I dunno, it doesn't look THAT schizophrenic, really.
You see a lot of sharper transitions than that IRL if you look at a biome map.
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Whether or not Golarion subscribes to "real-world" geography, the designers have repeated stated that their primary intent was to create a world where different kinds of stories could be told in different countries. So you have an Egypt parallel, a revolutionary France parallel, a "two countries on the brink of war", an "unexplored wilderness", etc.
Some of it holds up to scrutiny, some doesn't. Just remember, it's an exercise in worldbuilding for a game line not a home game world (though some was imported from the designers own games).
In many ways, you can think of it as more Faerun than Oerth. Ironically, Ed Greenwood takes worldbuilding detail very seriously (he always wants to know how they get the sewage out of the castles, for instance), but that didn't translate to the evolution of the Forgotten Realms. It makes really good business sense to do it their way (see: Paizo), but if you like your worlds to stand up to intense scrutiny, you're going to have to make a choice between limiting the kinds of stories you can tell, and creating a rational world.
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Honestly, we haven't had any problems with this. Varisia, if I recall correctly, is about the size of Washington state. And has coasts, a bit of swampland, some forests, low mountains, and high mountains.
I don't have a climatology background, but it seems pretty reasonable.
Would you care to quote a specific example?
I know old Tarzan movie/an indiana jones movie/pulp magazines pull this nonsense but player tend to be smarter. How do others make sense of this?
We repeat to ourselves "It's just a show, we should really just relax."
I tend to assume all fantasy is in a time of glacial age when north and south are ice sheets and all the other climate zones get squished into a pretty narrow bands.
Also explains why there are so many big nasty things (most of the upper CRs are BIG) as they have the size to keep their body heat, find the hard life philosophically appealing or stubbornly stick where their ancient homelands were.
Also explains why at low levels you don't meet them as only when you go well out of the squished 'civilized' equatorial zones of young flexible races do you meet such primordial behemoths. It normally works with some generous imaginings. Even works to explain why most campaigns are a bit more 'medieval fantasy' then arabian nights/wuxia.
This isn't a bad explanation. If it works for you, go with it.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised to find someone who knows more about glaciation finding that cringe-worthy.
Just leaving it with a simple "this is how it is, no one has approached it in a systematic manner" is safer in the long run. Local tribes will have legends about why there's a desert there, regardless of whether the desert is downwind from mountains or upwind from a lush, green forest.
And in these settings, the legends might just be right.
Cheers!
Landon
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Most modules have pretty expansive terrain types. Mountains to deserts to jungles.Golarion environments seem all over the place. In campaigns you go from tropical islands to jungles to deserts to jungles to mountains within silly distances.
That can be done in the real world in several locations (many in south america)
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That can be done in the real world in several locations (many in south america)
That's very true.
Another good real world comparison is New Zealand, because of the Lord of the Rings movies. You've got the Shire, Rohan, Gondor, Rivendell, the Misty Mountains, Fangorn Forest, and some others I'm forgetting in about 100,000 square miles. Which, if my math is right, is about half the size of Varisia.
Even ignoring high-diversity areas like that, it's not weird to be able to walk to several different biomes from any point of human habitation. Columbus, Ohio where I live isn't terribly interesting geographically (not on any oceans or major lakes, no mountains), but I'm still within a day's hike of several waterways, some wetlands, a ton of farmland, several small towns, and forests that could sustain high-HD predators. To say nothing of a whole city for urban adventure.
There are certainly areas on Earth where you could walk for a week and not hit any major changes in terrain, but that's not the rule... especially for anywhere you have a town or city to be walking from.
Cheers!
Landon
Suspension of disbelief is necessary in a game with goblins, wizards, and demons.
In rl mountains and weather patterns can put tropic ir subtropic zones in strange places. There is for example a subtropic zone that goes all the way up to southern canada through the us east coast. Mountains and weather patterns can make one side a paradise and the other a desert.
Golarion environments seem all over the place. In campaigns you go from tropical islands to jungles to deserts to jungles to mountains within silly distances.
The Big Island of Hawaii has mountains, deserts, and jungles (as well as an active volcano and sometimes snow at the highest peaks). That's in an area smaller than Connecticut.
