"Campaign Setting" and "Inner Sea World Guide"

[Arianord]

Is the original "Campaign Setting" book now essentially obselete with the release of the Inner Sea World Guide? I have the latter, and was considering picking up "Campaign Setting" but I was wondering if it would provide me with anything worth getting, in light of having the Inner Sea World Guide.

[Winterthorn]

I have both books, and the Inner Sea World Guide hard cover updates the material in the older C.S. book. I hope that helps.

[Adam Daigle]

The Inner Sea World Guide was updated to Pathfinder from the older 3.5 rule system the Campaign Setting book was written for. Also it includes a more relevant update to the setting and its intentions. Some things were changed, but fundamentally it is not too different from the earlier book.

[Fromper]

So the general consensus is that the Campaign Setting book is so obsolete that it should just be skipped?

[Urath DM]

Let me put it this way...

Instead of just updating the Campaign Setting from 3.5 rules to Pathfinder, a new book named the Inner Sea World Guide was created. A large proportion of the material in the Inner Sea World Guide came from the Campaign Setting.. and more was added.

There may be some material in the Campaign Setting that is not in the Inner Sea World Guide, but that is mostly because:

a) it was already updated elsewhere (Core Rulebook has most of the the weapons and armor, for example, and the Adventurer's Armory has the others)

b) it was something that the folks at Paizo prefer to just let fade away and have no intention of following up on

c) it was a specific thing for 3.5 that is now either built into the Pathfinder rules, or is no longer needed

So, generally, the Inner Sea World Guide replaces the Campaign Setting for 95% of all uses. If you have a "completist" streak and just like to own "complete sets" of everything, then you may want it.. but it is a little pricey.

So what is in the Campaign Setting that is not in the Inner Sea World Guide (or any other book yet that I know of)?

1) Pronunciation Guide
2) World map with adventure locations (up through August 2008)
3) four NPCs
4) Random Encounter Tables by terrain (outdated for use today; the AP volumes sometimes have region-specific encounter tables)

[Jeff Erwin]

There is very little left out from the CS in the revision. A few paragraphs on Psionics, mainly, and some prestige classes - one of which got replaced in Pirates of the Inner Sea.

[Cpt_kirstov]

More or less... about 90% of the campaign setting was put up on the wiki as well.... there are some facts in the campaign setting that are not in the ISWG, but not terribly much

[drayen]

There are also feats from the Campaign Setting that were not carried over to the Inner Sea World Guide or were substantially changed.

[James Jacobs]

Inner Sea World Guide is indeed meant to replace the Campaign Setting hardcover. A lot of content was revised, changed, or just abandoned in the transition, as we had the luxury of time and a greater understanding of how Golarion works (and what DOESN'T work in the setting) when we did the revision to the book.

The Campaign Setting hardcover, as a result, is pretty much obsolete. Although still valuable to collectors of Golarion material... perhaps more so, I guess, depending on your frame of mind.

[Gorbacz]

My Campaign Setting will be never obsolete ... because it has signatures from Mr. Dinosaur, Bull-man, Herr Schneider, Mistah Suttuh, Sean Kombustible Reynolds and WAR.

[Freehold DM]

Campaign setting has darklight sisterhood. Nuff said.

[Gorbacz]

Freehold DM wrote:

Campaign setting has darklight sisterhood. Nuff said.

For every Darklight Sisterhood, there's one dragon getting drunk in a tavern in Olfden...

[GeraintElberion]

Only CS has a ghostbusters easter egg...

[Callum]

The "Languages" section has been reduced from two pages to one page, dropping most of the detail, including any references to alphabets. Since the PRD has also dropped the SRD's table of languages & alphabets, there's now no way of knowing which alphabets are used by which languages in Golarion.