I recently purchased the Pathfinders Chronicles and Core books. I read through the entire setting book this weekend (the rulebook is something I won't be reading cover to cover any time soon). I have to say that I'm impressed. I've been disgusted with Forgotten Realms for some time, but I never thought something would come along that would actually make me consider moving all my campaigns out of Faerun and into another world. But Golarion is a very tempting setting.
I do, however, have some problems with the book and some questions.
Minor Quibbles:
1. Organizing the nations alphabetically was a mistake. Organizing the nations alphabetically without having a smaller version of the map in the book so you can quickly see where a nation is located was a borderline disastrous decision. When I first got the book last Friday, I was stunned at how inaccessible the country write-ups were since I had no idea where these nations were located. I almost abandoned reading it right then, but I solved the problem by printing a smaller version of the map (on 2 pages) and using that as a reference as I read through each country write-up.
The 3.0 Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (FRCS) remains the best book on a setting. I'm surprised that their system of organizing country write-ups by region is not used just without thinking in any other book of that type. Golarion's setting book would really have benefitted from this organization.
2. For someone who knows nothing of the setting, the gods section should have made it clearer who the major gods are. I gather that Golarion does not use the FR's system of ranking deities (greater, intermediate, minor, demigod). That's a mistake, but I can understand wanting to reduce the statistical nature of gods. However, you can't do that and not have some kind of an introduction to your deities giving some concept of who is more "powerful" or, more importantly, more widely worshipped. For example, although Shelyn (goddess of beauty) is listed as one of the major gods with a full write-up, is she really as powerful or widely worshipped as the God of Magic or Pharasma, goddess of the dead? It is fairly obvious who the leading god of evil is (Asmodeus, in a delicious simplification of the usual DnD pantheon issues) and who the leading god of neutrality is, but it is hard to find their rivals in the gods of good. Who is the major force for goodness in Golarion? The equivalent of Lathander or Torm?
Since there are no pictures of the gods (a mistake in my mind), there needed to be more of an effort to describe some of them. Pharasma comes to mind as a goddess whose appearance remains a mystery. Is she supposed to look like a Midwife (Demeter-like) or like Myrkul (the classic Reaper-type appearance)?
3. The NPCs introduced in the books should have been given levels. This goes with my biggest problem, which I will get into below. But to give us all these ruler, hero, and spellcaster names without any context on their power level was a major omission. Is the Majestrix of Cheliax an aristocrat or a budding spellcaster? How powerful is the Queen of Irrisen? GMs kind need this info for context. I'm used to FR levels, but I think Golarion is attempting to avoid this kind of epic-level overpopulation.
Questions / Major Quibbles
1. The first major question is also my biggest problem with the book. Where are the over all population numbers for the nations? How many people live in Cheliax? In Andoran? In Taldor? Why wasn't this information in the book? If you expect the GM to make these numbers up, we at least need more context than just city populations. Are there millions of people in Avistan? Tens of millions?
Population numbers are important for determining all kinds of important macro-items. The size of a nation's army can be important for determining a reasonable garrison in an out of the way castle. The book is very light on all kinds of statistics, but the populations of the various nations is the one that is the hardest to just make-up out of thin air. I can guesstimate NPC levels or even be comfortable with the idea that GMs can make any of these NPCs whatever level suits their campaign. But the point of a setting book like Chronicles is to ease the burden on GMs for things like geography and population is a big part of that.
2. Are there epic-level NPCs in Golarion? I admit I come from the FR and I am used to all these epic-level character clogging up the setting. That means my context for this kind of thing is skewed. But since the book lacks any NPC levels, I sort of need to know what's intended. Are the leaders of these nations intended to be epic-level NPCs like FR (I think not) or more reasonably powerful upper-level characters or even just aristocrats. If you're going to use the Majestrix of Cheliax as a major villain in your campaign, it would be nice to know if she is supposed to be level 12 or level 20. (And yes, I realize Abrogail II is probably not even close to level 12, I was thinking of the position more in the abstract sense.)
3. What kinds of ships are used in Golarion? The book is littered with references to battle fleets, warships, and merchant vessels. Unlike the FRCS, though, there is little info on what kinds of ships these are supposed to be. Are they simple galleys? More advanced things like medieval cogs? Or are we talking about things like caravels or even galleons? Again, the GM can make this stuff up, but a setting book should help out. I could have missed this though, and if I did, don't take this as a criticism of the book.
4. Where are the monstrous nations? I understand that Golarion, like FR, is a human-centered world. But the book contains very few references to the presence of goblin, orc, gnoll, naga, lizard-folk, or other monstrous nations, cities, or just organizations. FR started to do a better job of fleshing these groups out in books that came after the FRCS. Is Golarion headed down the same path?
5. Where are the demihuman nations? I kept expecting to find more about Elven kingdoms (I guess there's just the one), dwarves (only fleeting references), gnomes, and halflings. Do these races just have few or no political entities?
Final Thoughts
This really dragged on for a long post. Despite the seeming negative tone, I want to make one thing clear: I love these books. I won't say anything more about 4.0 than that once it came out, I thought my fantasy PnP book-buying days were over. That does not appear to be the case. I've already preordered the Bestiary and I'm looking forward to Golarion equivalents to Faiths and Pantheons and area supplements as they come out (hopefully).
Cheliax alone made the book worth reading despite my criticisms.
I look forward to reading Pathfinders books and maybe even starting up a PnP campaign here in the future.
These aren't the best message boards I've ever seen, and I think I posted this in the wrong place.
Oh well. I still hope someone replies.
Thank you for the reply.
Anything in the Chronicles book that you point to, I've read; the rest I'll look into if I find out some more details.
Whether worshiper numbers correlates to divine power isn't really what I was getting at. I sincerely doubt all 20 of the gods presented in the setting book are exactly equal in power. In fact, I can tell by a lot of the nation writeups that they are not (plus a few specifically say they aren't widely worshipped). The problem is that piecing together which deities are more important than others is a puzzle; and I don't have all the pieces. It would have been nice if something was provided along the lines of the greater/intermediate/minor system or just a paragraph or sentence saying "X is probably the most widely worshipped of the good gods."
The population issue is a major oversight I think.
So there are a few monstrous nations here and there, but this information is primarily omitted.
I also have to say its a strike against the setting to have so few demihuman nations. I didn't think you could actually go more pro-human than FR, but here we are.
I'll poke around and see if other information is available. My enthusiasm is a bit tempered right now though. I feel like I have 900 pages worth of material on a system and a setting, but that I'm only seeing a very, very partial picture. I didnt' get that impression with FRCS, even though that setting has tens of thousands of source material from 2e on.
Hi, and welcome to the Paizo boards. :)
Before I answer your questions, I think you need to understand that Golarion is presented more like how TSR/Wizards presented the World of Greyhawk: information to whet your appetite and inspire your imagination, but what you do with it and how much you want to develop it is up to you. Forgotten Realms is more of a "here's EVERYTHING you need to know, now play!" sort of presentation. Back in Team Greyhawk, we called this "stone soup vs. vegetable soup"... giving you the basics vs. giving you everything.
{1. Organizing the nations alphabetically was a mistake. Organizing the nations alphabetically without having a smaller version of the map in the book so you can quickly see where a nation is located was a borderline disastrous decision.}
I see your point about including a smaller version of the map to reference proximity. However, I disagree that alphabetical organization was a mistake. People know the alphabet, and if the Galt section references Cheliax, they know they can look it up under "C."
{The 3.0 Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (FRCS) remains the best book on a setting. I'm surprised that their system of organizing country write-ups by region is not used just without thinking in any other book of that type. Golarion's setting book would really have benefitted from this organization.}
Unlike the Forgotten Realms or Earth, Golarion doesn't really have geographical regions or subcontinents that we use to group countries into categories; Golarion doesn't have a grouping like "Europe" or "the Shining South," for example, so organizing them into categories in the PCCS would be pretty arbitrary, and (IMO) confusing (yes, the main countries in the book are technically "on the Inner Sea," but that definition is so lax to include places like Sargava, the Realm of the Mammoth Lords, and Mendev, which are hundreds of miles and two or more countries away from the actual Inner Sea).
Mind you, I'm one of the people who WROTE the FRCS, and that book's geographical organization often frustrates me because I might be reading about Chult and want to look up something about Cormyr, and they're not listed right next to each other in the book.
The FRCS is structured like a tour guide; it's organized assuming you're familiar with the overall geography and know that Aglarond, Rashemen, and Thay are part of the Unapproachable East and therefore listed under "Unapproachable East." The PCCs is structured like an encyclopedia; it makes no assumptions about what you know and lets you follow the alphabet to find things.
{2. For someone who knows nothing of the setting, the gods section should have made it clearer who the major gods are.}
Page 158: "Scores, perhaps hundreds, of gods have followers on Golarion—the first section of this chapter looks at the 20 gods and goddesses whose faith has most widely spread throughout Avistan and Garund."
{Since there are no pictures of the gods (a mistake in my mind), there needed to be more of an effort to describe some of them. Pharasma comes to mind as a goddess whose appearance remains a mystery. Is she supposed to look like a Midwife (Demeter-like) or like Myrkul (the classic Reaper-type appearance)?}
In a roleplaying game, the player characters are the stars of the show. When describing the setting where the characters live and act, what Pharasma actually looks (in terms of providing art) isn't really that important, any more than what Hades looks like if you're running a Greek campaign, or what Odin looks like if you're running a Viking campaign... the PCs are the stars, they're not going to rub elbows with the gods, and I'd rather use art budget to show an interesting NPC or monster than to depict a god (mind you, the FRCS doesn't show actual pictures of the gods, either, and you're more likely to meet an FR god in person than a Golarion god). And as to Pharasma's actual appearance, the book says she looks like a midwife, a mad prophet, or the reaper, depending on what role she's portrayed in.
{3. The NPCs introduced in the books should have been given levels. This goes with my biggest problem, which I will get into below. But to give us all these ruler, hero, and spellcaster names without any context on their power level was a major omission. Is the Majestrix of Cheliax an aristocrat or a budding spellcaster? How powerful is the Queen of Irrisen? GMs kind need this info for context.}
I think you need to divorce yourself from the Realmsian idea that *every* NPC's class and level is important. Unless the PCs are going to attack the queen of Cheliax, her level is irrelevant, so it doesn't need to be listed in the book. And if they ARE going to attack her, your job as a GM is to make the encounter challenging and interesting, which means you should decide what her class and levels are... especially because if we list her as a level 3 aristocrat, your 5th-level PCs are going to think she's a pushover. (Except, of course, for her pit fiend bodyguard/advisor.)
{I'm used to FR levels, but I think Golarion is attempting to avoid this kind of epic-level overpopulation.}
Yes.
{1. The first major question is also my biggest problem with the book. Where are the over all population numbers for the nations? How many people live in Cheliax? In Andoran? In Taldor? Why wasn't this information in the book? If you expect the GM to make these numbers up, we at least need more context than just city populations. Are there millions of people in Avistan? Tens of millions?}
I wasn't involved in that part of the book, and while it would have been nice to have this information... is it really necessary? Does it matter if Cheliax has 100,000 people or 200,000 or 500,000? Are your PCs going to wipe them out one by one, or engineer a plague to kill of tens of thousands? It's an old, populous country.
{Population numbers are important for determining all kinds of important macro-items. The size of a nation's army can be important for determining a reasonable garrison in an out of the way castle.}
See, to me, that's the sort of thing that you decide as needed for the adventure. If you have an encounter nearby and you don't want a large military presence, don't have one.
{2. Are there epic-level NPCs in Golarion?}
In general, no.
{3. What kinds of ships are used in Golarion? The book is littered with references to battle fleets, warships, and merchant vessels. Unlike the FRCS, though, there is little info on what kinds of ships these are supposed to be.}
Remember that the PCCS was written assuming you were playing D&D 3rd edition, so anything available in the D&D PH (such as sailing ships and warships) is in the setting.
{4. Where are the monstrous nations? I understand that Golarion, like FR, is a human-centered world. But the book contains very few references to the presence of goblin, orc, gnoll, naga, lizard-folk, or other monstrous nations, cities, or just organizations. FR started to do a better job of fleshing these groups out in books that came after the FRCS. Is Golarion headed down the same path?}
Golarian is a humanocentric world, and there are few significant gatherings of nonhumans... at least, few that are cohesive enough to be considered an actual country.
{5. Where are the demihuman nations? I kept expecting to find more about Elven kingdoms (I guess there's just the one), dwarves (only fleeting references), gnomes, and halflings. Do these races just have few or no political entities?}
Dwarves are primarily from the Five Kings Mountains, though there are other settlements.
Elves are primarily from Kyonin, mainly because when they retreated from the world millenia ago, they did so on a racial-national-identity level, and those who remained behind didn't stick around to found new countries, and those who have returned have returned via the magical gateways in Kyonin, thus are concentrated there.
Gnomes are exiles of the First World and aren't prone to nation-building, but there are several large settlements mentioned on page 11.
Halflings tend to blend in and either live among humans or in subtle halfling-only settlements; they're not much for nation-building either.
And, when comparing the FRCS to the PCCS, remember two things:
1) FR is a world that's been around for 43 years, starting in Ed Greenwood's head, and around for 20 years as a published campaign setting. That book is jam-packed because the design team had to condense that material into something digestible in one book. By comparison, Golarion is NEW, and there are many opportunities to expand upon it.
2) The FRCS is a 320-page book. The PCCS is a 256-page book. There's more info in the FRCS simply because there's more room for it.
Creative Director
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What Sean said!
Also (one of my pet peeves, since I named him), it's "Treerazer," not "Treerazor."
Treerazer sounds like someone who tears down trees and destroys them (which is, among other things, exactly what this demon likes to do).
Treerazor sounds like a knife you use to shave trees (and is thus not correct).
Anwyay, between SKR and Charles, hopefully most of the questions got answered? This is a pretty hectic and busy week for us at Paizo; we're trying to get five products shipped to the printer and are still getting used to our new office...
Thank you very much for the reply.
Your reply is thorough and logical. However, I'm still left confused about several decisions.
1. We disagree on the importance of population levels. They provide an important context.
If a nation is 100,000 people (this would be an extremely small medieval nation), then a local 2nd or 3rd level aristocrat is likely to have a group of retainers in the dozens, not the hundreds. This comes up in terms of structuring believable encounters.
If high level PCs are trying to take down the Majestrix, and you say her Royal Guard is 24 guys, but Cheliax has 6 million people, that is going to be ridiculous.
So you're right, in a sense, that the GM can make this information up. But it would be nice to have at least a little context. If I say Cheliax has 6 million people and then a later Pathfinder says that Avistan is a continent of 7 million, I've got a bit of a problem.
It would have been better (and easy, frankly) to have included this information in the setting book.
And to prove it's easy, I'm going to come up with populations for every nation in the book, probably by this weekend. I'll post them. The only thing I need is a starting point and hopefully people can provide at least a little context for that.
2. The Gods are poorly presented, I think, considering how interesting the snippets are.
I love the FR's pantheon (the original one) and having pictures of how the gods are represented is a major plus. Gods appear everywhere; not in person, mind you, but in religious iconography. Fleshing out a temple requires knowing what a god looks like. Plus clerics tend to mirror their patron, at least in most other settings.
But that's not the biggest issue. The biggest issue is putting these 20 Gods you present as major forces into relative terms. Figuring out how common temples of X, Y, and Z should be. Figuring out which Gods are known in every region. That's difficult when you just drop 20 of them on us and leave only snippets for us to figure out that Pharasam is more widely worshipped than Shelyn. Or whatever.
I bought the Gods and Magic book from you. I hope it will help. I hope to buy a bigger Faiths and Pantheons book from you someday too.
3. The smaller map inside the book would have made the alphabetical listing a non-issue.
I understand that FR is a much more developed world. That's been a very bad thing, actually, for a long time (I can't remember the last change they made that improved the setting; or I didn't have to ignore).
Golarion seems very promising. But it also seems a little too "stone soup" to me right now.
I appreciate any reply.
I didn't really anticipate replies from the authors, much less expect them.
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Creative Director
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Honestly... I suspect "Gods and Magic" will scratch this itch. Each of the 20 core deities gets a two-page writeup and a picture. The lesser gods do not, but they all have descriptions. Furthermore, all of our deities get large articles in the Pathfinder adventure paths eventually—these are 6 to 8 page articles that appear in the 2nd and 5th installment of each Adventure Path. So far, we've published articles for about half of the deities, with the other half coming at a rate of four per year.
I appreciate any reply.
I didn't really anticipate replies from the authors, much less expect them.
You've just run into the best thing about Paizo: the ready-willing-&-ableness of the staff to provide feedback about their products. I once had a question on a Friday evening about an adventure I was going to be DMing the next day. I posted a question on the boards, and the guy who wrote the adventure clarified the point before the game session began. (Thanks, Greg A. Vaughan!)
As far as some of your concerns go, particularly in regard to exact class levels and population numbers, the Paizo crew have said that they've explicitly left some things vague so that they don't paint themselves into a corner if they come up in a future adventure; that is, most areas that have not yet been addressed in their published products are purposely not specific so that decisions about their relative power levels can be made by the author(s) of whatever adventures might make use of them -- or, by the DM who chooses to set his own adventure in a corner of Golarion.
For the deities, Gods & Magic is a terrific resource and does include "portraits" of each major deity. However, the best information on a particular deity you can find will be in the AP write-ups. The one on Cayden Cailean, for example, has 3 or 4 varying portrayals of him, emphasizing (imo) the fact that different regions will have different visions of him, based on a general physical description.
Figuring out which Gods are known in every region.
While each is not an exclusive list, in each of the country descriptions includes a "Religion" section that covers which of the twenty major deities are most heavily worshiped there. Similarly each of the racial descriptions includes a short list of "Favored Deities," again from the twenty major deities.
Figuring out which Gods are known in every region.While each is not an exclusive list, in each of the country descriptions includes a "Religion" section that covers which of the twenty major deities are most heavily worshiped there. Similarly each of the racial descriptions includes a short list of "Favored Deities," again from the twenty major deities.
True, but this is only the start.
I'm going to refrain from arguing the population issue in two different threads. The general discussion thread should be the better place for it. Suffice it to say, the numbers should have been in the book, but they aren't. The question now is how to deal with it.
The deity issue might be solved by the Gods and Magic book, or at least helped.
My other quibbles are easy to deal with on my own.
Again, I understand about not pigeon-holing DMs by saying something like Queen Abrogail II (LE Wiz4), but I think it would only have helped.
As for the gods, we had limited space to cover them in the campaign setting, and at the time we knew we'd soon be publishing Gods and Magic, which would address them in more detail. There are also lengthy (5000-8000 word) writeups of various gods in the Pathfinder Adventure paths (every 3rd issue starting with #2, so 2, 5, 8, 11, and so on). So far I've covered Desna, Abadar, Zon-Kuthon, Calistria, Sarenrae, Cayden Cailean, and (coming soon) Iomedae.
As for the gods, we had limited space to cover them in the campaign setting, and at the time we knew we'd soon be publishing Gods and Magic, which would address them in more detail. There are also lengthy (5000-8000 word) writeups of various gods in the Pathfinder Adventure paths (every 3rd issue starting with #2, so 2, 5, 8, 11, and so on). So far I've covered Desna, Abadar, Zon-Kuthon, Calistria, Sarenrae, Cayden Cailean, and (coming soon) Iomedae.
Also Lamashtu and Rovagug :)
Feh, I've done so many I'm starting to forget. ;)
I understand the desire for population numbers, though rather than plain numbers (both too limiting and too uninformative) I'd prefer a "heat map" showing what specific places are heavily or lightly populated.
I don't understand the confusion with the gods. Each nation has the list of popular gods worshipped there, and since it's not in alpha order I assume, like the old GH books, it's in rough order of popularity in the given country. Other details are in the text. There is no number on "how many people in the whole world worship Sarenrae" because that's a pointless number. In Qadira, Sarenrae's the most popular deity. What more do you want?
Similarly, god pics are OK, but they tend to make people think "that's the way this god looks." In Golarion there are distinctly different regional conceptions of the gods; my favorite is Shimye-Magalla, the janiform incarnation of Gozreh and Desna. What does a god look like? Uh... Who knows, you never see them. At most you see their heralds and whatnot. Excepting the couple gods who are actually ascended humans, but even that's no excude (cf. the many debates IRl about "what Jesus really looked like").
On ships, I extrapolated from the Technology section and am assuming early 1500s tech in general. In the Shackles section they name a bunch of way more modern ships like "sloop" and "man-o-war" but IMO that's poorly thought through and it should be mainly galleys in the Inner Sea, old cogs, carracks, and caravels in the Arcadian Ocean.
On NPC levels - I prefer not being limited to a "canonical" one. I also don't like having info like that embedded in otherwise player-safe information - when I use setting bits to brief my players I have to spend time redacting those little rules bits. "A powerful wizard" or the like is more than good enough.
The appearance of gods is important for things like iconography and cleric appearance. As I said above, most clerics in most settings tend to mirror their deity. And the fact that they have pictures of the gods in Gods and Magic suggests this isn't an unreasonable request.
I want the gods put in context. Two or three paragraphs of introduction to the section was all that was necessary to say something along the lines of "Many gods are stronger in certain regions, but X, Y, and Z are widely known everywhere." Or "the pantheon is defined by the struggle between X and Y for worshippers and these two gods are the most widely known in Golarion" or "almost every god of these major deities has exactly the same number of worshipers and are exactly as well known as the others, despite the fact that their portfolios suggest widely divergent power levels." That last one can't possibly be true, but if it is, then I need to know it rather than having to piece it together.
I shouldn't have to go through the entire setting book, looking at every region and race, to figure out who the primary forces for good and evil are in a setting.
I'm actually a little surprised to be getting some pushback on the deity criticism, because I really thought they were very poorly presented. There is no context for the section at all. The information is interesting and I think the pantheon has great potential, but right now its like being dropped in the middle of a bunch of trees and being told to determine the size of the forest.
I want the gods put in context. Two or three paragraphs of introduction to the section was all that was necessary to say something along the lines of "Many gods are stronger in certain regions, but X, Y, and Z are widely known everywhere." Or "the pantheon is defined by the struggle between X and Y for worshippers and these two gods are the most widely known in Golarion" or "almost every god of these major deities has exactly the same number of worshipers and are exactly as well known as the others, despite the fact that their portfolios suggest widely divergent power levels." That last one can't possibly be true, but if it is, then I need to know it rather than having to piece it together.
Maybe you're looking for something that just isn't a feature in Golarion? I haven't read every Paizo product, but I've never gotten a sense of "competition" between the gods or that they "struggle" for worshippers. Gods & Magic lists which deities work well together and which are personal enemies, but in general they don't seem to have much concern over how many followers they have. I've read on the boards about a setting in which the gods' powers & status depend on them having enough worshippers, but I don't remember if that was FR. If so, then I think it just doesn't apply in Golarion.
I want the gods put in context. Two or three paragraphs of introduction to the section was all that was necessary to say something along the lines of "Many gods are stronger in certain regions, but X, Y, and Z are widely known everywhere." Or "the pantheon is defined by the struggle between X and Y for worshippers and these two gods are the most widely known in Golarion" or "almost every god of these major deities has exactly the same number of worshipers and are exactly as well known as the others, despite the fact that their portfolios suggest widely divergent power levels." That last one can't possibly be true, but if it is, then I need to know it rather than having to piece it together.Maybe you're looking for something that just isn't a feature in Golarion? I haven't read every Paizo product, but I've never gotten a sense of "competition" between the gods or that they "struggle" for worshippers. Gods & Magic lists which deities work well together and which are personal enemies, but in general they don't seem to have much concern over how many followers they have. I've read on the boards about a setting in which the gods' powers & status depend on them having enough worshippers, but I don't remember if that was FR. If so, then I think it just doesn't apply in Golarion.
It's strange that you focused only on the middle of my examples and concluded that since it didn't apply, Golarion must not be for me.
And yes, Forgotten Realms' pantheon is defined in 3.0/3.5 by the struggle between gods to gain worshipers in order to move up the greater/intermediate/minor ranking system.
I didn't say Golarion needed that competition for followers (though I did express my opinion that a greater/lesser ranking system would have provided instant context), but the deity section is just kind of there. It jumps right in, once again in alphatetical order only, and starts summarizing gods. The summaries are great, but it all just seems to stand alone and is almost divorced from the setting.
If all 20 gods are equally important and differ only because of the regional and racial biases listed earlier in the book, despite their portfolios, then that's very unique in any setting. That could be what was intended, but I'm skeptical of how that would work.
In the end, I'm less uncomfortable with the setting's decisions (few monstrous and demihuman nations, no FR-style competition between gods, more Greyhawk-ey in world details) than with the seeming arbitrary nature of the information that was provided.
No national populations, but city populations.
No context provided to the Gods over-all place in the world, but individual regions and races favor god X over god Y.
Lots of canon NPCs introduced, but no levels or classes hinted at for them.
It's a weird mix of being vegetable v. stone soup (using the analogy introduced above), some of which makes sense because of space constraints, but some decisions just seem odd to me.
It's strange that you focused only on the middle of my examples and concluded that since it didn't apply, Golarion must not be for me.
I didn't mean to imply that Golarion wasn't for you. I just thought maybe you expected a feature of FR to carry over that didn't.
And I just focussed on the middle part of your post because, well, that was the part that I thought I had something reasonably intelligent and/or helpful to say about. :)
I'll be interested to know if Gods & Magic allays your deity concerns somewhat (although it doesn't provide a ranking of power levels or popularity of religions that I'm aware of). I bought it at the same time as the Campaign Setting and so never experienced the deity section of that book on its own; I always had Gods & Magic to turn to for more information.
After reading the deity write-ups in the APs, however, I find even Gods & Magic lacking! I really hope that when they finish out the major deities, they'll compile all the AP articles into a new deities book, with crunch sections converted to PFRPG.
A Faiths and Pantheon book for this setting would be excellent.
I'm not going to purchase all the individual magazine writeups to get the extra pages on the gods, but I would certainly purchase any compilation book.
Gods and Magic will help, I think. It can't hurt. At its length, though, you are probably right that it will leave me wanting more. But, hey, that's how publishers keep selling books. :)
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Creative Director
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A Faiths and Pantheon book for this setting would be excellent.
I'm not going to purchase all the individual magazine writeups to get the extra pages on the gods, but I would certainly purchase any compilation book.
Gods and Magic will help, I think. It can't hurt. At its length, though, you are probably right that it will leave me wanting more. But, hey, that's how publishers keep selling books. :)
Gods and Magic WILL help. Again... it has pictures of all the deities, and a lot of info about them. Beyond that, you'll probably want to pick up the copies of Pathfinder with the expanded deity writeups that Sean lists above.
But the reason we didn't do more about the deities in the book was because of space constraints, really; we only had 256 or whatever pages to present all the information about the world we wanted to do, and while I would have LOVED to do a Pathfinder RPG sized tome about the book... that wasn't an option. Instead, the development of Golarion STARTS at the hardcover but doesn't end there. It continues in pretty much every book we publish, with the exception of the actual rule book line which just started up.
So if you enjoy Golarion, you really should check out the rest of the books in the Chronicles, Companion, Adventure Path, and Module lines. (AND: We kind of cringe when folks call them magazines, since they're made as books and sold as books.)
I'll call them books from now on, though they are bit short for me to purchase (where I would I put them all?) individually. Hopefully, a longer book will appear at some point in the future on the gods.
I understand about space constraints.
Some things should have been in the book that aren't (population numbers and some kind of contextual introduction to the deities), but it is what it is.
I was going to go through and do the population issue myself, but I'm betting that at some point this is addressed and then I'll have wasted my time.
So no chance of putting together a campaign in Golarion right now since this information is vital, but I'll keep reading what I've purchased and be on the lookout for new info.
Thanks again for the great responses.
I shouldn't have to go through the entire setting book, looking at every region and race, to figure out who the primary forces for good and evil are in a setting.
Then you don't have to. The primary divine forces for good, evil, and whatever are those twenty deities whose faith has most widely spread throughout Avistan and Garund. Deities that have less of an impact on the setting appear in a later section of the book or other books.
To me it seems less like you being dropped in the middle of the trees, and more like you having an outside view of the forest while asking the exact number of trees. To me, paragraphs going on how this deity is less powerful than this other diety, but is still more popular among worshipers because of their porfolio would have been a waste of space. I feel that the deity section gives the basics I need to know about the campaign setting and that I don't [i]really[i] need to have a precise ranking of them.
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Creative Director
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I understand that you're disappointed that this "vital" information is missing for you, but since the book's been out for over a year now and this is really the first time that I've heard this complaint, I'm pretty certain that it's not as "vital" missing information as this thread's making it out to be. Said missing information certainly hasn't bothered us in the creation of a half dozen or so campaigns for the world so far...
We may add population information to the countries some day, like maybe when we do a second printing of the book. But that's still some undisclosed time in the future.
I understand that you're disappointed that this "vital" information is missing for you, but since the book's been out for over a year now and this is really the first time that I've heard this complaint, I'm pretty certain that it's not as "vital" missing information as this thread's making it out to be.
We may add population information to the countries some day, like maybe when we do a second printing of the book. But that's still some undisclosed time in the future.
It's present in all the settings books I own (Forgotten Realms, Fading Suns, Freedom City, Eberron), so some people must be interested in having it.
With absolutely no context on what the population numbers might be and conflicting reports in the other thread about even a remote range, I'm confident that whatever numbers you come up with will be totally different than any work I'd do. So why put time into it when I know eventually you'll probably have this information somewhere (even just an offhand reference in an article would obsolete almost everything I would come up with), but at the moment I have a better chance of divining the location of water with a stick than coming up with some indication of what direction you'd go?
I don't see how people establish all kinds of macro-level detail about commerce, militaries, governments, economies of scale, and wars without the population number. But I'm just too detail-oriented I guess.
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Creative Director
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I don't see how people establish all kinds of macro-level detail about commerce, militaries, governments, economies of scale, and wars without the population number. But I'm just too detail-oriented I guess.
You don't need to know precise numbers of populations to know that. You can do all of that stuff just knowing whether a nation has a high, average, or low population. And while we DID know these things when building the various nation entries, there's not really a specific entry for this value. The information's in the writeups of the nations themselves, or implied by the size and number of cities. If we weren't able to establish all of that, we wouldn't have been able to talk about the macro-level stuff at all... but we did, so it's not an absolutely necessary part of the game.
It would be nice to include in the reprint though. It'd probably make a cool blog post, even.
On the deity thing, I feel like you've let "D&D pantheon syndrome" corrupt you. There isn't so much of a theme of as "what deities are major forces for good in the whole world." Deities are worshipped in specific places by specific people. Sarenrae's big on some places and unknown in others.
One of the weaknesses of FR and Eberron and other game worlds is their overly modern conceit of being "one world, that just happens to be divided into countries." Golarion has a lot of different people groups, a lot of pretty uninhabited (by people) space, and stronger differentiations of culture and religion.
"Sarenrae is a major god of Good!" That is, I suppose, helpful in Qadira, but is stupid in the Lands of the Linnorm Kings, who have never heard of her. Frankly, the artificial homogeneity of religion is one of the major things that turn me off on those other campaign settings you cite.
I don't see how people establish all kinds of macro-level detail about commerce, militaries, governments, economies of scale, and wars without the population number. But I'm just too detail-oriented I guess.You don't need to know precise numbers of populations to know that. You can do all of that stuff just knowing whether a nation has a high, average, or low population. And while we DID know these things when building the various nation entries, there's not really a specific entry for this value. The information's in the writeups of the nations themselves, or implied by the size and number of cities. If we weren't able to establish all of that, we wouldn't have been able to talk about the macro-level stuff at all... but we did, so it's not an absolutely necessary part of the game.
It would be nice to include in the reprint though. It'd probably make a cool blog post, even.
High in terms of what? What's the base number? What's the basis for comparison? Sean Reynolds said this same thing, substituting the word populous. High, medium, and low mean nothing when you have nothing to start with.
You need more context than populous/not-populous. I don't need to know that the population is 5 million, but I do need to know if its closer to 5 million than 500,000.
You can't write up stories of how Cheliax lost 10,000 men in a single battle against Andoran if Cheliax ends up having a population of 250,000. No one loses 4% of their population in a single battle; heck a medieval society would be lucky to have 4% of their population under arms. But if Cheliax has 5 million people, suddenly 10,000 men being lost is the Cannae-like catastrophe you were going for.
I'm totally from a different planet, I guess. I can't see even starting to plot out a mid-level campaign without knowing at least a certain range of how many people live in an area. Golarion could be almost any number. One calculation in the other thread would have yielded a Cheliax population of like 300,000. A more reasonable calculation might yield 3 million (10% urban population). That's a huge range.
The book doesn't even provide a number to start from. If I knew just one country's population, I could work with it. But I don't even know where to begin within a factor of ten.
And if I did just plod in and make it what I want it to be, I face the prospect of a blog post changing it and I won't even be close. So then I'm alienated from every canon source that might come out or I have to just start over and retcon.
That's why there's no point in campaigning in this setting until some new info comes out.
I don't mean this to be acrimonious. But this is a strange piece of information to be lacking. As I said, not just lacking the detailed info country-by-country. I don't have a remote idea of what kinds of numbers Paizo has in mind for this setting.
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And if I did just plod in and make it what I want it to be, I face the prospect of a blog post changing it and I won't even be close. So then I'm alienated from every canon source that might come out or I have to just start over and retcon.
That's why there's no point in campaigning in this setting until some new info comes out.
Maybe you could unhitch yourself from the cannon train and just make the numbers whatever works for you. I mean, they're just numbers, and numbers are easy to fudge.
If you decide that a place has a certain number of inhabitants and Paizo comes out with a number higher or lower... who cares? You just adjust numbers of future publications by an appropriate amount and roll on.
I really don't understand why the lack of population numbers is such an Golarion-shattering travesty.
And if I did just plod in and make it what I want it to be, I face the prospect of a blog post changing it and I won't even be close. So then I'm alienated from every canon source that might come out or I have to just start over and retcon.
That's why there's no point in campaigning in this setting until some new info comes out.
Maybe you could unhitch yourself from the cannon train and just make the numbers whatever works for you. I mean, they're just numbers, and numbers are easy to fudge.
If you decide that a place has a certain number of inhabitants and Paizo comes out with a number higher or lower... who cares? You just adjust numbers of future publications by an appropriate amount and roll on.
I really don't understand why the lack of population numbers is such an Golarion-shattering travesty.
It doesn't make the books any less interesting to read or enjoy.
But it does make it hard for me to be a DM. I'm just one person though. I'm not expecting anything to change. I'll wait for the info to become available or at least some context to be established. Then I'll do as much or as little I need to. But I can't pull these numbers out of a hat and be comfortable.
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Creative Director
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It doesn't make the books any less interesting to read or enjoy.
But it does make it hard for me to be a DM. I'm just one person though. I'm not expecting anything to change. I'll wait for the info to become available or at least some context to be established. Then I'll do as much or as little I need to. But I can't pull these numbers out of a hat and be comfortable.
I posted a longer response to this problem on the other thread... but the nutshell version is that you SHOULD build up your own numbers for populations. Create numbers that make sense for your game.
And assuming you go for it... use these boards! It's unfortunate that these threads have an undercurrent of antagonism. Rather than taking a stance that the game is broken and the book is incomplete (words and phrasing that IMMEDIATELY put us at Paizo on the defensive), I suspect you'll get a lot more support by saying, "What do folks think would be good population totals for these nations?" Rather than attack the book for what it fails to provide, enlist the fans and even us editors to help come up with a solution. There's COUNTLESS examples on these boards where fans have taken up something we only just barely mention or drop hints about and run with it to create all sorts of cool and imaginative and HELPFUL content.
One fan posted an MP3 of a song in an adventure.
Someone else routinely builds illustrations of our locations in sketchup to help visualize what the maps look like from the outside.
Another fan started cataloging all sorts of demon lords, filling in gaps and incorporating demon lords from Pathifnder products.
And there's lots more examples. So! Rather than seeing the missing population numbers and our choice to not include them because we didn't think they were necessary... think of it as a big opportunity to add something back to the game and share with everyone else! Golarion will be richer for it, and we'll have one or two less unhappy threads on the boards. :-)
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Creative Director
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Actually, another idea just hit me. You mentioned a fear that you'd come up with population numbers that would only be obsoleted by a blog post... would folks LIKE Paizo to build up a blog post that contains the population numbers? Because we're always looking for blog post topics. It's not something we could whip up in a day, or honestly probably even a week... but if folks are interested I bet I could wrangle together a post sometime this month or next that has all that information.
Would that be cool? I think it might be... but not if building the population numbers here on the boards would be more fun, or if you really needed those numbers like tomorrow...
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I think it wouldn't be a bad idea, if only to give some of us who care about such minutiae an idea of how much agriculture would need to exist to support a region or nation, the size of potential armies, the availability of certain items (more people generally mean more commerce and a better chance of an item or rarity surfacing in a market place, for instance), or any of a host of data that could be extrapolated from simple demographic/population numbers. I always loved the population/percentage of humans/demi-humans/humanoids for the countries/regions in Greyhawk for a lot of different reasons.
Absalom is a huge city, Riddleport isn't, but having a more concrete idea of exactly how different the two populations are couldn't be a bad thing. I can kind of see the OP's point, from a verisimilitude angle. Some people are just more comfortable with official numbers, as it can make the player's and DM's expectations equal.
I have ideas in my head of what the populations are, and I have no problem running with those assumptions, but maybe a couple of players have different assumptions. This can, conceivably, create an immersion problem if the two assumptions are miles apart. Something as simple as nailing down the ballpark population ranges could make running the setting smoother, I suppose.
So, I guess what I'm saying is, get writing that blog for October or November!
;)
Actually, another idea just hit me. You mentioned a fear that you'd come up with population numbers that would only be obsoleted by a blog post... would folks LIKE Paizo to build up a blog post that contains the population numbers? Because we're always looking for blog post topics. It's not something we could whip up in a day, or honestly probably even a week... but if folks are interested I bet I could wrangle together a post sometime this month or next that has all that information.
Would that be cool? I think it might be... but not if building the population numbers here on the boards would be more fun, or if you really needed those numbers like tomorrow...
I'd like it. Like the OP I was...(disappointed?...not really but something...) to not have populations included even though I suspect no player is ever going to want to know the relative populations of Cheliax and Taldor nor is it likely to matter to the kind of stories I plan on telling.
I suspect that part of the reason things like this seem like an omission is that the books are enjoyable to read in their own right - even if you're not actually using all the information. Golarion also seems very real and if you guys know so much about it, you must know how many people live in Varisia, right?
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Creative Director
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I suspect that part of the reason things like this seem like an omission is that the books are enjoyable to read in their own right - even if you're not actually using all the information. Golarion also seems very real and if you guys know so much about it, you must know how many people live in Varisia, right?
I could probably whip up a population total for Varisia pretty quickly, as well as for Katapesh, Belkzen, Mediogalti Isle, and perhaps Cheliax... because those are regions from my homebrew world or are regions that I'm now very familiar with due to working on those regions in an Adventure Path. But I'm not nearly as familiar with the other 40 some nations. Others at Paizo are, but getting everyone to be on the same page is not a simple task.
Golarion is bigger than one person. No one person at Paizo has their brain wrapped all around everything, because it's too much information. No one at Paizo has read everything Paizo has published.
The only way we can really pull this all off is that we've got a team of nearly a dozen people who are paid to pull it off. They work as a team, each supporting the others with their own knowledge and skills, and Golarion is the result.
Kind of a tangent there, but hopefully it speaks to how simply pulling population numbers (or ANYTHING that touches all of the Inner Sea nations) out of the air isn't easy. If it were, we probably would have done it, or at the very least these threads would have never manifested in the first place.
SO! I'll get cracking on organizing the Great Golarion Census of 4709 AR tomorrow, and hopefully by sometime in October we'll have a big juicy blog post to share! Or sooner, if it ends up being easier than I thought.
I suspect that part of the reason things like this seem like an omission is that the books are enjoyable to read in their own right - even if you're not actually using all the information. Golarion also seems very real and if you guys know so much about it, you must know how many people live in Varisia, right?I could probably whip up a population total for Varisia pretty quickly, as well as for Katapesh, Belkzen, Mediogalti Isle, and perhaps Cheliax... because those are regions from my homebrew world or are regions that I'm now very familiar with due to working on those regions in an Adventure Path. But I'm not nearly as familiar with the other 40 some nations. Others at Paizo are, but getting everyone to be on the same page is not a simple task.
Golarion is bigger than one person. No one person at Paizo has their brain wrapped all around everything, because it's too much information. No one at Paizo has read everything Paizo has published.
The only way we can really pull this all off is that we've got a team of nearly a dozen people who are paid to pull it off. They work as a team, each supporting the others with their own knowledge and skills, and Golarion is the result.
Kind of a tangent there, but hopefully it speaks to how simply pulling population numbers (or ANYTHING that touches all of the Inner Sea nations) out of the air isn't easy. If it were, we probably would have done it, or at the very least these threads would have never manifested in the first place.
SO! I'll get cracking on organizing the Great Golarion Census of 4709 AR tomorrow, and hopefully by sometime in October we'll have a big juicy blog post to share! Or sooner, if it ends up being easier than I thought.
Cheers. :)
I didnt really mean you should know it all. It was an oblique compliment - your stuff is so good, it sounds like you're all writing about somewhere you've actually been.
I suspect that part of the reason things like this seem like an omission is that the books are enjoyable to read in their own right - even if you're not actually using all the information. Golarion also seems very real and if you guys know so much about it, you must know how many people live in Varisia, right?I could probably whip up a population total for Varisia pretty quickly, as well as for Katapesh, Belkzen, Mediogalti Isle, and perhaps Cheliax... because those are regions from my homebrew world or are regions that I'm now very familiar with due to working on those regions in an Adventure Path. But I'm not nearly as familiar with the other 40 some nations. Others at Paizo are, but getting everyone to be on the same page is not a simple task.
Golarion is bigger than one person. No one person at Paizo has their brain wrapped all around everything, because it's too much information. No one at Paizo has read everything Paizo has published.
The only way we can really pull this all off is that we've got a team of nearly a dozen people who are paid to pull it off. They work as a team, each supporting the others with their own knowledge and skills, and Golarion is the result.
Kind of a tangent there, but hopefully it speaks to how simply pulling population numbers (or ANYTHING that touches all of the Inner Sea nations) out of the air isn't easy. If it were, we probably would have done it, or at the very least these threads would have never manifested in the first place.
SO! I'll get cracking on organizing the Great Golarion Census of 4709 AR tomorrow, and hopefully by sometime in October we'll have a big juicy blog post to share! Or sooner, if it ends up being easier than I thought.
Shrugs.
Ok, then I'll wait for October. I should have read this thread first.
As you do this, please keep in mind that not every city is listed in the setting book and that the 67% figure in the other thread is going to produce unworkable population numbers.
If you aren't at least producing a Cheliax population of around 3 million, the numbers are going to be too low to support the cities you've listed in the book.
The other thread concerned me because the population totals mentioned offhand would be far too low. Sean Reynolds pointed out that 3.0/3.5 uses a 10% urban population base and that will give you the base number you need to get populations that are more in line with what people expect from a late medieval society.
I'm certainly glad I didn't push forward the other night and do every nation now.
.I'm certainly glad I didn't push forward the other night and do every nation now.
Actually, in a sense its too bad. Paizo and its fans thrive off the interactions together. You may have missed the oportunity to have a defining role on "populating" a published campaign world...
.I'm certainly glad I didn't push forward the other night and do every nation now.Actually, in a sense its too bad. Paizo and its fans thrive off the interactions together. You may have missed the oportunity to have a defining role on "populating" a published campaign world...
If I had only two days, then that wasn't much of an opportunity. :)
This only shows what I always suspected. Paizo was interested in providing this information at some point and that it was simply omitted from the setting book for various reasons.
That means any numbers I came up with would have been for my own edification and would have been de-canonized as soon as Paizo addressed it, which I always assumed they would.
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Creative Director
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The other thread concerned me because the population totals mentioned offhand would be far too low. Sean Reynolds pointed out that 3.0/3.5 uses a 10% urban population base and that will give you the base number you need to get populations that are more in line with what people expect from a late medieval society.
I probably shouldn't have even mentioned that in the other thread, since the 50% number was a completely random choice. Of COURSE we'll take the time to make sure that the population numbers are logical and make sense for each nation; that's why it's not something that we can throw upon a messageboard or blog in a few hours. It's gonna take a while to get those numbers all worked out. They'll be addressed with the same attention to detail as the rest of the book's contents are, otherwise what's the point?
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Creative Director
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That means any numbers I came up with would have been for my own edification and would have been de-canonized as soon as Paizo addressed it, which I always assumed they would.
You keep saying this. I'm not sure how accurate this sentiment is. If you had gone through and developed logical population numbers for the nations based on the size of their cities and the flavor and information gleaned about the civilization level provided in the nation's description, chances are VERY GOOD that the numbers you generated would end up being very close to the numbers we would come up with, since we'd be taking the same type of steps to generate the numbers. And in fact, if you did these numbers and they ended up about right (likely as the result of posting the numbers and work on messageboards and involving the community in getting feedback from them and us), chances are excellent that we'd simply adopt those numbers as canon.
If you DO want to take a stab at this, go for it! I suspect that this method of generating numbers would be MUCH more quick and, honestly, interesting to watch than to just wait a month or so for us to do all the work in-house and then throw it up on a blog post.
That means any numbers I came up with would have been for my own edification and would have been de-canonized as soon as Paizo addressed it, which I always assumed they would.You keep saying this. I'm not sure how accurate this sentiment is. If you had gone through and developed logical population numbers for the nations based on the size of their cities and the flavor and information gleaned about the civilization level provided in the nation's description, chances are VERY GOOD that the numbers you generated would end up being very close to the numbers we would come up with, since we'd be taking the same type of steps to generate the numbers. And in fact, if you did these numbers and they ended up about right (likely as the result of posting the numbers and work on messageboards and involving the community in getting feedback from them and us), chances are excellent that we'd simply adopt those numbers as canon.
If you DO want to take a stab at this, go for it! I suspect that this method of generating numbers would be MUCH more quick and, honestly, interesting to watch than to just wait a month or so for us to do all the work in-house and then throw it up on a blog post.
Consider it done then.
I've done a good deal of work on southern Avistan. I will post those numbers sometime this week, no later than Friday night. I will include my final population number, my methodology, and leaps of faith I made because I don't own every book.
If you find it useful, great. But I would also appreciate being told if I'm just going in a totally different direction and am wasting my time. And I know, that some think I'm not really wasting my time since I could always just keep using my numbers, but I'm always going to use the canon numbers for something like this, so I would be (unless for some reason other people preferred my numbers to your's, which I doubt).
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Creative Director
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This only shows what I always suspected. Paizo was interested in providing this information at some point and that it was simply omitted from the setting book for various reasons.
One more thing: The total population numbers were NEVER supposed to be in the setting book. And to be honest, the drive to nail down population numbers was pretty much totally off anyone's radar here until these posts popped up (because up until now, no one had mentioned them at all).
The idea that we've been interested in giving out this information but decided not to for "various reasons" hints at a Paizo vs. Customer conspiracy that, quite simply, does not exist.
This only shows what I always suspected. Paizo was interested in providing this information at some point and that it was simply omitted from the setting book for various reasons.One more thing: The total population numbers were NEVER supposed to be in the setting book. And to be honest, the drive to nail down population numbers was pretty much totally off anyone's radar here until these posts popped up (because up until now, no one had mentioned them at all).
The idea that we've been interested in giving out this information but decided not to for "various reasons" hints at a Paizo vs. Customer conspiracy that, quite simply, does not exist.
This is not what I meant.
What I meant was that this was information that Paizo did not consider embargoed and that it only seemed logical that as you did more and more products fleshing out individual regions, this information would pop up.
Perhaps, though, I'm also just of a totally different mindset. I just assumed that as you created these regions, populated the cities, and imagined the world, you always had a population range in mind and didn't share it in the book because it wasn't narrowed down, but that it was always something in the background of world design. That might not be true.
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Creative Director
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I've done a good deal of work on southern Avistan. I will post those numbers sometime this week, no later than Friday night. I will include my final population number, my methodology, and leaps of faith I made because I don't own every book.
Fair enough.
One thing to ABSOLUTELY keep in mind, and it sounds like you probably are... Golarion is NOT an attempt to model medieval Europe, but with goblins and dragons and magic. We take inspiration from ALL of history, both real and imagined. In fact, Rome at its height, Egypt during the height of the pharaohs, legends of Atlantis, and work of authors like Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber are as important a resource to go to, if not MORE important, than trying to make everything fit the numbers and percentages and all that that were present in medieval Europe. And on top of all of THAT... Golarion's history and civilization have been around longer than we have in the real world. In Golarion, magic does the things that technology does for us in a lot of cases. So in some cases, you can be justified by thinking that sociologically Golarion might even be centuries AHEAD of where we're at right now.
All of which is basically saying that don't abandon creativity and imagination in favor of raw math and numbers, I guess. Determining these numbers is as much an art as math.
[I]f you did these numbers and they ended up about right (likely as the result of posting the numbers and work on messageboards and involving the community in getting feedback from them and us), chances are excellent that we'd simply adopt those numbers as canon.
If you DO want to take a stab at this, go for it! I suspect that this method of generating numbers would be MUCH more quick and, honestly, interesting to watch than to just wait a month or so for us to do all the work in-house and then throw it up on a blog post.
Consider it done then.
I've done a good deal of work on southern Avistan. I will post those numbers sometime this week, no later than Friday night. I will include my final population number, my methodology, and leaps of faith I made because I don't own every book.
If you find it useful, great. But I would also appreciate being told if I'm just going in a totally different direction and am wasting my time. And I know, that some think I'm not really wasting my time since I could always just keep using my numbers, but I'm always going to use the canon numbers for something like this, so I would be (unless for some reason other people preferred my numbers to your's, which I doubt).
And the great thing about Paiz's community relationship. YOu now get the best of both worlds, in making your own numbers, you have a real chance at setting them in stone for the rest of us.
There are lots of folks here that have the books you are missing. I'm sure you'll end up with lots of help with any information that you don't have.