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Im a huge fan of Golarion campaign but I dont use a lot of published adventures. Its come to my attention that there is a great deal of campaign information hidden away in the various adventure path books. (details on Brevoy in Adventure Path 31, Crown of the World 51 etc.)
This is fine I guess as these areas need to be fleshed out for the adventure in question but do the rest of us have to purchase the adventure to add this information to our personal Golarion data base?
Is there, or will there, be a product that provides this background information on its own?
I would imagine if an area proves of sufficient interest it would get some more attention in another campaign setting product. Otherwise, yeah your looking at buy the AP volumes.
Creative Director
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We often publish gazetteers in our Campaign Setting line that are separate from but often support the Adventure Paths, but including additional information in the Adventure Paths themselves is part of the core function of that line. They are more valuable if they continue to carry a perception of being "useful" before and after they're used to play that particular adventure, after all.
I understand completely, from a marketing standpoint its a wise mechanic, just a little expensive for those of us wanting the background info but not needing the adventure.
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Creative Director
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I suppose it is... but I also feel that our adventures are worth it! Even if you never run the adventure, you can use the stat blocks and the maps at the very least in your games.
And I think that it's a wise standpoint from a content viewpoint as well as marketing, since that extra information on the world beyond what is built into the adventure makes the GM's job easier and helps to handle situations where the PCs deviate from what the adventure expects of them.
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The adventure paths are fun to read themselves. I also enjoy the short fiction which is included, and the 3 or for monsters which are introduced in a bestiary section....The adventure paths have lots of stuff in them there are also the gazetteers as well. I like the maps also.
I enjoy reading them and looking through them, even though I know i probably will never be able to run or play through all of them. So I often will cherry pick an adventure path for stuff i can use in a home campaign, be it an NPC villian or a dungeon, a map etc.
I think the adventure path is a pretty good deal.
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Ok, you sold me. Ill pick up a few. Its like, what =$50 or so for the entire path on PDF? That way I can print out the background info and read the adventure for fun or ideas!
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Developer
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Something you can do to help narrow down your search for particular things you're looking for is to look for the basic information at PathfinderWiki. Each topic provides sources used and each book we've done has a page so you can really narrow down what would be the best things to pick up for any Golarion topic we've already covered.
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Thanks Adam, I just signed up as a contributor on the Wiki and your right, thats a great idea.
Speaking personally, what would be really helpful is a single page "Golarion Canon Index" that listed each country and then each of the books that had significant information on it (along with a brief description of what that information was, e.g. "map and detailed description of cityname")
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I suppose it is... but I also feel that our adventures are worth it! Even if you never run the adventure, you can use the stat blocks and the maps at the very least in your games.
And I think that it's a wise standpoint from a content viewpoint as well as marketing, since that extra information on the world beyond what is built into the adventure makes the GM's job easier and helps to handle situations where the PCs deviate from what the adventure expects of them.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. The whole reason I started reading the APs to begin with was the article on Iomedae in Pathfinder 26. And that got me interested in the rest of Council of Thieves...which got me interested in the OTHER APs...and before you know it I've collected almost all of them!
The AP books are freakin' awesome!
Agreeing with the others, Paizo's adventures have always been top-notch. I remember taking an interest in Savage Tide back in Dungeon, and that combined with the wonderful Demonomicon articles by James Jacobs helped to get me on board with Pathfinder back in 2007.
When I read through their first adventures, I was blown away and haven't looked back since. My favorite deity of the setting is still Desna, who has an article all the way back in Pathfinder #2: The Skinsaw Murders. I'm very glad I obtained all the early ones when I could.
Like others have said, even if you never run the adventure path itself, the lore contained in them and the story make for wonderful reads, and have inspired me many times in creating neat side adventures of my own!
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The Adventure paths are excellent sources of ideas and background information.
I've been a subscriber since Kingmaker and I will probably never run half of them, but I value each one of them. Whenever I run something of my own creation, I can always consult the APs for inspiration, encounters, maps, lore, etc.
I've run single issues of an AP as stand alone adventures. Most notably issues 4&5 of Kingmaker (which we started, but didn't finish). The pcs actually worked for their former pcs (15 years later) to thwart their common enemy Ivoretti (the "new" pcs were children of Pitax's former ruling family, which Ivoretti had killed).
My players got a kick meeting the king and his advisors, now in their 40ies and retired from adventuring.
(Sorry for rambling about this, I got carried away).
So even if you aren't planning to run an AP, there's tonnes of uses for the info inside.
Besides, I enjoy reading the APs as "litterature".