who also make their offices in these buildings. The Eye of Pangolais, a former church dedicated to Aroden, overlooks the town from a northern hill, wreathed rumors of this kind of thing.

What the town is known for across Nidal, however is the School of the Pale Sun on the other side of town. It’s not Pangolais’s Dusk Hall, but it is still a prestigious school for Nidalese diplomats and agents abroad, particularly shadowcallers, choosing its students by means of divination spells. Pangolais and Ridwan provide most of those students. It relies on Chelish faculty to counteract the effects of Nidal’s isolation. Nidalese instructors like Headmistress Virexia of Pangolais (LE human bard (archivist) 7) mostly just make sure there are no traitors among the students while they teach the sneaky and treacherous ways to work for their country.

Helthir of the Midnight Citadel, a LE male human inquisitor 5 (but of what domain or inquisition???), rules the town. He’s filled with devotion to Zon-Kuthon and blood from an old Pangolais family. Most of what he does is to contain Nisroch’s chaos by means of informers and an utter lack of respect for privacy. Only the fetchling ghetto is safe from his reach, but they are just as suspicious as Helthir.

You might know this,but Xibalba (or at least the name) is taken from Maya cosmology. You could research that to fill in details til Paizo publishes more about it.

Pope Uncommon the Dainty wrote:

{. . .}

I recently saw someone describe the Mindspin Mountains as the most Tolkienian area of Golarion. Which, I suppose, might make Nidal Mordor? Regardless, there is a small coal-mining village tucked into their foothills where two rivers converge called Ash Hollow. OK, so Nidal burns coal, evidently. Which changes some of my mental image of its culture ~ I had before imagined them more as something like Westeros or a grim version of Early Modern, Renaissance, or even medieval France and England. Large echoing rooms of castle-stone for the nobles with dramatic fireplaces fighting back any chill while providing a lovely stage for wineglass brooding. But coal shifts that image to one inspired by some years later; now I have to import some imagery of, like, 19th-century London.

Of course, it makes sense that they need coal, since the land is kept in shadow.
{. . .}

I wonder if the coal is needed for actually keeping the land in shadow? With the effect extended by divine magic, of course -- nevertheless, this brings up an issue that Nidal's air quality might be atrocious (and this would not be at all objectionable to at least most of the Kuthites). (Serious air pollution on Earth goes back into Antiquity, and a Science article from the 1980s or 1990s showed graphs of substantial mercury pollution going all the way back into pre-Roman Greek times, and this article also mentions Ancient Greek and other pre-Roman-equivalent societies making air pollution. So by analogy, air pollution could well be a widespread problem on Golarion, and Nidal could be especially bad if they have coal smoke and add divine magic to keep the smoke from dissipating or raining out so that the shadowing effect persists.)

It certainly changes one's mental image of Avistan, doesn't it, this one little detail? I do especially like the idea that the Kuthite clergy use their divine magicks to maintain the clouds of coal-black smoke hanging ominously over the realm, pulling the famous Londonesque pea-soup fog with their miracles from the cold, dewy ground and the genteel streets of Pangolais to install it high above where it can block the light of the hated sun.

As a devotional polytheist (and some of this is culture-specific, rather than derived from a broad theological type or orientation to certain types of praxis), it actually fits more closely with how I understand the complex and ongoing interactions between mortal, immortal, and cosmos. Many types of priest are essentially cosmological handymen, maintenance workers who keep the ma'at, the ollin (yes, those are two concepts from very different places and very different cultures, do please forgive me; I work with both) functioning well so that the world doesn't break down. Importing that and twisting it to a Nidalese context makes mevery happy. Thank you for the idea!

***************

Blacksulfur Pond is a pretty standard creepy pond. It has no visible inlet and sits in the middle of a hush. It even looks black from a distance, though that illusion is revealed as such with a closer inspection. It is not the water that is black, but the pondbottom itself, a shimmering darkness. It is a dead pond, with no life of any type in it or on it or around it. If you ask the locals, they’ll tell you it’s got a fissure to the Darklands’s gasses, but in truth it’s a portal to a pond in the Shadow Plane, one not very well-known on the other side.

The Umbral Court once watched this portal for incursions, but they’ve been so rare that only Leorel of Nisroch (NE human abjurer 3) guards the pond. And he lives an hour away, without much drive to travel all that way very diligently. I like that he’s an abjurer, quite a bit actually. For one, it’s an all-too-oft-ignored subclass, and I appreciate it being presented here as being tied into the world/situation in a way with more meat than ticking off boxes (like, the “this university needs a professor from every school of magic” thing). For another, it’s not the school of magic I immediately associate with Nidal and its tropes, so seeing abjuration show up here helps imagine Nidal as a place with a complex and verisimilitudinous culture. Makes me want to play an abjurer Umbral agent, actually, with a similar job.

Brimstone Springs is high up in the Mindspins. Tolkien-ish territory, remember? Its named for the sulfurous and brightly colored Soulsheen Baths. As with many such places, they are popular as a cure for many things with all the toxic chemicals in their waters. Yeah, okay, confusing poison for medicine is a little over-the-top “fair is foul”, but it’s also extremely realistic. This is one of the times that restraint would actually make the setting seem more alien and one-dimensional.

The Nidalese especially enjoy immersing themselves in various poison waters that stain their skin yellow and grant them visions of their afterlives if they stay in them for a day. It also decides where they’re going; a drowning devil named Reinoks uses it to collect souls for Infernal Duke Crocell. They’re similarities to certain Hellish places have started to attract a number of Chelish tourists to Brimstone Spring, as well, setting up some nice chance for the isolationists v. Cheliax fans conflict to pop up in an unusual setting where many people would have their defenses lowered. Evidently, they’re featured in the Giantslayer adventure path’s gazetteer of the Minspins. I should read that, because now I really wanna play out an underhanded political adventure or even campaign in Brimstone Springs! The Latinist in me really loves the image of cloak-and-dagger political intrigue among the baths and the wandering steam.

I do wish I knew of even one or two NPCs published here or somewhere else that had yellow skin and knowledge that they would go to Hell when they died. It would make an interesting motivation for a good-aligned Chelaxian, actually ~ they don’t feel the need to be evil because they can rest assured that they will end up where they want to be after death, so they can safely and freely go against the grain of the culture.

The Cairn of Attai Horse-Speaker, the pre-Earthfall chieftain of the Atteran tribe, is said to be marked by an ancient statue and an entrance into the earth somewhere in Barrowmoor. It seems to be detailed in Tombs of Golarion.

The vampiric nobleman Volsazni Dezarr (a name that strikes me as more Varisi than Kellid) keeps a collection of light-related artifacts and holy wonders in the Castle of the Captive Sun, his ostentatiously named country home. His choice of guests is evidently also unusual, but we won’t know any details for some pages, it seems.

57 years ago (the equivalent of about 26 years culturally and only 8 to the elfs), the Order of the Scourge razed Citadel Gheisteno, headquarters of the Hellknight Order of the Crux, to the ground for betraying their founding ideals and the Measure and the Chain. All were killed. Considering that this was only 23 years or so after House Thrune (who, along with Iomedaean knights, helped the Scourge do this) won their civil war, bargaining Nidalese independence for Nidalese aid, I’m kind of surprised that we’re not told of this being a major international incident. By my math, remember, the culture should be reacting as if that civil war had ended only about a decade ago in our terms, and to any elf it would have been the equivalent only like 3 years ago! Even without that math, we can clearly see events from 1997 affecting today’s political situation. And whether the alliance with Nidal is a good thing is still a cause for instability in Nidal, anyway!

Lianne throws in another call-out to her two books set in Nidal, including their protagonists’ hometown of Crosspine in the gazetteer. It’s just a small village on the southeastern border of the Uskwood known for producing lots of arcane and druidic magic-users.

The Atteran Ranches are an area of Nidal that has gotten a bit more attention than a lot of the shadow-hugged nation’s other regions. For one thing, it is set up to very easily produce the sort of good-vs.-evil conflict that appeals to a certain type of gamer, or the freedom-vs.-oppression that does the same for a different type. For another, its heady mix of cowboys, rural horror, paranoia under totalitarianism, religion, whimsy-vs.-suffering, and familial drama gives it a simply enchanting flavor. Should I ever get the urge to play a game inspired by Mercedes Lackey or any number of CW shows, the Atteran Ranches are where I would do it.

The Ranches still practice many of the ancient ways of the Nidalese Kellids before Earthfall, modifying the ten-millenia-old practices to a more settled life between the Uskwood and Barrowmoor. And not just the horse-tending ways, either. We are specifically told that they continue to fight with archaic spear-using styles and practice antique funerary rites. With my immersionist tendencies, I quite appreciate that we are given the names and descriptions of not one but two breeds of horses the people of the Ranches have been husbanding and tending for all these centuries. Nidarrmars have dark hides and a reputation as fast, silent horses calm in the face of danger and easily trained, whereas the dappled grey chiardmars are quick and wild like moon shadows on the grass.

Much to the edification of the urban gossips of Nidal, the Atteran Ranches do indeed harbor Desnan dissidents. Both the family which has given its name to the Ranches as a whole since time immemorial and the Blackraven family have heirs who follow the ways of the Starsong. I really like their names: Daiye and Odarac. Daiye matches the emotional feel of Nidalese culture nicely, and Odarac really feels like a Frankish name of the sort that makes sense for the Kellid ur-culture of Nidal.

Daiye’s father Vaide (another good name!) is trying to cover for them by loudly and clumsily searching for non-existent Desnan agitators elsewhere. Hired Kuthite fanatics who call themselves “dream hunters” have come into the Ranches on his dime. The various clans of the region easily mislead these outsiders, taking advantage of their ignorance of the social landscape and ways.

But everyone knows that this is a situation that cannot hold. Sooner or later, the secret will out and on that day, fates will be settled.

I’ven’t looked at 2nd edition yet, but I believe I’ve picked up that the timeline advanced by ten years, is that so? Does anyone know if they’ve said anything yet about the situation of the Atteran Ranches, then?

We are pointed to other entries in this book to help flesh out the Ranches: Barrowmoor, Ravenscry, the Uthori Steppes, and Whitemound. It seems that a different book, Tombs of Golarion, also has some relevant information, in this case about the Cairn of Attai Horse-Speaker. I appreciate the linguistics there, as Attai could very conceivably be etymologically related to Atteran. These locations feel like a mix of British naming practices (the compound names) and Mongolian linguistics. Mongolian seems like a good mix there, in terms of the ur-culture. It helps keep Kellid from being too reductively Celtic/Scythian wile still having a strong resonance with the idea of a culture of horse-nomads.

Speaking of British-style names, Auginford is a small farming town with a problem. I have always appreciated how Paizo has leveraged its OGL and SRD to be unashamed of including characters mixing and matching and including information from their supplements, helping those bits of crunch actually feel integrated. The aristocratic sheriff Joeen Malsten is a hunter (from the Advanced Class guide), and has been talking with other nearby rulers to try t figure out whether Pangolais should be involved.

A very sort of Lovecraftian structure was revealed outside of Auginford by a rainstorm last year, all green flecks in black stone and patterns that seem to wriggle when you look at them. Its appearance presaged an outbreak of creepy, quiet sounds haunting people’s houses at night. The town’s chickens have been laying leathery-shelled blue eggs filled not with yolks orchicks but stinking slime and the wombs of the livestock have produced strangely-shaped, long-dead offspring.

Barrowmoor (mentioned, of course, in the description of the Atteran Ranches) has a quick description as a collection of charcoal cairns and tombs decorated with flint and braided horsehair. It has a very gothic feel to it, cold winds and a bleak feeling to the description of the land. I think of Scotland for some reason,or maybe i’m mistaking Robert E. Howard for Scotland in my head.

The use of the term “sheriff” in the description of Auginford might give us a little more information about the governmental structure of Nidal. It comes from the term “shire reeve”, a shire being either a district in general or basically equivalent to a county. Pre-feudally speaking, a shire was originally under the rule of an earl, and consisted of a group mof what were called hundreds (each ruled by a constable). A hundred was 10 tithings, and each tithing was a hide,mdefined as an area containing enough arable land to support a single household. I just learned the term for the office, term, or jurisdiction of a sheriff cuz I looked it up, and I just love the word: “shrievalty”. It makes me giggle.

Reeves were responsible historically for keeping the peace on behalf of the king in England and Wales, whereas in Scotland they were (and are) judges. As feudalism centered the idea of the manor, they also assisted the bailiffs (court functionaries), serving as the overseers of the peasants and the work they were feudally bound to perform for the lord of the manor. He also was in charge of selling the produce produced, collecting monies, and paying accounts.

Perhaps intriguingly, they were often peasants chosen once a year, sometimes by appointment from the lord but just as often elected by the peasants themselves. Occasionally, that election was protected from the lord’s veto, even!

What does this tell us about the Nidalese system, described by one commentator on this Let’s Read over at the Paizo forums as an all-encompassing church-state bureaucracy with no feudal admixture perhaps analogous to 1st-century Egypt or mid-20th-century Russia? (and I’ll add as a reminder that it seems to function by means of a military-academic complex.) I’m not overly sure. I like the idea of the shire-reeve being elected by the peasants, and imagining the small-story possibilities of the Umbral Court working to influence an election to get someone who suits their plans better than the alternatives into office. What U.S. citizen doesn’t like a good story of election tampering?

This need not be a terminal accomplishment for a Troll who has the guts.

Somehow, I've managed to never hear about the Augurs (Golarion is bug, y'all). I can totes imagine one in a town along Nidal's border with Varisia, enjoying an honored position as the Eternal Kiss's annual sacrifice.

Actually, Kaer Maga may not be particularly close to the southern border (Korvosa is significantly closer), but this does establish that trolls join dwarves in the ranks of "we know they live near Nidal and they can take more pain than other mortal beings". Why don't we hear more about Nidalese trolls? It just makes sense that they (and dwarfs) would be respected by Kuthites....

***

Albatross is a nice, little town, all cliffs and ports isolated in the mists of Conqueror’s Bay. Imagine the stereotype of the stern yet cozy English fisherman, and that’s kind of the image I get of the Nidalese in Albatross. At the moment, when I think of that image, the primary association I have with it is the installments of Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series that were set in Cornwall. Imagining that series in Nidal takes my imagination many intriguing places. The people of Albatross practice a no-doubt homey version of augury, tracking the motions and activities of the town’s namesake birds.

This is where the Umbral Court imprisons its agents who have done something against them but who can’t just be offed. Worse than the questionable nutrition of the town’s flavorless cuisine and the townsfolks’ barely monosyllabic conversation is the prohibition the Court has placed upon hurting the people here. No relief from one’s punishment can be found in sadism here.

Albatross makes me think of nothing more than The Prisoner, that treasure of British postmodern Cold War paranoia. If I were ever to run an adventure in or passing through Albatross, I think this blend of elements ~ Dark is Rising, The Prisoner, France-by-way-of-Conan-and-Hellraiser ~ would be plenty to give it an unforgettably unique flavor.

There’s a caligni druid here by the name of Alkaiva of the Uskwood. She lost a political tussle with Eloiander of Ridwan and was only saved by two of her aunts in the Umbral Court. For some reason, her white wolf is given a name that doesn’t feel very Nidalese to me at all. It doesn’t seem to mimic the linguistic conventions of any of the languages I would expect to feed into Nidalese (French, Gaelic, Scythian, maybe some English, even Greek, perhaps with French, Italian, Spanish, or Latin loanwords from Cheliax). “Xiaq” reads to me as more like . . . Inuit or Tlingit, maybe with some Chinese influence.

It’s actually kind of interesting in an understated way. Famously, Golarion has often felt kind of threadbare when it came to international politics, due to the manner of its development. The many realms were treated as the personal project of the various high-level designers, with a not-insurmountable-but-still-a resistance to encroach on another’s turf. Little bits like a druid of the Uskwood having an animal companion that seems to imply some connection to the Crown of the World, a connection which might maybe have had something to do with her conflict with Eloiander, give DMs a platform to build that international diplomacy for their campaigns.

I would actually absolutely adore playing a Pathfinder campaign of international diplomacy, roaming Avistan and maybe greater Golarion, too, shaping history with our words and relationships.

Alkaiva is given an impressive number of adventure hooks in just 100 words or so ~ everything from her messing around with the town’s augury tradition by using her powers to train the whitr albatrosses to dance, to her having secrets that could damage Eloiander’s political position by revealing that his anti-Cheliax stance isn’t just words, to Eloiander not being okay with leaving her alive.

I recently saw someone describe the Mindspin Mountains as the most Tolkienian area of Golarion. Which, I suppose, might make Nidal Mordor? Regardless, there is a small coal-mining village tucked into their foothills where two rivers converge called Ash Hollow. OK, so Nidal burns coal, evidently. Which changes some of my mental image of its culture ~ I had before imagined them more as something like Westeros or a grim version of Early Modern, Renaissance, or even medieval France and England. Large echoing rooms of castle-stone for the nobles with dramatic fireplaces fighting back any chill while providing a lovely stage for wineglass brooding. But coal shifts that image to one inspired by some years later; now I have to import some imagery of, like, 19th-century London.

Of course, it makes sense that they need coal, since the land is kept in shadow.

Thousands make a pilgrimage to Ash Hollow every year, however, for the Festival of Nigh’s Return, completely changing the town for that week (after all, it increases the population by multiple dozenfolds). They come to gather in the valley and on the hillsides near the mountain Aghor Thal to watch a giant, rose-shaped black iron crucible heated with a massive bonfire. It literally fills a cave mouth. Once it is good and hot at duck, the sacrifices begin and do not end until dawn. Millennia of use has awakened the cauldron as an evil idol served by a group of reclusive ascetics known as the Watchers on the Hill.

The Watchers on the Hill are led by a human oracle named Baegloth, a name which shows up in chronicles written many centuries ago in the founding documents and original historical references to the cult. This has led the villagers to believe that he and the rest of the Watchers are effectively immortal, their destruction only possible by destroying the Black Rose.

Pope Uncommon the Dainty wrote:

I'm curious, as I keep working on my close reading of the Nidal book. Do you remember how Nidal, Ridwan, and Nisroch came into their names? On a meta- level, I mean; why did the designers choose those names for those places?

I didn't invent any of those names, but I suspect there was no deeper meaning or plot other than that they wanted something that sounded kinda creepy. The "Ni-" prefix maybe evokes the word "night" which is a big theme there, but that's probably a coincidence.

MOST of the names we create for Golarion that are made-up nonsense words tend to have no deeper meaning, though.

Do you know who might have invented them? And if that person has an AMA thread?

I only ask because they're real-world words with deeper meanings. "Nidal" is Arabic for "struggle" and is in at least one Palestinian organization's name iirc (the ANO; Abu Nidal Organization, or Father of Struggle Organization), "Ridwan" is both the angel who guards the gates of Paradise and the holiday celebrating Baha'u'llah's announcement that he was a Divine Manifestation, and Nisroch is the (mistaken) name of the god King Sennacherib was worshiping when he was assassinated in the Bible and a demon in Paradise Lost who said the demons would lose because they felt pain and the angels didn't.

I'm curious about the intentions and thoughts behind those choices. Partially, I admit, because Nidal is one of the Designated Enemies of the setting (despite my interest in the more complex and nuanced picture laced throughout their setting book ~ I mean, it's also a land of truly devoted and loving parents and ancient knowledge carefully preserved for ten millennia, which is twice as long or so as Earth's recorded history) and that leaves me slightly uncomfortable with the two Arabic words used in it.

I do love what they say about Nidalese language, phonetics, and etymology though.

We next get a list of the Great Kuthite Ceremonies, preceded by a note that everyone in the realm must find some way to join the public celebrations, whether it is performative or not, by dint of the generally oppressive atmosphere of the place. Which is a thing I’m certainly down with; my love for Nidal doesn’t mean I think it’s a nice place to live, nor even does my desire that Nidal be written in such a way that I coud play a good character who doesn’t reject everything about its culture. However, the writing gets a bit lurid and eager to convince us of Nidal’s EEEEVIIILLL for me.

For the 10 days before the first new moon of the new year, communities choose a victim (usually an enemy or prisoner, if they can, though the improperly pious function just fine, and the smaller villages often substitute a pig or a goat or, inviting Umbral suspicion, even an effigy) to lavish with the good life, no luxury denied. They then torture and eviscerate them on the night of the new moon, looking for portents in what are only described as the “ritual’s details.” I think I would choose to interpret that as a combination of, like, ancient Roman haruspicy and some of the things involved in the lead-up and interpretation of Afro-Diasporic sacrifice rituals, looking at like how the animal behaves and gaining knowledge therefrom.

I actually kind of hate this ritual, the Eternal Kiss. For one thing, it seems quite unconnected to anything in Kuthite ecclesiology, theology, or cosmology other than the timing. A shift of even just a handful of words would have been sufficient to shift that, sadly, making it the religion’s effort to learn what the coming year had in store for them. I am fairly certain that wordcount could have been cleared for another sentence giving us a brief description of how the Nidalese Kuthite faithful view the changing of the calendar or the passage of time. The other reason I hate it is because of its resemblance to a lot of Nahua/Azteca human sacrifice rituals involving an ixiptla (a word I’ve seen translated as “deity impersonator”). The issue isn’t taking inspiration or having resonance with Nahua culture ~ that’s something I’d love to see more of, actually ~ but in the text’s attempts to drive home, again, the EEEVIIILLLL of it. If you’re going to do that, it’s probably best to avoid any semblance to actual oppressed/colonized peoples.

The autumnal equinox plays host to the Festival of Night’s Return, which is given the couple of words necessary to tie it into the Kuthite approach to the world. Elements of Beltaine and Burning Man and medieval Catholic mortification of flesh all combine into the description of the holiday. The distinction between rural and urban celebrations is very clear in the Festival of Night’s Return. Out in the country, the villagers flagellate themselves with simple knotted cords or leather straps, causing no more injury than, say, a light-to-moderate SM scene, and the prayers are kept simple, largely similar to those of farmers everywhere, only worded to fit the Midnight Lord’s ways. Bonfires burn effigies of Sarenrae or Shelyn to show their god’s victory over beauty and light. (I’ve said before that I prefer a much more complicated relationship between the two siblings, and I’m frankly kind of surprised that no mention is made of Desna here. She is both an ancestral deity of the Kellid Nidalese and the primary divine agent working to end Zon-Kuthon’s hold over Nidal, after all). As the bonfire dies down and the self-whipping slows, villagers break off in groups or couples to, well, I believe the tasteful way to put it is the way the book puts it: “to celebrate.”

In the cities, Night’s Return is a carnivalesque affair, grand and grim. The Midnight Lord’s pre-dominance permits him to share the flames with no one, not even those he has vanquished. Well, the bones of the previous year’s sacrifices burn amongst the wood, but that’s different. The parade is filled with those who want to attract the Court’s attention or even favor, so everyone seeks to best those next to them, pushing themselves beyond their limits to shows of bloody, grisly devotion amongst the extravagant displays of shadow magic that burst throughout the streets. Here, the holiday drains the energy from all but the masochistic, preventing the kind of eager seeking of the fesh that marks the village holidays.

The third of the Great Celebrations is the one most tied to Nidalese culture, and thus my favorite among them. The first Moonday of Lamashan (mid-autumn, October-ish) remembers the terrible time just after Earthfall. Well, terrible for those without a shadowed god providing for their needs, anyway. Originally, it was celebrated by scavenging the bones of foreigners who’d starved, constructing a ceremonial table from them and serving a harvest feast upon it. Now, the bones are of a community’s dead, stretching back through the long generations, and it is a festival of remembrance of the past and thankfulness to Zon-Kuthon for having protected those ancestors so that they could give birth to those celebrating the rite. Among the Great Celebrations, I envision the Feast of the Survivors to be the homiest of them all, not too far in feel from a Kuthite Thanksgiving, to give a rough analogy. It’s when family members gather to spend time with everyone they love, even the ones they don’t love.

I am always annoyed by fantasy holidays with formulae like these, honestly. I mean, unless Moonday itself is important to the celebration in some way (think “the 7th day” in Abrahamic traditions, or the various associations of the days of the week with the orisha in Ifa and Yoruba-derived Afro-Diasporic traditions, for examples), it’s very much an industrial way of schedule things. As far as I can tell, most pre- or non-industrial festival calendars timed things to the seasons or the position of celestial bodies or the rhythms of agriculture than to any sort of an idea of “weekend” (which is an artifact of struggles against industrial, capitalist bosses).

The last of the Great Celebrations is the Shadowchaining. The first day of Kuthona (early winter, December-ish) hosts a parade of all those with animals magically bound to them, many changed by shadow but also those who are not, flaked by kneeling inhabitants who repeat standard prayers of humility and gratitude. The animals are allowed to hurt those praying, though not to injure or kill them, and then at the end are released to a snarling display of nature red in tooth and claw against some enemy of the faith from outside of Nidal, as the crowd cheers and roars.

Has anyone ever compiled a calendar with all of the various national, cultural, and religious holidays of Golarion, or even just Avistan? There have been so many described, I’m just kind of curious to see what lines up with what….

The fact that this thread has damn near 80,000 posts and has gone on for a serious grip of years is kind of mindblowing, frankly. Thank you, James, for answering just SO. MANY. QUESTIONS. about the amazing world you and others have created.

I'm curious, as I keep working on my close reading of the Nidal book. Do you remember how Nidal, Ridwan, and Nisroch came into their names? On a meta- level, I mean; why did the designers choose those names for those places?

The Umbral Court, as with all groups of two or more people, has its divisions and its arguments. They work to hide them from their subjects and foreigners, hoping to build up an image of a cabal unified by their Kuthite devotion and their personal infusion with the Midnight Lord’s power. We are given two examples of their divisions: a political one concerning Nidal’s relationship with Cheliax, and a theological dispute concerning something called the Belevais Doctrine. That latter argument is one of my favoritest things in the book, by the way.

Nidalese city-dwellers and graduates of the School of the Pale Sun in Elith Lorin tend to be super-excited about Nidal’s alliance with the infernalists of Cheliax. The vampire sorcerer Kholas has voiced this opinion more eloquently, louder, and more often than anyone, making him something of the face of this contingent, who wish to expand their nation’s influence across all of Golarion and to bring more and more to the revealing ways of Zon-Kuthon’s pain.

However, Eloiander of Ridwan and the Uskwood druids have argued against them, pointing to the Nidalese’s special status as the chosen people of Zon-Kuthon, exalted in suffering above all the rest of Golarion. Foreigners, they say, mean little to the lord of the velstracs, and extermists (including Eloiander himself) have even gone so far as attempt to sabotage the alliance or make any Chelish in their borders’s stay unbearable.

I enjoy this conflict! It feels very well-placed so that the Cheliax-Nidal alliance can present all the dangers of a unified evil alliance to those games who want such a thing, but which clever heroes like the PCs can sabotage, defeating it by means of subterfuge instead of meeting an overwhelming force head-on. It can also provide a good reason for Nidalese PCs of any alignment to join forces with a party crusading for the forces of good ~ imagine the possibilities of an evil Nidalese Kuthite PC teaming up with a bunch of Iomedaean and Milanite PCs against the devil-worshippers of Cheliax. Even if the party is composed entirely of relatively typical Nidalese, this division can generate any number of plots.

The Belevais Doctrine, as I said, is one of the peaks of this book. It feels very reminiscent of actual theological debate (it would fit in with questions like the medieval European debates around things like God’s ability or inability to create a boulder He can’t move, or whether imagined things have enough reality to be considered moral patients, or whether Jesus ever shat and what that would mean about His blend of divinity and humanity), while also remaining very grounded in the reality of a pulpy fantasy setting. My main metric for such things in recent years is gem fusion from Steven Universe ~ which is clearly an allegory for romance and even sex, allowing the cartoon to comment on such things, but is also alien enough to spawn storylines of its own that would not make any sense if they were about such things. I feel like that’s the kind of allegory that Tolkien would be happy with.

OK, but WTF even is the Belevais Doctrine? It is an answer, the orthodoxy of which has haunted Nidalese theologians for centuries and yet is still very much in question, to a very important question to Nidalese culture: do the undead feel pain as intensely or as loudly, as the living? Adherents of the doctrine claim that pain exists to warn the living of danger or death, and that therefore those who have nothing to fear from most sources thereof, those who are already dead, cannot feel true pain by definition. Certainly, the undead can suffer ~ no Nidalese who can lookout their window would debate that ~ but the Belevais Doctrine seeks to distinguish misery or agony from pain itself. And it is pain that Zon-Kuthon bequeaths as gift to those he blesses.

Velstracs, according to the doctrine, are alone among the races of the Realms Beyond to feel true pain, either because they’ve replaced some skin with that of living mortal beings or simply through sufficient body modification in service to the Midnight Lord. Thus, its believers, believe that undead and non-velstrac outsiders are forever shut out from proper dedicated worship of Zon-Kuthon. The undead are the more politically important and contentious of the two groups, due to the large number of them within the shadowed borders of Nidal.

Belevaisians argue against raising the undead above living worshippers who profess an equal amount of piety in the Kuthite hierarchy, effectively holding them to a higher standard to achieve similar rank. As one would expect, they have made few friends and many enemies amongst the undead population of Nidal.

The fact that these two divisions are largely unrelated gives me intriguing ideas of rather complicated Nidalese political divisions. I’d love to explore them in a campaign someday: Belevaisian isolationists vs. undead-supporting expansionists vs. Belevaisian expansionists vs. undead-supporting isolationists. With four great poles around which to circle and (on the lower side of the scale) dozens of people in the Umbral Court, you can easily keep each faction down to a manageable but easily expandable 10-15 members. Imagine the sociocultural drawing-and-quartering you can put the PCs through, with what they think of as a single, god-given voice pulling them in four different directions!

I'm a dirty rotten immersionist with an interest in fantasy languages. Too much Tolkien, I suppose.

Are there any web resources that have dictionaries or glossaries of any of the Golarion languages? I'm kind of curious about conlanging up some etymologies......

Elves not reaching physical maturity until their second century is an artifact of 1E and is no longer true in 2E. The 2E CRB changed that to around 20 years, about the same as every other common ancestry (except goblins).

Yeah, but it's an artifact I happen to like :-p Honestly, however, that change stretches my suspension of disbelief some. Without the fallback on historical change happening slower for a significant part of the population thanks to generational dynamics being stretched over greater periods of time, the idea (as an example) that Nidal has had a single, continuous culture ~ let alone a stable government! ~ for twice as long as written history has existed on our planet is almost unbelievable to me.

But, anyway, here's the next installment!

The book continues on to remind us that Kuthite religion is not the only influence on Nidalese culture. It’s obviously a duh, but it needs to be said, both because in-setting, foreigners are likely to think that it is, and out-of-setting players always love to reduce settings to the simple one-sentence introduction we use to aid decision-making. Of course, it then goes on to describe elements of Nidalese culture that are Kuthite, like the politicking of the Umbral Court and the slight difference in holiday celebrations that develop from fear, defiance, or zeal for the state religion.

But then we get a quick paragraph about Nidalese fashion. In terms of ancient Forgite RPG theory, immersionism is my primary creative agenda. A good amount of the juice I get from RPGs comes from feeling like I am deeply embedded in a fictional world ~ yes, I also enjoy Tolkien’s sub-creation theory, despite my polytheism. Fashion is one of those very subtle ways you can communicate culture and history, much like Tolkien’s fictional philology, and so I can become fascinated with the history of fashion in D&D worlds. It helps that one of my current RISK* sweeties, as well as an ex-RISK now-friend sweety of mine, has done deep study on fashion and the development thereof. Their drag, both of theirs, is everything.

Anyway, we’re told that the tension between stoic silence and a joyful quest for pain forms a central organizing factor of Nidalese fashion. They prefer greys and blacks in austere cuts, and express quality and fanciness with the garments’ elaborate structure and architecture, rather than in ornamentation. I imagine this structure is focused on draping and close tailoring, as their love of austere cuts would seem to preclude dramatic silhouettes or profiles. I can fully imagine a Nidalese socialite finding such things as bustles or shoulder pads or hoop skirts gauche attempts to distract from the tailor’s undoubtedly poor mastery of their craft, or at best of the unattractive body of the person wearing the outfit.

This seems to be confirmed by what we’re told of preferences in Pangolais, where silk and lace float off bodies in layers. Nisroch and Ridwan tend towards a more war-like look, giving up the float of those delicate fabrics for stiff leather, either glossy or welted for decoration. It’s a little harder to layer leather, but I can imagine that the higher classes often lean towards less stiff clothing. Buttery garments, one on top of the other, seem much more likely, or even things like suede.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the Nidalese distaste for ornamentation in clothing, they love to adorn their bodies by means of things like piercings, tattoos, brands, and scarification. Of course, the pain involved in these things no doubt help. Nothing is said about Nidalese traditions of these things, in terms of materials or locations or designs. I would imagine that, since the experience is more important than the product for most Kuthites, there isn’t much in terms of cultural trend. Rather, Nidalese body mod culture probably leans much more toward how it often functions in the US today ~ it’s a form of personal expression, with the artistic eye being the primary determiner of things like location, color, material, etc., and designs ranging from those deeply infused with personal meaning to perfunctory designs that the artist can do in their sleep to ridiculous and easy humor.

Nidalese disdain bright colors in general, but especially in gems and jewelry, favoring instead things like moonstones, onyxes, and smoky quartz. It’s not actually mentioned, but I would imagine that a Nidalese would judge aesthetics largely in terms of chiaroscuro and the drama of shapes.

* Romantic, Intimate, Sexual, and/or Kinky, that is.

Big cosmic things like the manasaputra and especially the annunaki and apkallu. Really dig into that grand real-world sci-fantasy stream that is ancient astronaut theory while making use of the grand scales easily available with a galaxy as your landscape.

Give the greys and the reptoids and such things (mothmen?) a grounding in Starfinder lore; right now they kinda stick out as blatant references unmoored to the setting.

A Starfinder adaptation of the occult line (Occult Adventures, Psychic Anthology, Occult Mysteries, Occult Origins, Occult Realms).

More about the religions and gods of the universe, both the Golarion ones and those from beyond the Pact Worlds. There are some really intriguing choices in the core 20 (Lao Shu Po for the win!) and I wanna see more about them and how they've changed with new technology, modern sociopolitical memes, and shifts in their centrality.

Information on the Outer Planes, with specific work put in to differentiate them in play from going to alien planets.

Everyday life in the Pact Worlds and beyond. Stuff like #Starfound. I want some feel for music, fashion, food, products, interracial relations from the point of view of the kasatha parent dropping off their child with their Eoxian teacher. To give this idea more selling power beyond freaky immersionists like me, you can build it into like Twilight Zone-style stories. Or just do something like the ancient Shadowbeat sourcebook for Shadowrun (that was what 1st edition?) That book alone made me wanna play a game as a sports team or a rock band or an investigative journalism team or an emergency medical team.

Actually ~ SPACE HOSPITALS. If there's anyway to build an Adventure Path out of a hospital drama in a science-fantasy setting, my money's on Paizo to do it.

A new chapter means a new, pretty opening page! In the obviously gorgeous art atop the two pages, we see a couple of wagons, brightly lit despite the general gloom in the image, decorated (though not richly) in white and red with flags and banners and awnings. A trail of about fifteen people follow, their postures not as festive as the wagons. I do appreciate that at least one elder is visible among the small figures. The wagon train approaches a city which lies at the end of a winding road between two hills. An odd bright, warm glow from the left intrudes upon the city’s blacks and greys and purples, colors reflected in the giant storm-like cloud above it that appears to be connected to the city in some way by giant chains. The chains dissolve into the cloud atop and have links that appear to be larger than most of the city’s buildings. This procession is being watched by three giant boars and three deers, all six of whom have eyes that glow with a cold blue for some reason.

I like this piece ~ it establishes the overall eerie mood of Nidal but also remembers to assert that there are other aspects to this gloomy realm, as well. We see how present the natural world is, even affected by the spiritual reality of the place. We see the common Nidalese pursuing their own lives, as mundane and comprehensible to us as they, by logic, must be, and even that there is a place for the warm and the festive in Nidal. It is not a one-dimensional place, and we are immediately reminded of that on the front page of the gazetteer.

Below the art on the first page is, of course, a relatively sizeable in-universe quotation. This one is from a Chelish ambassador to Nidal, writing to the person replacing her in her position. It describes Nidal wonderfully as a “strange and old place, capricious in the way that strange old things often are”, which is a lovely British fantasy author way of describing a place. The quotation establishes that even the Chelish fear Nidal, but it also reasserts the beauty of Nidal, and “fascinations that dig into your soul as surely as the Kuthites’ hooks bite into their skin”, as well as the invaluable knowledge shepherded by these ancient masochistic people.

This quotation, more than anything really, is what got me excited about Nidal, pushing past my concerns that its depiction would be one-dimensional, cartoonish, and annoying to me as a lifestyle masochist. But, as Ambassador Thelassia Phandros says, “It is a place, for better or worse, that you will never forget. You can’t. The scars remain forever.”

The actual text of the gazetteer opens up with a reminder of just how ancient Nidal is (a topic I’ve harped on as well throughout this Let’s Read). And yet, unlike might be expected in many other times, that antiquity is not locked away in a book on a shelf or a curio in a vault, but a vital part of what it is to be Nidalese, even today. The book tells us that the poorest of peasants will have an item (a pitcher, maybe, or a necklace) old enough to be in a museum. That’s a part of Nidalese culture that deserves even more attention, I feel ~ the idea that literally everyone has been around objects made as long before them as Jesus was to us, has used and worn these objects throughout their lives. The blend of comfort and caretaking they must feel with the physical objects around them must be intriguing, mixed maybe even to an exotic mindset. It’s a detail easily added into the game as well: the Nidalese fighter and the way she takes care of her sword or armor, or the Nidalese wizard who carries their spellbook roughly over the shoulder but always puts gloves on before turning the pages. Of course, Nidalese occultists would be the pinnacle of such a mindset.

This constant presence of the ancient even affects language and clothing, where the inclusion of centuries-old elements is considered a sign of sophistication. Pangolais’s fashion is even described as “defiant” in its mix of new, daring trends with ancient materials and techniques. This is another interestingly gameable detail, as the reaction of the rest of Avistan to Nidalese clothing must be confused and even stilted.

The final note in the introduction has to do with the homogenizing nature of both Nidal’s historic isolationism and its cosmologically-enforced state religion. Though regional differences do exist ~ a Nidalese could easily tell an Atterani hose-tender from a Pangolaisian aristocrat, for example ~ they tend to be so subtle as to escape the notice of outsiders. This could lead to NPCs (or even PCs!) who have the problematic notion that all Nidalese are exactly alike. Combined with the oddness of their traditional/cutting-edge fashion and distinctly alien philosophy, this probably marks Nidalese as outsiders across Avistan, which could lead to both exoticizing and ostracizing them.

Though I hate to apply the word “Orientalism” to an ostensibly faux-European culture, it seems likely that most Avistani (whose culture has been so shaped by the faux-Byzantine Taldans anyway) might take such an attitude to the Nidalese, and this introduction succinctly lays out the reasons why, without ever mentioning such a thing.

Who would have expected truth in advertising from the House of Lies?

The best lies are true....

306 years after Edammera’s Folly and 4810 years ago (overall culture equivalent: 2186 years ago / elfin culture equivalent: 687 years ago), the Umbral Court migrates shadow giants from Mitheeriak on the the Shadow Plane into the Ombrefell to live in Nidal. This was only 92 years before Aroden pulled the god-birthing Starstone from the depths and became god of humanity and prophecy. The shadow giants are descended from the shadow gigas (first descendants of the titans) and flat-out refuse to consider the possibility that their ancestors were slaughtered by the velstracs after Doloras released them from their Hellish prison. In more recent history, velstracs have tried to subjugate them ~ when the shadow giants have managed to overcome these attempts, they have literally bathed in the velstracs’ blood (as they do with every fallen enemy they face, of any kind).

Their religion, as described briefly on the wiki, seems to bear some resemblance to Mesoamerican religion with sacrifice and short-stepped pyramids (oh, what I wouldn’t give to find an RPG that depicted Mesamerican religion, including nextlaoaliztli/sacrifice, without branding it evil!); their clergy is evidently made up of members of the spiritworker (a.k.a., “shaman”) class. Some traitorous shadow giants are said to have hooked their wagon to Zon-Kuthon in Xoviakain, so those must have been the population from which the Umbral Court took their elite operatives. Isolationist to the point of only dealing with proven warriors who show them proper respect, they’re used when the Court wants to leave no survivors.

64 years after Aroden did his thing (so 4654 years ago, felt as 2115 years or 664 years), a caligni seer by the name of Fiersythe collects one of the most detailed chronicles of mortal interactions with the Dark Tapestry: the Voyages of the Void. That means that, to the general multiracial populace, the book is about as old as the first Roman temple of Venus is to us, and for the elfs it is about as old as the Golden Bull constitution of the Holy Roman Empire.

Eldith Lorin is founded for river transportation 4531 years ago (2059 years ago/647 years ago). That’s the last of the long-ago events on the timeline. A big gap jumps us to 618 years ago, felt by the culture as a whole as if 281 years ago and by elfin culture as 88 years ago ~ I’m a couple years into my middle age, according to Pathfinder, and my grandmothers are just a bit younger than 88, so this would be about your elf PC’s great-grandparents’ time. This is when some Nidalese attempt to forcibly convert the people of Jol, capitol of Southmoor in the Lands of the Linnorm Kings built upon the once-giant-ruled ruins of Thassilonian Torandey, to the ways of the Midnight Lord. Maybe they’d have succeeded if they tried this in the Kellid Land of the Mammoth Lords instead. The Ulfen tortured them to death ~ one of the nice things about being a Kuthite is that this was probably still considered a win by the proselytizing invaders.

Gawdz, that sounds like a rad historical event to play out! Open call to any DMs who wanna run a campaign set here….

413 years ago (187 years ago/59 years ago ~ so, like, as old as Michigan’s statehood, Oliver Twist, Queen Victoria’s reign, Chicago, Houston, Proctor & Gamble, the telegraph, and the daguerrotype from the point of view of the general population and in your elf’s grandparent’s time), Chelish Emperor Haliad III begins the Everwar, and Cheliax and Nidal battle for 33 years. At the end of those three decades, the Black Triune orders Nidal to surrender, which helps open up Nidalese culture to both moderation and outside influence. Huh. Last month, I attended the San Francisco Dickens Faire in celebration of Christmas ~ after all, the Victorian Era really helped create and shape our image of that holiday. Makes me wonder about the Nidalese relationship to Shadowbreak, and the cultural artifacts which owe their form to this period.

Speaking of, the next thing on the timeline is the opening of the House of Lies in the Uskwood. Shockingly what it says on the tin (sort of a bardic college/school for the best liars in the world), the House was founded but sixteen years into the Uskwood. We’ll obviously get into more detail about the Uskwood in the gazetteer section, but it’s worth noting that it’s a complicated place, with Kuthite druids, two different alien invaders (by the mi-go and by xenomorph expies called the hive), and the House of Lies.

The Chelish Civil War began 118 years ago (felt as 53 years ago to the culture as a whole and 16 years ago to the elfs ~ that’s historically as distant to the modern Golarionian as the Summer of Love, the beginning of the Cambodian Civil War, the Six-Day War, the Nigerian Civil War, Chinese support of the Vietcong and Che Guevara’s execution are to us, and is likely about when your elf PC was born. Nidal backed House Thrune with shadowcallers, velstracs, the Adamant Company, and a quiet purge of any diplomats and dignitaries from any Chelish houses other than Thrune in their borders.

Six years before House Thrune’s victory, in 4634 AR, Shadowbreak ends with a sudden purge of moderate Kuthites in Nidal. They are sent to the Cathedral of Exquisite Agony to suffer for decades and/or to become “repatriated” as velstracs. Historically that would be as far back as, like 1982 is to us (that’s the year I was born!) and only 12 years to the elfs.

42 years ago (think, like, as far back as 2001, or 2014 if you’re an elf) was a Golarionian Jack the Ripper equivalent ~ shadow beasts (the shadow template, I think, is what’s referenced here) roamed the Chelish streets of Westcrown. The vampire and former Pathfinder Ilnerik Sivanshin was supposed to stop or mitigate their attacks with a contingent of shadowcallers and Midnight Guard, but is thought to have encouraged them. Ilnerik shows up in the Council of Thieves adventure path, and I am fascinated by the similarity of his last name to that of the goddess of illusions, Sivanah.

White Estrid, the Ulfen Linnorm King of Halgrim, raided Nisroch with 15 longships fourteen years ago. She then broke through a Chelish blockade at the Arch of Aroden, and sold her treasures in Absalom (possibly leaving her cousin behind?). The combination of cultural elements there ~ Vikings taking things from France by way of Riddick and The Hell-Bound Heart and breaking through a Spanish-Italian naval blockade to sell things in, I dunno, Lankhmar? Sounds epic to me!

The Towers of the Fiendlorn have one last claim to fame: four years ago, one was found in the Umbral Basin, abandoned and somehow warped by the Abyss. An expedition tries to explore it and fails disastrously. This has all the makings of a ghost story that would explode across Nidal, with its mixture of closeness to their ideals and distance from their alignment (presumably matching their lawfulness originally, it is somehow tainted by chaotic energies?)

Y'all have a total point about the rebellion being used in multiple ways by the Umbral Court to maintain their control. It's not an either/or, either ~ the best control mechanisms do so by several means simultaneously (identifying dissidents much like the RCP does in the US, providing a pressure valve, et cetera).

But I was saying something slightly different. Diane di Prima said that the only war that counts is the war against the imagination. The Umbral Court (well, the Black Triune, but I imagine the Court's been around for a good long while) has ruled Nidal for *twice the length of Earth's recorded history.* Even taking into account the effects on culture of having long-lived races like dwarfs and elfs, I would argue that the culture would experience that length of time AS the length of Earth's recorded history.

The Black Triune, with that much inertia alone, has probably won the war against the Nidalese imagination. And that's *without* taking into account the various things they do to spread acceptance of their rule through the populace, including what you describe.

Pope Uncommon the Dainty wrote:

The clouds which choke off Nidal’s sun aid this effort, as only the efforts of the Uskwood druids keep the people fed. Of course, the Uskwood is a fraction of the territory of the nation, so I imagine that the druids send out parties on a circuit of the land to ensure that the farms can produce enough food for Nidal to remain free from unwanted control by not importing food from elsewhere. This might make an interesting campaign for a party heavy in druids, rangers, hunters, spiritworkers (the so-called “shamans”), witches, or even clerics and oracles with the right domains/mysteries.

An alternate to your notion would be a party on a mission to do this very thing, traveling Nidal and using both their abilities and their practical knowledge to ensure farm viability, intended to be primarily animal husbandry and crop management, but, of course, being that it's an adventure game, ending up dealing with bandits and monsters and similar 'farm troubles.'

The party can be 100% loyal Kuthites, and yet also be doing, essentially, good works! Cause that's what's needed to keep the country going. (Yes, there are other groups out there hunting down heretics and terrorizing the locals, but that doesn't have to be *your* party's focus.)

Kuthite dogma could even go hand in hand with farm advice, with druids of Zon-Zon noting that birth does not come without pain, and that to make a rose bush thrive, you have to cruelly cut it back. Such with all things. Cut away the excess and let the best in your crop/herd/self flourish. Grow through the pain and become stronger. Please leave a contribution in the alms box on your way out. See you next year when we pass this way again.

That's actually pretty much exactly what I was trying to describe, though you developed it much more awesomely than I did. This is exactly the kind of thing I love about Nidal and am occasionally disappointed in people's depictions of it (occasionally even Lianne's in this book). There is no reason it has to be all "Hurr, hurr, hurr, pain is evil. What even is consent? We like bad things cuz a good life is one without pain and we hate that." Instead it can be what you describe, a harsh but ultimately helpful embracing of the painful parts of life, a call to see them as necessary. This hews much closer to my religious understanding informed by the gods I work for and with and who just are my friends and my experiences as a masochist.

tl;dr ~ I would play or run that campaign in the hottest of seconds.

Here's the next installment:

One thing I neglected to mention in my last post is how disappointed I am that the book never explores the possibilities inherent in Kuthite Nidalese dwarfs or orcs or giants coming from the Mindspin Mountains. I imagine that anyone with the ability to drink so deep from the well of pain before being broken (read: Constitution bonus) would be greatly respected in this shadowed land! And dwarfin takes on Nidalese Kuthite praxis, in particular, are fascinating to contemplate! Sigh, another thing to add to my list of Nidalese writing projects.

Anyway, the next thing we’re given is a short, one-page timeline of the past 10,000 years. I have a strange love of timelines; just before they hit the point of trying to include way too much, they can end up helping one see some of the connections between events and trends. They spawn historical hypotheses like few other tools, simply by bringing our awareness to certain things’ proximity to each other.

Earthfall and the Black Triune’s meeting with Zon-Kuthon are the first two events on the timeline. Both have perhaps longer descriptions than I feel is strictly warranted. Chances are that readers of this book know what Earthfall is, and they certainly know the details about the Black Triune from elsewhere in the book. My guess is they decided to flesh it out a bit more here because timelines are the sort of thing people look at to figure out how interested they are in a setting, but it still feels a bit like filler to me.

It seems to have taken three years for surviving Azlanti and Thassilonian intellectuals to make it to Nidal. This sort of thing is the kind more likely to be verisimilitudinous than it seems at first, as one thinks about how long it would take for news of Nidal’s relative prosperity to spread and then for people to make even seemingly short journeys to the realm.

The Black Triune seems to have been trying to consolidate Nidalese government under their direct rule for about 18 years before they invented the Umbral Court, which was also the beginning of the Cathedral of Exquisite Agony and when their ageless immortality became known to their subjects.

The Age of Darkness lasted a thousand years as Golarion’s sky shook itself clean of Azlant’s ash. As I said before, I once calculated the approximate sociohistorical multiplier for a standard D&D world, based on the relative ages of maturity of the PHB races. I might have weighted it according to the racial demographics from the DMG’s settlement rules, but I can’t remember. Anyway, it came out to about 2.2, with elfs becoming adults at literally seven times the age of humans! This means that Earthfall would have been about as distant to the average Avistani at the end of the Age of Darkness as 1565 is to us, and as distant to the average elf as 1877 is to us. Expect more of these conversions as I discuss the timeline.

8918 years ago (experienced as the equivalent of 4054 years ago to the general populace and 1274 years ago to the elfs) the holy city of Ridwan is begun with a shrine overlooking the site of the Black Triune’s bargain. That makes it maybe as old as, like Damascus or Aleppo in Syria or Byblos in Lebanon or Kirkuk in Iraq, all of which are still inhabited. Hell, in the cases of Damascus and Byblos, that might even be true from the human perspective, as those cities are around the 8-9000 year mark!

Velstracs gave the Nidalese memory chains, allowing them to begin building the Cathedral of Embodied Wisdom to house them, 8521 years ago (equivalent to 3873 or 1217 years ago). Intriguingly, that’s only 491 years after the end of the Age of Darkness (or us to 1797, culturally and generally, or us to 1950 for an elf). That . . . actually feels quite right, like just about the right amount of time for the Nidalese to start becoming concerned with losing knowledge of something important.

Nisroch, the main port of Nidal and the most common place to encounter foreigners by far, began 7718 years ago as a simple fishing village. That would be the cultural equivalent of about 3508 years ago, or 1102 if you’re an elf.

5718 years ago (2599 or 817), Nidal became the center of a new type of philosophy, called “physical philosophy”. It was developed by some qween by the name of Irogath of Ridwan, and was all about storing pain somatically in one’s own body so it can be then unleashed into another’s later. This philosophy becomes the main teaching of the Irogath Monastery, and I think is the only specific datum given for the intellectual history of the monk class in Avistan, which is actually kind of exciting. The monk has always been a bit of an odd fit ~ largely due to the Eurocentrism of the average D&D setting, I freely admit. With polytheism reimagined as a bunch of mini-Catholic Churches, the Taoist- and Confucianist-inspired ways of the monk were rarely given the kind of grounding they needed to make sense in the setting. I like this tiidbit, which can give us a jumping-off place to imagine the other monastic philosophies (at least until the Aganhei Pass gets going).

Two entries tell the origin of the haunted place known as Edammera’s Folly (though we are not told why ~ it seems like it should be Mesandroth’s or Fiendlorn’s Folly…) An “archnecromancer” spent 25 years, starting 5141 years ago (2337 or 734 years ago) trying to achieve immprtality before the Shadow Plane consumed the base of one of his towers, flooding it with shadow creatures and causing it to be abandoned.

The section on the resistance begins with the line, “The Umbral Court does not cow everyone in Nidal.” Frankly, I don’t much imagine they need to ~ they’ve ruled in an unbroken reign for 10,00 years (culturally speaking, again, about 5000 years, the length of Earth’s written history). My assumption would be that the greatest obstacle facing the resistance against the Black Triune would be convincing the Nidalese populace that another way is even possible. Especially with the efforts put in by the Court to ensure and create Kuthite faith amongst the prosperous of their nation, the resistance would likely be recruiting from the poorer and more oppressed people of Nidal. The kind of folk who, even in a setting like Golarion with information technology significantly advanced as compared to most D&D settings, have no idea how other nations work, no other examples other than the eternal reign of the Triune, the Court, and their agents to feed their dreams of freedom.

The rebellion, we are told, is mostly unorganized and composed of tiny cells or even lone wolf freedom fighters. As I supposed in the previous paragraph, dissidence is often associated with foreignness ~ contact with foreign ideas or foreign infiltrators. However, there is also an element of ancient Kellid spiritual traditions resisting the Midnight Lord’s intrusion upon their cultural territory. We were told earlier that the ancient Kellids of the region worshipped Gozreh and Desna ~ it is specifically the latter goddess of dreams and luck who feeds the ranks of the treasonous with oracles and spiritworkers (seriously, those two classes are called out in the text). The region known as the Atteran Ranches, which we will learn more about in the future, is particularly associated with this kind of resistance.

Everywhere but in the Ranches, rebels keep a low profile, performing very minor acts of sedition and only then with caution. The Atteran, however, send enchanted dreams to the Nidalese people, aiming to inspire mass revolt. There is a significant element of religious magical research amongst the Atteran resisters, as well, as they hope to exorcise umbral shepherds from those they possess and to free the Umbral Court from Zon-Kuthon’s influence.

The Umbral Court continues to demonstrate its deviosity when it comes to the relations it fosters with the nations around it. They purposefully keep these relationships full of distrust and fear in order to discourage their subjects from fleeing their borders and means that those who do are often killed or returned by the very lands they thought would provide them refuge.

Cheliax, of course, is a bosom buddy with whom Nidal gets along famously. We are given some idea how Nidal makes its money, exporting ornate silver jewelry, brutal Ridwani blades and dark Ridwani gems, and the exotic fare offered by the Uskwood and trade with the Shadow Plane. It doesn’t sound like the Nidalese are selling to the common Chelish; their brand is high-end and expensive, and support the Chelish taste for conspicuous consumption and finery.

The other thing Nidal exports, again primarily to Cheliax, are people. Workers, such as torturers, shadowcallers, experts in population control, and diplomats for the infernal empire to use in its own efforts across Avistan, Garund, and Arcadia. They also, of course, send much information back to Nidal and serve the Midnight Lord by steering Chelish decisions and policies.

The Mindspin Mountains no doubt give Nirmathas and Molthune quite a bit of relief, as their existence is the primary excuse they use to avoid having much to do with their gloomy neighbor. No mention is made of the dwarfs and other races that inhabit the Mindspin Mountains, which is kind of a shame really. The standard PC-opposition races (orcs, giants, etc.) might be all-too-easy to paint with a boring brush when it comes to their interactions with the Kuthites, but there are many interesting directions a skilled author could take them. Even better, the Mindspin Mountains house dwarfs from Janderhoff ~ with their standard toughness, I can only guess what kind of thing Kuthite dwarfs could get up to, and with a rather interesting racial pantheon to begin with, there's much missed opportunity there, in my mind.

Interestingly, Geb (the Garundi nation of the undead ruled by an ancient lich that’s been at war with the high-magic realm of Nex for millennia, leaving the magic-scarred faux Wild West of Alkenstar as their border) has recently reached out to Nidal. Honestly, if I’m drawing parallels with Earth cultures, this is kind of fascinating, as I often use the following rough equivalencies: Cheliax=Italy+Spain, Nidal=France, Geb/Nex=Ethiopia/Eritrea. I say this is interesting because Italy colonized Ethiopia and (I just recently heard; I’m not sure how much I believe it) played a significant role in the development of Eritrean identity. Anyway, the rumormongers suggest that the delegation has to do with learning Nidalese shadow magics for the benefit of Gebish vampires.

That sounds like a fascinating thing to play with ~ either shenanigans around the negotiations (PCs on one side or the other in a very talky game of political bargaining, or rebels trying to make use of the meeting to further the cause of freedom, or in 2e especially a character who uses this as an opportunity to take character options from both cultures, or a scholarly group who has to reluctantly deal with the politicians trying to sell or prevent the sale of their research, or some other such).

I like that the book notes that the lack of showy displays of self-mortification in rural villages isn’t due to a lack of belief or even of faith, but a simple consequence of the relative poverty of village life. Without the money or magics to perform or survive the big shows of pain, the folk out here celebrate much more simply. It gives a reason other than “pain is bad, mmkay?” for a Nidalese character to be a member of a party or show up in a narrative with much less possibility of squicking out those players who might be less comfortable with Zon-Kuthon’s ways.

There’s also more freedom out here from the hierarchy and dogmas of the Zon-Kuthite . . . church? Is there a church? We’re back to the question of the actual structure of religion in Golarion. Is this like a mini-Catholicism? Or is it closer to something like Judaism or Islam, where there is a monotheism but not much of a hierarchy beyond the local or the regional, and it’s all about which teachers you follow or ideas you adopt? Or is it closer to many polytheisms, wherein all the gods are worshipped all the time (although Nidal would be closer to monolatry, considering the Black Triune’s ancient deal, wherein the others would be recognized but only the Midnight Lord actually worshipped) and the priesthood*s* are a collection of religious professionals with specialties ranging from particular rituals or magicks all the way to specific spirtual practices or paths or the ways of individual deities?

Anyway, without Umbral agents barring access to the necessities of life and ambition as much, country Nidalese merely act with the guidance of a local cleric. Actually, I quite like the term vicar for this role, for some reason. It is now, in my head, a Kuthite vicar. They are noted to be either a local zealot or a washout without ambition from the big city. Beyond that, there’ll be a couple of visits from Uskwood druids or shadowcallers every year to snap up youths to train in their ways (with or without consent, of course).

The Umbral Court has once again done a wonderful job of populace control, in that they are known to react with overwhelming force to any hint of sedition and to masquerade their agents as travellers in order to learn of that sedition. This has led to a widespread xenophobia amongst the rural Nidalese, which of course will tend to contain and weaken the rebellious elements of Nidalese society. Considering just how long Nidalese history has lasted, this suspicion of strangers is likely almost reflexive and impossible to shake off.

The clouds which choke off Nidal’s sun aid this effort, as only the efforts of the Uskwood druids keep the people fed. Of course, the Uskwood is a fraction of the territory of the nation, so I imagine that the druids send out parties on a circuit of the land to ensure that the farms can produce enough food for Nidal to remain free from unwanted control by not importing food from elsewhere. This might make an interesting campaign for a party heavy in druids, rangers, hunters, spiritworkers (the so-called “shamans”), witches, or even clerics and oracles with the right domains/mysteries. The PCs could be a group of younger druids, just out of their indoctrination and not yet stuck in their evil ways, overseen by a stern NPC elder whom they have to circumvent in order to be heroes or even antiheroes. In addition to just the general moral dilemmas presented by the situation, the hive or the mi-go (both of whom infest the Uskwood) could work as villains of the campaign. Multiclassing (or the right archetypes) with vigilante could be useful here, too.

One mof my main agenda for fun is immersion, so I simply adore that we are told that wheat and rye serve as Nidal’s staple, as well as fish and gasping white fish.

I forgot to mention in my last post that the seeming structure of Nidalese government has probably created something of a blend between the ancient Roman system of patronage and some areas of Europe under the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This is significant because it can quite shift how one thinks of getting things done in this gloomy land ~ I can imagine that there is quite a vocabulary (of words, body language, and customs) associated with maintaining one’s relationship with whichever specific Umbral agent military leader or academician one usually goes to in order to get what one needs, but that the only accepted way to acquire that relationship is through showy and intense displays of Kuthite religiosity. This results in fun things such as being useful to a specific agent and gaining their patronage thereby is considered corruption by Nidalese culture, unless you arrange to get suspended by hooks in your back or partially flayed as a way of publicly giving them an excuse to make use of you. Moreover, it’s probably likely that the agent has to manipulate or backchannel you into appearing to do it for your own reasons and on your own initiative without appearing to be seeking your aid.

A sidebar addresses the rifts to the Shadow Plane that dot the Nidalese countryside, which allow travel across the veil, but more importantly allow that realm’s inhabitants to come into Nidal. A few specific ones are mentioned:
* The Cathedral of Exquisite Agony in Pangolais has one in its dungeons that doesn’t allow mortals to cross over but only shadow-creatures to come to the Material Plane
* Ridwan has one at its center that leads to the chasm known as the Deeping Darkness
* A storm known imaginatively as the Shadowstorm (I actually kinda like the name) roams around the Umbral Basin
* Blacksulfur Pool, south of Nisroch
* The ruins of a wizard’s lair from centuries ago has one evocatively known as Edammera’s Folly
* There’s one caught behind crystal in something called the Moonless Mirror; like the Shadowstorm it is said to be unstable and flickering

And of course, both permanent and temporary rifts litter Nidal like mouseholes in an old barn. Interestingly, they are opaque from either side ~ inky and diffuse from the mortal side and indistinctly bright from the other, without the ability to see what awaits should you go through.